Including DLC, micro transaction purchases, etc. If you got a game for free, please also list your non-infinite next best.
For me it’s Team Fortress 2. $100 total spent on hats and the Orange Box back in the day, 4200 hours plus of fun, meaning 2.3¢ AUD per hour. Initially I thought DotA2 would be my best but it turns out I’ve spent a lot more money in that game than I thought…
My worst is God of War: Ragnarok. Bought it full price for $95 AUD, only played 2 hours and hated it, meaning $47.50 AUD per hour.
I got Rollercoaster Tycoon on the front of a Cereal box. I’m still playing that copy decades later… i think I’m working on dollar per decade rather than dollar an hour here
My wife and I tried God of War 2018 recently because the internet sings its praise.
Turns out we were both pretty turned off by the Neanderthal toxic masculinity Kratos shows the boy all the time.
I’m sure it’s setting up the story for character growth, but it was annoying as hell.
It was for the story. It’s not a clone of the earlier games where Kratos is hellbent on tearing everything down, and everything revolves around that goal. The end of the game hits abruptly without closure on the god-killing aspect, and that’s when I figured out it’s actually a soft story about a father and son, burying their deceased loved one, and slowly recovering from the trauma and grief. The god-killing part is just a long sidequest, the story begins and ends with the mother’s burial.
Assuming you’re not going to play it:
Tap for spoiler
Yeah, he slowly changes throughout the story. By the end he’s actually a decent dad
I would recommend even watching a let’s play because for me it was one of the best games / stories in the last decade or so
Most…probably Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Bought it when it first came out, and as soon as I beat it, when the credits finished I created another character. I must have beat the game over a dozen times on OG Xbox, 360 and Xbone (I still have the original disc).
Least? Maybe Bioshock Infinite which I bought full price at launch and probably made it less than 1/3 through before I put it away and never touched it again. That or Returnal, I bought a used copy for maybe under $15, played a couple hours before throwing the game away because of how much I hated it.
I have tried so hard to like Returnal. But the constant starting completely over EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME just gets so old.
I’m with ya on that one. I tried to like Returnal I really did but it got so irritating and boring and I never felt like I’d made progress.
Yeah exactly.
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Most - SimCity 4. I don’t remember buying the CD but countless hours later I can say it was worth it.
Least is really hard. Like you have to really really fuck up a game for me to not like it. Three come to mind. Cities Skylines 2. Mortal Kombat 1. Starfield. Both games coming after two of my all time faves. I spent 500+ hours in CS1. If you can’t tell city builders are my jam. So for me to actively despise a city builder is pretty condemning of the quality of the game. That’s my problem with Skylines 2.
MK1 I powered through the story and had no desire to play any other part of it. It was a buggy incomplete mess. The roster was a step back from MK11 IMO. The game play was supposed to address the main complaints of how slow and limited MK11 was. They did that by adding a gimmick instead of going back to the MKX formula. MK1 is just a failed mess of a game.
I would have forgot about Starfield if not for seeing it in my Steam library just now. Mechanically this game fucking blows. I really hate some of the design decisions they made in the game. Like oxygen frequently stopping you from sprinting early game. The menu designs. Space flight. It’s all so baffling to me. They really fumbled the ball.
Vampire survivor. $4.
1000+ hours. Of just staring at pretty colors.
Bought every single DLC to continue supporting them.
Have you tried their new game?
In a similar vein. “Dome keeper” has had me teleport from and to Europe on 12 hour flights 4 times now.
FTL, Terraria, core keepter, and everything supergiant games ( hades, bastion, transistor) all punched well above their costs.
Most enjoyment per dollar: I want to say RimWorld, but that shit’s expensive at over a hundred dollars for the base game plus expansions even during the rare times it’s on sale.
So I’d have to say Terraria, which I bought for maybe fifteen bucks back at release when it had like three bosses and IIRC ended at Skeletron. Fifteen years of massive free content updates later, it’s a sprawling randomly generated Metroidvania with dozens of bosses and an endgame that barely resembles its beginning, and I’ve probably done a dozen full playthroughs over the years.
That’s not even getting into the mods, with tModLoader being given the official seal of approval and letting you swap between a multitude of content overhauls from within the game itself.
Least enjoyment per dollar would probably be Caves of Qud. It’s not a bad game, but I went in with sky-high expectations that it couldn’t possibly meet and I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy it for what it was; instead feeling frustrated at what it wasn’t (and didn’t try to be). It didn’t help that I regularly play freeform games like CDDA and Dwarf Fortress and the comparatively static structure of CoQ felt extremely restrictive in comparison.
Oh no, caves of cud is next on my list and I just bought it 🤞
It’s a good game! It’s just not the game I wanted.
Make sure you’re patient with yourself! Qud is an amazing, unique experience, but patience is a must. I hope you have fun!!
I ended up trying it out. It reminds me a lot about what I loved about Elona back in the day, but way easier to understand and play (this is a good thing). Definitely wasn’t what I was expecting though! I quite enjoyed it, in that unique way where you’re both frustrated but also enjoying it for some reason. I played role play mode because I’m absolutely not doing hardcore mode. The game played ok on controller but it feels like you really need to play it with keyboard (right trigger + direction to move, left trigger + A + direction to interact with an item is criminal lol)
I feel like I actually need to clear some brain space and play this game another time though. Like it feels like a big commitment rather than something you just throw on after work
This edition of PC Zone Magazine cost £4 back in 1995. The cover CD had 1,000 Doom levels and IIRC a bunch of modding tools. I probably got 1,000 hours of entertainment out of it and often think back marveling at the value for money!
Of course all this stuff is available for free online nowadays!
Idk if you like quake as much as doom but you can get hours of fun out of a map pack like the quake brutalist jam. Very high quality maps completely for free. Those thousand hours for 4 pounds definitely beat all my top games, I’d say it was worth it.
I never really got into quake in the same way but I did enjoy some quake 2 mods. I’d gone to uni by then so didn’t have as much free time to while away!
Even before it went F2P, Rocket League. 10,000+ hours, and counting.
Elden Ring for one, because my buddy liked it so much he bought it for me. Not sure if it counts though because I ended up passing it on and bought a copy for my brother so we could all play together.
Otherwise Splitgate, free basic ass arena shooter that is the only thing that has scratched the itch that quake 3 started me on when I was a child.
I used to play WoW back in the day, and I would pay a monthly subscription of 13 euros per month, for three years straight, which is a total of around 470 euros, but I would play 8-14 hours a day almost everyday (for around two years), so in the end it was a good overall value-for-money (although a complete waste of time). Minecraft is also in the top 3, with a licence of 25 euros (while it was still owned by Mojang) and countless hours (easily over 1.000). But the biggest value for money was is Skyrim on Steam: I got it for 1 euro in a sale, around 330 hours spent (playing vanilla on my Steam Deck). I had to quit it cause I could see it going to the thousands of hours easily.
Biggest regret so far is Rimworld: paid full price (30 euros), played less than two hours. I always say I’ll make it worth its price someday, but my backlog is already in the hundreds, so I don’t see it happening any time soon.
I feel like I’m the perfect demographic for Rimworld, but I just can’t get into it for some reason
Most? Stardew Valley. It’s my wife’s favorite game. The fact that she finds joy in one of my hobbies (that we didn’t have in common before dating) gives me happiness when I’m not playing. I know that’s not quite what you’re asking, but it is how it is.
If I treat all games to yield the same enjoyment per time unit (don’t get me started on that assumption) then it’s just which have I played most. Probably something in the quest for glory series or chrono trigger. I got a chrono trigger save with max stats once. Getting to level 99 was harder than getting enough tabs.
Least? Idk, state of emergency? That was not a great game
Most bang for the proverbial buck? Valheim for $20 in early 2021. Played the hell out of it until well into Ashlands and the souring that caused (more the FPS drops than endless enemy spam).
Least? Probably pre-ordering Fallout 76 Tricentennial edition for… $76. Hated most of my early play, only stuck it out for a year because of how much my wife loves the IP, then quit for over 4 years. We play again, but it’s also not quite the dumpster fire it was at launch.
Maybe also Simcity 2013. Cheaper but infinitely worse.
EDIT: best might be tired with Master of Magic. Bought on sale in 1994 (no clue how much), still playing to this day. A heavily modded Windows native version (Caster of Magic II) that supports submods and was itself last updated in 2025.
I kept having this really weird problem in Valheim. It would run perfectly fine, running at 140fps. Then, randomly, for no discernable reason, after 15–90 minutes of playing it would suddenly and without warning enter what I call “lag mode”, where it would just tank down to 8fps and become unplayable. The only temporary fix was to restart my PC, which was extremely annoying when playing with friends.
I would just endure the lag when doing housekeeping. Making homes and buildings, making equipment and potions and portals, etc. Then when it came time for an adventure or boss, I would be like, ok brb guys, restart my PC, and hope we killed the boss before I got hard CC’d and taken out by poor performance.
I couldn’t find any explanation for this anywhere, I tried everything to fix it. Years later after patches it was still an issue even with a brand new OS, but it was isolated to my PC. My only guess was it was a memory leak or something unique to my setup. It kind of sucked the joy out of the game.
Same!
Also, I love building. It made the process miserable for any sizable base. Doubly so in my Ashlands one.
So much wasted potential with the stunning lack of optimizations and glacial pace of development.
At least they got a pony.
You’re the only other person I’ve met with the same issue. I even made a bug report and forum post and complained everywhere, everyone said I was crazy lol
Most: Fallout 4, I have over 7000 hours in it. Bought it pre-launch with season pass.
Least: I have no idea, probably several games I bought and never played.
Wow, what do you do in FO4 to keep it fun after 7k hours?
Factorio. Spent a total of €52 and have 1,600 hours. €0.03/hour
No, I am already friends with someone who has 17,000 hours. Yes Seventeen Thousand.
That’s nuts. If they bought it on release and played everyday since then it works out at 8 hours a day. That’s more than a full time job!
Not quite, factorio first released in 2012. They didn’t get to Steam till much later. Also, it’s not uncommon to have the game running or paused even if you’re not playing.
Hmm… I was going off Wikipedia which says 2020 - I guess the earlier release was an alpha.
In any case having your factories running in the background (overnight?) would quickly bump up those hours. Not sure it’d make for a very interesting stream though!
It might not necessarily be running. But factorio is a game that’s very conducive to you hopping in for a few minutes at a time, so some players have it paused a lot of the time when they’re alt tabbed instead of closing it.
Ah I see. I’ve only played Mindustry (2D Java/ Android equivalent) and if I left that running overnight I’d wake up to complete devastation!