ROI is largely a buzzword these days, but it has a meaning: Return On Investment. And, as video games cost more and come with more and more DLC, whether or not you get your money’s worth is a pretty serious question to gamers. Fortunately, eBay sat down and figured out a formula telling you exactly how much a game is worth playing.
The formula itself is pretty straightforward: They divide the hours it takes to beat the game by the current price and multiply that by the average percentage it got from reviews. The result is what eBay’s calling a “Value Rating.”
They applied it to over 300 games, and the results are rather interesting. Nintendo took five of the top ten slots, and cult games tended to be rated highly. Even more interesting, though, was that eBay applied the same formula to DLC, and found in a lot of cases that DLC just isn’t worth it. Not a shock considering some of the DLC that floats by for games: Who gets value out of a weapons skin pack anyway?
We can argue over the method and how it’s designed: For example, there doesn’t seem to be any mention of multiplayer, which would add hours to the game’s fun factor, and also, well, the top twenty of modern games rates Assassin’s Creed II as the modern game with the highest value. I’m sorry, does it have boats? No? Then your system is painfully flawed.