The Theoretical Price Tag

[Baenki]

I know there are threads that discuss the value of KSP already but let's do this for fun.

What should you have payed for KSP? (in theory)

What have you payed per hour by now?

Do it like this:

Time played:

650 hours (I have 260 logged in steam but i assume i have played 2.5 times that since I started.)

Money payed: 23$

$ per hour: 23$/650h = 0.035$/h

Now lets assume an AAA-title costs around 60-70$ and has around 10 hours of gameplay so ~6.50$/h.

What should you have payed?

650h x 6.50$ = 4225$

Edited January 24, 2015 by Baenki

[Renegrade]

For me? Twenty two thousand, seven hundred and fifty of whatever kind of dollar that is~

KSP has been worth every cent. I might complain about a million things, and question 90% of the choices that happen, and call MaxMaps a ScrubLord because of that botched Duna landing of his (his words, not mine ), but I have without a shadow of a doubt gotten full value for my money. Many, many times over.

[Rich]

I rationalise most of my entertainment purchases like this. If the cost per hour is lower than that of going to see a film at the cinema, then I consider it to be a worthwhile purchase. I don't know exactly how many hours I have logged in KSP, but I can assure myself that it is more than 15 (I paid £15 for it back in 0.14). That's not even including all the evenings I spent modding the game. Either way, KSP was a good buy.

[Beale]

Whenever I would complain about a tiny bugbear in the game, this is what it comes down to, I've gotten more hours from this than any other game.

I bought the game for €16 - equal about 0.22 cent per hour for 700 hours (Don't judge me).

Add onto that easily double the number of hours modding it.

When I would consider some of the other unfinished indie game trash I have bought and played for less than an hour or so (Only for the dev to cancel development a month later), KSP has been immense bang for buck.

I'd be happy to spend another €15 / £10 per expansion, as long as it had decent content.

Edited January 24, 2015 by Beale

[Dingbat1967]

Considering I paid what ... maybe 30$ for the game ... and I got thousands of hours of enjoyment out of it. Money well spent. If Squad decides to come out with seperate DLCs, I'll be more than happy to fork more money over.

[Waterlimon]

I wouldnt say all the hours are equally valuable so the comparison is not valid.

I would place the hours in a continuum between 'new content' and 'wasting time' (not in the negative sense)

What I mean is, that if I were to use 10 hours to get my craft somewhere, there might be 2 hours of 'content' (new situations, making decisions) and 8 hours of waiting for stuff to happen, performing some really slow transfer manoeuvre, or going back in time to redo something because you failed (if I do 90% of a missin correctly and fail, Id have to do that exact same 90% again with only the last 10% being new content).

If we consider the AAA titles, often its a steady stream of new content. With KSP, youll be doing the same things many times. With KSP, there is a stream of new content as well, but it slows down with time and is a bit slow to begin with anyways.

A more valid comparison would take your KSP hours, multiply by lets say 0.75 (to account for the gameplay being generally slower paced instead of 1 GB of assets per minute being thrown at your face), and for all hours above 50 multiply by 0.25 (because youll be spending so much time doing the same things over and over again and generally things taking longer etc where during first hours you have all these new parts and planets and such to play with).

so 1000 h -> 750 h -> ~200 h ???

Its like even if you have a movie you like to watch again every year, you dont really get as much out of it anymore so you wouldnt want to pay the full price every time (unless you only pay based on how much time was wasted).

So comparing 1000 h in KSP to 1000 h of story in some 500$ AAA+++ game doesnt really work, since its not only the time, its also the quality of that time (of course you might like KSP more than anything and give a 0x multiplier to hours of entertainment on all other games, which is probably what you did when you didnt choose to buy those games but bought KSP).

I find KSP more than worth the price not because of hours wasted on building rockets, redoing missions or waiting, but because of the few moments where I understood how something works or something interesting happened as well as the entertainment offered by content on the forums which would be difficult to understand without playing the game, but doesnt really count toward playing the game.

[Ikaneko]

Whenever I would complain about a tiny bugbear in the game, this is what it comes down to, I've gotten more hours from this than any other game.

I bought the game for €16 - equal about 0.22 cent per hour for 700 hours (Don't judge me).

Add onto that easily double the number of hours modding it.

When I would consider some of the other unfinished indie game trash I have bought and played for less than an hour or so (Only for the dev to cancel development a month later), KSP has been immense bang for buck.

I'd be happy to spend another €15 / £10 per expansion, as long as it had decent content.

That's roughly 13 weeks of your life purely spent doing KSP stuff.

Damn.

[Renegrade]

If we consider the AAA titles, often its a steady stream of new content. With KSP, youll be doing the same things many times. With KSP, there is a stream of new content as well, but it slows down with time and is a bit slow to begin with anyways.

A more valid comparison would take your KSP hours, multiply by lets say 0.75 (to account for the gameplay being generally slower paced instead of 1 GB of assets per minute being thrown at your face),

You're also going to have to take into account that the "gig of assets per minute" aren't necessarily meaningful either.

For example, I was playing GTA V on the PC a few weeks ago. I was taking and driving cars that I'm pretty sure weren't mine. Doing little missions. Shooting people. Reloading. Doing stealthy takedowns. Skinning gorilla 'nads so I could make a bigger wallet. All of the additional content was more of the same. This big, jungly island. All green everywhere. Hey, wait, that isn't realistic and next gen - that's lens flares everywhere and brown artfully mixed with gray! There's no green in real life!

Then I realized that I was playing Farcry 3, and GTA V hadn't come out yet. And that "content" in an 'AAA' game (they must call 'em that based on the battery, which is the smallest and weakest of the commonly-used classic long cell formats) is largely just pixels with different colors. So, given that Farcry is green and has you skinning gorilla nads and you can unlock scopes and ACOGs and different grips for your guns (or is that Battlefield 4?), I'd give it an extra 15 minutes of content, multiplied by 1.5x for the 50% more color (green) it has over duochrome 'next gen' games...

Also botching a mission is exactly and entirely gameplay. As is building rockets (that's half the bloody game).

The only place I'd accept any sort of reduction multiplier is when you're at maximum warp and mashing the > key to warp faster.. Top warp is a bit slow for interplanetary even in non-RSS scale KSP...

[SkyRender]

My best estimate is that I've played 2500 hours or so of KSP. Since I have the store version (and since I've been playing since before Steam was an option anyway), I can't really give a more precise figure than that. Now in the US, at least, most games go for $60 for home systems ($40 is about the price ceiling for games on the 3DS). Factoring in PC game prices is a lost cause since they tend to go down to 10% of their original asking price within a single year. Since I've had a fairly even mix of titles between my 3DS and Wii U, I'll put my average price per game at $50 (though if I were completely fair it'd be lower still since I have slightly more 3DS games than Wii U games at this point). Now here's where it gets interesting: the majority of the games I buy are much longer-lasting than your typical 10-hour game. I like to play JRPGs and WRPGs both, and my game library reflects this. As such, my value per hour for my collection (even limiting it to this generation and excluding PC games) works out to about $1 per hour.

So, by the original poster's reasoning, KSP is worth around $16,250. By my own scale, however, it's $2,500. Either way, that's a huge difference from what I originally paid for it!

EDIT: Concerning the argument going on above, any statistical measure is derived and thus is only valuable in an abstract sense anyway. Generally the most "valid" measures are not ones that are easy to obtain. For example, the most scientifically useful measure of how much value an entertainment product has to you would be a combination of how high and how many endorphin spikes you experienced while playing/watching it (indicating how much fun you were having on a chemical level). That's not exactly easy to measure, of course. Measuring by a less precise figure like dollars per hour of value, by contrast, is (even though it also has far greater potential for false positives and false negatives both).

Edited January 26, 2015 by SkyRender