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.
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
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
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.
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 - 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.
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
The Sims 2. I paid for all the extensions, so quickly calculated, something around 300€ in total, back then. But I’ve been playing it for twenty years. I do not know, how many thousand hours I have on it, so I cannot calculate the price per hour, but I think it is pretty low at this point. And still getting lower.
// The least I do not know, I do not play many other games.
Even before it went F2P, Rocket League. 10,000+ hours, and counting.
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!
Probably Cyberpunk 2077…
Got it on sale, after they had taken steps to correct the horrendous launch, coupled with a handful of QoL mods and now I’ve gotten $.05 per hour out of it.
Price: ~$20 USD
Logged time: 436.5 hours
Edit:
Forgot least… uhhh… hell, probably Ff7 rebirth. Can’t really count hours, since it takes a stupid amount of fucking time to do anything, but I really can’t overstate how just fucking awful this game is. Just…just fucking terrible.
I just bought it during the steam sale, what mods would you recommend?
Off the top of my head, there’s one that adds more climbing handholds, one that tweaks katana usage to make it more viable…
Let me see if I can dig up a mod list after while and I’ll get you a better idea
While Minecraft doesn’t have an hour tracker, I almost certainly have over 1000 hours for £15. I have nearly 700 hours in The Binding of Isaac, which is currently £1.09 on Steam.
I don’t have the original disc, but absolutely Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 Platinum Edition. Most bang for my buck, enough back in the day I found a copy online and had an amazing time playing it again. I LOVE it more than the first 2 games purely for the ability to ride the coaster first person rather than through 3rd person following the track.
As for least bang for my buck, absolutely a Hot Wheels Stunt Track that I picked up thinking it would be like Beat That. Didn’t even make it past the first level without hating it. Was just a single stunt jump and then the level ends from what I can recall.
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?
Hmmm…
There are a few but my time tracker are all off for various reasons.
Minecraft, Skyrim, Conan Exiles, Rimworld, Baldurs Gate 3, XCOM2, Fallout 4, Civ 4. Cyberpunk might be in here.
Lots old games without trackers are likely in here. Final Fantasy Tactics has got to be really high on this list… Maybe FF3/6… Mario RPG?
All of these are easily at about 1000 hours now. I’ve played them for actual enjoyment. The best deal is likely Minecraft as I got that during my Indev… Skyrim I may have bought twice so that might be the worst deal of these.
As for the worst, hmmm. Maybe sometime like one of the more recent farcry. I guess a franchise game could count. Like ones that never really improve anything but I play cus friends or something. Like Forza Horizon. It’s not complete dogwater, but I have giving them money for it.
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.