People love to bring this up but no, the $/hour people get by signing to Spotify and Netflix-likes are vastly more in line than what they use to pay for games. Movies also don't last 60 hours and people wouldnt want to buy an 80$ Simpsons blu-ray set that came with the two best episodes instead of entire seasons
But there are plenty blockbuster films that last a couple hours that people pay a lot more to see in cinemas right?
But it's also like there just isn't this level of scrutiny around "getting your money's worth" in a lot of media. Like nobody is buying super long books because it's the "best value" or whatnot. There are definitely people who cancel subscriptions when they're not using them, but plenty just leave them around even if they're not engaging with a lot of the content.
It's this very specific form of vacuous and empty gratification that prompts this sort of perspective. It's the sort of perspective one might take (and I definitely had) as an underfed college student trying to maximize the amount of calories they can get by minmaxing instant ramen or something. To some extent streaming services fit in here -- especially with the notion of Netflix as background noise or something you don't actually actively engage with. Like I wonder if the value prop of netflix would be as good if there was a rule where you had to pay rapt attention to whatever you were watching and couldn't drop shows halfway.
I honestly don't know. How people value stuff is super weird I think and generally inconsistent across media which pushes me to think its basically a fruitless endeavor to try and compare streaming to books to tv to movies to games. Maybe easier to compare within medium populations but not between.
It seems that you need a few necessary conditions for $/hr to be a big factor though.
1. The moment to moment content needs to be base, rudimentary and low quality enough that the sheer amount of it becomes a mitigating factor. This is why nobody complains that some very classic novels are short, or that a game which is absolutely stellar in one thing can be maybe only 10-20 hours. Like nobody is complaining that DMCV isn't a 100 hour behemoth for example because its ultimately a vector for a deep and expressive combat system above all else.
2. The game cannot be too short -- like 2 - 5 hour kind of stuff. People seem to be able to perceive this sort of length easily. I'd guess marginal noticeability of the additional hour seems to trail off really quickly after like 10, 20 and then maybe 40-50 hours though.
3. The raw dollar amount matters especially at the high extremes. It's why $10 indies that might offer less $/hr get more of a pass. There is a sticker price factor that I think is important to a lot of people. Streaming services also benefit from this -- the value prop of gamepass isn't necessarily you will play so many games for so little $, as much as it is there are lots of games you could *choose* to play and the price for entry is very low. Like if gamepass or Netflix was $50/month, it could still probably work out to $1/hr, better than many long video games, but the perception of what it is and cost of admission I think would make people more actively think about the $/hr heuristic. Similarly, with expensive AAA releases nowadays I think this might be important.
It feels like $/hr becomes a useful heuristic to either decry the exceptionally short experiences or as a support for extremely long experiences where the quality-weighted average dollar/hour might actually be far less than the headline number.
It would be interesting to see some more studies and whatnot on how consumers perceive value across media at any rate.
I guess at the end of the day it all comes down to how nebulous an experience is and how subjectivity of valuation interacts with that.
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