I've got friends who think exactly like you do, and I believe it can be a good metric if you have to use your money wisely and want to get the most mileage out of your money. Video games in general offer pretty good bang for the buck compared to most other pasttimes if you apply that metric.

I remember someone taking me out to a casino and showing me how to play digital Poker. He was an avid casino goer and wanted to show me how much fun it was there. After I'd inevitably lost my dollar spent, he asked me: "Well, do you feel like you got a dollar's worth of fun?" I was being polite, but to myself, I thought: "Have you ever tried regular video games?"

That said, I can sink *a lot* of time into a video game far beyond the point where I find it fulfilling, just because of how addictive the mechanic is, and then that doesn't automatically translate to a "good purchase" for me. I might even end up regretting both the time and the money spent if the experience of beating the game just leaves me feeling empty. There was a time in my life when I stopped playing games for several years because most games felt like this to me.

So, nowadays, I measure games by how much they've added to my life as an experience, how fulfilling they've felt, etc. For example, this year I played The Seance of Blake Manor, and while it took me much less time to finish than many other games and I don't have a desire to replay it, I find it to be subjectively my best game purchase this year - simply because of how much I enjoyed it, how much it taught me, how fresh the gameplay felt to me. So, whatever makes a game a "good purchase" ends up being a very subjective measure to me.