How do you measure a game's worth?

[Ravage]

Is it how long the SP is? How varied the weapons are? Or perhaps is it only the story? The gameplay? The character development? How much money was put into making it? What makes the $60 all worth it?

A question a definitely want to ask is, can gaming be considered an art form?

I do think some games like Journey could be considered art, some games not. It varies.

What are your opinions?

 

[Vern5]

The Number of Hours I am having fun should be greater than or equal to the price I payed in American Dollars.

Somebody make that into a mathematical formula, please.

 

[Caiphus]

I was about to say that the amount of fun you have is the only factor, but I think that production values should factor in somewhat. But that's my opinion.

I mean, I really enjoyed Minecraft when I played it a year or so ago, but if Mojang tried to charge $60 for it, that'd feel like a bit of a ripoff. Right? No voice acting, graphical quality being what it is (I mean, it's Minecraft), all that sort of stuff. I mean, it doesn't *need* any of those, and I still had probably 200 hours of fun with it. But yeah.

 

[gamer_parent]

The Number of minutes I am having fun should be greater than or equal to the price I payed in American Dollars.

Somebody make that into a mathematical formula, please.

This is actually how I generally think of it in shorthand. If a system has at least 3 things on it that I can get 200 hours of entertainment out of each, it's worth the purchase. Now, this is back in the day when a console was around 300 USD or so, and each game is around 50 USD. That's a total of 450 for 600 hours. So we can estimate that I valued entertainment at 1.5 USD per hour.

That was a very crude way of looking at it though, and it only handled the console itself. Clearly, there are games that I have bought that did NOT get that many hours into it. (In fact, most games will not see 200 hours except competitive games)

Does that mean my purchases were undervalued? I would disagree with that. (It included things like Shadow of Colossus, after all) So clearly a more sophisticated model is required.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

It depends. I can value a game for how many times I can play, if there's a co-op option, if I can go online, how long is the single player, is there replayability to the main campaign, can I do different kinds of runs, etc. Every game is a different case. For the record I've never paid over 30 USD for a current gen game. Don't think I could either. So every purchase I make is lower than that and there's a guaranteed replayability to it.

 

[Vern5]

The Number of minutes I am having fun should be greater than or equal to the price I payed in American Dollars.

Somebody make that into a mathematical formula, please.

This is actually how I generally think of it in shorthand. If a system has at least 3 things on it that I can get 200 hours of entertainment out of each, it's worth the purchase. Now, this is back in the day when a console was around 300 USD or so, and each game is around 50 USD. That's a total of 450 for 600 hours. So we can estimate that I valued entertainment at 1.5 USD per hour.

That was a very crude way of looking at it though, and it only handled the console itself. Clearly, there are games that I have bought that did NOT get that many hours into it. (In fact, most games will not see 200 hours except competitive games)

Does that mean my purchases were undervalued? I would disagree with that. (It included things like Shadow of Colossus, after all) So clearly a more sophisticated model is required.

Okay then. If the quality of the game is such that its entertainment value exceeds its number of hours played then we have to address Fun and Hours Played as separate values.

So, the calculation of a game's worth comes down to FUN + (Hours of Fun) >= Price.

Of course, now we have to quantify Fun, which is a terrifying procedure to consider.

 

[gamer_parent]

well, the question bears clarifying. If the question really is how much is a game worth financially in the business world, there are actually pretty well established guidelines on how you can come to that estimate. (It's generally what I would care more about, to be frank)

Now, personally, I did my little math up there already. 1.5 dollars per hour of gaming time, if you include the console itself.

However, I was thinking more about this and it occurred to me that not all hours of gaming are made equal. The 16 hours of ICO, for example, while much shorter, is probably worth far more than say, 16 hours of Dynasty Warriors. So clearly, a different way of looking at it would be needed.

I think if I had to call it something, it would be an entertainment value ratio. Obviously, not all of these are rated equal, since it depends greatly from game to game. A game with a low EVR could be something like say, a game that is literally nothing but grinding, but never has any true engagement. Think of it as the farmvilles of the world, where you play literally just to burn minutes because you're bored. On the other end of the spectrum, you might only get 15 total hours out of say, the latest COD. But it might be 15 INTENSE hours that you just can't put down. So in those cases, the EVR would be considerably greater.

Obviously, this value is highly subjective. But I think it gives us a useful starting point here. For players who value their time highly, they aren't going to pick up the 200 hour game that has a low EVR. For them, a high EVR game is critical. In those cases, a sticker price tag makes sense.

The key then, is understanding how people lead to this number.

 

[piinyouri]

If I enjoyed the game, it always helps if it's a good long one, with plenty to do on the side.
Of course length and content on it's own is not necessarily a good point. If the game is not fun to play through, having a long game just prolongs the negative experience.

I occasionally find a shorter game with zero replay value (NG+, ect) but is so amazingly good that it is worth playing again, but not very often, and most of the time I find myself feeling better betting my money on a longer game or one that has a lot of content.

 

[WoW Killer]

The Number of minutes I am having fun should be greater than or equal to the price I payed in American Dollars.

Somebody make that into a mathematical formula, please.

Hours / Dollars = Hours per Dollar

That's the kind of info we have these days that we didn't have in the past. I mean one of my most played games ever is Secret of Mana on the SNES, and I've absolutely no idea how many hours I've put into that game over the years. These days a lot of stuff has online stats, like all my Steam games give me playtime figures. Some other of my most played games are WoW and DDO, for which I could probably find out my hours played if I relogged back into them, but I don't know if Blizzard/Turbine would easily tell you how much money you'd put into the game. Anyway, it's still a fair measure. Games are about enjoyment, so the most enjoyable game is surely the one you've put most time in to.

The only trouble is, it doesn't help people decide what games to buy. The thing is, a stat like that can take months for a reviewer to draw up an accurate figure. Henceforth, it's information that's only worthwhile to a prospective buyer long after a game has been released. Games are all about those initial sales (or so I've heard), so you're screwed if you can't generate some buzz.

 

[Evonisia]

I usually base it on how much enjoyment I get from it and how many hours can I get out of it.

Say I bought a game for £35, and it took me roughly 10 hours to complete. That would be £3.5 an hour which I think is worth it because I enjoyed it. Because I liked it, you add on repeated playthroughs and that 3.5 suddenly becomes 1.2, or 0.5, and so on and so on. I've put hundreds of hours into my Halo 3 which cost £30 at the time, so suddenly I've spent near enough less than a penny per hour of gameplay time.

Of course extremely small games like Portal I won't pay full price for regardless of quality, and I only got it because I got four other games with it for the price of 1 normal game.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I measure it by how enriched I feel afterward.

A game doesn't need to be fun, or long, or have overly deep gaming mechanics, it simply needs to leave me with a lasting impression. However it chooses to do this is up to the game itself.

 

[The Enquirer]

Wanna know how I measure the value of my games?

How much fun did I have playing it?

One simple question that I need to answer.

 

[Nouw]

I measure it by how enriched I feel afterward.

A game doesn't need to be fun, or long, or have overly deep gaming mechanics, it simply needs to leave me with a lasting impression. However it chooses to do this is up to the game itself.

As much as I agree with the other responses, I feel this is also just as valid. When a game has you thinking about it months after you've played, you can consider it money well-spent e.g. for me, Spec Ops: The Line. As much as I find Bioshock:Infinite's gameplay to be a bit uninspired, I can't view it as a waste of money because it still managed to deliver a unique experience I remember fondly.

Another way of 'measuring a game's worth' can be how it influenced you, not sure how to word it better. Hotline Miami introduced me to a whole load of fantastic artists through its soundtrack such as Pertubator and Luminarium, granted the latter is from the yet unreleased sequel. As for the soundtrack itself I listen to it pretty much everyday because every song is a mood-piece.

Spoiler: Some of my favourite songs

It also introduced me to 'Drive' and consequently Ryan Gosling and Nicholas Winding Refn thereby also influencing me to watch 'Only God Forgives.' Best $5 I've spent on a videogame.

 

[Casual Shinji]

snip

I need to get around to playing Hotline Miami one of these days. I keep hearing good things about it, but it's just one of those games that slips my mind.

 

[otakon17]

By how much I play it at a time.

1-2 hours: Okay
3-4 hours: Good
4-5 hours: Great
6+ hours: Thank you sir, may I have another?

And how many hours total I have put into a game. Oblivion for example simply devoured 300 hours of my life when I first got it on the Xbox 360(and I STILL wasn't done with everything). Dragon Age Origins and its expansions got about 3 playthroughs from me(and a fourth in the making on the PC now). And one more factor, how many times I can go back to it and think "By God I love this game" no matter how many times I've beaten it. That one is reserved for the RPG classics on the SNES though.

 

[Zacharious-khan]

How much time it takes for me to complete it or get bored. plus just how much fun i had

 

[Nouw]

snip

I need to get around to playing Hotline Miami one of these days. I keep hearing good things about it, but it's just one of those games that slips my mind.

Well take your time, it's not going anywhere . It's best enjoyed when you're in the mood I reckon, if you ever spontaneously get into the mood for pixelated ultra-violence anyhow.

 

[TheRiddler]

Wanna know how I measure the value of my games?

How much fun did I have playing it?

One simple question that I need to answer.

I don't think we can actually judge based on fun. I mean, can you say that you were really having fun playing Spec Ops: the Line? Or for that matter, watching Breaking Bad? Both can be argued to be of significant merit and artistic value, yet I can't really argue that either gave me a fun, enjoyable time. We can't really say that a fun piece of media is necessarily good.

 

[Bruce]

A bit like any other artform, it depends heavily on what it is going for and whether I enjoy the attempts it makes at achieving it.

That said - it goes like this:

Gameplay: Is the game intuitive to play? Did I feel in control of the experience, or frustrated by the controls? Did the time it took to learn the game, feel worth it once I became at least reasonably competent at it? Did it fill my time or waste it?

The actual length of the experience isn't that important. The original Portal is a great game, and you can finish it relatively quickly. Ditto Brothers: A tale of two sons.

Meanwhile there are plenty of games which rely heavily on Skinner box techniques to keep you playing for a long time, which end up feeling like work. You don't actually enjoy it, you are grinding it.

Two hours you enjoy provides greater value than twenty hours of boredom.

Story, if it is there it has to be good. A great story can make a great game, a bad story can ruin one.

A story has to have internal coherence, it doesn't have to fit to how things are in the real world, but it must fit to how things are in the game's world.

Further the second you start telling stories, is the second you start communicating ideas and some ideas will crush a game if put across badly, and some ideas will crush it no matter how much work you put into them.

Sometimes this will be simply because they are boring cliches, more often it will be because they are ideas you should probably be ashamed of communicating. Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a prime example of this.

A note for developers who are weak on story: it isn't really necessary, a lot of really good games don't need any context to them at all, so if you aren't confident on plot skip it. A game with good mechanics and no story is still a good game, a game with good mechanics and abysmal story not so much.

In fact that is a fairly good rule of thumb for anything in the game - if it is there it has to be good, if you cannot achieve good (not perfect, not even excellent) it will probably reduce the player's enjoyment of the title and you should probably cut it.