BioShock Infinite bundle: which one you actually need

Search for a BioShock Infinite bundle and you will be offered at least four different things, all with nearly the same name, two of which contain each other. There is a Season Pass bundle, a Complete Edition, a Complete Collection, and BioShock: The Collection — and on a keyshop you will find several more built by resellers that correspond to nothing 2K has ever sold.

This is worth ten minutes of your time before you buy, because one of these options costs meaningfully more than another while containing strictly less. Here is what each package actually holds, checked against Steam's own listings rather than against the marketing names.

What each BioShock Infinite bundle contains on Steam

Start with the store page for BioShock Infinite itself — Irrational Games, published by 2K, released 25 March 2013. Steam offers exactly three ways to buy from that page:

• The base game. Columbia, Booker, Elizabeth, no add-on content.
• BioShock Infinite + Season Pass Bundle. The base game plus the Season Pass, and nothing else.
• BioShock: The Collection. Six separate entries, listed below.

That third one is the interesting case, because Steam's package data spells out its contents precisely: BioShock Remastered, BioShock 2 Remastered, BioShock 2: Minerva's Den Remastered, BioShock Infinite, the BioShock Infinite Season Pass, and the Columbia's Finest pack.

Read that list again and the decision mostly makes itself. The Collection contains everything the Season Pass bundle contains, plus Columbia's Finest, plus two remastered earlier games and a remastered expansion. It is a strict superset. Whether it is worth the difference is a live question about today's prices, which you should settle on the game pages rather than here.

Columbia is the reason people still buy this in 2026; the shooting was never the draw. (Official Steam screenshot)

What the Season Pass covers — and the one pack it does not

The BioShock Infinite Season Pass covers three add-on packs, and this is the part people get wrong:

• Clash in the Clouds (30 July 2013) — a wave-based combat arena mode. No story.
• Burial at Sea – Episode One (12 November 2013) — Booker and Elizabeth in Rapture before the fall, rebuilt inside the Infinite engine.
• Burial at Sea – Episode Two (25 March 2014) — the conclusion, and the one that actually ties the two cities together.

What the Season Pass does not include is Columbia's Finest, a separate pack of gear and in-game currency released in June 2013. It is bundled into The Collection but sits outside the Season Pass, which is a small thing, but it is exactly the sort of small thing that makes two similarly named bundles differ.

If you only want the story content, the two Burial at Sea episodes are the ones that matter. Burial at Sea Episode 1 & 2 is sold as its own pairing in places, which is the cheapest route if you already own the base game and do not care about the arena mode.

The 2013 launch trailer, on 2K's own channel — the publisher, not a mirror upload.

The catch with The Collection on PC

Here is the detail that no storefront puts in the title, and the one genuine reason a PC buyer might hesitate.

Look at the Steam package contents again: the Infinite entry inside The Collection is the ordinary 2013 app. There is no "BioShock Infinite Remastered" on PC, because 2K never made one. When the remasters were announced in 2016, the studio's position was that the PC version of Infinite already met current-generation console standards and ran well at high settings, so it did not need redoing. Consoles got a remastered Infinite; PC got the original, unchanged.

So on PC, The Collection is best understood as "remastered BioShock 1 and 2, plus the Infinite package you could have bought anyway". That is still a lot of game, and the remasters are the reason to buy it — but do not pay for it expecting a better-looking Infinite, because you will not get one.

BioShock 2 Remastered is the part of The Collection that genuinely changed on PC, alongside the first game. (Official Steam screenshot)

Check your library before you buy anything

This one has saved people real money for a decade and is still missed.

If you already owned BioShock, BioShock 2 or Minerva's Den on Steam before September 2016, 2K gave you the remastered versions free. They appeared automatically in your library as separate entries when the remasters went live on 15 September 2016 — not as an upgrade to the old listing, which is precisely why so many people never noticed.

So before you buy The Collection for the remasters, search your own library for "Remastered". If BioShock Remastered and BioShock 2 Remastered are already sitting there, then the only thing The Collection adds for you is the Infinite package and Minerva's Den Remastered, and the Season Pass bundle is very likely the better buy.

The 2007 original is still listed separately on Steam alongside its own remaster, which is half the reason the naming is such a mess. (Official Steam screenshot)

Reseller bundles and the naming problem

Away from Steam, the name sprawl gets worse. You will see a "Complete Edition", a "Complete Collection" and a "Complete Bundle" for Infinite, and they are not consistent between shops — some are the Season Pass bundle under a different label, some are console-era SKUs that never existed on PC, some are simply two keys sold together.

The rule is the same one that applies to every bundle: ignore the name and read the contents list. If a listing will not tell you which apps it activates, treat that as the answer. Our piece on region-locked Steam keys covers the other thing to check on these listings, and whether keyshops are safe covers the rest.

The broader point about bundles — that the headline discount tells you almost nothing until you work out what you would actually have bought separately — is the same argument we made about Humble Bundle tiers, and it applies cleanly here.

The Complete Edition trailer, uploaded by IGN rather than 2K — useful for seeing what the console-era packaging promised.

So which one should you buy?

New to the series entirely: The Collection. You get three games and all the single-player add-on content in one purchase, and the remasters of the first two are the versions you want to play. Start with BioShock, not Infinite.

You only want Infinite and its story DLC: the Season Pass bundle. The two Burial at Sea episodes are the point, and you will not miss Columbia's Finest.

You already own Infinite: buy the Season Pass or the Burial at Sea pairing on its own, and check your library for the free 2016 remasters before you consider anything larger.

You already own the remasters: skip The Collection. You would be re-buying the only part of it that is actually remastered.

On timing, all of these discount deeply and often — this is a 2K back catalogue that has been on the market for over a decade. There is no reason to pay near full price for any of it, and our explainer on what a historical low really means is worth reading before you decide a given figure is good.

The bottom line

The Collection is the right default, because on Steam it contains the Season Pass bundle outright and adds two remastered games on top. The only buyers who should not take it are the ones who already own the 2016 remasters — a much larger group than most people assume, thanks to a free upgrade that landed quietly in libraries and was never announced again.

Whatever you pick, buy it on a discount and check the contents list rather than the name. Every confusing thing about this particular back catalogue comes down to four packages sharing three words between them.