Gaming Habbit ROI

Buying impulse can be a disease. There are several ill people that cannot control their own reasoning and buy everything they see. Until they got empty pockets.

The gaming industry is now living a transformation (well, it already operates in large scale in this nee model), the distribution channels can be now totally digital. So if you see an ad, in matter of minutes you can buy and start the download. And if your internet connection is fast enough, the time difference between wanting and buying can be really short. Virtually immediate.

I’m not saying that impulses is wrong. And sometimes we have special items and tastes. We love stuff and when there are more to buy, we get excited.

I consider myself an economic guy. Hardly I go with impulses when we are talking about spending my own money. But other day I came with the question: the games that I bought worth? I played? Liked them?

Inspired by the indie developer Cliff, from Positech, I did some math in order to find what games was a bang of the buck.

The math is funding out how much time I played the game and divide by the price I payed. Thanks to Steam, I can see how much time I was with a game opened in my screen. Also, I can check my credit card to see how much. So all data I need is available.

There is one consideration: I’ve played several pirated games in my life and bought then recently for the sake of peace of mind. I did not count them also because I could not measure the amount of time I spent on them. Surely Mass Effect, Deus Ex 1, Morrowind and Oblivion, SimCity would be high on the list otherwise.

Considering that I can wait a bit for a game, I get many of them in a year of two after the release. These games tend to present a better ROI (Return of Investment). Buying at the release date is generally a bad decision, so unless is a long and good game, it will present a worse ratio.

The absolute king is… Team Fortress 2! Of course, it was free. But it is the game played most in recent years. More than 99 hours.

Then it comes smaller games that I bought very cheaply: Zeno Clash, Amnesia and GRID. All of them I played a lot, so the metrics favour them.

Then It comes some best-sellers that I played a big price, but I got me into them for a very long time: LA Noire I played 26 hours (and yet not finished), Witcher 2, Batman Arckham City and Skyrim, (other that I bought in the same day they launched the game and I still -shame- did not finish it).

Some of them I’m still playing, so there are some that would go even further up in the list. I can see Mark of the Ninja going this way… but I will write about it later…