Total War Shogun 2 Complete Edition price: what owners pay

On 28 September, Sega quietly stopped selling one of the best-reviewed strategy games on Steam. Total War: SHOGUN 2 has not been delisted — the store page is still there, your library copy still works — but you can no longer buy it on its own. Everyone arriving after that date is pointed at a remaster that costs roughly eight times what the original had been going for.

That makes the Total War Shogun 2 Complete Edition price a more interesting question than a remaster usually deserves, because what you pay depends almost entirely on whether you got in before the door shut. Here is the arithmetic, the loyalty discount's real deadline, and the one thing our price record says that the official FAQ does not.

What our price record shows about the original

Playze has tracked the cheapest listed price for Total War: SHOGUN 2 every day since 19 June 2026 — 94 days as of 8 October 2026. In that entire window the cheapest listing never left a band between $4.44 and $5.26. The lowest figure in our record is $2.99. For a game with a $8.99 list price, that is a title that was effectively always cheap and never dramatic about it.

There is a second oddity in the same data. The Shogun 2 Collection — the base game plus its expansion content — has a lower recorded low in our database than Fall of the Samurai does on its own. The bundle has been cheaper than one of its parts. That is not a glitch so much as a symptom of a fifteen-year-old catalogue where nobody has repriced anything in a while, and it is exactly the sort of thing that disappears the moment a publisher tidies up for a remaster. Current figures are on the Total War: SHOGUN 2 game page.

The Complete Edition's reworked lighting and shadows are the most visible change; the army models themselves are largely untouched. (Official Steam screenshot)

The Total War Shogun 2 Complete Edition price, and the owner discount

Creative Assembly's official FAQ sets it out clearly. The Complete Edition launches on Tuesday 13 October at 16:00 BST, priced at £34.99 / €39.99 / $39.99, across Steam, the Epic Games Store, the Microsoft Store and GOG.

If you already own the original, two things happen. First, any of the original game's DLC you do not already have is added to your account at no cost. Second, you become eligible for a 75% loyalty discount on the Complete Edition — and that discount has a hard stop. The FAQ states it "will end on 12th November, 16:00 GMT". Thirty days, and then the upgrade costs what everyone else pays.

A 75% cut off a $39.99 edition puts the upgrade in single figures, which is to say: roughly what the original game itself has been selling for all year. For existing owners this is an easy decision and a genuinely fair one. The thirty-day window is the part to diary, not the price.

The announce trailer from the official Total War channel, which is the only moving footage of the remaster released so far.

There is a Steam-only wrinkle worth knowing

The FAQ contains a detail that most coverage has skipped. Buy the Complete Edition on Steam and you receive the Complete Edition plus the original Shogun 2 and its DLC, with the Blood Pack excluded for age-rating reasons. Buy it on Epic, the Microsoft Store or GOG and you get only the Complete Edition.

That matters more than it sounds, because of the mod situation below. If you want both versions of the game — the remaster and the fifteen years of community work built on the original — Steam is the only storefront that gives you both for one purchase. On the other three you would be buying the remaster and losing access to the original entirely, since it is no longer sold standalone anywhere.

Castle sieges were Shogun 2's set piece and remain the clearest showcase for the texture work. (Official Steam screenshot)

What you actually get for the money

The FAQ's list is substantive rather than cosmetic. Updated lighting, shadows and textures. UI scaling for 1440p and 4K, which the original handled badly. Modernised controls. A 64-bit build, replacing an executable that had been creaking for years. Japanese and Chinese voice acting with full text localisation. Over fifty newly playable minor factions. Integrated Mod.io support. And the whole DLC catalogue including Rise and Fall of the Samurai.

The 64-bit upgrade and the fifty extra factions are the two that change how the game plays rather than how it looks. The rest is housekeeping — overdue, welcome housekeeping, but housekeeping.

The same announcement trailer, mirrored on IGN's channel — useful if the official upload is region-blocked for you.

The cost nobody is advertising: your mods

Here is the catch, and the FAQ is straightforward about it. Mods built for the original game are not compatible with the Complete Edition, which uses Mod.io instead. Mods for the original remain untouched and keep working there.

For a game of this age that is a real loss, not a footnote. Shogun 2's long tail has been overhaul mods, and a reader with two hundred hours in one of them is being asked to choose between improved lighting and the version of the game they actually play. The Steam-only detail above is the mitigation: own both builds and you can switch. On other stores you cannot.

The FAQ does not say whether save games carry across, which given the engine changes is worth assuming they do not until someone confirms otherwise.

Fifty-plus newly playable minor factions are a campaign-map change, and the most substantial addition in the package. (Official Steam screenshot)

Field battles run on the original's engine logic; the 64-bit rebuild is about stability rather than new behaviour. (Official Steam screenshot)

Don't buy the wrong Complete Edition

A genuine trap. There is an older physical bundle sold as "Shogun 2: Total War – The Complete Edition", listing three games and eleven DLC packs, and it still turns up at big-box retailers for well under the new edition's price. It is not this product. It is the 2011 game and its add-ons in a box, and buying it in October 2026 gets you the version that is about to stop being sold, not the remaster.

The same goes for SHOGUN: Total War – Collection, which is the 2000 original and a different game entirely, and for the Fall of the Samurai Collection. Check the release date on any listing before you buy; the naming in this series has never been kind to shoppers.

Where it is cheapest, and the one thing we cannot tell you

A structural note from our regional data. Across the nine regions we price the original in, the cheapest listing undercuts the cheapest official store price in only four — the United States, the euro zone, the United Kingdom and Poland — where the gap runs between 39% and 49%. In the other five, the cheapest price available is the official one. Our explainer on regional pricing covers why that pattern is so uneven.

Which raises the obvious question, and we are going to decline to answer it. Third-party sellers still list keys for the original and its collections. Buying one cheaply and then claiming the 75% loyalty discount would, on paper, get you the Complete Edition for a fraction of $39.99. The FAQ says Steam owners receive the discount automatically, but it says nothing about keys activated after the 28 September cutoff, and we have not tested it. Do not spend money on that theory on our word. If you want to try it, treat the key's cost as the whole of what you are risking, and read our guide to key resellers first.

Fall of the Samurai's naval and gunpowder units are included in the Complete Edition as standard. (Official Steam screenshot)

The bottom line

If you already own Shogun 2: upgrade, and do it before 12 November. A 75% discount on a competent remaster of a game this good is the easiest purchase on this list, and the free DLC top-up alone is worth claiming.

If you do not own it and you want the best Total War campaign Creative Assembly has made — which is a defensible claim, and one we have argued in our ranking of the series — buy the Complete Edition on Steam rather than elsewhere, for the original-plus-remaster bundling. $39.99 for the whole catalogue of a game that normally sells for a fiver is not a bargain, but the original is no longer an option, and the remaster is the only road in now.

If you are a mod user with hundreds of hours in an overhaul: stay where you are for a few weeks. Let Mod.io fill up first. Nothing about this release expires except the loyalty discount, and if you already own the game you can claim that and install later. Our piece on what a historical low actually means is the right way to think about the original's pricing from here — a delisted game's key prices tend to drift upward, not down. For alternatives while you wait, the strategy games currently discounted is the better list, and Total War versus Civilization is worth reading if you are choosing a first grand-strategy campaign at all.