Transformice. Played 5500 hours without spending a penny on it.

Biggest flop in recent history for me would be mewgenics. Dropped 30 bucks on it for like 2 hours of enjoyment and 10 more of forcing myself to try to like it

Tough choice but ruling out free games (if we include emulation I'll be here all day) I might go with Invisible Inc. It's a turn based stealth game with lots of different characters to try, each leaning into different strategies. While it's possible to knock out or kill guards, it's discouraged because it increases the alarm, so you have watch patterns and use tricks and diversions to achieve different objectives. I have 200 hours on it and it's on sale rn for $5. There are other games I have more hours on, but not as much enjoyment.

Runner up: Heroes of Might and Magic IV. I have no idea how many hours I have on it because I bought it before I had Steam, on a compact disk (in fact it's not even on Steam, I think it's abandonware?) and have come back to it so many times over the years. It's kind of a timeless hidden gem, lots of ways to build your characters and your armies, lots of different challenges, and the writing is fun and memorable. The style is a little different from the rest of the series and I never got into the others but the new one (Olden Era) is promising (and has a free demo that's really good).

Worst for me are the Total War series, maybe Napoleon or Rome 2. I remember when the first ones came out and there wasn't anything like it. In the year 2000, the ability to fly around the camera ordering troops around was incredible, and of course the ninja assassination clips were absolutely peak. But since then, every one pretty much follows the same formula, and it feels like if you've played one you've played them all. It's not that they're bad games, I just couldn't get into them.

Least - Hogwarts legacy: I bought it on sale mostly to "own the libs." My personality did a 180° in that same year so never opened the game again.

The 2-3 hours I spent felt like one huge tutorial, dialogue options just didn't matter, and also game didn't run great.

Most - Blade and sorcery: Modded the hell out of it daily. Also there was an update some time ago that doubled the native content.

Guild Wars 2 - I played the base and first DLC about 4k hours. The rest of thd DLCs were way less hours but still worth it.

Warcraft 3+TFT I've played the campaigns at least 4 times over the years, I think plus a ton of custom maps plus of course dota 1. Definitely best bang for buck. Other games that are close are path of exile(1k hours), counter strike(800hrs), dota2(1.4k hrs) and wow (way too many hours...but also a lot more money over the years)

For more traditional/offline games:

Gothic 2 I've played at least 3 times over the years , I think. Probably have 400+ hours in it. If they remake it like they did with the first one, I'm definitely gonna replay it.

Mass effect trilogy. Played the whole trilogy 3 times and I got the legendary edition but my first playthrough of that is on hold for now.

Don't remember which number exactly, but one of the older football manager games. I probably have like 400+ hours in that.

Worst value for money? That Warcraft mobile game. For whatever reason I was stupid enough to spend a bunch on it when it came out before I realized how grindy and stupid and pointless it was.

I also have only 22 hours in stalker2 ATM even tho I got it when it came out. It was quite buggy so I figured I'd let them cook some more. I'm sure I'll get my money's worth out of it eventually.

Given how big my library is and the fact that I rarely buy full-price, its hard to pick a single item.

If I had to pick one worst, it would probably be Company of Heroes 3. I was really hopeful for the game, and got it bundled with my CPU when building a new PC, but its just not very good. The campaign, the main part I was interested in, is slow and samey and uninteresting. The multiplayer is even worse, being riddled with microtransactions, lootboxes, and other such stuff in ways that significantly impact gameplay, in a supposedly competitive PvP game. Even if we assume the game was equivalent to $20, I only put in four hours, and didn't enjoy any of it.

In terms of best, the most technically correct would probably be Counter Strike GO/2. I've spent about $100 on it, between initial price, battle passes, and skins on the market, but selling those skins has earned me about $140 in revenue, so at 2000 hours, thats negative 2 cents an hour.

Excluding revenue made, its going to be Minecraft by a country mile. I've easily put in 10,000 hours since when I started playing mid-beta, so pessimisticly, it'd be around a quarter cent per hour. Honourable, more reasonable mentions would go to Gmod, where it works out to about 1 cent per hour when including time in the editor, and Dota and War Thunder, which are free, but I've spent thousands of hours in each and so bought about 2 cents per hour of microtransactions.

My wife and I tried God of War 2018 recently because the internet sings its praise.

Turns out we were both pretty turned off by the Neanderthal toxic masculinity Kratos shows the boy all the time.

I’m sure it’s setting up the story for character growth, but it was annoying as hell.

Worst is anything that I haven't gotten around to playing.

Best is either The Witcher 3, Fallout New Vegas, or Borderlands. Probably FNV.

Paid $50 for Half-Life 1 in 1998. Still play one of its mods on an almost daily basis. 10,000 hours is my low, low estimate.

Least? I've probably blocked it from my memory. Star Citizen had a free weekend a year or so ago and I quit after an hour or two when I realized how bad of shape it was in after well over a decade of development. So I guess I'll go with that one.

TF2 is way up there for me. I've played on and off since launch and accumulated 2500 hours. I think lifetime I might have gotten value from the game because I sold off a bunch of items that appreciated.

Diablo 2 has been the best value by far, even accounting for purchasing it several times over the years, plus the more recent re-make.

More recently, Baldur's Gate 3 and Hades 2 have been amazing bang for my buck.

Worst might be Diablo 4. I played for a few hours and just couldn't get into it.

Most: Minecraft, with over 1000+ hours

Least: Watch_Dogs: Legion. Barely made it one playthrough.

Best: Minecraft (bought at the Beta price), Counter Strike: Source, Counter Strike Global Offensive (I bought it before it became free), Rome Total War, Anno 1602, Age of Empires 2. I have hundreds of hours in all of these. Technically the last three were bought by my father originally, but I think I re-bought them all on digital platforms later.

Worst: Tom Clancy Division 2 (because it's shit and full of adverts), Monster Hunter World (because it never worked for me properly), Dragon Age 2 (just didn't like the style of top down gameplay).

For now definitely Deadlock. It's free (for now) and no way to even spend money (for now) i played 900 hors for now and i don't think i'm gonna stop anytime soon.

In no particular order: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio, Garry's Mod

Most, probably Skyrim. Across all platforms I’ve only spent around $80, and have around 5,600 hours in, so about 1.4¢ per hour.

Least is far harder. There have been several games I’ve spent $80 on that I played for a bit, didn’t like, and never touched again.

Honorable mentions for most:

Hitman: World of Assassination: 7.3¢/hr

Forza Motorsport 6: 5.2¢/hr

Fallout 4: 3.3¢/hr

Assassins Creed Odyssey: 4.5¢/hr

Oblivion: 10¢/hr

Halo MCC: 7.8¢/hr

Halo Reach: 8.2¢/hr

Rest of the Halo series is probably around 10¢/hr each if I were to guess but I don’t have hours tracked for the rest of them

Minecraft: 5¢/hr at a guess

For cheap games that I got a ton of enjoyment out of but maybe not necessarily a ton of playtime: Gunpoint, The Silent Age, Celeste, Limbo, Inside, Stanley Parable, Monaco (I do actually have a fair amount of time in this one but don’t have hours tracked, maybe 20¢/hr but those hours were thoroughly enjoyed), Little Nightmares. Probably more I’m forgetting at the moment.

For me its Skyrim, Mount and Blade Warband and Battlefield 3 (back when I still played Multiplayer). I have over 1000 Hours in all of them.

Most...is probably The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. That game came out when I was 3, I still have the original cartridge and it still works, and I still play that game to this day.

Least is probably going to be Where The Water Tastes Like Wine. I discovered the soundtrack first on Youtube, and then decided to try out the game. It's a dialog heavy game, they put a lot of emphasis on the presentation and voice acting, and it's idiotically slow. It puts a page of dialog up that you'll have read before the voice actor starts talking. If you open the pause menu and Quit the game, IT TALKS MORE. I hit Alt+F4 and haven't looked at it s ince.

I had bought two games at the same time, I played one of them for a few weeks before getting around to looking at WtWTLW, so I couldn't refund it.

Best would have to be PlanetSide 2. It's not the most hours I've put into a game, but it's up there, and now importantly it's the game that I most fondly remember my time playing. For a few years I ran ops with one of the oldest outfits in the game, and I still find myself remembering moments from those nights. It was a really cool community (maybe not as a whole, but certainly the people I was hanging out with) and we got up to a lot of really fun shit. I put maybe $100-200 into that game and got out experiences that genuinely changed me as a person.

Least would be Squad. I've never been able to make that game click. It's not like I don't play similar games, I've really enjoyed my time with Hell Let Loose, and Insurgency would be a very strong contender for my most bang for buck. Squad just... Doesn't work for me. And I don't really know why.

Another for Warframe. About 4000 hours over maybe 5-6 years and I think I only ever paid like $12 for some starter platinum.

Since that's free-to-play, here are runners up:

• Satisfactory - 850 hours and counting, bought for maybe $20.
• Forza Horizon 4 - got the premium pack for $20 about 6 months before EOL and put almost 750 hours into it.
• Elden Ring - 650+ hours so far.
• Terraria - 450+ hours, what a deceptively huge game.
• Skyrim - Endlessly replayable with mods, 300+ hours.
• Witcher 3 - explored everything, Heroic says 150 hours but it could easily be more.
• Fallout 3 - hundreds of hours, explored everything.
• Kerbal Space Program - 250 hours, got it for like $16 way back when.

Fallout 3 or New Vegas. I can't remember which cause they're both pretty close in overall hours played.

Neverwinter Nights, hands down. I played it 20 years ago and until recently I was DMing a weekly campaign using it, but I would guess I've put between 20,000 and 25,000 hours into it over the last 26 years. Honorable mentions for Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which I'm currently playing. (Spent all day today playing it, in fact.)

Least enjoyment? I pre-purchased Batman: Arkham Knight and quit it after one hour, so that's an obvious choice.

I'm deliberately excluding free titles as that would be technically infinite. Otherwise it would be Dota+Dota2 combined, even accounting for the last few years of playing Dota2 not exactly counting as "enjoyment".

Most enjoyment is tough, but it's probably either Diablo 2 or Warcraft 3. I played both fervently throughout my childhood, but considering Dota 1 technically counts as WC3 I think that is probably the one. I played a whole ton of WC3 custom maps, even apart from Dota. It was the unifying game me and my childhood best friend bonded over.

Least enjoyment per dollar is unquestionably STALKER 2. I pre-ordered the €100 deluxe edition because I love the franchise, I loved the GSC studio and I wanted to support them through being struck by the Ukraine war. I ended up doing a single playthrough and then shelving it, waiting for patches. But do I regret my purchase? Not necessarily. I knew it was an emotional purchase, I know it was a show of support. And I knew it was an investment for the future. GSC have still not given up on the game, they've slowly been fixing it and the first DLC is coming. And mods are being developed. Do I think it will supplant Anomaly? No. But it still has the chance to pay off.

Most value is probably Awesomenauts at around €50 spent and 1950 hours coming to 2.5c/h

Team Fortress 2 is there for me too, about €100 spent and 2200 hours for a shocking 4.5c/h. Still play it to this day.

Minecraft is also around the somewhere but like everyone else I have no clue about hours played. Might be anything from 500 to 2000 hours, impossible to estimate. Since I got the beta or alpha for cheap, I think €10, it might top the other two.

My worst value game is definitely GTA 5. I think I got that at €50 or so directly from Rockstar and only played it for an hour online and like an hour singleplayer. I enjoyed gta in the past but just don't care for it anymore, got bored out of my mind. Least time I ever spent on a game that expensive without being able to refund.

Most: Warframe, and by far. I have ~5000 hours on it, and it looks like DE will keep releasing banger updates. I've spent at least $200 (probably more) on various bundles because they deserve it. They also dodged a massive bullet when Sony tried to buy the company.

Excluding free-to-play titles, it's either ~~autistic crack cocaine~~ Factorio, Kerbal Space Program (the good one), or Derail Valley.

Least: probably Atomic Heart. I bought it at full price because of the Soviet Bioshock aesthetic and Mick Gordon's involvement, but the tutorial was so fucking long and boring that I bounced off.

Escape from Tarkov: $150. 18000h. $0.00833333333 per hour.

Best value was Desperados III. I intentionally paid full price for the base game and DLC on GOG after playing Shadow Gambit: Blades of the Shogun and loving the gameplay/concept. It was one of the few titles I've ever 100 percented and played repeatedly for months. I loved it so much I bought an unopened collector's edition for the PS4 at a steep discount and it now sits proudly on top of my bookshelf next to my Batman Beyond statue and Venture Bros. discs.

My worst was LA Noir on Steam. That mandatory Rockstar Social Club DRM login was such bullshit that I uninstalled it and hid it from the library list. Fuck Rockstar for forcing this. Never bought anything of theirs on PC again.

Shovel knight: bought on sale for maybe 10 dollars and received 4 full games worth of content over the years, and don’t know how many times I’ve played it over several platforms. Bought it a couple more times as well (physical and digital copies). And Spelunky: super cheap, hundreds of hours played, never managed to actually beat it.

Worst was Last of Us: bought a collector’s edition on PS3 because I loved Uncharted, couldn’t force myself to actually finish it. Tried the remaster on ps4 with the same result, although that one was a but more playable