I think for me it's either Minecraft or Monster Hunter World. I don't know how many hours I've spent on Minecraft, but I assume it's close to 1000 as I used to play it with friends daily when I was younger. Me and a couple of friends also got Monster Hunter World at the start of the covid lockdown and we ended up playing it more or less daily. I have 380h on it, but I think I've enjoyed it more than mc. Both of them costed between 20 and 30 €.

For the worst, if a series of games count then it's the Trails of Cold Steel series. After playing Azure I was excited for it, so I think I've even payed full price for the first or two. I ended up hating everything about them and convinced myself to play through, hoping the would get better, but ended up dropping the entire series a quarter of the way through CS3 when I saw there was no attempt at improving 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.

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

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

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

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.

Mahou Arms. I bought it for $12 and only played it for a couple of hours.

Most is Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R. Bought for $3, and played for 610 hours so far.

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.

Factorio. Spent a total of €52 and have 1,600 hours. €0.03/hour

Dwarf Fortress.

Thousands of hours played; $0.00 paid (Legacy version).

But also $10 for the Steam version which I bought after all those hours in the Legacy version when it was on sale.

This edition of PC Zone Magazine cost £4 back in 1995. The cover CD had 1,000 Doom levels and IIRC a bunch of modding tools. I probably got 1,000 hours of entertainment out of it and often think back marveling at the value for money!

Of course all this stuff is available for free online nowadays!

Most: Easily Dota 2. -$5 spent (I sold stuff I got for free), 2000+ hours played

The least: Probably a 20 way tie for games I bought on sale on Steam

Most is Slay the Spire, and I don't even think it's close. And I say that having bought it twice, once on Steam and once on mobile.

Least, I'm tempted to day League of Legends or Overwatch, both of which I bought extra cosmetic stuff for and neither of which I play anymore - and I'm not sure I even liked either of them much when I was playing.

But not knowing (and not wanting to know) how much money I've spent on either, I'll instead say either Imperator: Rome or Victoria III. I preordered both with extras, and ended up only putting around 40 hours into both before giving up. Compare that to other Paradox grand strategy games, where I can easily have 500+ hours played, and I really feel like I didn't get my money's worth.

Best value was thousands of hours in Minecraft for 10€.

Worst was probably something I bought as a child a long time ago for too much money, barely played it and then forgot pretty much all about it. There are a bunch of PSP games that come to mind like Monster Hunter which I just didn‘t enjoy at all.

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.

Gotta be BG3. Bought it full price the day I got my deck, about a year ago. There for a while I played every single day for hours. I still play a little most days, though it's with my wife rather than solo. I can't remember how many hours I have on the deck, and the ps5 version I eventually snagged so my wife could play has to have damn near half the time just from me.

I have to parrot the minecraft claim: ignoring that I've bought it for at least 4 friends now and own it on multiple platforms, it's still easily the one I got the most enjoyment per $ on.

as for least enjoyable? I regretably was an early adopter on Amazons New World. I played it once during the EA period, wasn't impressed but my morals at that time didn't allow me to request a refund on it as it felt dirty to buy a preorder then refund it for not liking the game itself. I easily paid 40$ for a game I played a whole 12 minutes of as it didn't vibe with me, and now due to the servers being shut down at the end of the year, is basically a digital paperweight.

I have so much time logged in civ5 that it makes me want to throw up lol. New Vegas may still beat it out though. Both bought at full price a million years ago

Least enjoyment per dollar had to be Fallout 4. I bought it full price on release, roughly $60, and got the PC version, because I didn't have a working console at the time. I can only game on PC with EDSF, not WASD. But that game hardcoded Use/Action to E while also allowing E to be mapped to move forward. So everywhere I ran, if there was an action to do it would automatically do it. I kept opening doors to hiding monsters, opening crates, doing whatever when I just trying to walk around. I probably only played that game for 10ish hours before giving up.

Most enjoyment per dollar has to be NES Tetris. I have no idea how much my parents paid for that back in 1989, but I still plug in my NES and play it occasionally. Even accounting for buying a second NES in college, multiple replacement controllers, a replacement cart reader tray, and a used copy of the game off ebay far later, I am probably only in for $200. And I can't even make a guess at how many hours I've played NES Tetris. I would skip full days of school in 8th grade to play. I would play for hours in college. I still play a few hours per year now.

Most number of hours is WoW, but at $15/mo plus $60/expansion times probably 6 expansions I've probably spent over $1000 on it for a rough estimate of 7200 hours played.

Least enjoyment would just have to be whatever is the most expensive game in my endlessly growing backlog. The other half of this question is more interesting, so I want to give multiple answers.

1. I've got just under 4,200 hours in Terraria and it's still my favorite game! For the $10 it cost me, that's 420 hours per dollar. Nice.

2. Minecraft would be a close contender. There's no way to track my hours in it, and I don't play it so much anymore, but I have to have at least somewhere close to the 4k I've got in Terraria, if not more. This game shaped my entire childhood back when the Xbox 360 edition first came out.

Those two are great, but they're also some of the best selling games of all time so I'll note some more niche ones as well.

3. DLC and all, Melvor Idle is a game I spent $25 on (edit: though the full base game is completely free if you don't mind playing through your browser) and managed to put just under 3,000 hours in. Now admittedly this is an idle game, so a large chunk of that time was having it open in the background while I do something else. But it's surprisingly interactive and I'd like to think at least 1,000 of those hours were me either actually playing or planning.

4. Barony is a game I've put 650 hours in since 2018, and man has it come a long way. Including DLC I spent about $30 on it for myself, though I've also bought the game or DLCs for multiple friends so its probably closer to like $60. It's a permadeath roguelike with next to zero meta progression. Check it out if you're into the genre, its currently on an all-time-low sale for $2 which is a damn steal.

Animal Crossing. My wife and I ran that island for years, with thousands of hours on the clock each.

Best is either Minecraft, Counter-Strike or Mirror's Edge. I've got 3k+ hours in the first two, but also something like 600 hours in Mirror's Edge which is nonsense for a game that's 4 hours long on the first playthrough.

Worst is almost certainly PUBG. Bought it to play with friends, realized I hated the entire concept.

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

Most playtime per buck:

Either Minecraft or Overwatch (the first one, before the content draught and aggressive monetization with OW2)

A close contestant is also Super Mario 64, which still is kind of a comfort game and gets a replay every once in a while. But that one was way more expensive IIRC.

Worst...

Hard to say. There are several games still on my pile of shame which make them technically infinite. OW2 was a free upgrade, and I never bought a season pass/loot box/..., so in theory the same "infinite" negative, though it's the closest to "hated/disliked game" for me.

Then there are a few games that are great, but just didn't "click" with me, so I somewhat regretted buying them. On the other hand, I supported the devs of generally great games that just weren't made for me. It isn't completely fair to list them here, but they're most fitting... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In this category: Witcher III, Hollow Knight, Subnautica.

Most enjoyment per dollar: I want to say RimWorld, but that shit’s expensive at over a hundred dollars for the base game plus expansions even during the rare times it's on sale.

So I'd have to say Terraria, which I bought for maybe fifteen bucks back at release when it had like three bosses and IIRC ended at Skeletron. Fifteen years of massive free content updates later, it's a sprawling randomly generated Metroidvania with dozens of bosses and an endgame that barely resembles its beginning, and I've probably done a dozen full playthroughs over the years.

That's not even getting into the mods, with tModLoader being given the official seal of approval and letting you swap between a multitude of content overhauls from within the game itself.

Least enjoyment per dollar would probably be Caves of Qud. It's not a bad game, but I went in with sky-high expectations that it couldn't possibly meet and I couldn't bring myself to enjoy it for what it was; instead feeling frustrated at what it wasn't (and didn't try to be). It didn't help that I regularly play freeform games like CDDA and Dwarf Fortress and the comparatively static structure of CoQ felt extremely restrictive in comparison.

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.

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.

Excluding free/infinite, I'd have to say my best is Morrowind, probably, but it could also be Sim City (Classic or 2000), Starcraft, Half-Life/TFC, Team Fortress 2, Super Mario World, or Mario Kart.

Worst is even trickier, as I'm very careful about my game purchases (excluding Humble Bundles that are technically infinitely bad because hours played is zero, but don't count because I paid to get some other game and/or donate to charity). It'd probably have to be some old early '90s game my parents bought for me, not anything I've bought for myself. I remember a couple of DOS games with horrible magenta and cyan CGA graphics (even though my computer could do VGA, BTW): one was some kind of helicopter game that I couldn't figure out how to play, and the other was some kind of side-scrolling platformer or beat-em-up (maybe Ninja Gaiden, or a rip-off of it?) that I also couldn't figure out how to play.