I play a few long games (some MMOs, Demon’s Souls, Mass Effect), but don’t really have time these days. I’d rather buy a very high quality, short game like Portal, or Batman: Arkham Asylum, than a reasonable quality, very long game like Dragon Age or Risen.

A game being in a genre I favour definitely helps, and should probably factor into the equation for an individual buyer – I will only play the best RTSes out (Dawn of War 2, Starcraft 2 when that hits), but will happily buy and play more TBSes than I really have time for, including interesting but flawed ones (e.g. Sword of the Stars, Heroes of Might and Magic, Majesty). Perhaps scaling the whole score by 0.5 (for a genre I tend not to like) to 1 (for a genre I play obsessively).

Hi Paul :)

You have to compare the cost per hour of a game, with it’s entertainment value (score in your article) per hour. Because every hour you spend on the game, you’re not doing something else.

This avoids the long-and-cheap priority-inversion problem, because if the game’s less entertaining per hour than your threshold, being longer won’t make it worthwhile.

So Portal’s four hours are easily worth more than you make per hour (my first-level cut-off) each, so spending less than that means it’s a good buy.

World of Warcraft (ignoring purchase cost) on the other hand has a known per-hour cost (on average, about 20 hours per week played, so 80 hours per $15 or so) and the play-or-not-play decision is entirely down to whether it provides you with 20c of entertainment per hour.

I realise the upshot of this is you’re making a decision of “will I get more than the cost of fun out of this”, but by breaking it up into two parts, and knowing where my pain thresholds are, it’s an easy decision to make.

First cutoff for me is my wage. For a game to cost more than I could have earned working in that hour, it’d better be damn good.

The second is ~$15 total cost, at which point I’ll give almost any game its first hour, where presumably it will have its peak entertainment-per-hour. This is how Steam has sold me so much stuff I’ll probably never play…

So I only really have to estimate which category the game falls into, get some idea of length, and I have a rough price point below which I’ll gladly buy it.