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.
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
I think for me it’s either Minecraft or Monster Hunter World. I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent on Minecraft, but I assume it’s close to 1000 as I used to play it with friends daily when I was younger. Me and a couple of friends also got Monster Hunter World at the start of the covid lockdown and we ended up playing it more or less daily. I have 380h on it, but I think I’ve enjoyed it more than mc. Both of them costed between 20 and 30 €.
For the worst, if a series of games count then it’s the Trails of Cold Steel series. After playing Azure I was excited for it, so I think I’ve even payed full price for the first or two. I ended up hating everything about them and convinced myself to play through, hoping the would get better, but ended up dropping the entire series a quarter of the way through CS3 when I saw there was no attempt at improving them.
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 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.
In no particular order: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio, Garry’s Mod
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
