A full-price game that holds you for 120 hours can cost less per hour than a budget one you finish in four. The cheaper purchase was the expensive one.
The reference point most people already have
A cinema ticket works out at roughly five to six units of currency an hour. A streaming subscription lands near one for someone who watches regularly.
That makes the scale easy to read. Under 1.50 an hour, a game is cheaper than nearly any other entertainment you can buy. Over 8, you are paying cinema prices for something you play at home.
Where the comparison breaks
Cost per hour measures price against length. It says nothing about quality, and treating it as a quality score produces obviously wrong conclusions.
A six-hour game can be better than a sixty-hour one. Some of the best-regarded games ever made are short, and a long game you did not enjoy has excellent cost per hour and was still a bad purchase.
It is a useful check on price, not a verdict on the game.
Where it is genuinely useful
Three cases. Deciding whether to buy now or wait for a sale, since the figure moves with the price. Comparing two games you want equally. And working out whether a long game you are lukewarm about is worth the money — usually it is, on this measure alone.
Why almost nobody publishes it
It needs two datasets that are rarely joined: a live price and a real completion time. We hold both, so the figure is computed rather than estimated.
