this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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The amount of options isn’t the issue.
For most 25-40€ games I buy, i can get a great experience for the next 30-50 hours.
Indie games absolutely crush the statistics, where some sub-15€ roguelikes have such insane replayability, that i’ve clocked over a thousand hours into a couple. Not to mention how incredibly creative, unique, and story rich some of them are.
Meanwhile, what used to be 60€, and is now 80€+, is some “cinematic” 20fps on console slop, that you can barely get 5 hours of real gameplay out of. I don’t wanna sit there and watch a movie with an occasional A button press. Or even worse, play something like the Assassins Creed reboot, that had 500 hours of gameplay, 490 of which is just useless collectibles around the map.
Measuring games by hours has become an increasing less useful metric to me because I already have my grinding games that I can endlessly replay. When buying new games, I'd rather get something I'll really enjoy for a short playthrough than a long epic JRPG I can't bring myself to actually set aside time for - even though I do really love JRPGs.
Check out Expedition 33. It feels like a love letter to jrpg but without the time commitment.
I agree, this game is a piece of art, really well made.
I watched the trailer and whats on steam about it, but it didn't take me in, and im curently looking for an rpg to play.
Is it really completely turn based and not that action turn based abdomination jrpgs have implemented the past years? I noticed some kind of quick time events during fights, is that optional or always active?
I feel like play time per money spent mattered when most people were buying offline games at full price but to me it hasn’t been relevant for a long time. I might pay full price for a game that is incredible for 5-10 hours but a game that is mediocre for 100 hours I wouldn’t even play for free.
I fully agree with that. There are some games that are fully worth the price, even if the hours/$ isn’t quite there, but in most cases it’s not anymore
Would be interested to know what games you have >500 hours in. Especially if they aren't multi-player online games.
Oxygen Not Included
Caves of Qud
Fallout 4. A lot of this is going to be due to mods.
Wargame: Red Dragon. Intended to be played multiplayer; I played it single-player. Steel Division II is a far better single-player choice if you don't mind the different setting, as the AI is much more interesting.
Skyrim. A lot of this is going to be due to mods.
Rimworld
Civilization V
Fallout 76, the only entry here I actually play multiplayer (and even that to a minimal degree; that game tends to have players having pretty minimal interaction with each other unless they're actually trying to play with each other). I would recommend playing Fallout 4 over Fallout 76 unless you specifically want multiplayer; Fallout 76 is just the closest thing to "more Fallout" short of a Fallout 5.
Not run through Steam, so no Steam stats (though available on Steam) but I'm sure that they're way up there:
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Free and open-source, though there's a commercial build on Steam if you want to effectively donate. If not, can download from their project page.
Dwarf Fortress. Free, though there's a commercial build on Steam with a fancier, more-approachable UI and such.
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, though that's going back a few years. Free and open-source.
Some others with a fair bit of playtime:
Steel Division II. Primarily a multiplayer game, but I only play single-player.
X3: Reunion
Mount & Blade: Warband. The Prophesy of Pendor mod adds a fair bit of time to this.
Elite: Dangerous. Though I don't remember how I accumulated that many hours. Wasn't super-impressed with the game. Probably pretty in VR, though.
Stellaris
Noita
Kenshi
Nova Drift
Starfield
The Sims 3
Starbound
Rule the Waves 3
Wasteland II
Fallout: New Vegas
Carrier Command 2. Primarily intended to be played multiplayer, but I play single-player.
Kerbal Space Program
Total War: Warhammer II
Lots of love for Starbound, that game is underrated af.
Stellaris, civ v, oxygen not included, city skylines, x3/rebirth/4, workers and resources: soviet republic, kerbal space program, rimworld, crusader kings 2 and 3.
Basically anything civilization/city/base/colony builder is my jam and some of them have over 2000 hours over the years. I like building perfect societies and roleplay how people live in them in my head while i do it. It's one of the ways i relax and express creativity.
To be fair, while paradox games like Stellaris or the crusader kings games you mentioned, certainly have a lot of replayability (I don't really care much for CK myself but have over 1000 hours on both Stellaris and EU4), they're not great examples for where cheaper games by smaller companies offer more than expensive ones from bigger ones. Partly because paradox is fairly sizable and well known these days, but mostly because those games are quite expensive, just split into numerous expansions that come out over time. One can opt out of getting them, sure, but they're where a lot of the different options that bring the replayability come from.
I'm right there with you. I absolutely hate Paradox's DLC policy and I'm guessing they lose a ton of paying clients the moment they hit the store page and get a 200-500€ price tag for the full experience, or even over 100€ for just the best hits for a really old game. I know they have mouths to feed, but i really don't like the way they do it and how they abuse their position of niche games nobody else makes. Nevertheless, even though you may choose not to purchase their expansions, you still have extremely healthy modding communities to carry you over.
Still, i wasn't coming so much from the angle that it's a smaller company providing better value than larger companies, rather showing to the OP that there are non multiplayer games that easily can provide over 500 hours of entertainment regarding the slighly off topic matter presented on the latter part of their comment. Of note is the fact that they don't use grinding mechanics to do it, for the most part (x series can be a little grindy in some aspects, but not overly), which is the mark of how incompetent devs try to get more "entertainment" hours out of their games.
RimWorld ...
Minecraft, slay the spire, civilisation, atomicrops.
Balatro could have been a contender but I lost interest suddenly and unexpectedly.
spoiler
Tetris the daddyFactorio, stardew, civ vi are my top 3.
I've clocked 600 hours in Kerbal Space Program, and probably high thousands to over ten thousand in Minecraft.
Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Witcher 3, Fallout
Really any RPG you can easily get 1000 hours of play.
Well I’m not them, but for me: KSP1: 1800.8 hours. Current cost $40 = $0.02 an hour DCS: 1294.7 hours. Money spent eh $300 = $0.23 an hour Witcher 3: 1131.5 hours. Current cost: $40 = $0.03 an hour. Civ vi: 589.9 hours. Current cost: $60 = $0.10 an hour Stardew valley: 579.3 hours. current cost $15 = $0.026 an hour Fall out new Vegas: 543.6 hours. Current cost: $10 = $0.0018 an hour
Now if we add in the $2000 worth of peripherals I have to play dcs it’s cost balloons quite a bit but, it’s not terribly difficult to get high playtimes in cheap games. I would also say the cost per hour for me is double or triple what it actually is, as these are the current prices, and besides dcs I buy everything only on sale lol.
My electricity costs to run the game are higher than the cost of the game itself at that point.
EDIT: Keep in mind that some of these have DLC, and if you buy them, it increases the price. Kerbal Space Program with all DLC is $70; that's still an extremely good value at 1800.8 hours, but does bump the number up. Fallout: New Vegas has (good) DLC that I would want; all DLC would take the game to $45. Civilization VI would go to $230 (and I assume that they're still turning out DLC). I listed Stellaris myself, along with a lot of other people. I really liked the game, and even the base game is a good game, IMHO, but in typical Paradox game fashion, if you buy all the DLC, it adds up to quite a bit
$470 currently, and they're still turning out DLC. Someone listed DCS, I have The Sims 3 on my list, Total War: Warhammer II. All of those games have pricey DLC libraries that, if purchased in total, run multiple hundreds or over a thousand dollars (with the Total War: Warhammer series using an unusual take on this, where prior games in the series also act as DLC for the current ones). They can still be pretty cost-competitive per hour with other games, but only if the person who buys them is actually playing them a a lot.
Factorio, eu4, stellaris, satisfactory, slay the spire, etc
FTL for me
Peglin for me. Cheaper world games I have an insane amount of hours in.
For indie and cheaper stuff specifically? The Binding of Isaac is over 1k hours between my two copies. Rimworld, Factorio, and Terraria are all close to 500h as well. If Minecraft counts as one for you, this is an outlier with roughly 4k hours since 2011.
Otherwise, I am quite into MMOs and story-rich singleplayer RPGs, so there's a handful of them with well over several thousands of hours played too.
If you like Terraria, have you tried Starbound?
Yes. I didn’t like it nearly as much, if at all. I’ve heard mods make that game infinitely more enjoyable though, so maybe i’ll try it again some day
XIV, but I never engage with other players aside from solo queue for dungeons etc
Terraria is the easiest one.
I wish I had more time to play other single player time sinks like Dwarf Fortress, or even BeamNG.drive.
It kills me the the Jedi games, TLoU2, GoW games, they're fun but they're what, max 30 hours to beat? And they're trying to up the price to 80?
Red dead 2 deserves 80. Cyberpunk in its current state could deserve 80. Both are around 100-120 hour games and I've replayed them multiple times. 30 hour games by proportion deserve a quarter of the price.
Never will understand people equating monetary value with how long they spend time with a game. Quality /= quantity or else Ubisoft and gacha games would be the best games of all time.
Obviously quality of gameplay matters, but point is that you need to take into account hours of gameplay, not just treat the game as a single unit, if you want to have a useful sense of what kind of value you're getting, since the amount of fun gameplay you get from a game isn't some sort of fixed quantity per game -- it colossally varies.
If the way one rates a game is to simply use the price of the game, and disregard how much you're going to play the thing, then what you incentivize developers to do is either (a) produce games coming out with enormous amounts of DLC, as Paradox does, if you don't count DLC price, (b) short games sold in "chapter" format, where someone buys multiple games to play what really amounts to one "game", (c) games with in-app purchases, data-harvesting or some form of way to generate an in-game revenue stream, or simply (d) short, small games.
I have a lot of games that I could grind for many hours
but I haven't done so, never will do so, because I've lost interest; they're no longer providing fun gameplay. I've gotten my hours out of the game, though that number is decoupled from the number of hours to complete the game. I have other games that I've played to completion a number of times, and some games
particularly roguelikes/roguelites
which aim for extreme replayability. The hours matter, but it's not the hours to complete the game that's relevant, but the hours I'm interested in playing the game and have fun with it.
For some genres, this doesn't vary all that much. Adventure games, I think, are a pretty good example of a genre where a player has to keep consuming new art and audio and writing and all that. They aren't usually all that replayable, though there are certainly adventure games that are significantly shorter or longer. But you won't be likely to find an adventure game that has ten, much less a hundred times as much reasonable gameplay as another adventure game.
But there are other genres, like roguelikes, where I don't really need new content from an artist to keep being thrown my way for the game to continue to provide fun gameplay. There, the hours of fun gameplay in a game can become absolutely enormous, vary by orders of magnitude across games in the genre and relative to games in other genres.