007 First Light price: Steam's cut is not the floor

Steam has finally put a real discount on IO Interactive's James Bond game, and the 007 First Light price is the lowest the official stores have ever shown it. That is a smaller achievement than it sounds. For three months this summer you could have bought the same game, in the same region, for less than Steam is charging today — and our record says the window closed in late September.

Reading our own data on 18 October 2026: the cheapest figure we have ever logged for 007 First Light is $28.69, at the key reseller Gameseal, on 19 September 2026. We hold 118 daily readings going back to 19 June, a few weeks after the game launched at the full $69.99 AAA price in May. Of those 118 readings, 90 sat under $32. Today's is not one of them.

IO Interactive built this on the same engine as its Hitman trilogy, which is why the level design reads as a stealth sandbox rather than a corridor shooter. (Official Steam screenshot)

What our 007 First Light price record shows

Split the 118 readings into phases and the shape is unmistakable.

• Mid-June to late August. The floor settled almost immediately and then barely moved. Every reading from the start of July to the end of August fell between roughly $29 and $31. Two resellers, Driffle and GAMIVO, held the cheapest slot on most of those days.
• 1 to 22 September. The genuine bottom. Gameseal undercut everyone and took the floor to $28.84 on 15 September, then $28.69 on 19, 20 and 21 September. That is the deepest point anywhere in our record.
• 23 September onwards. It broke. Our reading on 22 September was $29.74; on 23 September it was $49.30. The game has not been under $35 on any day since.

That is a $20 step in twenty-four hours, and it is not a Steam price change — Steam was not the cheapest seller on either day. What moved was the key resellers. We have watched the same thing happen to STALKER 2 and WARDOGS inside the same fortnight, and the mechanism is always the same: cheap allocations sell through, the listings that were undercutting everyone stop existing, and the next cheapest offer becomes the floor by default.

The official launch trailer, posted on the game's own 007 First Light channel rather than a mirror.

Why the official store suddenly matters

Here is the fact that makes this week worth writing about. Across all 118 days we have tracked this game, 16 October 2026 is the only one on which Steam itself was the cheapest place to buy it. On every other reading a reseller was underneath. That is unusual for a five-month-old AAA, and it tells you something precise: the grey-market supply of cheap keys has genuinely dried up, and the publisher's own discount is now doing the work that resellers used to do for it.

It also means the usual advice inverts. Normally we would tell you to check the resellers before the storefront. For this one game, this week, the storefront is the thing to check — but check it on the game page rather than taking our word for a number that will have changed by the time you read this.

The driving sections are short set-pieces rather than an open world, and the October update added four more of them. (Official Steam screenshot)

What the regions say

We track this game in nine regions, and the records are not the same shape in all of them. Against the $69.99 the game launched at in May, our deepest-ever United States reading of $28.69 is a 59% discount — a number no storefront has ever advertised, because it was assembled out of three competing resellers rather than announced by anyone.

The more useful split is simpler than percentages. In the United States, the eurozone, the United Kingdom, Poland and Brazil, our record contains prices below the one showing today, so those readers have demonstrably missed a better moment. In Canada, Australia and New Zealand it does not: in all three, the cheapest price we have ever logged is the price showing now. If you are buying from one of those three you are not waiting for a repeat of something that already happened, which is the one case where "buy today" is defensible on our own data rather than on hope. Why the same game costs such different amounts in the first place is a longer story, and we have written it up in regional pricing explained.

IO Interactive's own trailer for Extended Operations, the free update that landed on 1 October 2026.

The game is bigger than it was in May

If you looked at this at launch and passed, the thing you passed on has changed. Extended Operations arrived on 1 October 2026 and it is free to everyone who owns the game. Video Games Chronicle's write-up on the day lists New Game+ with your unlocked outfits and gadgets carried over, a harder "00" difficulty with two-hit kills, four Aston Martin Valhalla missions set in the Slovakian mountains, a stealth mission in a guarded villa at a Vietnamese resort, and a full photo mode.

That matters to the buying decision in a way patch notes usually do not. A five-month-old game with a substantial free content drop and a 91% Very Positive rating across nearly 48,000 Steam reviews is not a game being quietly abandoned, and the Metacritic average of 84 has held. You are buying into something still being worked on.

The Pearl, the villa added by the October update, is playable right up to the rooftop. (Official Steam screenshot)

Skip the Deluxe upgrade

The Deluxe content is sold separately as an upgrade, which means you do not have to decide at the till — you can buy the base game now and add it later if you ever want it. Our record for that upgrade bottoms at $15.99, and nothing in it changes the campaign. Buy the base game, finish the campaign, and decide about cosmetics afterwards. The same logic we applied to pre-orders applies here: every edition upgrade you defer is a discount you have not yet had to pay for.

Bond's Instinct ability does the work Hitman's instinct vision did, which is the clearest tell about where this studio came from. (Official Steam screenshot)

If you want the Hitman alternative instead

Worth knowing before you commit: the same studio's back catalogue is enormously cheaper. Our lowest-ever figure for HITMAN World of Assassination — three games' worth of levels — is $7.01, and Hitman: Absolution has been under a dollar. If what appeals to you about First Light is the sandbox stealth rather than the Bond licence, you can test whether you like IO Interactive's design for the price of a coffee first. That is not a reason to skip Bond; it is a reason not to find out for $40 that the genre is not for you.

Bottom line

Buy it now if you are in Canada, Australia or New Zealand, where our record holds nothing cheaper than what is showing today. Buy it now if you were going to buy it anyway in the next month, because the cheap-key supply that held the summer floor has not come back and there is no sign in our data that it will before Christmas.

Wait if you are patient and in the US or the eurozone. The floor our record actually proved is around $29, it was held by resellers rather than by Steam, and the Steam Autumn and Scream Fest windows at the end of October are the next realistic chance of the official price going deeper. Set an alert on the 007 First Light page and let it tell you. What you should not do is treat the current cut as a historic low, because for three months of this year it simply was not. If you want the longer version of why that distinction matters, read what a historical low price actually is.