It’s over 9000- er, 100!
Krikket, as Krikket so often does, had another eminently yoinkable idea the other day. This particular one was around taking a look at games in her Steam library with over 100 hours of playtime. Krikket specifically wanted to look at non-live-service and non-free-to-play titles, as a means of checking against an older metric of game value: Dollars per hour spent.
I’m not sure I’m going to make those same exclusions. We can find out together as I meander my way toward actually making a start. I am however most certainly going to ignore Idle/Clicker-style games. I have five of those with over a hundred hours of ‘play’. I have 10 games with over a hundred hours of play if I do make those additional exclusions, and 18 if I don’t. … 18 is kinda a lot.
Nait’s 10 Purchased Games with Over a Hundred Hours of Play
Skyrim, the original. Just barely eking in there with 100.2 hours played. This is of course discounting the further 30 odd hours from the Special Edition which in combination would push it up the list a little further, but still… Even then less time than I actually thought!
Unsure what my cost/hour is, though! Apparently, I never purchased the base game on Steam directly. I did purchase the DLCs, but it looks like I got them all on sale at various times. If I assume I paid $40 USD for Skyrim itself, then the total package cost me $68.21 USD and comes out to 0.68c / hour. Off to a decent start!
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, clocking in with 104.8 hours. I really liked Odyssey, which just made Valhalla all the more disappointing to me.
I spent $165.99 NZD on this one. NZD does not help me out for these calculations though, so converting to USD by the average 2018 exchange rate, we get to $114.91 USD. … That didn’t help me as much as I would’ve hoped, and we still end up at over $1/hr, with $1.10 / hour.
You know what though? I’m still going to count that money well spent. If I ever go back and finish the rest of the DLC, will probably get it down under the $1/hr mark as well.
XCOM 2 with 109.8 hours, and another one, like Skyrim, where I’m somewhat bemused by the fact it isn’t more. I basically haven’t played it since wrapping up our Succession Game, but unless we get a surprise announcement followed by a super-swift release of XCOM 3, I’m fairly confident this one will get more play.
I bought XCOM 2 from Green Man Gaming and managed to dig out the purchase email for it. I picked it up for $46.20 USD, and the DLC later for $22.49 NZD, for an end result of 0.55c / hour in USD. Nice.
(PS: From now on, I’m going to give all dollar values in USD only, regardless of what I purchased it in. I’ll continue using the average exchange rate for the year in which I purchased it.)
Monster Hunter Rise with 113.9 hours. And I haven’t even done the expansion yet. I do keep poking the friends I played the base game with to kick things off again, but I’m beginning to think I might be on my own for the rest of this one. Phooey!
Despite also purchasing the expansion and not playing it, still managed to keep this one down to 0.87c / hour.
Incidentally, I think MHR might be the most recently purchased game I have to make it over the 100-hours played mark.
Dragon Age Origins with 125.4 hours played takes us to the complete opposite end of the spectrum, and I think this might be the oldest game with over 100 hours. In fact… It is the third purchase I ever made on Steam, and only the second game. (I also purchased a copy of this for my brother.)
Just counting what I spent on my own copy though… which is still a bit, since I went for the Digital Deluxe edition, this one comes in at 0.52c / hour. Best one yet!
Elden Ring with 125.7 hours played, with more yet to come whenever the DLC rolls around. Elden Ring is the only souls-like to make it into the over-a-hundy club, too. I wondered if Dark Souls III might’ve joined it, but no. DS III I spent ‘only’ 88.6 hours with.
After converting the purchase price to USD, works out to 0.56c / hour.
The Division, or “Tom Clancy’s The Division” if you want to be pedantic about it, with 143.2 hours played. Also, arguably, this was a live service game. It certainly continued to get updates post-release with the goal of extending the game’s life for players. However, it still had a rather definitive ‘end’ and I’m going to throw this one in here.
I grabbed the ‘Gold’ edition of this one, but still managed to work it down to 0.68c / hour of play.
Stellaris with 170.4 hours played. Between The Division and here, there were several skips in the form of MMOs (Rift, ESO) and an idle game (Realm Grinder, last played in 2018!) If you’re wondering how I can possibly have 170 hours played and so few achievements, well- that’s easy. Probably 165 of those hours were played in multiplayer, where achievements are not granted. You in fact need to play Singleplayer in Ironman mode (no save/reload) to earn any of the achievements.
…
…
OK, this one was some math I could’ve stood to have not done ever.
But turns out, that when you’re also buying the expansions (mostly) at release, you end up paying a bit of a premium for that.
Nonetheless, the end cost/hour wasn’t as bad as I suspected while working my way through the tally. But it is $1.59 / hour of play, which is so far, and I suspect shall remain, the most ‘expensive’ on this list.
But you know… That’s still a decent value over the time spent, I think.
Cities: Skylines with 171.2 hours played. Another Paradox game. Do I have to do the math again? Because… I’d probably really quite rather not. Although I suppose with this one… I did tend to buy most of the DLC on sale. Countering that fact, I think I bought a lot more of it.
*sigh*
Let’s see how this goes.
Yeaaah. There were a LOT more items than Stellaris. End result? $2.11 / hour. This is still better than what I thought it might work out to, but still blows away my assertion from Stellaris, literally the previous entry, that it would likely remain the most expensive on this list. Hah. Hah! I say.
Monster Hunter: World with 174.5 hours played. Surely it is time for another PC/powerful Console-centric MH title now? Rise was nice and all, but, World was breathtaking. I picked up Iceborne, the expansion for this one, and finished it even! Played a little of the end-game zone too, although not much of the post-Iceborne released content.
Monster Hunter: World brings us back to better value results too, with 0.67c / hour.
It also, as it turns out, brings us to the end of my non-F2P/non-MMO-style games as well.
While still ignoring idle games, my top game by Steam’s reckoning is Path of Exile at 384.4 hours played. Still rookie numbers compared to non-Steam MMOs, or even just some of the games once tracked by XFire (anyone else remember XFire?). I had well over 1,000 hours in the original Neverwinter Nights, for example. I think that is certainly an outlier for me though, so far as non-MMO’s go.
I didn’t get anywhere close to the cost/hour values that Krikket did, with my lowest being 0.52c / hour. But even at the other end of the scale, with $2.11 / hour for Cites: Skylines, I reckon this represents a pretty dang good spend for time enjoyed.
…
Let’s just not go investigating the infinite cost/hour titles that will exist from the never-played list, and we’ll be all good. :)
This was posted during Blaugust 2023, the annual blogging event hosted by Belghast. Blaugust is an event aiming to welcome new blogger blood into the fold and revitalise those who’ve been at it a little longer.
The Blaugust Discord is still available to join in, year-round!
