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, 2023 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, 2023 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, 2023 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, 2023 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, 2023 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

[Oubliette_Red]

CoH will always be #1 in my book for best bang for your buck.

 

Outside of that, if anyone only went by hours spent in-game, then according to Steam is would have been DDO with 2,413.1 hours. My personal opinion would somewhat differ, I think the cost for VIP is excessive, the expansions they pump out are ridiculously priced. Meanwhile they never fix issues, most especially the lag. I only played because I was playing with friends and if it weren't for them I wouldn't play at all. I gave up saying "that's so stupid" regarding game mechanics that I just started saying "that's so DDO".

 

Personally I would place Minecraft as most valued, Paid $25 back in 2012 when I started playing with co-workers and I still play it today.

Second would be Morrowind, no idea how many hours I spent in the game on just one character, bought it long before I had Steam, but I scoured every, single inch of that island, every house, town, city, cave and ruin. I played so much of it that when I first started playing CoH and entered my first cave mission map, I avoided running through or landing in puddles because I didn't want to chance mobs hearing me.

 

Edited January 12 by Oubliette_Red

[Luminara]

On 11/3/2023 at 8:20 AM, pawstruck said:

My highest value

 

On 11/3/2023 at 8:20 AM, pawstruck said:

My lowest value

 

[Madzookeeper]

if i'm entirely honest, the game i have the most time in is LOL. i've put money into it, at one point had every champ, had friends i wouldn't have met without it, and have literally thousands of hours in it. but holy crap is that game toxic in a lot of ways. i don't know if i can say it's best or worst value simply because of time put in and fun i had with it, but i also flat out refuse to touch it again at this point for a whole host of reasons. bit of a conundrum there.

 

best value: the mass effect trilogy. i've played it by myself like 8 times, and just in the last year went through it with my wife making all of the decisions and she loved it, was a great time playing with her, and it's hard to argue with 9 times through it, i have to say. that's like 900+ hours easy, and that's not even including the multiplayer that i have at least another hundred hours in.

 

morrowind. oh morrowind. i have one character ever in that game, and said character had 860+ hours and was an absolute blast. couldn't mod the game due to being on xbox, but the game of the year edition... *chef's kiss* hours in elder scrolls games have done nothing but go down since then. as an example, i think i have more hours modding skyrim than actually playing it at this point... which is extremely sad, though i did beat everything in the base game and the first expansion, though just kinda burnt out going through dragonborn. never did finish that. 

 

dark souls series, elden ring are pretty up there. i've only beaten 3 and elden ring, but i've had nothing but fun with all of them other than the freaking capra demon fight. i would like to slap whoever designed that fight as it may be the single worst boss fight i've ever encountered just off the design. such a small space with THREE enemies coming after you is just stupid, especially when you don't have an effective jump button to get to the ledge for falling attacks, which is the only practical way to handle the stupid thing given dodging and blocking are almost out of the question given your equipment and space to move around in. just no, no, no. otherwise seriously enjoyed my time with all of them, even dark souls 2.

 

and i do love me some civ, going all the way back to 2, test of time, 3, 4, call to power, 5 and 6. almost never finished games, but i loved starting them and everything up the renaisance time period. after that it just gets to be such a slog with all of the units moving around and everything, but i do have a LOT of hours in these games over the years, along with games like them such as alpha centauri, masters of orion 2, age of wonders 1-4... so yea. fun times.

 

least value is... harder. i don't tend to play games i don't like for very long, and there's been more than a few of them. the one that stands out to me the most though, probably biomutant. i was looking forward to that game but holy crap was it disappointing. played it for like two hours, trying, trying to get some fun out of it, but between lack of fighting when you get to the overworld, lack of anything really, bad controls, bad fighting, just... oh god, let me play dark souls. or elden ring. it tried to be a souls like in some ways, and oh god did it fail hard.

 

otherwise, well, i just don't really remember games i don't like, because i just don't play them long enough for them to really stick in my mind. and it's seldom that i'm actually THAT disappointed in things. but i did just remember one other game. NBA 2k20. got that with the money i got for christmas. oh how i tried to enjoy it, put easily 40-50 hours into it... but the shooting mechanics and everything else were just so abysmal that i gave up and haven't touched a sports game since as they all seem to have identical problems now. sure, i got it down to almost 1$ an hour... but i had zero fun and was utterly frustrated almost the entire time i was doing it. that has to count for some really bad value right there, since it was actively the opposite of what a game is supposed to be.

 

i suppose any of the games that i've bought and haven't played yet could count here as well, but so many of them were on really good sales that i have a hard time really feeling like i haven't gotten some value out of them just because i got them cheap. and often times it's also supporting a dev that i like or think deserves it, so there's value in that whether i've played it or not. especially if it's a dev doing things i am very appreciative of, or a company actually making changes towards much healthier practices in general. i think and feel that rewarding that kind of behavior is a net positive for gaming as a whole.

Edited January 24 by Madzookeeper

[StarseedWarrior]

I think its a bit subjective let me explain we are all on different paths in our lives, different perspectives to lead to some evolution of our lives, so a vet gamer will have standards of what they like since they likely played and beaten many genres already, allot of us vets for example love rpgs, take gotham knights many people did not like this because they did not understand it, in batman games you pretty much can do everything out of the box without combat being locked behind a skill tree, it was all extra in gotham knights you start pretty weak and most stuff that make the combat fuction decent are locked behind skills.

 

Many did not have the patience to see just how deep this game was and took it at face value, it was never meant to be the next arkham.  It truly is an outstanding game no matter how you look at it, and it can be played at 60 fps now on xbox pass and pcs for sure.

 

So value is all about what you experienced, what your favorite things you pick up from games, systems, combat, crafting and so on, and most of all did the experience surprise you. Sometimes a linear action game that is only 2 hours can be totally worth it to someone, however there is an issue with greedy companies over pricing games to so there is that.

[Kyksie]

On 11/3/2023 at 8:36 PM, TheOtherTed said:

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.

 

OMG, this is the same for me. I played MOO II so many hundreds of times, I only stopped when I found an unbeatable strategy. MOO III, on the other hand, was so bad that the software store broke it's no return policy and gave me a refund on it.

 

 

Edited February 1 by Kyksie

[Scoobdoo]

Minecraft is a classic in that regard. It's amazing how a $20 game can provide thousands of hours of entertainment, especially with friends. Super Smash Bros. Brawl sounds like it created some unforgettable memories during your college years. And don't even get me started on the nostalgia of Pokémon Red/Blue and Gold/Silver – those Burger King toys were a blast.

If you ever need advice on financial matters or gaming recommendations, feel free to reach out to Mortgage Broker in Bradford or your friendly fellow gamers here.

Edited February 13 by Scoobdoo

[The Tsaurian]

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.

My all time favorite game and my #1 as well!  An older kid that lived on the same street as I did introduced it to me, but I was too young at the time to appreciate it.  I revisited it like a decade later after grabbing it for some pocket lint on a Steam sale and have never looked back.  I replay it at least once a year.

#2 would be Divinity Original Sin 2, which me and my best friends did a months-long coop playthrough of.  Easily my favorite gaming memory, Gavlan earned their Divinity!

#3 is Counter Strike Source, Warcraft servers were amazing and I miss them so much.

 

Honorable mention is Baldur's Gate 3, which in an age where releasing unfinished and unrefined crap is the norm, made me feel so vindicated in backing the project from day one.

 

I am very glad it is better now, but I have never felt more cheated out of my hard earned money by a game than Cyberpunk 2077.