Are games worth the price?

One of the main concerns with the game market, especially with the PSP and DS / 3DS is that new games are too expensive, especially DS games, the majority have worse graphics than a game you can download on the iphone app store for 59p or even for free sometimes... I think games need to have enough content to be worth the investment you make when purchasing it. for example, Super monkey ball 3D is not worth the full £40 price tag. i completed it in 3 hours and haven't gone back to it since.. I think that is most people's problem with the launch line up on the 3DS, none of the games are worth the price or have enough content to to justify the purchase of the system and console. I have a way of working out if a game is worth the price you pay for it. each £1 spent on the game should be 1 hour spent playing it. so a new game at £40 should last me 40 hours. very few new games i have played last that long at all, with most of the games I've bought new recently lasting about 10 or so hours.. so maybe games are over priced?

only 3 modes, and takes about 3 hours to complete? Certainly not worth £40...

But then so are most of the games i have downloaded from the app store for 50p, most of them haven't even been played for 30 mins.. with the exception of angry birds, which I've easily put 40 hours into. its great that i can buy a game like that for only 50p but is it changing the way people think about the price of games, if they can get that much play time from something so cheap, why pay full price for a new release? i think the app store should adjust it's prices to make longer and better games more expensive, it would help maintain the value of games as a whole.  and most new games should go down to about £20, but thats just me talking..

are games like angry birds one of the reasons less people are willing to spend money on DS games?

Some games are great value for money, take Spectrobes for example, i paid all of £5 for it on the DS and it my second most played DS game with over 80 hours play time on it. but because it's so cheap, most people won't consider getting it because they think it's gone down in price so it must be a bad game, same goes for some wii games like NiGHTS Journey Of Dreams, it can be found in game shops for about £5 now, and i have put about 30 hours into that. but no one will buy it because its cheap so they presume it's a bad game. there are more examples too.. Then theres the FIFA games, £40 when they come out, and the next year you can get the same version for about a quid or less. they don't loose their value due to lack of content, but due to it being obsolete now the next installment has been released.

you can get it for about £5 now. definitely worth it!

Of course, everyone has different tastes in games and will put huge amounts of time into a game that someone else may play for 10mins and get bored, so value for money can change between everyone. thats why it's had to say how much a game is worth, why do some games hold their price, while other, equally worth games fall below £10 just weeks after being released. It always confuses me why, in shops like gamestation, certain pre owned games are in the 3 for £10 section, and some are 3 for £5, yet usually the quality of the games doesn't seem to make a difference to the price, is it to do with how much stock they had when it was new? is it based on how many they had traded in? maybe on the scored the game got by reviewers?

But maybe it shouldn't be judged entirely on length, sometimes the experience and enjoyment of the game will be enough to make it worth the price, for example, although Donkey Kong Country Returns only took me about 8 hours to complete, i had so much fun playing through it that i didn't regret paying full price for it. and there are some games i have played for more than i paid but not enjoyed as much, so even though i played more than i paid i didn't have as much fun while doing so, and surely the main reason to buy the game in the first place is to have fun and enjoy playing it.

Im sure most of us have got a new game on release, just because it's new and theres been hype building up to it, just to get home and play it, then 5 hours later complete it and put it on the shelf, never to be touched again..

Do you think games are worth the price? are app store games to cheap? do games loose their value too quickly?