Given how big my library is and the fact that I rarely buy full-price, its hard to pick a single item.

If I had to pick one worst, it would probably be Company of Heroes 3. I was really hopeful for the game, and got it bundled with my CPU when building a new PC, but its just not very good. The campaign, the main part I was interested in, is slow and samey and uninteresting. The multiplayer is even worse, being riddled with microtransactions, lootboxes, and other such stuff in ways that significantly impact gameplay, in a supposedly competitive PvP game. Even if we assume the game was equivalent to $20, I only put in four hours, and didn't enjoy any of it.

In terms of best, the most technically correct would probably be Counter Strike GO/2. I've spent about $100 on it, between initial price, battle passes, and skins on the market, but selling those skins has earned me about $140 in revenue, so at 2000 hours, thats negative 2 cents an hour.

Excluding revenue made, its going to be Minecraft by a country mile. I've easily put in 10,000 hours since when I started playing mid-beta, so pessimisticly, it'd be around a quarter cent per hour. Honourable, more reasonable mentions would go to Gmod, where it works out to about 1 cent per hour when including time in the editor, and Dota and War Thunder, which are free, but I've spent thousands of hours in each and so bought about 2 cents per hour of microtransactions.

Dwarf Fortress.

Thousands of hours played; $0.00 paid (Legacy version).

But also $10 for the Steam version which I bought after all those hours in the Legacy version when it was on sale.

Most: Easily Dota 2. -$5 spent (I sold stuff I got for free), 2000+ hours played

The least: Probably a 20 way tie for games I bought on sale on Steam

Best value was thousands of hours in Minecraft for 10€.

Worst was probably something I bought as a child a long time ago for too much money, barely played it and then forgot pretty much all about it. There are a bunch of PSP games that come to mind like Monster Hunter which I just didn‘t enjoy at all.

Paid $50 for Half-Life 1 in 1998. Still play one of its mods on an almost daily basis. 10,000 hours is my low, low estimate.

Least? I've probably blocked it from my memory. Star Citizen had a free weekend a year or so ago and I quit after an hour or two when I realized how bad of shape it was in after well over a decade of development. So I guess I'll go with that one.

Neverwinter Nights, hands down. I played it 20 years ago and until recently I was DMing a weekly campaign using it, but I would guess I've put between 20,000 and 25,000 hours into it over the last 26 years. Honorable mentions for Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which I'm currently playing. (Spent all day today playing it, in fact.)

Least enjoyment? I pre-purchased Batman: Arkham Knight and quit it after one hour, so that's an obvious choice.

Animal Crossing. My wife and I ran that island for years, with thousands of hours on the clock each.

Most is Slay the Spire, and I don't even think it's close. And I say that having bought it twice, once on Steam and once on mobile.

Least, I'm tempted to day League of Legends or Overwatch, both of which I bought extra cosmetic stuff for and neither of which I play anymore - and I'm not sure I even liked either of them much when I was playing.

But not knowing (and not wanting to know) how much money I've spent on either, I'll instead say either Imperator: Rome or Victoria III. I preordered both with extras, and ended up only putting around 40 hours into both before giving up. Compare that to other Paradox grand strategy games, where I can easily have 500+ hours played, and I really feel like I didn't get my money's worth.

Gotta be BG3. Bought it full price the day I got my deck, about a year ago. There for a while I played every single day for hours. I still play a little most days, though it's with my wife rather than solo. I can't remember how many hours I have on the deck, and the ps5 version I eventually snagged so my wife could play has to have damn near half the time just from me.

Transformice. Played 5500 hours without spending a penny on it.

Biggest flop in recent history for me would be mewgenics. Dropped 30 bucks on it for like 2 hours of enjoyment and 10 more of forcing myself to try to like it

Least enjoyment would just have to be whatever is the most expensive game in my endlessly growing backlog. The other half of this question is more interesting, so I want to give multiple answers.

1. I've got just under 4,200 hours in Terraria and it's still my favorite game! For the $10 it cost me, that's 420 hours per dollar. Nice.

2. Minecraft would be a close contender. There's no way to track my hours in it, and I don't play it so much anymore, but I have to have at least somewhere close to the 4k I've got in Terraria, if not more. This game shaped my entire childhood back when the Xbox 360 edition first came out.

Those two are great, but they're also some of the best selling games of all time so I'll note some more niche ones as well.

3. DLC and all, Melvor Idle is a game I spent $25 on and managed to put just under 3,000 hours in. Now admittedly this is an idle game, so a large chunk of that time was having it open in the background while I do something else. But it's surprisingly interactive and I'd like to think at least 1,000 of those hours were me either actually playing or planning.

4. Barony is a game I've put 650 hours in since 2018, and man has it come a long way. Including DLC I spent about $30 on it for myself, though I've also bought the game or DLCs for multiple friends so its probably closer to like $60. It's a permadeath roguelike with next to zero meta progression. Check it out if you're into the genre, its currently on an all-time-low sale for $2 which is a damn steal.

Tough choice but ruling out free games (if we include emulation I'll be here all day) I might go with Invisible Inc. It's a turn based stealth game with lots of different characters to try, each leaning into different strategies. While it's possible to knock out or kill guards, it's discouraged because it increases the alarm, so you have watch patterns and use tricks and diversions to achieve different objectives. I have 200 hours on it and it's on sale rn for $5. There are other games I have more hours on, but not as much enjoyment.

Runner up: Heroes of Might and Magic IV. I have no idea how many hours I have on it because I bought it before I had Steam, on a compact disk (in fact it's not even on Steam, I think it's abandonware?) and have come back to it so many times over the years. It's kind of a timeless hidden gem, lots of ways to build your characters and your armies, lots of different challenges, and the writing is fun and memorable. The style is a little different from the rest of the series and I never got into the others but the new one (Olden Era) is promising (and has a free demo that's really good).

Worst for me are the Total War series, maybe Napoleon or Rome 2. I remember when the first ones came out and there wasn't anything like it. In the year 2000, the ability to fly around the camera ordering troops around was incredible, and of course the ninja assassination clips were absolutely peak. But since then, every one pretty much follows the same formula, and it feels like if you've played one you've played them all. It's not that they're bad games, I just couldn't get into them.

I have so much time logged in civ5 that it makes me want to throw up lol. New Vegas may still beat it out though. Both bought at full price a million years ago

Gotta be either Anno 1800 or one of the Monster Hunters.

Most playtime per buck:

Either Minecraft or Overwatch (the first one, before the content draught and aggressive monetization with OW2)

A close contestant is also Super Mario 64, which still is kind of a comfort game and gets a replay every once in a while. But that one was way more expensive IIRC.

Worst...

Hard to say. There are several games still on my pile of shame which make them technically infinite. OW2 was a free upgrade, and I never bought a season pass/loot box/..., so in theory the same "infinite" negative, though it's the closest to "hated/disliked game" for me.

Then there are a few games that are great, but just didn't "click" with me, so I somewhat regretted buying them. On the other hand, I supported the devs of generally great games that just weren't made for me. It isn't completely fair to list them here, but they're most fitting... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In this category: Witcher III, Hollow Knight, Subnautica.

I have to parrot the minecraft claim: ignoring that I've bought it for at least 4 friends now and own it on multiple platforms, it's still easily the one I got the most enjoyment per $ on.

as for least enjoyable? I regretably was an early adopter on Amazons New World. I played it once during the EA period, wasn't impressed but my morals at that time didn't allow me to request a refund on it as it felt dirty to buy a preorder then refund it for not liking the game itself. I easily paid 40$ for a game I played a whole 12 minutes of as it didn't vibe with me, and now due to the servers being shut down at the end of the year, is basically a digital paperweight.

Tbh I'm not sure there is a game I've clocked 1,000 hours on. I have multiple with about 250-300+ hours played; but if I had to combine the hours played with GMod on my old steam account and my current one, it would probably equal close to 1,000.

I'm not sure if there are any that I've gotten the least amount of enjoyment out of, but there are plenty that I just haven't gotten around to playing.

This edition of PC Zone Magazine cost £4 back in 1995. The cover CD had 1,000 Doom levels and IIRC a bunch of modding tools. I probably got 1,000 hours of entertainment out of it and often think back marveling at the value for money!

Of course all this stuff is available for free online nowadays!

Most value is probably Awesomenauts at around €50 spent and 1950 hours coming to 2.5c/h

Team Fortress 2 is there for me too, about €100 spent and 2200 hours for a shocking 4.5c/h. Still play it to this day.

Minecraft is also around the somewhere but like everyone else I have no clue about hours played. Might be anything from 500 to 2000 hours, impossible to estimate. Since I got the beta or alpha for cheap, I think €10, it might top the other two.

My worst value game is definitely GTA 5. I think I got that at €50 or so directly from Rockstar and only played it for an hour online and like an hour singleplayer. I enjoyed gta in the past but just don't care for it anymore, got bored out of my mind. Least time I ever spent on a game that expensive without being able to refund.

Best is either Minecraft, Counter-Strike or Mirror's Edge. I've got 3k+ hours in the first two, but also something like 600 hours in Mirror's Edge which is nonsense for a game that's 4 hours long on the first playthrough.

Worst is almost certainly PUBG. Bought it to play with friends, realized I hated the entire concept.

Factorio. Spent a total of €52 and have 1,600 hours. €0.03/hour

Excluding free/infinite, I'd have to say my best is Morrowind, probably, but it could also be Sim City (Classic or 2000), Starcraft, Half-Life/TFC, Team Fortress 2, Super Mario World, or Mario Kart.

Worst is even trickier, as I'm very careful about my game purchases (excluding Humble Bundles that are technically infinitely bad because hours played is zero, but don't count because I paid to get some other game and/or donate to charity). It'd probably have to be some old early '90s game my parents bought for me, not anything I've bought for myself. I remember a couple of DOS games with horrible magenta and cyan CGA graphics (even though my computer could do VGA, BTW): one was some kind of helicopter game that I couldn't figure out how to play, and the other was some kind of side-scrolling platformer or beat-em-up (maybe Ninja Gaiden, or a rip-off of it?) that I also couldn't figure out how to play.

Most: Cyberpunk 2077. base game + expansion and I've clocked in hundreds of hours on it. I replay it from start to end doing every single thing every year. I've done all the endings, done so many different builds, and yet I keep going back.

Least: I will admit Star Citizen. a few years ago I fell for it. I will also admit I "pledged" just over $200 for a ship. biggest gaming mistake I ever made and still to this day I feel like an idiot for falling for that scam.

For me its Skyrim, Mount and Blade Warband and Battlefield 3 (back when I still played Multiplayer). I have over 1000 Hours in all of them.