Focus Entertainment sale: the games worth buying before 14 Sept

Focus Entertainment is the publisher most people cannot name and most people own something from. The French company sits in the awkward middle of the industry — too big to be indie, too small to price like Ubisoft — and it spends that position on games that are strange, specific and usually about half the length of a blockbuster. Its catalogue goes on sale often. It does not go on sale this deeply often.

The Focus Entertainment sale is live on Steam now and runs to 14 September, according to the publisher's own sale page. That is a nine-day window across a back catalogue that includes one of the best co-op shooters of the last five years and one of the best-looking single-player games of the last ten. Here is what is genuinely worth your money in it, what is not, and how to check you are not paying more than you need to.

What the Focus Entertainment sale is actually good for

Publisher sales are usually a mess: a few headline discounts, then three hundred DLC packs. This one is unusually easy to navigate because Focus publishes so few games. The whole catalogue is maybe two dozen titles that matter, and they cluster into three groups — two recent hits, a run of mid-budget curiosities from 2018 to 2024, and a long tail of things you buy on a whim.

The important thing to understand is that Focus games are almost never full price for long. If you miss this window, another one comes along. What makes a publisher sale worth acting on is the depth on the older titles, where the discount tends to be far steeper than in a seasonal Steam sale. So the priority order below is not "best game first" — it is "hardest to get this cheap again first".

Space Marine 2's whole pitch is the swarm: hundreds of Tyranids on screen at once, and a chainsword that does not care how many there are. (Official Steam screenshot)

Space Marine 2 is the one to buy first

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 turns two on 9 September, and Saber Interactive has kept patching it the whole time. It is a third-person action game with three modes stacked inside it: a six-hour campaign playable in three-player co-op, a set of PvE Operations missions with six classes to level, and a PvP mode that most people ignore. The Operations are the reason people are still playing — they are short, repeatable, and the class progression is deep enough to carry a hundred hours.

It is also the rare modern action game that is legible. You are enormous, the enemies are numerous, and the combat is about crowd management rather than dodge timing. If you bounced off soulslikes, this is the power fantasy that does not punish you for wanting one.

The gameplay reveal from The Game Awards 2022, on Focus Entertainment's own YouTube channel. The horde density shown here is what the finished game actually does.

Both halves of A Plague Tale, in order

Asobo Studio's two-game series is the strongest single-player thing Focus has published. A Plague Tale: Innocence (2019) is a tight, linear stealth game about two children crossing a plague-ridden France with a river of rats behind them. A Plague Tale: Requiem (2022) is the bigger, prettier, sadder sequel, and it is one of the few games where the technical showpiece — tens of thousands of individually simulated rats — is also the emotional one.

Buy Innocence first even though Requiem is the better game. It is shorter, cheaper, and Requiem's ending only lands if you have done the first one. Together they are about twenty-five hours, which is the right length for a story this bleak.

Requiem moves the series out of grey France and into the Mediterranean, which is partly an art decision and partly a very deliberate contrast with what happens in it. (Official Steam screenshot)

The Requiem launch trailer, posted to Focus Entertainment's official channel. Mild spoilers for the first hour, none for the ending.

SnowRunner, if you understand what it is

SnowRunner arrived on Steam in May 2021 and has been receiving paid and free seasons ever since, which means the base game now sits in front of an absurd amount of content. It is a driving game with no racing in it. You take a truck across mud, and the mud wins, and you spend forty minutes winching yourself out of a ditch, and this is genuinely one of the most absorbing things on PC if it clicks.

It will not click for everyone. Try the first region before you commit to a season pass; the DLC is where the money actually goes.

This is the whole game. There is no lap timer and nothing is chasing you — the terrain is the opponent. (Official Steam screenshot)

The middle tier: Banishers, Atomic Heart, Evil West

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden (DON'T NOD, 2024) is the pick of these three. It is a two-hander action RPG set in 1695 New England, and its actual mechanic is moral: for every haunting you resolve, you decide whether the living or the dead pay for it, and the game tracks it. It is not a combat showcase. It is a writing showcase with combat attached.

Atomic Heart (Mundfish, 2023) is a first-person shooter in a retro-futurist Soviet facility, and it is far better at art direction than at pacing — the open-world sections between the good bits are the weak part. Evil West (Flying Wild Hog, 2022) is a linear, unfashionable, thoroughly enjoyable vampire-punching game with two-player co-op, and it does not overstay its welcome.

Banishers puts a living banisher and a dead one in the same party, which is the setup for every decision the game asks you to make. (Official Steam screenshot)

The back catalogue worth a punt

These are the ones that get properly cheap in a publisher sale and rarely elsewhere. Insurgency: Sandstorm (2018) is still the best mid-realism tactical shooter that does not demand a squad and a headset rota; it kills you in one shot and it is better for it. Curse of the Dead Gods (2021) is a roguelike whose central idea — taking curses as the price of power — is smarter than its reputation. Aliens: Dark Descent (2023) is a real-time squad tactics game that understands the films better than most Alien games do.

Then there is the Spiders and DON'T NOD back catalogue: GreedFall (2019), a colonial-fantasy RPG with genuinely good faction politics and stiff everything else; The Surge 2 (2019), a soulslike built around cutting specific limbs off enemies to loot them; and Vampyr (2018), where feeding on a named Londoner permanently removes them and everything they were doing for the neighbourhood. All three are flawed and all three are doing something no other game does.

Insurgency: Sandstorm has no killcam, no minimap and no health bar. Seven years on, that is still an unusual combination. (Official Steam screenshot)

What to skip

Season passes for games you have not started. Focus is generous with post-launch content and stingy about explaining what is in it, and the SnowRunner and Space Marine 2 passes both cost a meaningful fraction of a new game. Buy the base game, play ten hours, then decide.

Also skip the "gold" and "complete" editions on reflex. On the older Spiders titles the expanded editions bundle content that is thin, and the base game frequently discounts harder.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is the cheaper, shorter half of the pair, and the one to start with even though Requiem is the better game. (Official Steam screenshot)

Check the price before you click buy

A publisher sale is a Steam promotion, not a market-wide one, and the official store is not automatically the cheapest place to get a key. Our own comparison of keyshops against official stores across 105 games found keyshops cheaper most of the time — though not always, and not without caveats. Open the game page on Playze and look at every listed offer before you commit; each of the games above links straight to its live price.

It is also worth knowing whether a discount is actually good. A 70% banner on a game that regularly hits 80% is not a deal, it is a nudge — which is the whole argument in what a historical low price really means. And if you would rather wait, the Steam sales calendar sets out when the next window opens.

The bottom line

Buy Space Marine 2 if you have anyone to play it with, and both A Plague Tale games if you do not. Those three are the ones you would still be glad you bought at twice the price. Add Insurgency: Sandstorm and Banishers if the budget stretches, and treat everything else as a punt rather than a purchase.

The sale closes on 14 September. Focus discounts again before the end of the year, reliably, so nothing here is urgent — but the deep cuts on the 2018–2021 catalogue are the ones that are hardest to catch, and those are the ones to take now. If you want more options across every publisher, the current best PC game deals is the wider list.