So, I just did some quick calculations on my Steam account. And when I say quick, I meant for this to take five minutes and instead it took an hour.
First, according to the Wasted on Steam Calculator, my account has seen about 618.8 hours of playtime total. Of that 618, Skyrim alone makes up 12% at 74.2 hours. That’s just where it stands now, I haven’t even finished the game yet.
Now, here’s the thing. about 23 hours of my account’s total don’t actually exist. I played Sniper Elite (#9) for about a half hour then went to bed. However, there was a weird bug where the executable got stuck running on my PC until I came back to it the next day, and Steam tracked all of that as time played. So, without that, we’re looking at 595.4 total hours played. That only bumps Skyrim up to approximately 12.5%, but that number is sure to grow over time. Based on this new figure, I’ve played about 24.8 full days of PC gaming.
Looking at my top 10 (actually top 11, but excluding Sniper Elite for the previously discussed reason), here’s some facts about the games that make up the lineup:
- 7 role-playing games or games with heavy role-playing elements
- Skyrim
- Fallout: New Vegas
- Dragon Age: Origins
- Mass Effect 2
- Fable 3
- Torchlight
- Alpha Protocol
- Two strategy games
- Plants vs Zombies
- Civilization V
- Four FPS games, or games with heavy shooting elements
- Fallout: New Vegas
- Mass Effect 2
- Alpha Protocol
- Portal 2
- Story-driven games
- Everything except PvZ and CivV
- Breakdown:
- Bethesda games (Skyrim & FNV): 133 hours (22%)
- Everything else in the top 10: 283.3 hours (48%)
Next, according to the Steam Calculator website, my account is worth $2107.44. That’s an approximate figure of what I’ve spent, with variances based on actual purchase price (I purchase most of my stuff on sale) and price drops over time. Either way, it’s a moderately useful metric, because now, with the amount of time I’ve played, as discussed in the last paragraph, I can figure out my cost/time ratio.
So, $2107 over 595.4 hours gives each hour a calculated value of $3.54 per hour. That’s a pretty great deal, when you consider some other entertainment options:
- Movies cost about $30 for two people to attend, because nobody goes alone, and then you have to get snacks, and then sit there and watch a two-hour movie. ($7.08 = 2 hours)
- Golfing costs about $20 a person at a nice course, or about $10 a person at the courses that people like me play, and that’s about three to five hours out of a day. ($10.62-17.7 = 3-5 hours)
- An average bar tab for my wife and I (mostly me, plus a Diet Coke) is usually about $20, and that’s if we ate before we met up with people for drinks. That’s usually about two to three hours. ($7.08-10.62 = 2-3 hours)
To take this a step further, one of the aforementioned calculators also mentions cost per hour on a game by game basis. Given this is based on current prices, I did a little math to figure out what my cost per hour is based on the prices I actually paid for the games, including all DLC, whether or not I actually played it.
- Skyrim – 54 cents per hour
- Fallout: New Vegas – 78 cents per hour
- Dragon Age: Origins – $1.09 per hour
Lots of DLC I paid full price for and didn’t play
- Plants vs Zombies – 23 cents per hour
- Mass Effect 2 – $1.14 per hour
Again, lots of DLC, but this time most of the DLC was short
- Civ V – $1.91
This is one of the few games I paid full price for, then bought DLC for. I’ll come back to it off and on, so I’ll get my money for it over time.
- Fable 3 – 70 cents
- Torchlight – 60 cents
Luckily, full price on this game was only $20
- Alpha Protocol – 11 cents (LOWEST!)
It’s moments like this that make people sing the praises of Steam sales. This game was two dollars and I got almost 18 hours out of it. You can’t beat that kind of value proposition.
- Portal 2 – $2.60 (HIGHEST)
I bought this as a pre-sale, so I paid less than full price, but still more than one of the many sale prices. I was just so stoked for it to come out, I couldn’t wait.
I’m not done yet. My PC cost $717.47 to build. My Xbox cost $250 when I bought it. Obviously, looking at those, the value proposition is the Xbox. However, let’s look at hours of game time. According to my Raptr profile, PC gaming makes up 61% of the quantity of games I actually play. It says I’ve played just over 100 Xbox games, but this has only been tracking for a year and a half, so let’s give it a hefty 15% boost, and say I’ve played 115 games on the Xbox. Let’s figure some numbers here. 30% of that is made up of Xbox Live Arcade games, so we’ll account for those at an average price point of $10, and the retail titles we’ll account for at the average price of $60. That means I’ve played about $5175 worth of Xbox games. Granted, for a long time, I had Gamefly, so I was not buying every game I played.
TL;DR: Here’s what I gained from all of this:
- PC Gaming
- Higher up front cost to build a machine
- Steam has frequent sales, often with rock-bottom pricing
- Lower software cost leads to a wider range of available games
- Console Gaming
- Lower up front cost
- Cost of purchase can be alleviated by rentals/borrowing
- Software costs are higher, never get access to Steam-like deals without resorting to theft
