Curious as to what people think has the most replay potential.
Rules:
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The "desert island" aspect here is just to create an isolated environment. You don't have to worry about survival or anything along those lines, where playing the game would be problematic. This isn't about min-maxing your situation on the island outside of the game, or the time after leaving.
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No live service games unless the live service aspect is complete and it can be played offline -- that is, you can't just rely on the developer churning out new material during your time on the island. The game you get has to be in its complete form when you go to the island.
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No multiplayer games -- can't rely on the outside world in the form of people out there being a source of new material. The island is isolated from the rest of the world.
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You get existing DLC/mods/etc for a game. You don't get multiple games in a series, though.
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Cost isn't a factor. If you want The Sims 4 and all its DLC (currently looks like it's $1,300 on Steam, and I would guess that there's probably a lot more stuff on EA's store or whatever), DCS World and all DLC ($3,900), or something like that, you can have it as readily as a free game.
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No platform restrictions (within reason; you're limited to something that would be fairly mainstream). PC, console, phone, etc games are all fine. No "I want a game that can only run on a 10,000 node parallel compute cluster", though, even if you can find something like that.
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Accessories that would be reasonably within the mainstream are provided. If you're playing a light gun game, you can have a light gun. You can have a game controller, a VR headset and controllers, something like that. No "I want a $20 million 4DOF suspended flight sim cockpit to play my flight sim properly".
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You have available to you the tools to extend the game that an ordinary member of the public would have access to. If there are modding tools that exist, you have access to those, can spend time learning them. If it's an open-source game and you want to learn how to modify the game at a source level, you can do that. You don't have access to a video game studio's internal-only tools, though.
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You have available to you existing documentation and material related to the game that is generally publicly-available. Fandom wikis, howtos and guides, etc.
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You get the game in its present-day form. No updates to the game or new DLC being made available to you while you're on the island.
What three games do you choose to take with you?
Maybe this is cheating but RPG maker, ACC or maybe ACE if it's out in time with a great rig, and probably Minecraft.
That's a clever idea.
For those not familiar, RPG Maker is a popular engine -- or series of engines, really -- used to let people make games easily. The company that makes them also sells some libraries of assets to make games. So, in a sense, one could think of all games made using one of the RPG Maker engines as maybe being a "mod" -- some commercial, some not; BallShapedMan is aiming to walk off with the entire library of RPG Maker games under the rules as given.
ponders
I think that from a standpoint of the rules I set, I'd probably not allow it.
People don't normally think of RPG Maker games as being mods, but as stand-alone games. And, yeah, I know that there's gray area there, and by using something like Skyrim, which has seen very heavy modding (is Enderal a different game or a huge Skyrim mod?), one is edging into that gray area. But there's gotta be some kind of line, and I think that at least as the term conventionally is used, RPG Maker games don't fall into the "mod" camp.
RPG Maker is definitely not normally considered to be a game on its own. It's an authoring environment; if you buy it on Steam, it's listed as an "Application", not a "Game". Something like Skyrim is unquestionably a game, even if people have taken it and used it as a platform to build a lot of stuff.
Speaking purely in terms of designing this post to be interesting to read, I'm hoping to get a list of super-replayable games. But if RPG Maker gets allowed, then the post just devolves to a list of widely-used game engines. Unity or Unreal Engine has an authoring environment and such too...are all games that use Unity or Unreal Engine "one game"? I think that it probably wouldn't be a very interesting question.
I'll give an upvote for cleverness in analyzing and aiming to game the system, though. ;-)
Gimmie a quick sec to make a Godot add-on that plays snake in the editor lmao - can I play sonic colors now?