What I notice in my experience (with a couple obvious exceptions) is that at any price, I typically get way more entertainment time per dollar with indie games. Hollow Knight is deep into pennies per hour long ago, Slay the Spire is close to free at this point, and even indie games I don't finish end up being the cheapest form of entertainment I've got. That said it's the same conversation, but an order of magnitude less "value" with big budget game releases.

Back in the arcade era, they made games arbitrarily difficult to make us spend more quarters. Hence why so many middle aged gamers are good at platformers and have a chip on their shoulders about easier modern games. So I don't know if hours per dollar is really the conversation we should be having about games, because that's not the value proposition for me.

The real value of games is as art. Such a variety of creative energies are poured into game development that it's easy to end up with a whole that fails to cohere to some extent. When it does come together with not only cohesiveness but a clarity of artistic intent, that should be seen as an astonishing achievement.

The real reason I think indie games do better in terms of the flawed metric of playtime per dollar is because of the smaller teams and leaner budgeting. I think we agree here. They are not as pressured by externalities to create on a schedule, to appear valuable to shareholders by clumsily chasing buzzword trends in game design, by monetising with dark patterns and micro transactions. Too much money is toxic to artistic pursuits.

I guess my only quarrel with you is the idea that Silksong wouldn't have been worth $60. I'm already ten hours in, just found the first main boss, and on your metric it'd already have beaten the best movie I've ever seen in theatres for entertainment time per dollar. It's a flawed yardstick that still makes the game look good.