You think playing a game for 20-40 hours represents good value? You're playing the wrong kind of game, pal. You need to be playing sports games, where people bleed their annually-released games dry.
EA Sports' Dave Littman - producer on NHL at EA Canada - has told us that "The average EA SPORTS gamer spends 200 to 300 hours playing their favorite sports game each year". That figure is a combination of both online and offline play. And is for just one game.
Can't think of too many games outside of WoW, Call of Duty 4 or Halo 3 where we'd be looking at figures like that. And those are one-off games, not regular, annual occurrences.
Sounds absolutely bonkers, I know, but as someone who probably sinks 50-100 hours or so into FIFA each year (amidst having to play pretty much everything else as well), it also sounds entirely plausible. It might be a stretch saying the "average" gamer spends that long, but with many sports games fans picking up one game and one game only (they're a Madden guy, or an NBA guy, etc), then playing that game for nearly 12 months, there'd still be a sizeable number of people out there racking up hundreds of hours on a single game.