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

Most "is it worth it" advice ends at the review score. A review score tells you whether a game is good. It says nothing about whether it is good for the money, right now, at this price, and those are different questions.

Start with the reviews, but know what they leave out

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.

The one thing a percentage can never carry is the price. People review the game they played, and what they paid for it never enters the number. A rating does not move when a game is full price and it does not move when it is ninety percent off, so two games sitting at the same 92 percent can be a fair deal and a bad one on the same afternoon. The rating is where I start.

Turn the price into hours

A price alone means nothing. A price against how long the game actually is means a lot. Take the main story time from HowLongToBeat and divide. The hour count a store page puts on its own game is marketing. 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. That is the standing flaw in dollars per hour: it pays for length. Length only counts if you will actually play it, which is why the finish rate, the share of players Steam counts at the ending, is worth checking beside 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.

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. A deep cut is not a warning sign. Among games with a real review base, the deep discounts do not sit on worse games, which is the opposite of what the reflex says.

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 to know what the wait buys you, in dollars, before you decide. I have been running it since the PC was a hand-me-down, and the only thing that has changed 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.
• Where Steam can show it, a healthy share of its players at the ending achievement.

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. Paste your Steam wishlist here and it comes back ranked by value, with the best deal first. The BANG Score rolls the reviews, the price per hour and, where one exists, the finish rate into one number if you would rather skip the arithmetic, and each game page's price chart covers the timing. Every game's score is here.