The amount of times I “finally sit down and watch that new Netflix show I’ve been putting off” and it’s 7 years old. My kid is into “newer Disney stories” I don’t know from my day… that are 25 year old films!

I get free reducing the barrier-to-entry, but I kinda look at games in terms of “how much is the ratio of the cost to how many hours of fun gameplay that I get?”

I mean, I have some games that I briefly try, dislike, and never play again. Those are pretty expensive, almost regardless of the purchase price.

But the thing is, if it’s a game that you play a lot, the purchase price becomes almost irrelevant in cost-per-hour of gameplay. I’ve played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead — well, okay, you can download that for free, but I also bought it on Steam to throw the developers some money — and Caves of Qud a ton. The price on them is basically a rounding error. And the same is probably true for the top few games in my game library.

You could charge me probably $2000 for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and it’d still be cheaper per hour of gameplay than nearly all games that I’ve played, because I’ve spent so many hours in the thing.

If people are playing these like crazy, you’d think that the same would hold for them. That the cost for a game that you play like crazy for many years just…doesn’t matter all that much, because the difference in hours played between games is so huge that it overwhelms the difference in price.