Games that provided most/least value for money

[pawstruck]

You can define "value for money" however you like; I'd be interested to hear different perspectives. For me, it's a trifecta of game cost, number of hours having fun, and quality of the fun itself.

 

My highest value* were:

#1. Minecraft. I paid $20 back in beta and probably got 2,000 hours of genuine fun with friends.

#2. Super Smash Bros. Brawl. $60 but I played every night with 3 roommates for all my four years of undergrad. Only game to regularly send me to 11/10 laughter. I think we ended with 179 custom stages and over 6,000 matches played.

#3. Pokemon Red/Blue and Gold/Silver. I was 11 when I got Blue and the Pokemon wave was juuuust cresting in the US. Remember the Burger King toys? the "Mew glitch" stories at recess? Damn, what a time to be alive.

 

*Honorable mention: City of Heroes. I probably have over $1000 into the game. Obviously I think it's excellent or I wouldn't be here. However, the amount of downtime/grinding in the old game was pretty significant. I probably regret putting in so much CoX time in high school, should have hung with my friends more IRL.

 

My lowest value were:

#1. League of Legends. One of my top regrets in life. Holy shit I hate this game. Put in ~2,000 hours and ~1,300 of those were having zero fun at all. Probably have $300 into the game, too. Riot Studios is dumb, but maybe I'm dumber because I poured so much of myself into a game I despised. Might even have helped to end my first marriage. -_-

#2. World of Warcraft. I think some of my highest highs were from this game, but damn they were few and far-between. Must've put in over $2,000 between the monthly sub and yes, the microtransactions. (I was a vanilla boi, but they got me eventually). I actually loved the game, but if I could have just half of the hours back that I put in to WoW, I could literally learn to play an instrument or something.

 

Your turn!

Edited November 3 by pawstruck

[Skyhawke]

Best value: The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind.  I bought the game and both expansions. Between the expansions and player mods, I had @ 320 hours in on one character. Freaking loved that game.

 

Worst value: The Order 1886. I bought it full price, beat it a couple hours wondered what the hell Sony was smoking.

[TheOtherTed]

Best value:  Master of Orion II (1996).  I still play it about once every 2-3 months.

 

Worst value:  Master of Orion III (2003).  Buggy and unfinished to such a degree that I swore I'd never buy any game until at least 6 months after release.  The only thing I liked about it was that the Sakkra music was vaguely reminiscent of wood thrush calls, at least to my ears.

[biostem]

For me, it's an ironic mirror-image type thing:

 

I played CoH from about 2004 to 2009, then came back for a little when it went F2P.  Before my return, I bought a lifetime subscription to Champions Online, which was a huge waste of money, looking back at it.  And here I am, spending a lot of my gaming time playing CoH all over again, and still hardly ever check in on CO.  Heck, I played Neverwinter for a good bit as well, and have all but abandoned that game after some of the changes they made there...

[honoroit]

best:

 

lords of the fallen  about 110h so far, 70USD. thats 0.63USD/hr and going down. pvp a bit imbalanced right now, but theyre patching it every few days.

 

dark souls 1/2/3, bloodborne, elden ring:

1000s hours between these. pvp!

 

smite: fun 130ish or so gods and monsters square off in arena, assault, conquest... sort of like lol, but more 3rd person shooterish with line lock targeting. probably spent 200usd on skins over nearly 10y.

 

wow-

played ~14y. miss it a bunch sometimes. but i dont have the strength for the required social at high levels anymore.

 

recently: my hero ultra rumble - its fun, and you needn't spend a penny. importantly, dont feel motivated to as the gatcha content is crappy.

 

bad:

genshin: i spent thousands bc i wanted venti, xaio, albedo and scara... no.

 

seven deadly sins grand cross: same...but gloxinia, helbram (all fairy boys available, and all their outfits, always)... smelly meli... pvp was good.

 

i am strictly forbidden from all gatcha. i love them, but im not an oil baron. and they cost that much. like you spend as much as a nice car yearly as much (or more), if you want all the things...

 

diablo 4;

i didnt go back after ~season 1. i adored d3.

 

both, sort of:

 

- ffxiv, good value to mess about / be a little ghost in.

tho subbing retainers costing more than the sub does is silly. e.g. its 78USD for 6mo sub... but if you want another 140 slots in the ah, its another 88usd on top of that over the same 6mo.

 

coh - like it lots but cant find strength to gather prisms by farming, and all i want is some shadow auras... so havent played in a few months.  some people on excelsior are right wing lunatics, anti semitic, weird nationalisms, deeply upsetting, and kind of push that in public chat.

maybe its an older crowd comprising them and HC has become some sort of den for them, maybe its like how eve online had terrorists in its bowels...dunno.  been thinking of migrating off excelsior when new content drops to HC.

[Mr. Vee]

My top steam time is 509 hours in NBA2k16, which i got either free or basically free in a humble bundle, don't remember. But seeing as i've lost years of my life to CoH two different times and the sub was cheap the first time around, it's still the all-time champ.

[pawstruck]

On 11/3/2023 at 1:00 PM, Skyhawke said:

Best value: The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind.  I bought the game and both expansions. Between the expansions and player mods, I had @ 320 hours in on one character. Freaking loved that game.

 

Morrowind was awesome.

 

What's stupid is every time I play an RPG alone, I get bored because it "doesn't matter" and "no one will ever know I even did this."

 

Then I log on to CoX and almost never team with or speak to anyone. 🙃

[Mr. Vee]

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

Highest value: COH, especially since Homecoming: also the original Elite, Star Trek Online (pre ARC takeover, but haven't been back for all the reinvestment of the modern Paramount-friendly era), OG PS1 Gran Turismo, PUBG Mobile, Counterstrike, Dance Dance Revolution (PS3, and any arcade if the cabinet's still in good shape and I'm drunk enough), most of the Tomb Raiders, the Thief series, KOTOR, and SWG (before the dark times... before the NGE.)

 

Lowest value: Elite: Dangerous. Badly needs optimisation and stripping down the graphics, and came close to exploding my work laptop. See also EvE, which was a massive time/money-sink until I worked out that any kind of serious competitive play would cost more of my time, fitness, money and sanity than I was prepared to give up for casual gaming.

 

(Dis)Honorable mention...: say what you like about WoW, and especially about Activision Blizzard, it's still a good, accessible, very playable game with a tonne of content and hidden Easter Eggs, and can still be fun to play...

...if you don't do any raids or multiplayer events, and ignore any comments about your odd playstyle/non-minmaxed toon/sexuality/sense of humour(assuming they have one, which they don't seem to like much.) Exceptionally toxic community even by EvE standards.

Edited November 8 by ThaOGDreamWeaver

[SeraphimKensai]

15 hours ago, Mr. Vee said:

This was the first Bethesda game I wrote any mods for. Such a great game.

[Saiyajinzoningen]

Best Value 

By far CoH. SWIM played from the 1st month till the month before the last (SWIM couldn't watch the sunset)

SWIM had a sub for 90% of the time but 6 months before the game went down a friend offered to purchase SWIM's account for an obscene amount of money

So SWIM got to play the best game in the whole world for free and made some on top. 

 

Worst Value

Diablo 2

Not gonna lie, SWIM loved this game way too much. SWIM probably would have been one of those "had a heart attack while farming" horror stories if SWIM's account hadn't gotten banned for an excessive amount of SoJ's. Anytime SWIM sees or hears "SoJ" SWIM gets.....

 

 

Edited November 8 by Saiyajinzoningen

[Scarlet Shocker]

Steam tells me that Civilization V would get me my 747 pilot certificate and everything else needed to achieve it, with No Man's sky a long way behind but a close runner up Bloons TD6. Not to mention the whole Total War thing but that's spread over a few iterations.

 

None of those compare to the hours I've spent in CoH - although the above games (excluding TW) were a single one-shot purchase and I did spend a few £££ on CoH when live and occasionally donated post-sunset.

 

I should also give an honourable mention to AFK Arena on mobile which is expensive to progress in, very P2W but fun all the same if you can be patient, so deffo excluded from VFM

 

I also neglected to mention The Secret World (aka Secret World Legends after it's "relaunch") which did take a lot of my time after sunset but that wasn't so cheap. although highly underrated.

Edited November 8 by Scarlet Shocker
TSW

[pawstruck]

On 11/8/2023 at 5:04 PM, Scarlet Shocker said:

I should also give an honourable mention to AFK Arena on mobile which is expensive to progress in, very P2W but fun all the same if you can be patient, so deffo excluded from VFM

 

Curious to know how you feel about the money spent now. I've always been poor enough IRL that P2W games were a hard "no," but I understand some people spend hundreds on them without blinking.

[Scarlet Shocker]

On 11/13/2023 at 12:53 PM, pawstruck said:

 

Curious to know how you feel about the money spent now. I've always been poor enough IRL that P2W games were a hard "no," but I understand some people spend hundreds on them without blinking.

 

I have dropped a little bit of spare cash on it, but not huge amounts and not often. You could spend a fortune on that particular game and many other app games I think, they do encourage you to be gouged. But if you're selective and patient you improve progress without spending a fortune

[Hedgefund]

Malcolm Gladwell says you gain true expertise after 10,000 hours, Now, I may not have this expertise in any single version of Sid Meier's Civ, but if we include all hours played across 2-6, he would consider me a pro.  Actually, Civ 5 + 6 is enough to cross that threshold.  No way to know time spent on 2-4 though.  For figuring value, it doesn't even matter what the cost was, the denominator is so huge, the cost/hour approaches 0.

 

Worst value would any of the innumerable games I have in my Steam library I haven't even installed yet.

Edited November 16 by Hedgefund

[Dona Eis Requiem]

Best:

City of Heroes

Diablo2

Grim Dawn

Banished (modded)

 

Worst:

WoW

Neverwinter

[Angel Pheonix77]

Best: Fallout 4, Skyrim, Conan Exiles, The Secret World (Not the free2player version.)

 

Worse: Champions Online by far.

[EnosFay]

On 11/9/2023 at 3:05 AM, Saiyajinzoningen said:

Best Value 

By far CoH. SWIM played from the 1st month till the month before the last (SWIM couldn't watch the sunset)

SWIM had a sub for 90% of the time but 6 months before the game went down a friend offered to purchase SWIM's account for an obscene amount of money

So SWIM got to play the best game in the whole world for free and made some on top. 

 

Worst Value

Diablo 2

Not gonna lie, SWIM loved this game way too much. SWIM probably would have been one of those "had a heart attack while farming" horror stories if SWIM's account hadn't gotten banned for an excessive amount of SoJ's. Anytime SWIM sees or hears "SoJ" SWIM gets.....

 

 

+1