How do you determine what to spend on games?

I've been thinking about this a lot recently and I'm sure it's been discussed here before but how do you determine the value of a game.

My point is simply. What makes a $60 game a $60 game in your head? Why would you not spend the same on a mobile version?

What this boils down to for me is this. I have no hesitation buying GTA V for $60. In fact if I could afford the super expensive collectors editon I would buy that. I think its worth it based on past experience. I bought GTA IV collectors for $90 (I believe) and I've put over 100 hours into the game. My rule? I must get 1 hour for ever $10 I spend. I came to this rule feeling that I'm willing to go to a 90 minute movie for $10, so the interactive experience should be at $10 an hour.

But what about mobile games or free to play games? Why do I feel different about thoses? So I changed the way I think. If I'm gonna get 50 hours of play from a F2P game, why not spend money in it. I did this in Simpsons Tapped Out. I play the game daily for months. I didn't want to spend money in it because its a F2P mobile game, but I decided they have earned my money at this point. They got $20 from me. And one day they may get more.

So how do you judge that value? What makes you not pay when you are having fun?

I don't really have a rule but in the case of a game that is alright but not great if i happened to spend an hour for every 5-10$ i paid then it doesn't feel like a waste.

Looking back at the last couple years i'll say that very few games i paid full price have been worth it for me but i end up buying enough games during major sales and spend way more times on some of those that it more or less even things out after a while. For every 60-70$ for games like the last Mortal Kombat that i played for maybe 5 or 6 hours there's an XCOM i get for 40$ and end up playing for 115 hours and counting.

In the end i don't think about that stuff too much since i feel like i've got way more value overall than what i actually paid and frankly, without buying games in the first place i'm not gonna find out if they were truly worth it or not.

At the moment i'm playing Dark Souls. I got it this summer for 8$ and have so far played 65 hours. That kind of stuff makes it easy to forget and not be mad about the next "bad" purchase i'll make.

I don't think I will ever feel comfortable with the Free To Play Model. I was planing Anno Online for a few weeks. I was digging just spending 15 minutes a day doing my few chores and then rearrainging my village into a working town. But then you just hit a point where there is NOTHING you cna do for days because the finacial model is just 0.2 % teh other way so you never make any money, so you cna't build the next thing, so you can't raise up your villagers to merchants.

So then you sit there going, "Jesus, do I really have to spend $10 on gems to get over those hump?" And you find yourself saying, "Meh, I rather just stop playing."

It might works on the next generation of consoles because I'll have $5 sitting in my PSN wallet...but who knows. I think if SOny were smart they would make sure all FtoP games allow for mirco purchases taht work. The exampel in Anno woudl be $1 of real monye buys enough "funny gems/coins/whatever" to get something done. I guess I'm saying Sony should make sure FtoP games are a good deal not wild cash cows for publishers.

I rent a lot of games, so I'll only buy a game at full price if it's at launch and I want to support the developers. Like with Tomb Raider, I liked the direction Crystal Dynamics is going with the series so I felt I needed to show support by picking up the game at launch for full price. Otherwise, I'll rent a game and then wait a couple months for the price drop to pick it up if I really liked it.

About F2P games however i do have a rule.

If right from the start the game feels functional and somewhat complete then great, otherwise i'm not even going to bother.

When it comes to spending money on a F2P game i want to get as much value out of it as i would if i bought any other regular game for whatever i'm paying. Diablo 3 is a 60$ game. If i decided to spend 60$ worth of heroes in Marvel Heroes would i be getting something close to D3 in value? Something along those lines.

My rule? I must get 1 hour for ever $10 I spend. I came to this rule feeling that I'm willing to go to a 90 minute movie for $10, so the interactive experience should be at $10 an hour.

I heard someone say, a few weeks ago, that they don't believe in buying games "by the pound". He meant that he didn't like the idea of buying games based on how much content they have, never mind if that content is all good. And I really agree with him. If games are to be art - and when judging their value, that is a question that must be answered - then we can't really judge them by their cost-to-content ratio or else they're just produce.

You can decide that it isn't worth spending $60 on a game, but you can't declare a game bad because you spent $60 on it and it's only 5 hours long. Especially if that five hours happens to be absolutely brilliant in many was, like Portal 2 was. It's this mentality that leads to grinding, bad pacing, shitty levels, overly long segments, etc.

On the topic of mobile and F2P games - I don't play them, with the exception of Peggle and TF2 respectively. And those two only occasionally. They're not worth the same amount of money because, despite the fact that you spent fifty hours or so in them, they're usually either not much more than rip-offs of something better, or mechanically simple enough for a baby to understand it. League of Legends and TF2 have proven themselves otherwise, so some F2P games are "deserving" of your money, but I'd rather give my money to things that aren't continually asking for more of it.

I do think there's a big difference between mobile and handheld games, considering that handhelds have proven themselves quite well over the years as hosts of great games, from Metroid 2 to Fire Emblem Awakening.

On a final note, Journey seemed like a very expensive buy at $15. Despite that, it's one of the best games released last year. It's an example of a game with absolutely no fat there to bore you. I didn't get fifty hours of mind-numbing entertainment with that game. I got an hour and a half's worth of memorable landscape, beautiful music, and a simple but wonderful story, and every time I think about the game and look back on it, nothing but pleasure comes to mind. Fifteen dollars didn't buy an hour and a half's worth of wasting time, it bought some memories of something beautiful.

And you lose that when you're only concerned with and judge quality by a game's hour counter.

@monkeyking1969: I think that this is a major psychological flaw that f2p games have in appealing to a mainstream audience (ignoring things like Dota2, where all paid content is cosmetic). A lot of the time, these games expect you to become impatient with the pace the game is allowing you to take things for free, so you'll buy more powerful items or faster xp gain, or something like that. But what they're ignoring is that doing this causes the customer to actually have negative affect toward their game before making the purchasing decision.

There are many people with addictive personalities who will spend a whole lot of $ just to get their fix, but more balanced individuals will say, "I'm not enjoying this, I can A) do something else or B) pay money for it and maybe it will get better". Even if this individual chooses B, the game now has a much higher bar to climb to retain the customer, because the game must have bored him to have reached that point and it now needs to become significantly different thanks to his purchase than it was before.

Ideally, the consumer makes a purchase out of good will instead of out of frustration. This makes him much more likely to feel favorably about the purchase and to repeat it. So, the best microtransactions are ones that the player makes not because his current options are poor, but because the temptation of the purchasable options are too great to resist. This requires a lot of effort, which is not typically something I see a lot of made after an f2p game's initial release.

I do think a game has to be meaty enough to be worth my money. I don't buy 3-4 hour long games. It's not worth it to me. Brothers for example, I'm not buying it because its too short. Money is a factor for me, and I want the most bang for my buck with my purchases. I don't think theres anything wrong with that.

Am i skipping good games? Sure. I would play Brothers if it was like 3 bucks. I'm also buying good games with some meat to them.

I don't feel any obligation to support stuff. I buy what i want for the reasons that i want. One criteria of value that i use is length, as a result, I don't play many indie games. They tend to be rather short. Sure, indie games are awesome, but well, my money is better spent on the cheap AAA game from last year than the new indie darling. (Plus, i dont really like platformers and 90% of indies are artsy platformers...)

Can't really comment on F2P stuff, i haven't gotten into any of them for longer than 2-3 days.