Highest hours of gameplay per dollar paid

Outside of WoW (which virtually required you to play) it would have to be ES Oblivion

 

Humble bundle #2 had a minimum price of 1 cent, it included a small collection of indie games. I have just over 15 hours logged on steam.

That's 1500 hours / dollar, AKA 0.0007 U.S. dollars per hour

I have about the same amount of hours in humble bundle #3, also with a price of 1 cent. If you bought it early on at that price, it would have included humble bundle #2. I'm sure there are people out there who played them a bit more than I did and paid 1 cent for the set.

I imagine there are a lot of people with at least 5000 hours / dollar, or 0.0002 U.S. dollars per hour, on the humble bundle #2+#3 set.

(I'm not saying I paid 1 cent, but if you were to say it had a price tag, that would be it)

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At this point, it start to become relevant to factor in enjoyment levels in addition to time spent, because the difference in cost between 100 hours / dollar and 10,000 hours / dollar is extremely small compared to the value of time for most people. The real cost is in the hours themselves, not the sticker price of the game.

In other words, once you spend 500 hours on a game, if your time is worth $10 / hour, you could have made $5000. If you're going to spend 500 hours on a game, it hardly matters if the game costs $60 or is given to you for free, the net cost to you will be essentially equal. How much enjoyment you got out of that 500 hours may be highly variable. I think it's time to reconsider our definition of value.

 

Lol... I can't belive I forgot about KOTOR... after playing it 5-6 times I think I had it down to 10-15hrs from start-finish...

 

Well you can't always work. Nice thought to think all your gaming time could have been making money, but as we know, all work and no play makes Johnny a crazy boy.

 

I've spent 192, 720 hours playing this amazing game...it's called "Life". I haven't invested that much money into it and I haven't died yet The graphics are out of this world though...

Mr. Mysterious

 

Damn you made me do the math!

 

Started Warcraft 2 around 2003 or 2004 after had so much fun with warcraft 1.
Been playing ever since thanks to dota.

I can easily do 7-8 hours a day doing a that starts over every 1 hour. No life. xD

 

Star Wars Battlefront II
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic
Mass Effect (original)
Killing Floor
Counter-Strike Source (original)
Audiosurf

 

Well, the title is "per dollar paid", not "as related to a price that you could have paid if you were a deadbeat", so I don't think that really counts...

Question: what are you doing to maintain a consistent earning potential every hour of the day? Personally, I'm salaried - if I do my job well, I keep it and get paid a certain amount. When I'm off work, I suppose I could find some part-time work or hand-tool leather wallets or something, but the reality is my off-work hours are time that represents approximately zero earning potential to me - I have more productive things to do than play video games, but none of them provide any monetary reward. Really, even counting the upfront cost of the game, playing computer games is one of the less-expensive ways I can spend my time.

I don't mean to justify sitting on one's butt and playing games all day (I actually play at a standing desk, for what little it helps), but if we're doing money math, it's not so simple as "time is money, therefore gaming is expensive."

 

Hundreds of hours on StarCraft and still counting.

 

Can i mention WoW?
Also its beaten by any f2p game in this context

 

I'd say Halo: Combat Evolved for PC. bought it in around 2007-2008 for $20 and I still play it this year.

 

I'm not saying that you should be earning money every moment or that you even could be earning money every moment. I'm not making a commentary about how computer games are expensive forms of entertainment, either. I am saying that there is very little practical cost difference between 500 hours for free vs 500 hours for $50. Another way to look at this is that you could have worked for just 5 hours extra (much more reasonable) to buy the $50 game, and net even. You could then spend 495 hours on a $50 game + 5 hours extra work, vs 500 hours on a free game, at the same net cost. Maybe this example helps to show how initial cost has a small effect on value after you start logging a lot of hours. That is my specific point.

 

Thats why you can say that some games are priceless. Simply because amount of entertainment you gain from them are way beyond the price.

You can generalize it further and say that if price < your budget for entertainment then price doesnt matter.
There are very few games that can entertain you for more then 100 hours. Only multiplayer games come to mind tbh.
I really enjoyed deusexhr for example and played it like whole night when i first started. Next day however i was like "meh i d rather play smth with friends"

 

Wouldn't you need to be playing WoW for hundreds of hours every month in order for it to be comparable to the entertainment value of a massive game like Oblivion?

In my case, Oblivion GOTY cost around $20 and I got about 700-800 hours out of the game after playing a few different characters.

Each playthrough lasts a few hundred hours and I still haven't completed most of the quest lines in the game, not to mention all the thousands of quest mods and a few total conversion mods like Nehrim and Andoran. This works out to around $0.03 per hour of entertainment value so far and I'm still playing the game.

AFAIK, Warcraft charges a fee every month around around $15-20, right?

 

For me:
1. Counter-strike (Came with HL2 when I bought it retail).
2. L4D2: mostly survival now. Pretty sick on Dead Center
3. Halo Reach......far distant to Counter-strike. Played CS:S probably every month for the past 7 years.

 

15 a month/5 years

If you were in a raiding guild you would easily spend 20 hours a week raiding that doesn't include leveling alts, doing dailies, pvp, etc. plus when include the sheer amount of content...well, I think I got my moneys worth. I don't care about this thread enough to do the math but you can if you want ;D

 

I have 600 hours of gameplay in modern warfare 2.

Currently 10th prestige level 8 (stayed at 9th for a long time)

Got 6 nukes in one day once, 2 in consecutive games
Have everything legit, 1k headshots with intervention, m4a1, acr, and ak-47
113 win streak
around 20 flawless free for alls
Pulled out a chopper gunner every game for 10 games in a row one day

I could probably accurately draw out each map in detail.

60:1 dollar to hour ratio. Pretty beast of a deal.

 

Probably Stronghold Crusader or Age Of Empires 3.

I used to play Crusader all the time on our old P3, Windows 2000 desktop.

Out of my Steam games it's CoD BO MP, 58 hours.

 

Fair enough. I must have misconstrued your original post - I thought you were suggesting that the opportunity cost of a $50 game played for 500 hours was $5,050, which just isn't true for the vast majority of people. Of course, the opportunity cost is still high - if I spent 500 hours in a video game, I could have instead gone on three bike rides a week for a year, done a year's worth of weightlifting, and still had enough time to write a novel (though not very well). Or I could have learned another 2,000+ Chinese characters and 5,000+ words. On the other hand, I might have just watched 250 movies instead, in the end the negative impact of gaming on a person is probably pretty low - if you're the kind of person to game that much, you probably weren't going to do anything productive with that time anyway.

 

Had 30 days played on CoD4, bought it for $60, so 30*24=720/60=12.

12hr/$1.