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.
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
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.
It was for the story. It’s not a clone of the earlier games where Kratos is hellbent on tearing everything down, and everything revolves around that goal. The end of the game hits abruptly without closure on the god-killing aspect, and that’s when I figured out it’s actually a soft story about a father and son, burying their deceased loved one, and slowly recovering from the trauma and grief. The god-killing part is just a long sidequest, the story begins and ends with the mother’s burial.
Assuming you’re not going to play it:
Tap for spoiler
Yeah, he slowly changes throughout the story. By the end he’s actually a decent dad
I would recommend even watching a let’s play because for me it was one of the best games / stories in the last decade or so
Vampire survivor. $4.
1000+ hours. Of just staring at pretty colors.
Bought every single DLC to continue supporting them.
In a similar vein. “Dome keeper” has had me teleport from and to Europe on 12 hour flights 4 times now.
FTL, Terraria, core keepter, and everything supergiant games ( hades, bastion, transistor) all punched well above their costs.
Have you tried their new game?
Factorio. Spent a total of €52 and have 1,600 hours. €0.03/hour
No, I am already friends with someone who has 17,000 hours. Yes Seventeen Thousand.
Dang, I’m only slightly more than halfway there.
Gleba, I’m coming for you!
Oh Gleba my beloved hellhole. Just remember, if your plant stuff isn’t moving, throw a spoilage filter on it!
That’s nuts. If they bought it on release and played everyday since then it works out at 8 hours a day. That’s more than a full time job!
Not quite, factorio first released in 2012. They didn’t get to Steam till much later. Also, it’s not uncommon to have the game running or paused even if you’re not playing.
Hmm… I was going off Wikipedia which says 2020 - I guess the earlier release was an alpha.
In any case having your factories running in the background (overnight?) would quickly bump up those hours. Not sure it’d make for a very interesting stream though!
It might not necessarily be running. But factorio is a game that’s very conducive to you hopping in for a few minutes at a time, so some players have it paused a lot of the time when they’re alt tabbed instead of closing it.
Ah I see. I’ve only played Mindustry (2D Java/ Android equivalent) and if I left that running overnight I’d wake up to complete devastation!
Well, he is a twitch streamer and purchased it before it was sold on steam.
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.
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.
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.
I had the same experience with BG3. It feels more like a single player game in a way, in multiplayer it felt a bit awkward with the story moments. My partner kept skipping cutscenes, and making weird story choices that often led to genocide. Which I suppose is peak chaotic neutral murder hobo DnD behaviour, but the game really isn’t balanced around murder hobo 😂. I kind of was just held hostage and had to sit there while they talked to people and I had no idea what was going on. I’m planning to try again in single player eventually.
Playing a game like BG3 in co-op sounds utterly absurd to me. You’re supposed to have a gripping narrative with your character (which for a lot players will be a self insert, making it even more personal) with lots of text to read and digest and process. How are you supposed to focus on all that if you’re on a call with a friend??
It was in person so it was even worse lol. Couch co-op chaos did not go well with BG3.
It was good in Divinity: Original Sin 1 because in that game you can kind of just ignore the entire story and play it like an action CRPG, which we enjoyed a lot. I got my MC and Jafar (not his actual name but it was a funny running joke because we couldn’t remember his name), my partner got their MC and the two handed sword lady I also forget her name. It was a running joke like, FFS Jafaaaaar C’mon! Because he would constantly fall over and get crippled by every CC that got near him. Like his toe would touch one molecule of frozen floor and he’d just comically fall over for 3 turns… then fall over again as soon as he got up and tried to walk out of it. Classic Larian.
But yeah it didn’t work for BG3 because the story actually matters
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!
Idk if you like quake as much as doom but you can get hours of fun out of a map pack like the quake brutalist jam. Very high quality maps completely for free. Those thousand hours for 4 pounds definitely beat all my top games, I’d say it was worth it.
I never really got into quake in the same way but I did enjoy some quake 2 mods. I’d gone to uni by then so didn’t have as much free time to while away!
That’s epic. 1000 levels?!?! I beat the game and was sad there was no more levels, I would have loved that disc as a kid
Tbh I’m not sure I even played through all the WADs. I got really hooked on modding which was endless fun.
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.
I have tried so hard to like Returnal. But the constant starting completely over EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME just gets so old.
I’m with ya on that one. I tried to like Returnal I really did but it got so irritating and boring and I never felt like I’d made progress.
Yeah exactly.
Even before it went F2P, Rocket League. 10,000+ hours, and counting.
The Sims 2. I paid for all the extensions, so quickly calculated, something around 300€ in total, back then. But I’ve been playing it for twenty years. I do not know, how many thousand hours I have on it, so I cannot calculate the price per hour, but I think it is pretty low at this point. And still getting lower.
// The least I do not know, I do not play many other games.
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.
But that game hardcoded Use/Action to E while also allowing E to be mapped to move forward.
What if I told you (*insert Morpheus meme*)… that AutoHotkey may be able to force a remap? It could malfunction with some games but it usually works!
FO4 is better now, just wish they’d stop releasing micro updates that break mods
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.
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.
Oh no, caves of cud is next on my list and I just bought it 🤞
Make sure you’re patient with yourself! Qud is an amazing, unique experience, but patience is a must. I hope you have fun!!
It’s a good game! It’s just not the game I wanted.
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.
I think NMS is excellent, and not for me. I love logistics and puzzles. NMS is mostly exploration and combat. Their attempts at logistics and crafting are paltry, despite showing huge promise. Oh well. Maybe some day.
I love NMS but it’s been shelved for the better part of a year at this point and I don’t even really return for the updates anymore. Mods do a lot to improve the game and the new stuff they add is really cool but it’s built on a painfully limited and outdated foundation. Every planet might as well be the same so what’s the point of exploring?
NMS is the perfect game for a specific kind of person. Unfortunately that person isn’t me either. I’m glad some people like it though, and it seems well made
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.
I kept having this really weird problem in Valheim. It would run perfectly fine, running at 140fps. Then, randomly, for no discernable reason, after 15–90 minutes of playing it would suddenly and without warning enter what I call “lag mode”, where it would just tank down to 8fps and become unplayable. The only temporary fix was to restart my PC, which was extremely annoying when playing with friends.
I would just endure the lag when doing housekeeping. Making homes and buildings, making equipment and potions and portals, etc. Then when it came time for an adventure or boss, I would be like, ok brb guys, restart my PC, and hope we killed the boss before I got hard CC’d and taken out by poor performance.
I couldn’t find any explanation for this anywhere, I tried everything to fix it. Years later after patches it was still an issue even with a brand new OS, but it was isolated to my PC. My only guess was it was a memory leak or something unique to my setup. It kind of sucked the joy out of the game.
Same!
Also, I love building. It made the process miserable for any sizable base. Doubly so in my Ashlands one.
So much wasted potential with the stunning lack of optimizations and glacial pace of development.
At least they got a pony.
You’re the only other person I’ve met with the same issue. I even made a bug report and forum post and complained everywhere, everyone said I was crazy lol
