I was curious, and none of the sites tracking this sort of thing could easily provide me with the stats per game, so I looked up what I’d paid for a few steam games and how much effectively I’d paid ‘per hour’ to enjoy them. here are some I checked…

Battlefield Bad Company 2 & vietnam add on £0.15 / hour Dishonored £2.30 / hour Hearts of iron 3 £1.87 / hour. Sim City 4 Deluxe £0.14 / hour Defense grid £0.43 / hour Skyrim £5.86 / hour Tropico 4 £0.62 / hour Wargame:European Escalation £30.00 / hour

#It;s very interesting doing this, as it immediately shows me how impulse purchases at full price with no demo, based on a video are always my nemesis. Wargame:EE was a nightmare for me, whereas Battlefield BC2 is a huge gain. In fact, that figure is way lower if you discount the vietnam DLC. In that case, it’s a clear example of the company getting more from me in DLC (at full price) than the base game, something the stats show I’m clearly very happy to do (they clearly earned it). Something else that becomes clear is that this doesn’t really match my enjoyment of the game that much. Hearts of iron 3 clocked up a fair few hours, but did I really enjoy it as much as dishonored? I’d say definitely not. Another way to look at this is to say that, for example I’m happy to in general pay £1 an hour for quality gaming entertainment. By that measure the costs should have been:

Battlefield Bad Company 2 & vietnam add on worth £107 Dishonored worth £13 Hearts of iron 3 worth £8 Sim City 4 Deluxe worth £17 Defense grid Worth £4 Skyrim worth £4 Tropico 4 worth £10 Wargame:European Escalation worth £1

of course this assumes I have as much fun with each game, which isn’t entirely true. Even so, who would have thought I could justify spending 100 times as much on one game as I did on another, but that has to be the rational conclusion. Maybe those F2P whales are more rational than I assume?