How to Use Completion Times Before You Buy a Game

I have a rule that I do not review a game I have not finished, and it has taught me something about buying games that no trailer ever did. The number that predicts whether I will enjoy a purchase is not the score or the price. It is how long the game takes to finish, set against how many hours I actually have each week. Most of the games I regret buying were good games that I simply never had the time to see through.

Completion times are easy to look up. Sites such as HowLongToBeat collect playtimes from thousands of players, and a quick search before checkout tells you more about whether a game fits your life than most reviews. The trick is reading those numbers properly, because the obvious way to use them, dividing price by hours, steers people wrong.

Where the numbers come from, and what they leave out

Completion time sites rely on players submitting their own times. A typical entry splits them into a main story figure, a figure for the story plus a reasonable amount of side content, and a completionist figure for doing everything. Some also show how many people submitted each time, which is worth a glance: a figure built from 40 submissions is far shakier than one built from 4,000.

These are self-reported numbers, so treat them as a rough range rather than a measurement. The players who log times skew toward people who finish games, and toward people who play more efficiently than average. In my experience the main story figure is usually a little short for a careful first playthrough, especially in games with lots of reading, exploration or failure.

They also say nothing about how the hours feel. Twenty hours of a tight action game and twenty hours of a game padded with fetch quests look identical on the page.

The dollars per hour trap

The most common advice is to divide the price by the hours and buy whatever gives the best rate. Under that logic a 70 dollar open world game with 100 hours of content beats a 20 dollar game you can finish in six, every time.

I think this gets the question backwards. The rate only counts the hours you play, not the hours the game offers. If you abandon that open world game at hour 14, which is common, your real rate was 5 dollars an hour, and you never saw the ending you paid for. The short game, finished in two evenings, delivered everything it promised.

A long game is a commitment, not a bargain. Some people want exactly that commitment, and for them a 100 hour game is the right buy. Others want something they can finish before the next big release lands. The completion time tells you which kind of purchase you are making. It does not tell you which kind is better value.

Price per hour counts the hours a game offers. Your wallet only ever pays for the hours you actually play.

Turning hours into weeks of your life

The more useful sum is how many weeks a game will take you at your normal pace. Be honest about your weekly hours. Most adults with jobs who I talk to guess high; tracking a couple of normal weeks in your platform's playtime stats will give you a truer figure.

Here is the plain arithmetic for a few typical lengths. Genre ranges vary a lot, but a linear action or adventure game often lists somewhere around 8 to 15 hours for the main story, while large open world role playing games commonly list 50 hours or more.

At four hours a week, a 60 hour game is most of a season. That is fine if you love it, but it means everything else you buy in those months will sit unplayed. Long breaks also hurt long games more than short ones; coming back after three weeks away to a complex game often means relearning controls and forgetting plot threads, which is a common point where people quit.

Using the number at the checkout

Before buying anything over about 20 dollars, I now do three quick checks. First, the main story time, adjusted upward a little if I tend to explore. Second, how many weeks that is at my real weekly pace. Third, what else I am currently playing, and whether this game will push it aside or sit behind it.

If the answer is "I will start this in four months", I wait. Prices drop, patches land, and the game will still be there. That habit has saved me more money than any sale. It pairs well with skipping the deluxe edition, a point I agree with completely in the hidden cost of always buying the deluxe edition; extra content only matters if you finish the base game.

Completion time also helps you decide what kind of research to do. For a short game, a review or two is plenty. For a long one, it is worth judging whether the middle holds up, since that is where long games lose people; watching a streamer's VOD from the middle hours, as described in what to watch in a streamer's VOD before you buy, is the best way I know to check. And if you are still on the fence about a full price release, how to tell if a game is worth sixty dollars covers the other side of the decision.

When the number lies

A few kinds of game break this method. Multiplayer games, roguelikes and sandbox builders have no real ending, so their completion times measure something arbitrary. For those, the better question is whether a single session fits the time you have on a weeknight. Games in early access also change length between updates, so a figure logged a year ago may be well off.

I cannot tell you how much a long game is worth to you. Some players get more from one 120 hour game a year than from ten short ones, and that is a perfectly good way to play. The number just makes the trade visible before you pay.

For this week

Open your platform's playtime stats and work out your real average hours per week over the last month. Then take the next game on your wishlist, look up its main story time, and divide. If the answer is more weeks than you would honestly commit, leave it on the wishlist and set a price alert instead.