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Depends on the genre. An RPG would last for hundreds of hours, if you plan to go through every nook and cranny.

An arcade style game (that SEGA once specialized in) would only last a few minutes or hours of fun.

To be perfectly clear, nowadays open world games such as Witcher, Grand Theft Auto, and Watch Dogs are very popular because they last you for a long time. They don't have the linearity of RPGs or arcade games.

EDIT: lets see...i somehow managed to put 60 hours on Grid autosport and i still think it wasn't worth what i paid at the time, mostly because its just a mediocre version of Forza or GT, its just that there isnt much choice when it comes to racing simulator games on pc

View attached image.

Already do it, but since I only payed like 6.99 for CS 1.6 and got about 1000+ hours of playtime, can say it was a brilliant investment. xD

TF2 - should be on the stock exchange it was such a good investment :-)

There was a moment, when I was comparing games like that. But in the end, it's not about how much time you spent on a game, but how much fun you had while playing it.

Damn, I've seen people with playtimes over 1000 hours.

I use that method but throw it out the window with open world games. I count their story/worth.

This method is not bullet-proof really. A game that costs 4.99 eur on Steam might offer you more and longer entertainment than a game that costs 89.99 eur and no I'm not kidding. It all depends on the WOW effect when you actually get to play it. If there isn't any WOW effect then it's not worth it, but can you tell whether you're gonna like the game or not before you buy it? That's another tricky thing. Many people consider trailers a good way to tell, but to compare trailers for both these games I've mentioned, trailer for that 4.99 eur game didn't impress me at all so I was really really skeptical and I actually got that game for less when it was in a bundle only because I love the genre. To my surprise, I had more fun and more hours in it than I had in that said 89.99 eur game and the trailer for that 89.99 eur game was amazing and very promising, but unfortunately that turned out to be the only interesting part of the game after all, so all in all it was rather an expensive disappointment.

With this calculation Bad Rats, a game that costs 1 USD and lasts about 3-6 hours, is a good game. To the Moon, one of the greatest interactive movies ever created, is about 4 hours long and costs 8 USD, is a bad game.
If you are really weighing a game's value by sheer amount of play time, stick to the free-to-play MMOs or MOBAs.

It doesn't work like that for me. There are some games that cost quite a lot and don't really offer THAT much play time, however, the sheer brilliance of their story or gameplay makes up for that totally. And other times, I would play a game for hours, just to finish the main storyline (and probably all the side quests as I always do), but feel it was a bit of 'meh' experience afterwards.

TL;DR
It's not the amount of time, it's the quality.

I generally do the same thing, but it's not always the best measurement. I do tend to like making sure a game lasts its longest per dollar spent, though, considering limited funds and whatnot. Though sometimes in the line of thinking of $1 = 1hr it's still not so bad to let it slide once in a while. You can get a game that's only 5 hours of entertainment with $20 and you'll still come out ahead after you've gotten 100 hours off of $60. Not every game has to be the 1-1 if you base it off of that.

I like another youtubers rating system. Consider you have 20$ for a month of Ramen to make the tummy stop rumbling. The game is on sale & at 4.99$ . Will you part with 5$ worth of ramen to play that game this month?

I look at it as - This game costs as much as "Insert Item Here". Like say for example, A Tbone right now is $7.99 a pound. That means it would cost me around 20 bucks to make a good steak dinner for myself, with sides bread and steak. Now, would a game give me more enjoyment than that dinner for $20? If the answer is yes, I will probably pick it up

Really depends on so many factors... it's a nice baseline but there's so many exceptions that it quickly becomes almost useless.

Take "To the moon", according to steam I have 3.5h of playtime in it. I would never value that game at €3.50, it easily is worth steam's default €8, or even the €12 for the soundtrack edition (BTW: seriously, for this game you're gonna want the soundtrack), but the impact it had on me is very difficult to define in a monetary value.

All I'm saying is this: If pure hours of playtime needs to match the pricetag then there's gonna be a lot of amazing games you will pass on. Quantity vs. Quality goes for hours too... is 7 hours of 'kinda fun' really more than say, 4 hours of 'awesome' or 2 hours of 'wow!'?

That's a really simplistic and kind of idiotic way to look at it. Sand-box games are always longer than linear games and many times you'll wind putting dozens of hours in them just for the ambition of finishing the game. That doesn't mean that they're all worth it. A sand-box game with an uninteresting and boring world might squeeze more hours out of you, but it'll NEVER be as worth it as a shorter, more intense game, with a tight ,compact and satisfying story to it. In cases like these, length actually becomes a bad thing, Because you'll get bored as hell towards the end. Perfect examples of this are Far Cry 2 and Gun. There's not much inherently wrong with them from a game-play point of view, and you'll have fun playing them for a while, but after that everything will be tedious, repetitive and boring. But you'll find yourself playing to the end to finish the game.

In myself played almost 40 hours of Far Cry 2. Did I have fun all the way through this experience? Hells no. After about 10, i was already getting bored as hell and at the 30 hour mark I just said "fuck it", ignored all the side-quests and just went straight for the main quest. I got teh game pretty cheap (3 euro) and at that price virtually any game is worth it, but if it had cost 40 euro, would it have been worth it? FUCK NO. I'd much rather prefer a small 8 hour game, like Call of Juarez Gunslinger, in which I get to have non-stop, adrenaline pumping, action fun than an exercise in tedium. Another example: World of Goo (aka best puzzle game ever) can be finished in less than 2 hours, if you're really clever. Does that mean it's not worth its 10 euro price? More than that, I'd say, cause it's a brilliant masterpiece.