The Value of Gaming
I recently had a conversation with a friend about the new map packs. He complained that the price was way to high and how DLC is a complete rip off. It got me thinking about the value of gaming as a form of entertainment. I decided to look at it in time spent or other words how much per hour for that form of entertainment.
The price of a movie is about 9-12 dollars if you don’t count the high price of concessions it still work out to be about $4.50 to $6.00 an hour (give or take based on movie length). Still entertaining but rather expensive in relative terms.
A trip to the amusement park (Magic Kingdom, Busch Gardens…etc) runs about 60-80 dollars a ticket. Most amusement parks are only open at the most 12 hours, but I’ll be kind and give it 14 hours based on one of their longer special situation days. This day ends up being $4.29 per hour and that is at the $60 price tag and a 14 hour day.
Television seems like it would be a good value you watch it about 25 hours a week and you have what seems to be a relatively low monthly fee. My cable bill (minus the internet and phone service) runs about $100 a month. This ends up being one single dollar per hour. A nice deal.
Finally gaming this is interesting because you have to look at all the costs involved in gaming. It is easier to look at in what is spent over the life time of the system. Let me try to break it down…
$300 Xbox
$200 Peripherals (controllers, Headset…)
$180 Internet $7.50 per month times 24 months*
$100 Live for 24 months
$780 13 games at $60 a pop
$150 DLC
$1710 Total for the life of system
I’m simply going to look at time I spent playing games last year…. (
Time played (hours)
82 WaW 2 days 14 hours (62 hours) plus 20 for campaign
128 COD 4 3 days 21 hours (93 hours) plus 35 for campaign
60 Fable 2 60 hours
30 ODST 30 hours
200 Oblivion200 hours
134 MW 2 4 day 8 hours (104 hours) plus 30 hours in campaign and spec ops)
20 Dragon Age
50 Fallout 3
35 Orange Box
45 GTA 4
70 Gears 2
75 Rainbow 6 Vegas 2
25 hours in party chat
900 Halo 3 I have over 4 thousand games played over three accounts at about 12 minutes a piece…800 hours give or take (WTF….sad face) plus 100 for campaign
1854 total hours of entertainment
So I spent 92 cents an hour on gaming which makes it my personal cheapest form of entertainment.
Notes:
Amount time played is estimated.
Other factors can contribute to price or amount spent which I did not include (simplify)
*Internet service price was divided in half since in is also used for the computer
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