A good game provides hundreds of hours of entertainment for $60.
That's much better entertainment value than a $20 movie.
That's much better entertainment value than a $20 movie.
I also love System of a Down. Probably paid sub-$100 for their discography. Must have hundreds of hours of listening pleasure. Isn't this a better value than ME:A?
I'm also a huge Star Wars fan. The $30 I paid for the movie ticket and the popcorn combo when I went to see Rogue One brought me much more pleasure than those 30h of ME:A, so was this a better value?
I know, that's one game, one artist, one movie, but that's just to illustrate that it's not that clear-cut.
I was just ignoring the games and movies that suck and would be a waste of time and money.
We're talking about is the games you actually end up playing versus the movies you actually end up watching. For me the value for money is crushingly in favor of games, both in terms of hours per dollar and in terms of subjective enjoyment.
Other people might have a different overall experience, but let's at least compare the right things.
Fair enough. Really depends on the type of games you enjoy though. They really don't all have the same replay value. As you said, other people might have different experiences.
Average play time doesn't mean much in terms of actual game quality and value for your money. I've played games just to go through them, get the story and play the sequel, the one that's actually good.
Average time played is not a good metric because people on both extremes will skew it heavily, like any average - people who bought the game but never played it, or people who play it way too much. It also depends a lot on the game. On an okay-ish game that has a +/-20h campaign will be pretty easy to munch through just to check it off, but one can easily abandon an okay-ish game with 5-10 minute matches after a handful of hours.
I understand the point you are making in regards to average time played, but surely the people who, quote-unquote, play the game way too much, enjoy that specific game very much? Please note that you can also see the median playtime on the abovementioned website.
Is that a common practice? I once accidentally bought a "standard" version of a game instead of the "ultimate" on my Xbox One and had to deal with a couple of support people to refund my original purchase in order to get the other.
It cost you $2.66/hr for entertainment, that sounds like a great investment.
> Isn't this a better value than ME:A?
Not necessarily. One required active mental participation, one was passive. The big question is what value did you get out of each one?
You should have been alert to EA screwing up the Mass Effect franchise from all the garbage they pulled on Mass effect 3 (Weak ending, making Javik DLC when he was clearly a main character, etc.)
Waiting 30-60 days meant that the game was available for less than half that.
www.humblebundle.com -> Great place to find indie deals
www.factorio.com -> Game I've invested 100s of hours into because building and number management. Plus Mods!
What you say about the complexity of entertainment is absolutely true, but we somehow need to model it in a relatively easy way, and that means throwing out some details.
And from in naive guess, people don't enjoy themselves significantly more watching film than playing videogames. So dollar per hour is a good enough metric for our purposes.
One of the things I've been paying attention to as I get older is how many unique experiences a thing offers. Games that are hundreds of hours long, or otherwise provide hundreds of hours of entertainment, generally involve a lot of repetition. Repetition is intrinsically unmemorable.
The games keep you busy, and you might not describe yourself as bored while playing them, but it's not like you can remember all of the riveting times you fought a Zubat. And in that sense, was it an optimal use of time? Sometime I find it disturbing to think about. There are games where my total playtime adds up to literal months, but the number of unique memories I have of actually playing are depressingly few.
A day at Disney World costs far more per hour than a movie. Does that mean people should stay away from Disney World?
There's a huge continuum beyond the "am I entertained?" binary, and that matters much more than dollars per hour.
A trip to Disney for somebody might conceivably be something that they remember for the rest of their lives and that has value.
However, not all games, music, or video provide 100s of hours of entertainment so I'm not sure I understand your generalization.
> A good album can also provide hundreds of hours of entertainment for $10.
Passive/supplemental entertainment maybe. Outside of a very small percentage of serious audiophiles, I don't know anyone listening to 1 album for hundreds of hours other than as background noise.
If you include hardware costs I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on video games. The number of games I've spent more than 200 hours playing is in the single digits.
And that music streaming service probably comes close to maxing out the entertainment most people can get from purchasing music, so for most people, music isn't really competing against games in their entertainment budget.
There is a large population of concert goers, and large market for music merchandise and musical instruments.
I'd be surprised is music streaming services comprise 50% of the total music market, although they might be more than 50% of all recorded music.
If we're talking about concerts though, you're talking about a higher cost per hour than movies. Not comparable to $120 for hundreds of hours.
>market for music merchandise
I'm going to avoid merch because games have merch too, so it doesn't really seem worth comparing.
>and musical instruments
Musical instruments, for people who are interested, probably do provide a higher entertainment value per dollar than games, but they are definitely a much smaller niche market.
I understand the reasoning, but time spent is not really a great measurement of value. I probably spent hundreds of hours on a couple of games back in middle/high school and I'd be lying if I said I didn't regret at least some of that.
So while there is a greater value per hour of use for games, that does not necessarily equate to a "better entertainment value" for all users.