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 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 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
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.
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.
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.
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 🤞
It’s a good game! It’s just not the game I wanted.
Make sure you’re patient with yourself! Qud is an amazing, unique experience, but patience is a must. I hope you have fun!!
I ended up trying it out. It reminds me a lot about what I loved about Elona back in the day, but way easier to understand and play (this is a good thing). Definitely wasn’t what I was expecting though! I quite enjoyed it, in that unique way where you’re both frustrated but also enjoying it for some reason. I played role play mode because I’m absolutely not doing hardcore mode. The game played ok on controller but it feels like you really need to play it with keyboard (right trigger + direction to move, left trigger + A + direction to interact with an item is criminal lol)
I feel like I actually need to clear some brain space and play this game another time though. Like it feels like a big commitment rather than something you just throw on after work
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
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.
I just bought it during the steam sale, what mods would you recommend?
Off the top of my head, there’s one that adds more climbing handholds, one that tweaks katana usage to make it more viable…
Let me see if I can dig up a mod list after while and I’ll get you a better idea
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.
These are mine too!
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.
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?
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.
Now that you mention it I also got PUBG to play at an afterwork event with colleagues. Might be down there with GTA in terms of value for me.
Sounds like mirrors edge is a real comfort game for you. Unless you Speedrun it or something😅
Bought Mirror’s Edge because I liked it, but yeah most of the hours are speedrun related lol
Have you managed any world records or something? Could be cool to watch
Nah, I was never that dedicated. If anything, I treated speedrunning that game more like it was an extension of the existing game mechanics so it was more about finding a new way to enjoy the game rather than just playing for the sake of speedrunning. Unconventional, but fun.
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.
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.
