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.
Escape from Tarkov: $150. 18000h. $0.00833333333 per hour.
Damn. Assuming you played 8 hours every day, you played every day for 6 years straight. That’s pretty impressive
Minecraft : 15€ spent, over 10K hours played and I only wish I had played even more !
Fallout 4 : 60€ spent, it’s boring.
Shovel knight: bought on sale for maybe 10 dollars and received 4 full games worth of content over the years, and don’t know how many times I’ve played it over several platforms. Bought it a couple more times as well (physical and digital copies). And Spelunky: super cheap, hundreds of hours played, never managed to actually beat it.
Worst was Last of Us: bought a collector’s edition on PS3 because I loved Uncharted, couldn’t force myself to actually finish it. Tried the remaster on ps4 with the same result, although that one was a but more playable
Least - Hogwarts legacy: I bought it on sale mostly to “own the libs.” My personality did a 180° in that same year so never opened the game again.
The 2-3 hours I spent felt like one huge tutorial, dialogue options just didn’t matter, and also game didn’t run great.
Most - Blade and sorcery: Modded the hell out of it daily. Also there was an update some time ago that doubled the native content.
In no particular order: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio, Garry’s Mod
Least enjoyment for me was Star Wars Squadrons. I wasn’t interested in the slightest but my friend convinced me to buy it full price on release. It was rubbish and I barely touched it. A couple of months later it was available for 98p.
Most value will be either GTA V, MW2 or Monster Hunter World. By far the highest playtime of any of my games.
Best value was Desperados III. I intentionally paid full price for the base game and DLC on GOG after playing Shadow Gambit: Blades of the Shogun and loving the gameplay/concept. It was one of the few titles I’ve ever 100 percented and played repeatedly for months. I loved it so much I bought an unopened collector’s edition for the PS4 at a steep discount and it now sits proudly on top of my bookshelf next to my Batman Beyond statue and Venture Bros. discs.
My worst was LA Noir on Steam. That mandatory Rockstar Social Club DRM login was such bullshit that I uninstalled it and hid it from the library list. Fuck Rockstar for forcing this. Never bought anything of theirs on PC again.
Mahou Arms. I bought it for $12 and only played it for a couple of hours.
Most is Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R. Bought for $3, and played for 610 hours so far.
Given how big my library is and the fact that I rarely buy full-price, its hard to pick a single item.
If I had to pick one worst, it would probably be Company of Heroes 3. I was really hopeful for the game, and got it bundled with my CPU when building a new PC, but its just not very good. The campaign, the main part I was interested in, is slow and samey and uninteresting. The multiplayer is even worse, being riddled with microtransactions, lootboxes, and other such stuff in ways that significantly impact gameplay, in a supposedly competitive PvP game. Even if we assume the game was equivalent to $20, I only put in four hours, and didn’t enjoy any of it.
In terms of best, the most technically correct would probably be Counter Strike GO/2. I’ve spent about $100 on it, between initial price, battle passes, and skins on the market, but selling those skins has earned me about $140 in revenue, so at 2000 hours, thats negative 2 cents an hour.
Excluding revenue made, its going to be Minecraft by a country mile. I’ve easily put in 10,000 hours since when I started playing mid-beta, so pessimisticly, it’d be around a quarter cent per hour. Honourable, more reasonable mentions would go to Gmod, where it works out to about 1 cent per hour when including time in the editor, and Dota and War Thunder, which are free, but I’ve spent thousands of hours in each and so bought about 2 cents per hour of microtransactions.
Dwarf Fortress.
Thousands of hours played; $0.00 paid (Legacy version).
But also $10 for the Steam version which I bought after all those hours in the Legacy version when it was on sale.
Most: Easily Dota 2. -$5 spent (I sold stuff I got for free), 2000+ hours played
The least: Probably a 20 way tie for games I bought on sale on Steam
Best value was thousands of hours in Minecraft for 10€.
Worst was probably something I bought as a child a long time ago for too much money, barely played it and then forgot pretty much all about it. There are a bunch of PSP games that come to mind like Monster Hunter which I just didn‘t enjoy at all.
I bought alpha for $4.99. Same account 16 years later is being used by my kids. I’m easily at 1/5 of a cent per hour for the game.
Paid $50 for Half-Life 1 in 1998. Still play one of its mods on an almost daily basis. 10,000 hours is my low, low estimate.
Least? I’ve probably blocked it from my memory. Star Citizen had a free weekend a year or so ago and I quit after an hour or two when I realized how bad of shape it was in after well over a decade of development. So I guess I’ll go with that one.
Which Half Life mod do you still play every day?
Most is Slay the Spire, and I don’t even think it’s close. And I say that having bought it twice, once on Steam and once on mobile.
Least, I’m tempted to day League of Legends or Overwatch, both of which I bought extra cosmetic stuff for and neither of which I play anymore - and I’m not sure I even liked either of them much when I was playing.
But not knowing (and not wanting to know) how much money I’ve spent on either, I’ll instead say either Imperator: Rome or Victoria III. I preordered both with extras, and ended up only putting around 40 hours into both before giving up. Compare that to other Paradox grand strategy games, where I can easily have 500+ hours played, and I really feel like I didn’t get my money’s worth.
Neverwinter Nights, hands down. I played it 20 years ago and until recently I was DMing a weekly campaign using it, but I would guess I’ve put between 20,000 and 25,000 hours into it over the last 26 years. Honorable mentions for Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which I’m currently playing. (Spent all day today playing it, in fact.)
Least enjoyment? I pre-purchased Batman: Arkham Knight and quit it after one hour, so that’s an obvious choice.
