Including DLC, micro transaction purchases, etc. If you got a game for free, please also list your non-infinite next best.
For me it’s Team Fortress 2. $100 total spent on hats and the Orange Box back in the day, 4200 hours plus of fun, meaning 2.3¢ AUD per hour. Initially I thought DotA2 would be my best but it turns out I’ve spent a lot more money in that game than I thought…
My worst is God of War: Ragnarok. Bought it full price for $95 AUD, only played 2 hours and hated it, meaning $47.50 AUD per hour.
Most bang for the proverbial buck? Valheim for $20 in early 2021. Played the hell out of it until well into Ashlands and the souring that caused (more the FPS drops than endless enemy spam).
Least? Probably pre-ordering Fallout 76 Tricentennial edition for… $76. Hated most of my early play, only stuck it out for a year because of how much my wife loves the IP, then quit for over 4 years. We play again, but it’s also not quite the dumpster fire it was at launch.
Maybe also Simcity 2013. Cheaper but infinitely worse.
EDIT: best might be tired with Master of Magic. Bought on sale in 1994 (no clue how much), still playing to this day. A heavily modded Windows native version (Caster of Magic II) that supports submods and was itself last updated in 2025.
My wife and I tried God of War 2018 recently because the internet sings its praise.
Turns out we were both pretty turned off by the Neanderthal toxic masculinity Kratos shows the boy all the time.
I’m sure it’s setting up the story for character growth, but it was annoying as hell.
It was for the story. It’s not a clone of the earlier games where Kratos is hellbent on tearing everything down, and everything revolves around that goal. The end of the game hits abruptly without closure on the god-killing aspect, and that’s when I figured out it’s actually a soft story about a father and son, burying their deceased loved one, and slowly recovering from the trauma and grief. The god-killing part is just a long sidequest, the story begins and ends with the mother’s burial.
Assuming you’re not going to play it:
Tap for spoiler
Yeah, he slowly changes throughout the story. By the end he’s actually a decent dad
I would recommend even watching a let’s play because for me it was one of the best games / stories in the last decade or so
Elden Ring for one, because my buddy liked it so much he bought it for me. Not sure if it counts though because I ended up passing it on and bought a copy for my brother so we could all play together.
Otherwise Splitgate, free basic ass arena shooter that is the only thing that has scratched the itch that quake 3 started me on when I was a child.
Mount and Blade Warband, CKII, and EUIV are all up there extremely highly but I guess Warband due to less dlc.
Least is tougher. Probably a couple of NES stinkers from way back would be in the running. Though lord knows I have games in my steam library I’ve yet to play. Hard to say.
Even before it went F2P, Rocket League. 10,000+ hours, and counting.
Most: Fallout 4, I have over 7000 hours in it. Bought it pre-launch with season pass.
Least: I have no idea, probably several games I bought and never played.
Wow, what do you do in FO4 to keep it fun after 7k hours?
I used to play WoW back in the day, and I would pay a monthly subscription of 13 euros per month, for three years straight, which is a total of around 470 euros, but I would play 8-14 hours a day almost everyday (for around two years), so in the end it was a good overall value-for-money (although a complete waste of time). Minecraft is also in the top 3, with a licence of 25 euros (while it was still owned by Mojang) and countless hours (easily over 1.000). But the biggest value for money was is Skyrim on Steam: I got it for 1 euro in a sale, around 330 hours spent (playing vanilla on my Steam Deck). I had to quit it cause I could see it going to the thousands of hours easily.
Biggest regret so far is Rimworld: paid full price (30 euros), played less than two hours. I always say I’ll make it worth its price someday, but my backlog is already in the hundreds, so I don’t see it happening any time soon.
I feel like I’m the perfect demographic for Rimworld, but I just can’t get into it for some reason
The Sims 2. I paid for all the extensions, so quickly calculated, something around 300€ in total, back then. But I’ve been playing it for twenty years. I do not know, how many thousand hours I have on it, so I cannot calculate the price per hour, but I think it is pretty low at this point. And still getting lower.
// The least I do not know, I do not play many other games.
Most - SimCity 4. I don’t remember buying the CD but countless hours later I can say it was worth it.
Least is really hard. Like you have to really really fuck up a game for me to not like it. Three come to mind. Cities Skylines 2. Mortal Kombat 1. Starfield. Both games coming after two of my all time faves. I spent 500+ hours in CS1. If you can’t tell city builders are my jam. So for me to actively despise a city builder is pretty condemning of the quality of the game. That’s my problem with Skylines 2.
MK1 I powered through the story and had no desire to play any other part of it. It was a buggy incomplete mess. The roster was a step back from MK11 IMO. The game play was supposed to address the main complaints of how slow and limited MK11 was. They did that by adding a gimmick instead of going back to the MKX formula. MK1 is just a failed mess of a game.
I would have forgot about Starfield if not for seeing it in my Steam library just now. Mechanically this game fucking blows. I really hate some of the design decisions they made in the game. Like oxygen frequently stopping you from sprinting early game. The menu designs. Space flight. It’s all so baffling to me. They really fumbled the ball.
WoW. Never paid a dime and played thousands of hours.
Otherwise probably Captain of Industry.
How’d you avoid the monthly fee? Private servers?
Vampire survivor. $4.
1000+ hours. Of just staring at pretty colors.
Bought every single DLC to continue supporting them.
Have you tried their new game?
In a similar vein. “Dome keeper” has had me teleport from and to Europe on 12 hour flights 4 times now.
FTL, Terraria, core keepter, and everything supergiant games ( hades, bastion, transistor) all punched well above their costs.
Check your local library, can rent console games for free!
Minecraft is obviously up there, as is TF2 like you. Factorio is very high for me, relatively low cost and many hours sunk into it.
My current worst is probably Baldur’s Gate 3, I bought it to play with a friend but we’ve only done one session so far.
I had the same experience with BG3. It feels more like a single player game in a way, in multiplayer it felt a bit awkward with the story moments. My partner kept skipping cutscenes, and making weird story choices that often led to genocide. Which I suppose is peak chaotic neutral murder hobo DnD behaviour, but the game really isn’t balanced around murder hobo 😂. I kind of was just held hostage and had to sit there while they talked to people and I had no idea what was going on. I’m planning to try again in single player eventually.
Playing a game like BG3 in co-op sounds utterly absurd to me. You’re supposed to have a gripping narrative with your character (which for a lot players will be a self insert, making it even more personal) with lots of text to read and digest and process. How are you supposed to focus on all that if you’re on a call with a friend??
It was in person so it was even worse lol. Couch co-op chaos did not go well with BG3.
It was good in Divinity: Original Sin 1 because in that game you can kind of just ignore the entire story and play it like an action CRPG, which we enjoyed a lot. I got my MC and Jafar (not his actual name but it was a funny running joke because we couldn’t remember his name), my partner got their MC and the two handed sword lady I also forget her name. It was a running joke like, FFS Jafaaaaar C’mon! Because he would constantly fall over and get crippled by every CC that got near him. Like his toe would touch one molecule of frozen floor and he’d just comically fall over for 3 turns… then fall over again as soon as he got up and tried to walk out of it. Classic Larian.
But yeah it didn’t work for BG3 because the story actually matters
Fallout 3 or New Vegas. I can’t remember which cause they’re both pretty close in overall hours played.
RE9 is probably on the lower end for me. Was excited and paid full price and didn’t even get more than an hour into a second run before I got bored. The game is good but a depressing amount of it is basically on rails, kind of like the Beneviento house in RE8.
For 70 fucking bucks, it needs to ship with a mercenaries mode or seriously different NG+ mode. Insanity stops being interesting as soon as you get the blood collector and start making OP backstab injectors again and ironically showcases how actually rather unobservant most enemies are.
Compare that to games like Abiotic Factor, which are half the price (and I paid less than that because I got it during its 0.9 early access patch) and I’ve clocked hundreds of hours in or games like WoW or FFXIV which have clocked several thousand hours each.
