Games Cost More Than Money

There's a number on every game page that nobody talks about.

Not the price. Something more important.

How long the game takes to finish.

For someone in college with a wide open schedule, this number doesn't matter much. Time isn't a problem. A 100-hour game just means you'll be having fun for a long time.

But for a lot of people — working adults, parents, anyone whose free time has to be carefully managed — this number matters more than the price.

When Gaming Gets Harder to Fit In

Most gamers hit a point where their free time starts shrinking.

It usually doesn't happen all at once. You get a new job that takes more out of you. You have a kid. You pick up other things you want to do in the evenings. You realize you need more sleep than you used to.

At some point you go from gaming four nights a week to maybe one or two nights, for an hour or so at a time.

For me that happened around age 30. My gaming time dropped by a lot.

But here's the thing — my habit of buying games didn't change at all. I was still buying like I had all the time in the world.

What an Hour of Your Time Actually Buys

Let's run some simple numbers.

Say you get about an hour and a half of gaming time on a typical evening. That's a pretty realistic number for someone gaming after work or after the kids are in bed.

At that pace:

A short indie game that takes 8 hours means about 5 evenings. That's manageable — you could finish it in a week or two.

A medium-length game at 20 hours is about 13 evenings. Three or four weeks if you play it pretty regularly.

A big RPG at 50 hours is around 33 evenings. You're looking at two months if you play it almost every night.

A long open-world game at 100 hours is closer to four or five months.

And a game where the completionist run is 200 hours? That's over a year at this pace.

Now think about your backlog. Add up the hours. For most people who've been gaming and buying games for a while, the total is years of content.

That's not a problem, exactly. But it's useful to know.

The Guilt That Builds Up

Unplayed games don't just sit there quietly.

Every time you open your library and see a bunch of things you haven't touched, there's a small uncomfortable feeling. A list of things you told yourself you'd do and haven't. A hobby that started to feel like homework.

A lot of gamers talk about this without quite naming it. The backlog starts to feel like pressure. Sitting down to play something becomes a whole decision — which game, am I in the right mood for this, I've been meaning to play that other one for months.

Gaming stops feeling relaxing and starts feeling like something you need to catch up on.

That feeling comes directly from buying more than you play.

For Busy People, Time Is the Real Budget

Most working adults aren't buying games because they're cheap. Money usually isn't the issue.

The issue is time.

If time is what you actually don't have enough of, then every game you buy is a claim on future evenings. A 100-hour game when you have three hours of gaming time a week is asking for the next several months of your free time.

Sometimes that's a great deal. A game you love deeply, played slowly over a long time, can be one of the best experiences gaming has to offer.

But buying that same 100-hour game on a whim because it was on sale — without thinking about when you'll realistically play it or what else is competing for those evenings — that's where things go sideways.

Two Questions Worth Asking Before You Buy

Before buying any game, two questions are more useful than looking at the price.

When am I actually going to play this? Try to give a real answer. Not "sometime" or "when things slow down." Is it this month? This season? If you genuinely don't know, that's worth noticing.

How long is it? This is easy to find out. Crowd-sourced completion times exist for almost every game. A quick search and you'll know if you're looking at a weekend or a six-month project.

If your answer to the first question is vague and the answer to the second is "really long," the smartest move is usually to wait. The game will still be there when you have a clearer window for it. It will probably be cheaper by then too.

What VaultCheck Shows You

When you're looking at a game in a store, VaultCheck adds two things to the page.

First, it tells you if you already own the game somewhere else in your library. Buying something you already have is the easiest kind of waste to avoid — you just need to know.

Second, it shows you how long the game takes to finish. Not buried somewhere you have to go looking for it. Right there on the page, before you buy.

The price tells you what the game costs in money. Those two pieces of information together tell you whether buying it right now actually makes sense for your life.

For anyone who doesn't have unlimited time to game, that second part matters a lot.