Is a game worth it? How to decide before you buy

Most "is it worth it" advice ends at the review score. The review score tells you if a game is good. It does not tell you if it is good for the money, right now, at this price. Those are different questions. Here is a way to answer the second one that holds up.

Start with the reviews, but read the count

A 95 percent rating from four hundred people is a real signal. A 100 percent from eleven people is a rumor. Look at the percentage and the number of reviews together. Then check the recent reviews against the lifetime reviews. A game that was loved and is now sitting at "mixed" for the last month usually means a bad patch, a dead player base, or a monetization change. That gap is often the most useful line on the page.

Turn the price into hours

A price alone means nothing. A price against how long the game actually is means a lot. Take the real length, the main story from HowLongToBeat, not the store page fantasy, and divide. Twenty dollars for a tight eight-hour game is about two-fifty an hour. Sixty dollars for a forty-hour game you will finish is a dollar-fifty an hour. The cheaper sticker is not always the better deal.

One trap: long is not the same as good. A forty-hour game that bores you at hour six cost you sixty dollars for six hours. Length only counts if you will actually play it, which is why the finish rate, how many owners get to the end, is worth more than the advertised hours.

Check the price history, then wait if you can

Almost every game goes on sale, and the wait is shorter than the folklore says. This site tracks price histories for over 80,000 Steam games, and across 1.9 million recorded discounts the typical gap between one sale and the next is five to ten weeks. Most recorded sales are deep: about seven in ten are 50 percent off or more. And 91 percent of games that have been discounted once have been discounted again. The pattern repeats.

So the historical low tells you how patient is worth being, and the game's own sale rhythm tells you how long the patience runs. A game that has never dropped below ten percent off is a different purchase from one that hits sixty percent off every couple of months, and the price chart on its page shows you which one you are looking at.

When full price is the right call

Waiting is not free. If you will play a game this weekend and it costs a fair price per hour today, buying it today is a fine decision; six weeks of not playing it is a real cost the spreadsheet never shows. Full price is also how you vote for the kind of game you want more of, and on a four-hour masterpiece the whole premium is the price of a sandwich. The point of the math is not to always wait. It is to know what the wait buys you, in dollars, before you decide.

I still do this every time. I grew up running the hours-per-dollar math in my head before I spent twenty dollars, and I never stopped. The only change is that the number is written down now.

The quick version

• Reviews good and plentiful, and recent reviews not falling off a cliff.
• Price per real hour that you would pay for that kind of game.
• Not sitting just above a sale you could wait a few weeks for.
• A finish rate that says people actually play it, instead of buying it and bouncing.

If all four line up, buy it. If the reviews are strong but the price per hour is rough, wishlist it and wait for the drop. The BANG Score rolls these into one number so you can skip the arithmetic, but the reasoning is the same either way.