Which game did you get the most and least enjoyment per dollar out of?

Factorio. Spent a total of €52 and have 1,600 hours. €0.03/hour

This edition of PC Zone Magazine cost £4 back in 1995. The cover CD had 1,000 Doom levels and IIRC a bunch of modding tools. I probably got 1,000 hours of entertainment out of it and often think back marveling at the value for money!

Of course all this stuff is available for free online nowadays!

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

Most enjoyment per dollar: I want to say RimWorld, but that shit’s expensive at over a hundred dollars for the base game plus expansions even during the rare times it's on sale.

So I'd have to say Terraria, which I bought for maybe fifteen bucks back at release when it had like three bosses and IIRC ended at Skeletron. Fifteen years of massive free content updates later, it's a sprawling randomly generated Metroidvania with dozens of bosses and an endgame that barely resembles its beginning, and I've probably done a dozen full playthroughs over the years.

That's not even getting into the mods, with tModLoader being given the official seal of approval and letting you swap between a multitude of content overhauls from within the game itself.

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Least enjoyment per dollar would probably be Caves of Qud. It's not a bad game, but I went in with sky-high expectations that it couldn't possibly meet and I couldn't bring myself to enjoy it for what it was; instead feeling frustrated at what it wasn't (and didn't try to be). It didn't help that I regularly play freeform games like CDDA and Dwarf Fortress and the comparatively static structure of CoQ felt extremely restrictive in comparison.

Least enjoyment per dollar had to be Fallout 4. I bought it full price on release, roughly $60, and got the PC version, because I didn't have a working console at the time. I can only game on PC with EDSF, not WASD. But that game hardcoded Use/Action to E while also allowing E to be mapped to move forward. So everywhere I ran, if there was an action to do it would automatically do it. I kept opening doors to hiding monsters, opening crates, doing whatever when I just trying to walk around. I probably only played that game for 10ish hours before giving up.

Most enjoyment per dollar has to be NES Tetris. I have no idea how much my parents paid for that back in 1989, but I still plug in my NES and play it occasionally. Even accounting for buying a second NES in college, multiple replacement controllers, a replacement cart reader tray, and a used copy of the game off ebay far later, I am probably only in for $200. And I can't even make a guess at how many hours I've played NES Tetris. I would skip full days of school in 8th grade to play. I would play for hours in college. I still play a few hours per year now.

Most number of hours is WoW, but at $15/mo plus $60/expansion times probably 6 expansions I've probably spent over $1000 on it for a rough estimate of 7200 hours played.

Probably Cyberpunk 2077...

Got it on sale, after they had taken steps to correct the horrendous launch, coupled with a handful of QoL mods and now I've gotten $.05 per hour out of it.

Price: ~$20 USD

Logged time: 436.5 hours

Edit:

Forgot least... uhhh... hell, probably Ff7 rebirth. Can't really count hours, since it takes a stupid amount of fucking time to do anything, but I really can't overstate how just fucking awful this game is. Just....just fucking terrible.

While Minecraft doesn't have an hour tracker, I almost certainly have over 1000 hours for £15. I have nearly 700 hours in The Binding of Isaac, which is currently £1.09 on Steam.

Vampire survivor. $4.

1000+ hours. Of just staring at pretty colors.

Bought every single DLC to continue supporting them.

I’m leaving out free games I’ve spent thousands of hours in because they were zero dollars…

So the answer would be Java Minecraft. Got it before beta started and have been playing ever since.

Worst would be rise of the robots. Fell prey to the marketing back in the day and that game is as bad as they say.

Probably either:

Warframe - played for free for 500 hours, felt guilty and bought a $20 plat pack to thank them for all of the good times before quitting the game.

Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate - bought for $10 on the eshop, 1000 hours later still going strong.

Not sure about what's least. Technically any game I've bought that I haven't played yet, I suppose, but the game I felt worst about buying was Quest for Camelot for Game Boy Color when I was a kid. I went to the store with my parents to spend my birthday money on a game for the new Game Boy Color I'd just gotten, but they didn't have any good GBC games. I knew that I should just wait, but I really wanted to buy a game. So, I caved and bought it even though I hadn't even seen the movie, and it was predictably terrible, and I've never forgotten it.

I've regretted that purchase for almost 30 years now.

Best is either Minecraft, Counter-Strike or Mirror's Edge. I've got 3k+ hours in the first two, but also something like 600 hours in Mirror's Edge which is nonsense for a game that's 4 hours long on the first playthrough.

Worst is almost certainly PUBG. Bought it to play with friends, realized I hated the entire concept.

I have to parrot the minecraft claim: ignoring that I've bought it for at least 4 friends now and own it on multiple platforms, it's still easily the one I got the most enjoyment per $ on.

as for least enjoyable? I regretably was an early adopter on Amazons New World. I played it once during the EA period, wasn't impressed but my morals at that time didn't allow me to request a refund on it as it felt dirty to buy a preorder then refund it for not liking the game itself. I easily paid 40$ for a game I played a whole 12 minutes of as it didn't vibe with me, and now due to the servers being shut down at the end of the year, is basically a digital paperweight.

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.

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.

Minecraft is obviously up there, as is TF2 like you. Factorio is very high for me, relatively low cost and many hours sunk into it.

My current worst is probably Baldur's Gate 3, I bought it to play with a friend but we've only done one session so far.

Most: Vampire Survivors or Balatro for low price Indie games. Destiny 2 for AAA where I must have had close to 3000 hours at the end of The Final Shape (TFS).

Least: Anthem. I don’t remember if I pre ordered this game or not but my Destiny teammates definitely pressured me into getting it day one.

This was the game that convinced me live service games are a dead end. Just an absolute skeleton of a game you could tell was rushed to release. We played the 8 hour or so campaign and did a few of the post campaign missions and that was it. During all of that the game constantly crashed and the gameplay loop was DOA.

I always comment that Anthem made all the same mistakes that the original Destiny made with lack of content, story, and gameplay loop… 5 years after Destiny 1 released AND 2 years after Destiny 2 fumbled its launch.

Destiny 2 at least got a few more really good years out of it up to TFS then went off a cliff and was all but shut down this year. Kind of proves my point that live service games are a dead end.

The Most: Hollow Knight Silksong. My second best purchase ever.

The least: a horror indie game so badly optimized I couldn't even play a single minute of it. It was just like $1 or so, but it still hurts.

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.

Most: Cyberpunk 2077. base game + expansion and I've clocked in hundreds of hours on it. I replay it from start to end doing every single thing every year. I've done all the endings, done so many different builds, and yet I keep going back.

Least: I will admit Star Citizen. a few years ago I fell for it. I will also admit I "pledged" just over $200 for a ship. biggest gaming mistake I ever made and still to this day I feel like an idiot for falling for that scam.

Most playtime per buck:

Either Minecraft or Overwatch (the first one, before the content draught and aggressive monetization with OW2)

A close contestant is also Super Mario 64, which still is kind of a comfort game and gets a replay every once in a while. But that one was way more expensive IIRC.

Worst...

Hard to say. There are several games still on my pile of shame which make them technically infinite. OW2 was a free upgrade, and I never bought a season pass/loot box/..., so in theory the same "infinite" negative, though it's the closest to "hated/disliked game" for me.

Then there are a few games that are great, but just didn't "click" with me, so I somewhat regretted buying them. On the other hand, I supported the devs of generally great games that just weren't made for me. It isn't completely fair to list them here, but they're most fitting... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In this category: Witcher III, Hollow Knight, Subnautica.

Probably CSGO, because I made at least 100€ playing that game for ~500 hours, and even mostly enjoyed it.

As for the worst, kinda tough to say, since I bought so many games and it's probably one I can't remember. Only one I can think of right now is Monster Hunter 3 for the Wii, which I bought the collector's edition of, only to realize I really don't like Monster Hunter games.

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: definitely Guild Wars 2 - paid around 100 GBP for 5000 hours of fun over 11 years, so that's £0.02 / hour :)

Least: the ~540 bundle games in my Steam backlog I haven't played yet, bc I'm playing GW2 and Genshin instead 🙈

Excluding free/infinite, I'd have to say my best is Morrowind, probably, but it could also be Sim City (Classic or 2000), Starcraft, Half-Life/TFC, Team Fortress 2, Super Mario World, or Mario Kart.

Worst is even trickier, as I'm very careful about my game purchases (excluding Humble Bundles that are technically infinitely bad because hours played is zero, but don't count because I paid to get some other game and/or donate to charity). It'd probably have to be some old early '90s game my parents bought for me, not anything I've bought for myself. I remember a couple of DOS games with horrible magenta and cyan CGA graphics (even though my computer could do VGA, BTW): one was some kind of helicopter game that I couldn't figure out how to play, and the other was some kind of side-scrolling platformer or beat-em-up (maybe Ninja Gaiden, or a rip-off of it?) that I also couldn't figure out how to play.

Most: Factorio, by far

Best value for dollar is definitely Elite Dangerous. I bought it for 30 bucks and have around 1400 hours in it.

Worst value game that I bought and have played might be Cyberpunk 2077. I pre-ordered and have maybe four hours total played. I keep saying I need to go back and give it a proper go now that it's fixed but nah.

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

Minecraft : 15€ spent, over 10K hours played and I only wish I had played even more !

Fallout 4 : 60€ spent, it's boring.

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.

Terraria, probaby. Got it on sale for $5 (it's almost always 50% off) and I've played many playthroughs with many different friends over the past 15 years. When you factor in the very good modding support, its many difficulty settings, playthrough modifiers like the one that flips the world vertically (hell is up and the overworld is at the bottom), it's a game you can play for thousands of hours.

It's still crazy how cheap this game is for how much you get out of it. The devs are awesome for this.

Gotta be BG3. Bought it full price the day I got my deck, about a year ago. There for a while I played every single day for hours. I still play a little most days, though it's with my wife rather than solo. I can't remember how many hours I have on the deck, and the ps5 version I eventually snagged so my wife could play has to have damn near half the time just from me.

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.

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.

I have wasted so much time in Satisfactory. Bought it on sale in 2020 I think, whenever it came to Steam.

Now get your downvotes ready, because the game that has been a waste of money for me is No Man's Sky. Its just... not fun. Its repetitive. Im sure there is some obvious thing somewhere that I'm missing that makes the game fun but so far it's hidden behind hours of grinding.

(Free) Most: Super Mecha Champions, which was a free battle royale game on Steam that was a port of a mobile game. Best FREE.99 I ever spent, was such a fun game until servers closed.

(Paid) Most: The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. Literally peak game. It got me into modding and software development, and I still play it to this day. Best $59.99 I ever spent ($59.99 brand new for the 1.0 gold cart in 1998)

Worst: Need for Speed Unbound. Worst $4.99 I ever spent, I turned the game off after the characters in the game couldn't stop yapping in my ear about "police and politicans oppressing street racers." Also the driving physics suck because of course they do, Criterion made it.

Least enjoyment would just have to be whatever is the most expensive game in my endlessly growing backlog. The other half of this question is more interesting, so I want to give multiple answers.

1. I've got just under 4,200 hours in Terraria and it's still my favorite game! For the $10 it cost me, that's 420 hours per dollar. Nice.

2. Minecraft would be a close contender. There's no way to track my hours in it, and I don't play it so much anymore, but I have to have at least somewhere close to the 4k I've got in Terraria, if not more. This game shaped my entire childhood back when the Xbox 360 edition first came out.

Those two are great, but they're also some of the best selling games of all time so I'll note some more niche ones as well.

1. DLC and all, Melvor Idle is a game I spent $25 on (edit: though the full base game is completely free if you don't mind playing through your browser) and managed to put just under 3,000 hours in. Now admittedly this is an idle game, so a large chunk of that time was having it open in the background while I do something else. But it's surprisingly interactive and I'd like to think at least 1,000 of those hours were me either actually playing or planning.

2. Barony is a game I've put 650 hours in since 2018, and man has it come a long way. Including DLC I spent about $30 on it for myself, though I've also bought the game or DLCs for multiple friends so its probably closer to like $60. It's a permadeath roguelike with next to zero meta progression. Check it out if you're into the genre, its currently on an all-time-low sale for $2 which is a damn steal.

I have so much time logged in civ5 that it makes me want to throw up lol. New Vegas may still beat it out though. Both bought at full price a million years ago

Garry’s Mod, 10 dollars and 6000 hours logged.

Grim Dawn, paid around 50€ for it plus expansions, played 2400 hours for a bit over 2 cents per hour.

On July 27 Fangs of Asterkarn, the new GD expansion gets released! I'm hyped lol

The worst deal i got is One Step from Eden, a mix of rythm game and deck builder. I had to realize that i am not capable of playing this game, because i can either do one or the other, but not both at the same time. While trying to git gud i crossed over the 2 hour playtime for a refund.

Most - SimCity 4. I don't remember buying the CD but countless hours later I can say it was worth it.

Least is really hard. Like you have to really really fuck up a game for me to not like it. Three come to mind. Cities Skylines 2. Mortal Kombat 1. Starfield. Both games coming after two of my all time faves. I spent 500+ hours in CS1. If you can't tell city builders are my jam. So for me to actively despise a city builder is pretty condemning of the quality of the game. That's my problem with Skylines 2.

MK1 I powered through the story and had no desire to play any other part of it. It was a buggy incomplete mess. The roster was a step back from MK11 IMO. The game play was supposed to address the main complaints of how slow and limited MK11 was. They did that by adding a gimmick instead of going back to the MKX formula. MK1 is just a failed mess of a game.

I would have forgot about Starfield if not for seeing it in my Steam library just now. Mechanically this game fucking blows. I really hate some of the design decisions they made in the game. Like oxygen frequently stopping you from sprinting early game. The menu designs. Space flight. It's all so baffling to me. They really fumbled the ball.

Guild Wars 2 - I played the base and first DLC about 4k hours. The rest of thd DLCs were way less hours but still worth it.

Tough choice but ruling out free games (if we include emulation I'll be here all day) I might go with Invisible Inc. It's a turn based stealth game with lots of different characters to try, each leaning into different strategies. While it's possible to knock out or kill guards, it's discouraged because it increases the alarm, so you have watch patterns and use tricks and diversions to achieve different objectives. I have 200 hours on it and it's on sale rn for $5. There are other games I have more hours on, but not as much enjoyment.

Runner up: Heroes of Might and Magic IV. I have no idea how many hours I have on it because I bought it before I had Steam, on a compact disk (in fact it's not even on Steam, I think it's abandonware?) and have come back to it so many times over the years. It's kind of a timeless hidden gem, lots of ways to build your characters and your armies, lots of different challenges, and the writing is fun and memorable. The style is a little different from the rest of the series and I never got into the others but the new one (Olden Era) is promising (and has a free demo that's really good).

Worst for me are the Total War series, maybe Napoleon or Rome 2. I remember when the first ones came out and there wasn't anything like it. In the year 2000, the ability to fly around the camera ordering troops around was incredible, and of course the ninja assassination clips were absolutely peak. But since then, every one pretty much follows the same formula, and it feels like if you've played one you've played them all. It's not that they're bad games, I just couldn't get into them.

Transformice. Played 5500 hours without spending a penny on it.

Biggest flop in recent history for me would be mewgenics. Dropped 30 bucks on it for like 2 hours of enjoyment and 10 more of forcing myself to try to like it

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

My wife and I tried God of War 2018 recently because the internet sings its praise.

Turns out we were both pretty turned off by the Neanderthal toxic masculinity Kratos shows the boy all the time.

I’m sure it’s setting up the story for character growth, but it was annoying as hell.

Tbh I'm not sure there is a game I've clocked 1,000 hours on. I have multiple with about 250-300+ hours played; but if I had to combine the hours played with GMod on my old steam account and my current one, it would probably equal close to 1,000.

I'm not sure if there are any that I've gotten the least amount of enjoyment out of, but there are plenty that I just haven't gotten around to playing.

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.

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

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.

Warcraft 3+TFT I've played the campaigns at least 4 times over the years, I think plus a ton of custom maps plus of course dota 1. Definitely best bang for buck. Other games that are close are path of exile(1k hours), counter strike(800hrs), dota2(1.4k hrs) and wow (way too many hours...but also a lot more money over the years)

For more traditional/offline games:

Gothic 2 I've played at least 3 times over the years , I think. Probably have 400+ hours in it. If they remake it like they did with the first one, I'm definitely gonna replay it.

Mass effect trilogy. Played the whole trilogy 3 times and I got the legendary edition but my first playthrough of that is on hold for now.

Don't remember which number exactly, but one of the older football manager games. I probably have like 400+ hours in that.

Worst value for money? That Warcraft mobile game. For whatever reason I was stupid enough to spend a bunch on it when it came out before I realized how grindy and stupid and pointless it was.

I also have only 22 hours in stalker2 ATM even tho I got it when it came out. It was quite buggy so I figured I'd let them cook some more. I'm sure I'll get my money's worth out of it eventually.

Animal Crossing. My wife and I ran that island for years, with thousands of hours on the clock each.

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.

Most: Minecraft, with over 1000+ hours

Least: Watch_Dogs: Legion. Barely made it one playthrough.

In no particular order: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio, Garry's Mod

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.

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.

Another for Warframe. About 4000 hours over maybe 5-6 years and I think I only ever paid like $12 for some starter platinum.

Since that's free-to-play, here are runners up:

• Satisfactory - 850 hours and counting, bought for maybe $20.
• Forza Horizon 4 - got the premium pack for $20 about 6 months before EOL and put almost 750 hours into it.
• Elden Ring - 650+ hours so far.
• Terraria - 450+ hours, what a deceptively huge game.
• Skyrim - Endlessly replayable with mods, 300+ hours.
• Witcher 3 - explored everything, Heroic says 150 hours but it could easily be more.
• Fallout 3 - hundreds of hours, explored everything.
• Kerbal Space Program - 250 hours, got it for like $16 way back when.

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.

Worst is anything that I haven't gotten around to playing.

Best is either The Witcher 3, Fallout New Vegas, or Borderlands. Probably FNV.

TF2 is way up there for me. I've played on and off since launch and accumulated 2500 hours. I think lifetime I might have gotten value from the game because I sold off a bunch of items that appreciated.

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).

For me its Skyrim, Mount and Blade Warband and Battlefield 3 (back when I still played Multiplayer). I have over 1000 Hours in all of them.

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.

Fallout 3 or New Vegas. I can't remember which cause they're both pretty close in overall hours played.

For now definitely Deadlock. It's free (for now) and no way to even spend money (for now) i played 900 hors for now and i don't think i'm gonna stop anytime soon.

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

Most: Warframe, and by far. I have ~5000 hours on it, and it looks like DE will keep releasing banger updates. I've spent at least $200 (probably more) on various bundles because they deserve it. They also dodged a massive bullet when Sony tried to buy the company.

Excluding free-to-play titles, it's either autistic crack cocaine Factorio, Kerbal Space Program (the good one), or Derail Valley.

Least: probably Atomic Heart. I bought it at full price because of the Soviet Bioshock aesthetic and Mick Gordon's involvement, but the tutorial was so fucking long and boring that I bounced off.

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.

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.

Escape from Tarkov: $150. 18000h. $0.00833333333 per hour.

I'm deliberately excluding free titles as that would be technically infinite. Otherwise it would be Dota+Dota2 combined, even accounting for the last few years of playing Dota2 not exactly counting as "enjoyment".

Most enjoyment is tough, but it's probably either Diablo 2 or Warcraft 3. I played both fervently throughout my childhood, but considering Dota 1 technically counts as WC3 I think that is probably the one. I played a whole ton of WC3 custom maps, even apart from Dota. It was the unifying game me and my childhood best friend bonded over.

Least enjoyment per dollar is unquestionably STALKER 2. I pre-ordered the €100 deluxe edition because I love the franchise, I loved the GSC studio and I wanted to support them through being struck by the Ukraine war. I ended up doing a single playthrough and then shelving it, waiting for patches. But do I regret my purchase? Not necessarily. I knew it was an emotional purchase, I know it was a show of support. And I knew it was an investment for the future. GSC have still not given up on the game, they've slowly been fixing it and the first DLC is coming. And mods are being developed. Do I think it will supplant Anomaly? No. But it still has the chance to pay off.

Even before it went F2P, Rocket League. 10,000+ hours, and counting.

bought CS:GO a decade ago on sale for like £3 and I still play it (ignore the cost of the cosmetics i bought)

Most value is probably Awesomenauts at around €50 spent and 1950 hours coming to 2.5c/h

Team Fortress 2 is there for me too, about €100 spent and 2200 hours for a shocking 4.5c/h. Still play it to this day.

Minecraft is also around the somewhere but like everyone else I have no clue about hours played. Might be anything from 500 to 2000 hours, impossible to estimate. Since I got the beta or alpha for cheap, I think €10, it might top the other two.

My worst value game is definitely GTA 5. I think I got that at €50 or so directly from Rockstar and only played it for an hour online and like an hour singleplayer. I enjoyed gta in the past but just don't care for it anymore, got bored out of my mind. Least time I ever spent on a game that expensive without being able to refund.

Elden Ring for one, because my buddy liked it so much he bought it for me. Not sure if it counts though because I ended up passing it on and bought a copy for my brother so we could all play together.

Otherwise Splitgate, free basic ass arena shooter that is the only thing that has scratched the itch that quake 3 started me on when I was a child.

Tormentor❌ Punisher

Bought it on chrono(gg) for $1 and have something like 500 hours in it. Made it to number 2 on the global HardMode leaderboard.

Both one of the most difficult and infuriating games I've ever played, but one of the most skill-based and almost infinitely playable... Crazy considering it's a 2d top down arena based shooter.

Gotta be either Anno 1800 or one of the Monster Hunters.

RE9 is probably on the lower end for me. Was excited and paid full price and didn't even get more than an hour into a second run before I got bored. The game is good but a depressing amount of it is basically on rails, kind of like the Beneviento house in RE8.

For 70 fucking bucks, it needs to ship with a mercenaries mode or seriously different NG+ mode. Insanity stops being interesting as soon as you get the blood collector and start making OP backstab injectors again and ironically showcases how actually rather unobservant most enemies are.

Compare that to games like Abiotic Factor, which are half the price (and I paid less than that because I got it during its 0.9 early access patch) and I've clocked hundreds of hours in or games like WoW or FFXIV which have clocked several thousand hours each.

I don't have the original disc, but absolutely Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 Platinum Edition. Most bang for my buck, enough back in the day I found a copy online and had an amazing time playing it again. I LOVE it more than the first 2 games purely for the ability to ride the coaster first person rather than through 3rd person following the track.

As for least bang for my buck, absolutely a Hot Wheels Stunt Track that I picked up thinking it would be like Beat That. Didn't even make it past the first level without hating it. Was just a single stunt jump and then the level ends from what I can recall.

WoW. Never paid a dime and played thousands of hours.

Otherwise probably Captain of Industry.

Most: Fallout 4, I have over 7000 hours in it. Bought it pre-launch with season pass.

Least: I have no idea, probably several games I bought and never played.

Mount and Blade Warband, CKII, and EUIV are all up there extremely highly but I guess Warband due to less dlc.

Least is tougher. Probably a couple of NES stinkers from way back would be in the running. Though lord knows I have games in my steam library I've yet to play. Hard to say.

Most bang for the proverbial buck? Valheim for $20 in early 2021. Played the hell out of it until well into Ashlands and the souring that caused (more the FPS drops than endless enemy spam).

Least? Probably pre-ordering Fallout 76 Tricentennial edition for... $76. Hated most of my early play, only stuck it out for a year because of how much my wife loves the IP, then quit for over 4 years. We play again, but it's also not quite the dumpster fire it was at launch.

Maybe also Simcity 2013. Cheaper but infinitely worse.

EDIT: best might be tired with Master of Magic. Bought on sale in 1994 (no clue how much), still playing to this day. A heavily modded Windows native version (Caster of Magic II) that supports submods and was itself last updated in 2025.

No Man's Sky. Seems like getting good RNG is the difficulty of the game.

Check your local library, can rent console games for free!

I used to play WoW back in the day, and I would pay a monthly subscription of 13 euros per month, for three years straight, which is a total of around 470 euros, but I would play 8-14 hours a day almost everyday (for around two years), so in the end it was a good overall value-for-money (although a complete waste of time). Minecraft is also in the top 3, with a licence of 25 euros (while it was still owned by Mojang) and countless hours (easily over 1.000). But the biggest value for money was is Skyrim on Steam: I got it for 1 euro in a sale, around 330 hours spent (playing vanilla on my Steam Deck). I had to quit it cause I could see it going to the thousands of hours easily.

Biggest regret so far is Rimworld: paid full price (30 euros), played less than two hours. I always say I'll make it worth its price someday, but my backlog is already in the hundreds, so I don't see it happening any time soon.

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.

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

Diablo 4...

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.

Any game I've pirated hits infinity enjoyment per dollar, and honestly i can't remember a game i've paid money for and didn't get a good ratio of enjoyment out of. Probably something I haven't played yet? Yapyap, i haven't touched yet because my friends flaked, so i'll pick that one.