This comes up frequently on message boards where video games are reviewed. When a game doesn’t live up to their standards, gamers often complain about the cost of the game. Rarely do they complain about the time spent. They’ll often play a game for 40 hours or more, then give it a lukewarm rating and indicate that it is worth it only if you buy it on sale.
The most egregious example of this was a post I read back after The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim first came out. The person spent 100 hours playing the game (easy to do with an open-world game like that). He wrote that it was a mediocre game at best, and listed its faults in detail. He said the game wasn’t worth the $60 that he paid for it; he felt that it was a “$30 game”. He announced that when the next Elder Scrolls came out, he was going to pirate it. Pirating the next game for free will make up for overpaying for Skyrim (averaging out to $30 for each).
Summarizing, he felt:
- $60 plus 100 hours of his spare time = unacceptable
- $30 plus 100 hours of his spare time = acceptable
I’m having trouble reconciling this. Clearly the game was worth 100 hours of his time, because he a) spent that much playing it, and b) announced that he would play the next TES game as well. If he disliked the game, he would have quit earlier and would never play an Elder Scrolls game again.
But, he felt having to pay $60 for that 100 hours of enjoyment wasn’t acceptable. That works out to 60 cents per hour. It’s rare that you can find entertainment that cheap. Going to the movies, renting a DVD both cost more. Any live event costs a lot more. Netflix can be cheaper, as long as you watch 14 hours or more a month.
But really, if you’re going to spend dozens of hours on a game, and enjoy it, does it really matter whether it costs $30 or $60?
Another way to look at this is to assign a monetary value to your spare time. When you do something, even if it’s enjoyable, it’s ‘costing’ you spare time (something you don’t have an unlimited amount of). There are all sorts of calculators out there that estimate the value of your spare time. Obviously I can’t tell you what Mr. Elder Scrolls’ value is, but let’s just pick a low-ball answer: minimum wage. Most people value their spare time more than that, some a lot more, but we’ll go with that. In California, minimum wage is $10.50. Plugging this in:
- spend $60 cash, plus $1050 of spare time (100 hours x $10.50) = $1110 = unacceptable
- spend $30 cash, plus $1050 of spare time (100 hours x $10.50) = $1080 = acceptable
When we’re talking about a value over $1000, it’s hard to imagine that $30 really makes the difference between being satisfied and not. The guy didn’t think “well, I just effectively spent $1110 on this game, and that’s too much. But $1080 would have been okay”.
Instead, I think what’s going on here is that people keep two buckets in their heads. Time and money are considered completely separate. In the time bucket, the dozens of hours spent was worth it. But, in the money bucket, the game wasn’t good enough to justify spending $60, probably based on the price and quality of other games they have purchased.
Is that a reasonable mind set? I don’t think so. If the game wasn’t worth $60, then it wasn’t worth the 100 hours spent playing it. By keeping separate buckets, you miss out on the true cost of a (supposedly) mediocre game – the loss of your spare time.
By all means, wait for games to go on sale to save some money; I do this frequently. But if you’re going to spend 40 or 50 or 100 hours playing a game, the price should not be the determining factor of whether it was “worth” it.
