PC Game Price Index: who is actually cheapest? 38,252 games across 40 stores
Playze Data · Sep 6, 2026
This is the first edition of the Playze PC Game Price Index, a recurring measurement of what PC games actually cost across the stores that sell them. It is built from our own price database — 186,302 tracked titles, 38,252 of which more than one store sells — rather than from a hand-picked basket. We publish the method and the raw numbers so anyone can check the work or reuse it.
The headline numbers
- Across the 38,252 PC games that at least two stores sell, the cheapest price sits at a key marketplace 51.6% of the time and at an official store 48.4% of the time.
- Steam has the cheapest price on 21.5% of the 32,495 compared games it carries.
- In a 2,500-game sample from the top of the popularity ranking, a key marketplace beats every official store on 82.9% of the 1,576 games priced on both sides, with a median gap of 56.3% where it wins.
- Buying the 100 most popular paid games at official prices costs $1,709.17. Buying each at its cheapest tracked source costs $899.10 — a difference of $810.07 (47.4%).
- Only 20.5% of the catalogue is sold by more than one store at all. For the rest there is no comparison to make.
Who actually has the cheapest price?
The obvious way to measure this is wrong. If you count every game in the catalogue, whoever holds the only listing "wins" by default — measured that way Steam looks unbeatable at over 80%, purely because tens of thousands of deep-catalogue indies are sold nowhere else. So we count only games carried by two or more stores, where a comparison genuinely exists.
| Store | Type | Compared games | Cheapest | Median saving vs official |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gameseal | Key marketplace | 18,850 | 45.8% | 61% |
| Eneba | Key marketplace | 19,339 | 38% | 56% |
| MacGameStore | Official store | 2,153 | 30.1% | — |
| GameBillet | Official store | 5,166 | 26.5% | — |
| K4G | Key marketplace | 2,139 | 26.5% | 55% |
| GOG | Official store | 7,686 | 26% | — |
| Keycense | Key marketplace | 3,332 | 22.1% | 50% |
| Microsoft Store | Official store | 2,883 | 21.8% | — |
| Steam | Official store | 32,495 | 21.5% | — |
| YUPLAY | Key marketplace | 4,099 | 20.8% | 41% |
| GAMIVO | Key marketplace | 2,965 | 18.9% | 51% |
| Epic Game Store | Official store | 7,160 | 18.5% | — |
| Humble Store | Official store | 10,466 | 15.5% | — |
| Loaded | Key marketplace | 5,618 | 13.4% | 36% |
| Fanatical | Official store | 6,822 | 10.7% | — |
| GreenManGaming | Official store | 9,501 | 8.2% | — |
| GamersGate | Official store | 7,739 | 8.2% | — |
| WinGameStore | Official store | 5,207 | 7.2% | — |
| Playsum | Key marketplace | 2,928 | 6.5% | 4% |
| IndieGala Store | Official store | 7,004 | 4.8% | — |
| PlanetPlay | Official store | 3,377 | 4.4% | — |
| GamesPlanet US | Official store | 6,517 | 3.8% | — |
| Nuuvem | Official store | 2,486 | 3% | — |
| AllYouPlay | Official store | 4,615 | 2.1% | — |
| Newegg | Official store | 3,539 | 1.8% | — |
| JoyBuggy | Key marketplace | 2,575 | 1% | 1% |
| GamesPlanet UK | Official store | 6,206 | 0.3% | — |
| GamesPlanet DE | Official store | 6,100 | 0.2% | — |
| GamesPlanet FR | Official store | 6,151 | 0.2% | — |
How often each store holds the cheapest price, among games it carries that at least one other store also sells.
Two things stand out. First, the two largest key marketplaces are cheapest far more often than any official storefront. Second, among official stores the spread is wide: GOG and GameBillet undercut the field roughly a quarter of the time, while several regional storefronts almost never do.
How much a key marketplace actually saves
Our first pass at this in July compared 105 popular games by hand and found keyshops cheaper 80% of the time at a median 56% saving. This index widens that to the whole catalogue and holds up: the direction is the same, and the head of the catalogue behaves very differently from its tail.
These medians are measured only on the games where that marketplace is genuinely cheaper than every official store, so they answer "when it wins, by how much" — not "what will I save on any game I pick". A marketplace with a high median and a small catalogue share is running deep discounts on a narrow selection.
The gap grows with the price of the game
| Official price band | Games | A key is cheaper | Median gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| $0-10 | 996 | 76.6% | 37.1% |
| $10-20 | 350 | 92.6% | 62.1% |
| $20-40 | 193 | 95.9% | 71.2% |
| $40- | 37 | 94.6% | 56.4% |
Popular paid games priced on both sides (n=1,576).
Under $10 a key still wins 76.6% of the time, but at a median 37.1% of an already small number — often less than a dollar in hand. In the $20–40 band a key is cheaper 95.9% of the time at a median 71.2% below the official price. The more a game costs, the more the comparison is worth doing.
And with how popular the game is
| Steam reviews | Games | A key is cheaper | Median gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| <50 reviews | 209 | 79.4% | 44.4% |
| 50-200 | 197 | 72.6% | 42.2% |
| 200-1k | 268 | 76.1% | 44.2% |
| 1k-5k | 332 | 79.5% | 48.5% |
| 5k-50k | 981 | 81.7% | 43.4% |
| 50k+ | 371 | 90.0% | 52.6% |
Games priced on both sides across both samples (n=2,358).
At the top of the demand curve — games with more than 50,000 Steam reviews — a key marketplace is cheaper 90.0% of the time. The smallest band sits out of trend on a thin sample, so we would not read anything into it yet; the index will tell us whether that holds.
What an advertised discount is worth
We looked at every discounted offer on 500 multi-store games (1,717 offers) and compared the "regular price" each store strikes through against the list price the official channel actually charges. 18.9% of discounted offers quote a regular price above the official list price, which makes the advertised percentage larger than the saving a shopper really gets. In the sample this clustered in a handful of marketplaces: Keycense (128), Loaded (114), YUPLAY (76).
| Game | Store | Claimed regular | Official list | Advertised | Real vs list |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assetto Corsa | YUPLAY | $93.36 | $19.99 | 85% | 28.2% |
| Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land | YUPLAY | $140.38 | $69.99 | 61% | 22.1% |
| Assetto Corsa | Keycense | $85.54 | $19.99 | 84% | 29.9% |
| Cities: Skylines II | YUPLAY | $105.28 | $49.99 | 24% | -60.1% |
| Alan Wake | Keycense | $65.62 | $14.99 | 95% | 77.9% |
| Borderlands 2 | Playsum | $62.10 | $19.99 | 10% | -179.6% |
| Fallout 4 | Loaded | $59.99 | $19.99 | 90% | 69.5% |
| Sins of a Solar Empire®: Rebellion | Loaded | $74.79 | $39.99 | 94% | 89.3% |
Offers whose struck-through price sits above the official list price. Prices as tracked on 25 August 2026.
Assetto Corsa is the clearest case: an "85% off" listing struck through from $93.36, against an official list price of $19.99 — a real saving of 28%, not 85%. Two rows go further and cost more than the official store while still advertising a discount: Cities: Skylines II at $80.04 against a $49.99 list, and Borderlands 2 at $55.89 against $19.99. We are not claiming intent — currency conversion and regional list prices explain part of it — but the effect on the shopper is the same either way, and it is why we rank by final price rather than by discount percentage.
Today is rarely the best day
Only 5.1% of popular paid games are at the lowest price we have tracked for them, and the median game sits 59.2% above its tracked low. That is an argument for a price alert rather than a purchase — with the honest caveat that our price history starts on 18 June 2026, so "lowest tracked" is a floor within our window, not an all-time low.
The biggest gaps we found
| Game | Cheapest official | Cheapest key | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition | $39.99 | $0.44 | −98.9% |
| Two Worlds II HD | $19.99 | $0.36 | −98.2% |
| Vendetta - Curse of Raven's Cry | $29.99 | $0.55 | −98.2% |
| The Forest | $19.99 | $0.49 | −97.5% |
| GRAV | $19.99 | $0.54 | −97.3% |
| Project Zomboid | $24.99 | $0.74 | −97.0% |
| Grim Dawn | $24.99 | $0.75 | −97.0% |
| Eastern Exorcist | $17.99 | $0.54 | −97.0% |
| theHunter: Call of the Wild™ | $19.98 | $0.63 | −96.8% |
| Book of Demons | $24.99 | $1.07 | −95.7% |
Popular games with an official price of $15 or more, as tracked on 25 August 2026.
The pattern behind the extremes is consistent: the deepest gaps are on older catalogue titles whose keys have circulated through years of bundles and giveaways. On day-one releases the gap is usually small, and sometimes zero.
The caveats we would want a reader to know
- Cheapest is not the same as best. Key marketplaces are resale platforms — region locks, revoked keys and uneven buyer protection are real. We cover the risk picture in are keyshops safe? and define every store category on our methodology page.
- Editions can confound a comparison. Store feeds do not always distinguish a standard edition from a bundle, so a small share of listings compare different products. This inflates the extreme tail more than the medians.
- US prices only, converted where a feed publishes another currency. Regional pricing is its own study.
- Our price history starts 18 June 2026. Anywhere this index says "lowest tracked" it means lowest since that date.
- We earn affiliate commission from some of the stores in this study. It does not touch the ranking — the ordering is computed from price alone, and stores we earn nothing from are in the tables on the same terms.
Methodology
Every number here comes from the public playze.io API, so the study is reproducible without our database. The store leaderboard is a full-catalogue aggregate over the 38,252 games with two or more active US offers. Per-game figures come from two samples drawn on 25 August 2026: a systematic sample of 7,000 titles taken at a fixed stride through the catalogue ordered by release date — an ordering independent of price, so it does not bias the price findings — and a 2,500-title sample from the top of the popularity ranking, which is where almost all purchase volume sits. The two are reported separately throughout rather than pooled, because they answer different questions. Offer-level figures come from 500 multi-store games pulled individually. Medians are used throughout instead of means: the distribution has a long tail of sub-dollar keys that would drag an average around.
Use the data
The full store-level dataset behind this index is available as a CSV download, and the live figures are served from our public store-stats endpoint. You are welcome to republish any chart or figure here, including commercially, with a link to this page as the source. If you want a cut of the data we have not published — a genre, a publisher, a longer window — write to us and we will run it.
The next edition lands at the end of Q4 2026, and will be able to answer the question this one cannot: what happened to these prices over a full sale season.
