“How much does this game cost” is four questions

A game has a price on its store page. That number answers one question, and it is usually not the question you are asking.

Ask instead what the game will actually cost you, and it splits into four, which have four different kinds of answer — and only the first is published by anyone with an obligation to be accurate.

1. The price of entry — published, reliable

What the store charges. Hades II is €28.99 on Steam. Vampire Survivors is €4.99.

This is the only figure a publisher states plainly, and it is the only one most reviews quote.

2. The price to reach the ending — usually knowable, often ignored

Some games end. Others are built so that "finishing" is not a state, and the difference matters more than the entry price.

Hades II has a real ending, reached at a median of 31 hours 26 minutes across 407 player-reported playthroughs. Full completion sits at a median of 100 hours. Both figures come from player self-reports, which skew towards people who finish games and log them — worth knowing, and still far better than nothing.

For a live-service game there is no equivalent number, and that is not missing data. It is the design: the content does not run out, so no amount of hours reaches an end. On this site those games carry no completion figure at all rather than a plausible-looking one.

3. The price to stay competitive — almost never published

This is where "cost" gets genuinely hard, and where every confident number should be treated with suspicion.

Take Raid: Shadow Legends. Its publisher publishes no cost-to-progress figure, so what circulates are community calculations — and they disagree by roughly four orders of magnitude:

• Players report acquiring a specific legendary champion for around $40 through a targeted pass.
• A community site calculated the cost of collecting one of every Legendary and Mythical champion at over $1 million, growing by $150,000–$170,000 with each content patch.

Both are real answers to different questions. Neither is "what the game costs", and averaging them would produce a figure describing nothing at all. So our cost field for that game is empty, and the mechanic is explained instead.

Diablo Immortal is the same shape with a narrower spread: public estimates of full character progression run from about $100,000 to $540,000, a five-fold disagreement, largely because a system added after launch changed the ceiling and different estimates were made on different sides of that change.

An empty field looks worse than a number. It is more honest than one.

4. The price to complete the collection — a moving target by design

For a game still shipping content, this question has no stable answer at all: each patch adds to the total. The $150,000–$170,000 per patch figure above is not a cost, it is a rate. Any total quoted for such a game is a snapshot with an expiry date nobody prints.

The other axis: what the money actually buys

Two games can ask for identical amounts and be completely different products, so we score that separately from how often they ask.

Warframe scores 35 on our pressure index — money is requested often — and yet nothing sold in it buys competitive power. Getting that right required a second axis rather than a higher threshold. The temptation was to move the cut-off until the list filled up; the fix was to measure the thing we actually meant.

Vampire Survivors shows the same distinction from another angle. It is €4.99 once on Steam, and on a phone it is free with advertising and in-app purchases — the Google Play listing declares both. Same game, two entirely different money shapes. Nothing sold in either version makes you stronger than anyone else, because there is nobody else: there is no competitive mode for a purchase to distort.

That is the question worth asking before installing anything. Not "does it have purchases" — nearly everything does — but can a purchase make someone stronger than you. If the answer is no, spending stays a choice. If it is yes, spending becomes a condition of keeping up, and the store page will not tell you which.

How to read a game's monetization in five minutes

• Find out whether the game ends. If it does, the hours to the ending are the honest measure of what you are buying. If it does not, ignore every "total cost" figure you find.
• Ask what money buys, not how much. Appearance, convenience, extra content, or power. Only the last one turns spending into a requirement.
• Look for randomness, then look for it twice. Where a specific outcome requires favourable results from two independent chance systems — a character and its gear — the cost of a target outcome stops being calculable in any useful sense.
• Watch for timers separately. Energy meters and refill waits create recurring payment pressure without selling power at all. A game can be perfectly fair and still ask for money several times a session.
• Distrust any single cost figure the publisher did not publish. If it came from a community calculation, ask which question it answered — and check whether another calculation answered a different one with a number a thousand times larger.