I think that most of the games that I've really enjoyed have been ones that tend towards the "full price" side money-wise, but which I have played for a long time, replayed a number of times, not just done a single pass. Gotten DLC on. Often modded.

Think:

• Fallout 4
• Oxygen Not Included
• Caves of Qud
• Civilization V
• Stellaris
• Noita
• Kenshi
• Nova Drift
• Kerbal Space Program
• Rimworld
• Mount & Blade: Warband

The amount I've paid per hour of play on those is tiny.

My real constraint is the amount of time I have. I mean, I haven't really been constrained by what it costs to play a game. I have a backlog of games that I'd be willing to play.

The waste, from a purely monetary standpoint, is overwhelmingly games that I buy and touch briefly, and don't find myself playing at all. Frostpunk sounded neat, because I like similar genres (city-building), but I completely disliked the actual game, for example. A few Paradox games (Stellaris) I've really gotten into, but a number I've also found completely-uninteresting (Europa Universalis, say). There are apparently a number of Europeans who are extremely into the idea of their historic people taking over Europe, for example, and Paradox specializes in simulating those scenarios. I just don't care about playing that out. Sudden Strike 4 -- I've really enjoyed some real time tactics WW2 games, like Close Combat, but couldn't stand the more arcade-oriented Sudden Strike 4.

If you could give me a Noita, but high resolution and with some neat new content and physics I'd happily pay $100.

I've played Nova Drift for about 180 hours. That game presently sells for $18. So I paid about ten cents an hour. The price of the game is a rounding error in terms of the entertainment I got from it. Paying ten times as much for a sequel or DLC comparable to the stuff in the original game would be fine as long as I were confident that I'd enjoy and play it as much as I did the original game.

Sudden Strike 4 is about $20. I played it, forcing myself back to it, made it to about an hour total. So I paid about $20 an hour, or about 200 times the rate for Nova Drift. And I didn't enjoy that hour much.

In general, my preferred model would be for publishers to keep putting out DLC on highly-replayable games as long as people are interested in buying it: when I find something that I know I like, I want to be able to get more of it. If the Caves of Qud guy would hire more people to produce more content and just sell it as DLC, I'd be happy with that.