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.
No Man’s Sky. Seems like getting good RNG is the difficulty of the game.
Best: Minecraft (bought at the Beta price), Counter Strike: Source, Counter Strike Global Offensive (I bought it before it became free), Rome Total War, Anno 1602, Age of Empires 2. I have hundreds of hours in all of these. Technically the last three were bought by my father originally, but I think I re-bought them all on digital platforms later.
Worst: Tom Clancy Division 2 (because it’s shit and full of adverts), Monster Hunter World (because it never worked for me properly), Dragon Age 2 (just didn’t like the style of top down gameplay).
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.
Most…is probably The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. That game came out when I was 3, I still have the original cartridge and it still works, and I still play that game to this day.
Least is probably going to be Where The Water Tastes Like Wine. I discovered the soundtrack first on Youtube, and then decided to try out the game. It’s a dialog heavy game, they put a lot of emphasis on the presentation and voice acting, and it’s idiotically slow. It puts a page of dialog up that you’ll have read before the voice actor starts talking. If you open the pause menu and Quit the game, IT TALKS MORE. I hit Alt+F4 and haven’t looked at it s ince.
I had bought two games at the same time, I played one of them for a few weeks before getting around to looking at WtWTLW, so I couldn’t refund it.
Most: Terraria on PC. I paid $5 during their first big sale on Steam and have like 500 hours in it so $0.01/hr (1¢/hr )
Least: Spawn for the PS1. I got a special launch version that was $60. I hated it after 20 minutes and was full of regret. That’s $180/hr
Most, probably Skyrim. Across all platforms I’ve only spent around $80, and have around 5,600 hours in, so about 1.4¢ per hour.
Least is far harder. There have been several games I’ve spent $80 on that I played for a bit, didn’t like, and never touched again.
Honorable mentions for most:
Hitman: World of Assassination: 7.3¢/hr
Forza Motorsport 6: 5.2¢/hr
Fallout 4: 3.3¢/hr
Assassins Creed Odyssey: 4.5¢/hr
Oblivion: 10¢/hr
Halo MCC: 7.8¢/hr
Halo Reach: 8.2¢/hr
Rest of the Halo series is probably around 10¢/hr each if I were to guess but I don’t have hours tracked for the rest of them
Minecraft: 5¢/hr at a guess
For cheap games that I got a ton of enjoyment out of but maybe not necessarily a ton of playtime: Gunpoint, The Silent Age, Celeste, Limbo, Inside, Stanley Parable, Monaco (I do actually have a fair amount of time in this one but don’t have hours tracked, maybe 20¢/hr but those hours were thoroughly enjoyed), Little Nightmares. Probably more I’m forgetting at the moment.
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 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
First, IMO enjoyment ≠ playtime
If it’s about enjoyment, then Signalis takes the top spot. It was probably the cleanest purchase to end credits I’ve ever had in my life. Saw the store page on steam, bought it for 29.99, played through the game in 3 days. Never touched the game since and it is by a large margin the best game I’ve ever played.
For least enjoyment it must be the recent Warhammer Space Marine 2. Bought it for the Coop at full price (luckily just the standard edition). Extremely short and boring campaign and very repetitive and lackluster Coop mode. Wish I could get a refund but im already 7 hours in. The amount of games I’ve paid full price for in my life can be counted on two hands and this one definetly takes the price for most money and least enjoyment.
Bonus round: There are 2 games that, while I enjoyed at first and put 100s of hours in, have become so unbearably bad that I didn’t even request a refund (even if I still could) but straight up deleted them from my account. Thats Helldivers 2 and Squad. I got both them for fairly cheap but even if I didn’t. FUCK THOSE GAMES. They are the epitome of a waste of time.
POSTAL 2. I got it for a buck on GOG.
Diablo 2 has been the best value by far, even accounting for purchasing it several times over the years, plus the more recent re-make.
More recently, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Hades 2 have been amazing bang for my buck.
Worst might be Diablo 4. I played for a few hours and just couldn’t get into it.
vivid stasis is most enjoyment, as i got over 100 hours of an amazing game for only 0 usd, resulting in NaN hours/usd
the least is probably dracomaton, which i got for 0 usd and it burned my motherboard
Most: Factorio, by far
Best would have to be PlanetSide 2. It’s not the most hours I’ve put into a game, but it’s up there, and now importantly it’s the game that I most fondly remember my time playing. For a few years I ran ops with one of the oldest outfits in the game, and I still find myself remembering moments from those nights. It was a really cool community (maybe not as a whole, but certainly the people I was hanging out with) and we got up to a lot of really fun shit. I put maybe $100-200 into that game and got out experiences that genuinely changed me as a person.
Least would be Squad. I’ve never been able to make that game click. It’s not like I don’t play similar games, I’ve really enjoyed my time with Hell Let Loose, and Insurgency would be a very strong contender for my most bang for buck. Squad just… Doesn’t work for me. And I don’t really know why.
Nothing will ever match Indar on a Friday night. TR forever!
Imperialist TR scum in my comments section?! The Vanu will see an end to your reign of terror, just you wait!
Least: The two I bounced hard off of I think was the '24 version of Microsoft flight sim? Loved Century of Flight in the past, but felt like the navigating the UI was oddly arcane and just couldn’t be arsed to learn its eccentricities. Also GTA V. Do not get it, man. I really enjoyed San Andreas and the old Saints Row games, but GTA V was just boring for me.
BG3 was another that I didn’t get a ton out of… Act 1 was great, but it fell off a lot after that imo. Every session felt like a slog (I actually like 5e, but it tends to get more slog-y by itself at higher levels imo). I just watched the rest on YouTube and didn’t feel like I missed much in terms of experience. I get where people got into it though, the voice acting really was a treat and I did enjoy Act 1. But I felt like I went way over my usual dollar to fun ratio.
Most: Minecraft is up there, like many, especially for my kiddo. We both really like playing Golf With Your Friends together along with PinballFX. I’m pretty much done for good with it at this point but I put countless hours into New Vegas that I don’t regret one bit. Similar story for Oblivion and Skyrim. Batman Arkham Knight is, maybe controversially, best in the series IMO and the only game I’ve ever 200%'d. Even at the price, RDR2 was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in gaming. American and Euro Truck Simulators, CKII, Civ VI, Subnautica. I really liked Cyberpunk and put a lot of hours in there, but I came in well after the release kerfuffle and had no expectations. My wife plays the shit out of Disney’s Dreamlight Valley.
