Why price per hour is a bad way to judge a game

Dollars per hour feels like the honest way to measure value. Take the price, divide by the hours, lower is better. A twenty-dollar game that runs forty hours is fifty cents an hour, a steal. A twenty-dollar game that runs four hours is five dollars an hour, a ripoff. Clean, obvious, and wrong.

It optimizes for length, not for good

Sort games by dollars per hour and you have not ranked value. You have ranked length, with price as a tiebreaker. A four-hour game that is close to perfect lands below an eighty-hour grind that nobody finishes, because the grind has more hours to divide the price into. The metric pays developers to pad. Every filler quest and every slow walk between objectives makes the number look better.

I found this the hard way. An early version of the BANG Score led with dollars per hour, and the result was brutal in the wrong direction. Short, brilliant games scored like scams. Bloated games with a "just one more system" treadmill floated up. The formula was punishing exactly the games I would most want it to find.

Hours you will not play are not value

The deeper problem is that advertised length assumes you finish. Most people do not. On a lot of well-reviewed games the share of players who reach the end is small. Those unplayed hours still count in a dollars-per-hour number, so a game gets credit for content you will never see. A finish rate, how many owners actually get through it, is a better read on whether the hours are real to you.

What to use instead

Let the review quality lead. A game that reviews badly is not a good deal at any price, so quality should set the ceiling on the score and price should only move you down inside it. Then measure price against length with a floor by genre, so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games instead of against a role-playing epic. A short game built to be short is not bad value. It is a different shape of value.

Dollars per hour is still worth glancing at. It is a fine sanity check and a terrible headline. Use it to sniff out a sixty-dollar game with a six-hour campaign and no reason to replay. Do not use it to tell a tight, great, short game apart from a long slog. On that comparison it will lie to you every time.