The emergence of an $80 game -- Mario Kart World -- has caused quite a stir in video game circles over the past two weeks. I've seen a lot of posts here and on other sites like Reddit and YouTube arguing that the game isn't worth the asking price, but not all for the same reason. Some seem to think the price of a game should correspond to its budget and the size of the team that created it. Some seem to think it's about content and value. And some appear to think that no game, no matter what, is worth $80.

So I'm curious: how do you measure what a game is worth? Game budget? Production value? Prestige? Metacritic? Hours of game time per dollar? Your personal estimation of its quality? Some combination of several factors?

As a bonus question, how much would you be willing to pay for the best game you ever played?

Depends on the game, the genre, what I know of reviews. I want content but no bloat so it's less the hours but what the experience will be for those hours, I want quality but not at the expense of fun so a big budget means fuck all if the game is like Hellblade 2 for example but I also expect a certain level of quality and production for the money, Nintendo nor Xbox aren't providing that for the most part apart from a few titles. However I do not mind jank when the game if appropriately priced and has very good sales, I got Robocop for less than 10 and I wasn't disappointed.

Hours of content while important means very little when Vampire Survivors for 4,99 had near 70 hours of gameplay as a 10/10 game and FF16 a 5 or 6 at the most for 50ish on sale has those same hours if your were to do the side content, I only spent 32 hours in it for the story but it's the most generic filler, mediocre, monotonous, repetitive nonsense content ever put in a game.

Recently I didn't mind spending 20 euro on KARMA The Dark world cause it was a high quality, good game but only 8 hours and a 7/10 but I did feel like I should have waited for a sale, if even a light one on Black Myth Wu Kong which at 69,99 gave me 69 hours and was a 9/10 so overall it really does depend.

Also, very few games are worth 90 euro, Sekiro, Elden Ring, Divinity OS2 yes but definitely not Mario Kart when you can get CTR on sale for 10 easy.

If I had to, I'd spend about 500 euro on The Witcher 3 before I started to question why, probably I'd talk myself into a few hundred more but def not exceeding a 1000. 

How much I enjoy a game. I'll pay $70-$80 for MK and most Nintendo titles cause I enjoy the majority of their games and get a decent 50+ hours out of them. That's what I paid a decade ago if you take inflation into account. I won't be paying that much for Pokémon games however as gamefreak has no quality control.

It's not a simple calculus. It often has to do with gut feeling. The Last of Us Part II had the production budget to justify its $60 price tag, but I didn't enjoy it enough to think it was worth that. I feel I should've waited for a sale.
Persona 3 Reload shouldn't have been $70 from a production sense, especially because it was a cross-gen game. But was the quality and amount of content (a long story) worth $70? Yeah.
I would've easily spent $80 on Stardew Valley with all the free content ConcernedApe has added, the quality of the game, and all the options

@Wman1996 

That’s a fair point. And of course you can’t truly know what a game is worth until after you’ve purchased it and played it extensively — that’s the rub.

Perhaps I should have put “pedigree” as one of the poll options. I know that I assign a lot of weight to certain studios, publishers, and directors. The new Fumito Ueda game, for example — I’ll pay pretty much whatever they ask for it. I trust in his genius.

"How much I personally enjoy it" absolutely takes the cake for me.

It does have to do with replay ability of the game, but that in effect has something to do with enjoyment.

2 very different game examples I in hindsight would not bat an eye spending EUR100 or more on it after I experienced them:

'Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild' & 'Balatro'

Two completely diffent games, but in my view the best and most repayable of their genre by far. Worth every penny.

I weigh the worth of a game based heavily on innovation. Did it invent the wheel? Did it re-invent the wheel? If so, those types of games are worth the big dollars. Games like SMB 3, Chrono Trigger, DKC, Streets of Rage 2, Super Mario Kart, Sonic 2, Super Metroid, GTA 3, Resident Evil, Link to the Past, Secret of Mana, Sillent Hill, OOT, Mario 64, MGS, Megman 2, Contra... games like these are worth their prices, imo. If a game is just going to be something that I play, enjoy, and then ends up collecting dust for collections sake, I devalue them. That would mean almost 100% of modern games. They just aren't inventive enough. More derivative. Not classics. They can be good, but compared to the games that came before it, I just don't go back to them. They don't captivate me like the older games did, so I can't really see spending all that money on them when I can spend it on the best games of all time instead.

Are you willing to buy it at the price it is being offered? That's it.

/thread

I am willing to pay full price on a Zelda game, for instance, because I know I will enjoy them and play them for a long time.

Conversely, I won't buy games on sale just for the sake of having them because they're cheap. I don't even bother with most of the free games offered on PSN or EGS.