Time Invested does not Equal Time Well Spent

There is an ongoing debate about how much a game costs and how much time you can spend with it. How people value they time spent vs how much they paid for the game is subjected. So excuse my straw man argument here. My friend use the thumb rule of $1 spent for each hour is well spent. If you spent 60 bucks for a game, and he only plays it 10. He would argue that he didn't get his moneys worth out of it.

Again let's not argue if we should use $0.10 per hour or $0.50 the actual value used is meaningless for our discussion.

I want to focus on the part where we spent our time and try valuing it. You can spend $5 to watch the worst series you have ever watched, but it took you 8 hours to finish it. Or you could spent 20$ to watch a movie that becomes your favorite one. You may even watch it multiple times but in the end it took you only 3 hours to finish the movie twice.

Now the question: "how much value did you gain?" This is the hard part. Because this value cannot be quantified. We cannot put it into a number. And I really mean it we cannot choose the correct number. Because your gut may say. Ehhh a value of 20 or 3 or 1 or PI or e^2. Because every chosen number would have the same meaning. We could never compare the numbers to other times when you spent money on something.

How much value is gained on buying a TV? A better PC? A book? A video game? A subscription? I hope you get my point.

I once played a Crusader Kings 3 campaign that was plagued with bugs and even resulted in a corrupted iron mode save game (you only have one save game). Was this time well spent?

Most people choose time spent with thing I spent money on. Because for them there is no other quantified number. I know how much time I spent with something. But I never know what true value I gained or not gained.

The Meaning for Game Design

What does this have to do with game design? Value the time your players spent with your game, try not to waste their time with unnecessary grind to stretch out your game only because you think it needs to have X amount of hours of content. More things to do does not necessarily result in more value created.

Players that think they got their moneys worth for time spent will say so. Players who think otherwise will stay silent, you will seldom hear their complaints because they already left you. Now doing something else more valuable with their time.