The DeanBeat: Yep, I played Total War: Attila for 243 hours — and I’m not done

I admit it. I’ve been addicted to Total War: Attila, the latest military strategy game for the PC from Sega’s Creative Assembly studio. It’s not the most popular game in the world, and many gamers I know have never heard of it. But it’s my game, and I sure do feel important when I’m saving Rome from the barbarian hordes of Attila the Hun, the Visigoths, and the Sassanids.

For someone like me, the cost of the game is about 18.5 cents per hour of entertainment. But this isn’t just about me. It’s about the loyalty that I will have over a lifetime of retention for Creative Assembly’s Total War games, and the social value that I create by talking about the company’s games publicly — that’s priceless. Mobile game companies are starting to talk about the “lifetime value” of a customer. But in my mind, they’re only scratching the surface.