What Is Value Per Hour in Gaming?

What You Need to Know

• Value per hour is the game price divided by its HowLongToBeat main-story playtime.
• I use it as another buying signal alongside price and discounts, not as a score for whether a game is good.
• A $20 game with two hours of playtime can look terrible on paper and still be worth buying if the experience is good enough.
• DARQ is the game that made this particularly obvious to me.

Why I started looking at playtime

$20 was the price of DARQ when I first found it, and I immediately decided I wasn't paying that much.

After Blasphemous, I kept looking for games that could surprise me in a different way. I wasn't particularly interested in chasing the biggest visual effects or another giant action game. I wanted something creative, strange, and clever enough that I would still be thinking about it after I turned the Switch off.

Then I found DARQ.

It's a small game with a very distinctive visual style, built around a nightmare world where perspective and gravity don't quite behave the way you'd expect. I liked it almost immediately. The problem was sitting right underneath the trailer.

$20.

I waited for a sale, because that's what I do when a game looks interesting but the price doesn't feel right. Steam was much cheaper too, which would've made the decision easier if I actually owned a gaming PC. I didn't, and I still don't have a Steam Deck, so the cheaper Steam price was basically a nice piece of information I couldn't use.

But after I started building the price tracker, I realised there was another number I should have been looking at.

How many hours am I actually getting for that money?

Value per hour gives the price some context

The calculation itself is almost embarrassingly simple.

Take the current price of a game and divide it by the number of hours it takes to finish the main story.

A $20 game with a 20-hour main story costs $1 per hour. A $20 game with a two-hour main story costs $10 per hour.

Suddenly those two $20 price tags don't feel remotely similar.

That's useful because a game price by itself doesn't tell me much about the amount of time I'm buying. A $5 game might give me 30 hours of playtime, while another $5 game might be over in an afternoon. If I'm comparing the two purely on price, I'm missing part of the picture.

That's where the HowLongToBeat data comes in. I added its playtime information to the game data and use the main-story figure to calculate a cost-per-hour number where a match is available.

It's a small number on the page, but it changes the question I'm asking.

Instead of looking at "Is this game cheap?", I can also ask "Is this a good amount of game for the price?"

Those aren't the same question.

I put the number next to the price

Once I had the playtime data working, I wanted it somewhere I would actually see it.

So value per hour ended up appearing throughout the site wherever game prices are being compared. The reason is pretty selfish: that's exactly the information I want when I'm deciding what to buy.

Imagine you're looking at five games during a sale. They're all around $10, so the price doesn't help much. Then you notice that one has a main story of six hours and another has one around 25 hours.

That doesn't tell you which game you'll enjoy more. It does tell you that the $10 price means something very different for each one.

And this is where I think the number becomes genuinely useful. It gives me a little more context before I spend the money, without pretending that a spreadsheet can decide what I should enjoy.

Value per hour isn't a quality score

I want to make this distinction pretty clear because it's easy to look at a cost-per-hour number and start treating it like a ranking.

It isn't.

A lower value-per-hour number simply means you're paying less for each estimated hour of the main story. That's useful if you're shopping for a lot of playtime, but it doesn't tell you whether those hours are actually good.

A 40-hour game can have 40 hours of filler. A two-hour game can give you two hours that you'll remember for years.

Which one would you rather play?

That's a personal question, and no amount of HowLongToBeat data can answer it for you.

I still care about the number because I'm also a customer. If two games look equally interesting to me and one gives me five times the playtime for the same price, that's information I want to have before buying.

The final decision is still mine.

DARQ is the perfect example of why the number has limits

DARQ makes the whole argument a little awkward, because its main story is only around two hours.

At the $20 price I first saw, that works out to roughly $10 per hour.

On a value-per-hour table, DARQ doesn't look particularly attractive.

And I still think it's a fantastic little game.

That's the part I don't want a simple formula to erase. I found DARQ because I was looking for something creative after Blasphemous, and the game gave me exactly that. Its short length is part of the experience. It gets in, shows you its ideas, and gets out.

Would I rather pay $20 for two hours or $20 for twenty hours? Most of the time, I'd take the twenty.

Would I rather play a boring 20-hour game or a brilliant two-hour game?

Well, that's why I have a brain.

Adding playtime changed how I cleaned the catalog

There was another unexpected benefit after I started adding HowLongToBeat information.

Once I had another way of looking at the Nintendo catalog, I started noticing titles that didn't really belong in the kind of dataset I wanted to build. I ran some additional checks myself and found games with keywords and content that I didn't want mixed into the recommendations and analysis.

So I removed them.

That sounds like a small housekeeping job, but I actually liked what it taught me about building the site. Adding more data isn't automatically an improvement. Sometimes a new data source gives you a better way to decide what should stay.

That's useful for a price tracker because I don't want to throw every possible title into a database and call the job finished. The information has to help me answer a question that matters to someone who is about to spend money.

In this case, HowLongToBeat gave me one more way to look at the catalog.

Gaming isn't charity, and that's okay

I know some people don't like judging games through numbers like price per hour because they feel it puts too much emphasis on the business side of gaming.

I understand that.

I'm also not going to pretend that developers should price a game according to a formula that says ten hours equals $10 and twenty hours equals $20. That's not how creative work works.

Gaming is a business, and I'm a customer. Developers deserve to charge for the work they put into a game, while I get to decide whether the price makes sense for me.

If it doesn't, I can wait.

That's exactly what I did with DARQ.

The game didn't suddenly become better because the price dropped. I simply reached a point where the amount I was paying felt more reasonable for the experience I expected to get.

That's the part of price tracking I find interesting. Sometimes saving money doesn't mean finding the absolute cheapest game. It means finding the point where the price, the playtime, and your own interest in the game finally make sense together.

Value per hour works best when you add your own judgement

I wouldn't use value per hour as the first and only filter for buying games.

I'd use it as another number sitting beside the things I already care about.

If you're choosing between two games at the same price, playtime can tell you where your money might go further. If you're looking for a short experience, the same number might be almost irrelevant. If a game looks genuinely special, you might happily pay more per hour because the experience is exactly what you've been looking for.

That's why DARQ still sits in my head as a good example.

Two hours is short. $20 was expensive to me. The value-per-hour number made that obvious, but it didn't make the buying decision for me.

I still wanted the game.

So I waited for the price to come down. And to support the dev, i promote it freely on my website TO you.

And that is probably the best way I can describe what value per hour means to me: it's a buying signal, not a verdict.

Use the number when it helps. Ignore it when it doesn't.

Just don't let a spreadsheet tell you whether you're going to love a game.