> 20 hours on a video game is extremely rare these days, especially if you're not one that goes for the torturous achievements or sports/multiplayer FPS.
What are you talking about? One recently released critically acclaimed game was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which players have averaged 75 hours of time on[0]. Even at $60, that's $0.8/hour.
And don't forget that unlike food or movie tickets, the price of a game goes down drastically over time. If you're willing to play older games, you can get them for almost nothing.
With Steam, I got L.A. Noire, a game released in May 2011 to pretty good reviews (83/100 on Metacritic for the PC version), for just $7.50 in July of this year. I've already played it for 43 hours (and still haven't finished it) - just $0.17/hour.
I was one of those people who spent ridiculous number of hours in Skyrim, but that's a rare and far-between luxury. For every one great game like Skyrim, I pay for a dozen mediocre games that I play for maybe an hour or two.
The amount of time you need to commit to make it worthwhile is exactly the problem and introduces a high risk factor. If I see a mediocre movie, that's only 2 hours of value gone.
> For every one great game like Skyrim, I pay for a dozen mediocre games that I play for maybe an hour or two.
You're clearly doing something wrong then. I'm not a particularly big gamer, but by spending a minute or two online looking at review scores before buying a game, I've almost always been happy with my purchases.
> The amount of time you need to commit to make it worthwhile is exactly the problem and introduces a high risk factor.
I think this is less of a problem these days because you can get a pretty good idea of the quality of a game from online reviews, certainly better than newspaper-based movie reviews that people have relied on for the last half century (not that you can't find movie reviews online now as well).
Is it possible that I am using reviews and turns out I have specific things I enjoy or don't enjoy which isn't identical to everyone else?
For example, let's look at some of the highest rated games of all time list and see which ones I've bought and didn't feel I got my money's worth (just looking at the first page of metacritic top all time):
PS3: Assassin's Creed, Rock Band 2 (enjoyed Rock Band 1), Dragon Age: Origins, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare,
PC: Bioshock, Diablo 3 (big fan of Diablo 1), StarCraft 2 (big fan of StarCraft 1), Civilization IV.
Of course there are plenty of games where I did get more than my money's worth: Minecraft, Fallout 3, everything by Valve, GTA, WarCraft 3, Diablo, Elder's Scrolls, Baldur's Gate, etc etc. I'd say in any given year, there's probably at least as many games I've bought that were meh and just didn't grab me as there are ones that were amazing. That reminds me, I should probably send another donation to the Dwarf Fortress brothers.
It's not all about reviews, and not all games have demos on launch day (or even weeks later). Fact is, games are high-commitment (hours) and comparatively high-cost.
I was just as excited by MGS4 and Little Big Planet as I was disappointed when I had them. Reviews, hype and marketing did their job very well and I believed all of that. Luckily I was able to resell these turds.
What are you talking about? One recently released critically acclaimed game was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which players have averaged 75 hours of time on[0]. Even at $60, that's $0.8/hour.
And don't forget that unlike food or movie tickets, the price of a game goes down drastically over time. If you're willing to play older games, you can get them for almost nothing.
With Steam, I got L.A. Noire, a game released in May 2011 to pretty good reviews (83/100 on Metacritic for the PC version), for just $7.50 in July of this year. I've already played it for 43 hours (and still haven't finished it) - just $0.17/hour.
0: http://www.gamespot.com/news/skyrim-pc-players-average-75-ho...