Time is Money

I've always said a console is only worth it if you have a game or two that you intend on playing for a very extended period of time. Have you ever really given consideration to how much entertainment you're getting from your games? A common complaint is that games are too short, with a typical action/adventure game taking about 8 hours. Given that such games will cost $50-60 new, you're paying about $7/hour to play that thing! It's almost literally like you've employed it. That's not even taking into account the money you spent on the system and all its accessories. If you just bought a basic, refurbished console for that one game, the cost goes to about $150, making $18.75/hour. Fortunately, game consoles now can do much more that's not even related to gaming, but unless you bought that PS3 so you could have a blu-ray player, I think you're going to be using the game part more. Past the break, I record my money : time ratio for certain games.
Some of the games I play record the time I spend on them, so that makes things much easier.
Street Fighter 4 (counting Super): 836 hours. Granted, this counts some nights where I just left the Replay Channel going, but it's still plenty. Money spent: $60 for vanilla, $40 for Super, $52 in alternate outfits (I won't count the arcade sticks I bought for others that they don't use), $152 total. "Salary" investment: $0.18/hour, about $0.54/hour if you figure in the hardware. involved.
Soul Calibur 4: 379 hours. Money spent: $40 for the game (I wasn't really enthused at that point, so I didn't rush to get the game), $5 for Darth Vader, about $5 for the extra armor pieces, $50 total. "Salary" investment: $0.13/hour
Monday Night Combat: This doesn't have an actual timer on it, but I think we could assume I've played it about 2 hours/day on average. I've owned it for exactly 1 month, making about 60 hours played on it. Sounds reasonable, alright. At $15 for the game purchase with nothing else, that works out to $0.25/hour.
I'll update this with other games with timers once I discover them (too lazy to go digging for more right now), but I think I made my point. Games with high replay value have a high impact on your money. There's nothing wrong with playing shorter games. You never have the experience if you don't play them, and unless you have a friend who will lend them to you, you'll have to pay for that privilege. This makes actual data for my biggest reason behind getting replayable games, though.