We Checked 114,000 Steam Games. Here's How Much You're Overpaying.
We compared Steam's price against the cheapest available price from a legitimate key store, across 114,397 games. The results were pretty shocking.
Steam is where most PC gamers buy their games, but it is rarely the cheapest place to buy them. KrakenKeys tracks daily prices across 173,305 games from 21 stores, in five currencies, with data going back to August 2025. We compared Steam’s own price against the cheapest price from a legitimate key store across 114,397 games in our catalogue.
What we found:
- 28,221 of 114,397 are cheaper somewhere else than on Steam.
- Average saving among those: 66% (median 73%)
- Average amount saved: £6.46 (median £4.08)
- Total saved across every game with a current saving: £227,226
- Kinguin was the cheapest in 43% of cases.
Data accurate as of 12th September 2026
Examples of huge savings
Some standout examples from the games we checked, chosen by how big the savings are.
These figures are from the past 30 days. Click through to any game to see its current price and full price history.
| Game | Steam price | Cheapest price | Saving | Store |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Europa Universalis IV | £32.89 | £1.49 | 95.5% | loaded |
| The Witness | £29.99 | £0.96 | 96.8% | kinguin |
| Homeworld: Remastered Collection | £23.10 | £0.40 | 98.3% | driffle |
| Lisa: The Painful – Definitive Edition | £19.99 | £0.94 | 95.3% | difmark |
| Amnesia: The Dark Descent | £16.75 | £0.46 | 97.3% | gamivo |
| Pathfinder: Kingmaker | £15.99 | £0.51 | 96.8% | g2a |
| XCOM: Enemy Unknown | £12.83 | £0.24 | 98.1% | k4g |
| Outward | £4.19 | £0.09 | 97.9% | GameSeal |
New releases show the same pattern, at a smaller scale
The pattern holds for recent, full-price releases too, but the gap is narrower than for older titles.
New releases seem to carry a steeper discount in the weeks right after launch. Stores compete hardest for early sales at this point. The gap narrows over the following months. Click through to see current prices, and price history of each game.
The figures here are from prices checked at the time of publication.
| Game | Steam price | Cheapest price | Saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| Doom: The Dark Ages | £62.15 | £17.27 | 72% |
| EA Sports FC 26 | £59.99 | £31.66 | 47% |
| NBA 2K26 | £13.49 | £6.49 | 52% |
| MotoGP 25 | £44.99 | £26.80 | 40% |
Why the price difference exists
A Steam key is not tied to the region it was purchased in once activated. Publishers license batches of keys to distributors in lower-priced regions. Those distributors sell them on at a margin that still undercuts Steam’s own regional pricing, and the key works exactly the same once redeemed. Gamers just need to activate the key on Steam, and the game is added to their library. Exactly like they bought it from Steam. The saving simply comes down to where the key was sourced.
This is a different mechanism from counterfeit or stolen key sales, where the keys were never paid for in the first place. The stores in this article’s data are established retailers that pay for the keys they sell, through a cheaper part of the supply chain than Steam’s own storefront.
We’ve written guides to each store, we cover the stores background, trust factor, and how to redeem the key once purchased on the site.
Steam already prices games differently by region. A publisher can set a lower official price in one country than another, and Steam displays whichever price applies to the buyer. Third-party key stores work inside that same structure. They buy keys where the official price is lower and sell them on, rather than doing anything outside how Steam already allows games to be priced.
There’s an exception to the above. Official resellers like Fanatical, Green Man Gaming and GamesPlanet get their keys directly from publishers or developers, not through a cheaper region. Their discounts come from a direct arrangement with the publisher, often part of a promotion or bundle. We highlight all official resellers on KrakenKeys - and we are actively adding more each month.
How big the saving usually is
It varies a lot!
| Saving bracket | Games |
|---|---|
| 0-20% cheaper | 2,517 |
| 20-40% cheaper | 3,529 |
| 40-60% cheaper | 5,058 |
| 60-80% cheaper | 7,097 |
| 80-100% cheaper | 10,858 |
More than a third of every game with a saving, 10,858 of 28,221, is discounted by 80% or more.
Store legitimacy and methodology
Every store referenced in this article is one we actively support and monitor pricing for: publisher-authorised (official resellers) or established third-party retailers.
Results were spread across the market. Kinguin was the cheapest most often, accounting for 43% of results, with the remainder split across eighteen other stores.
Prices are pulled daily, and a store that stops being reliable, whether through broken listings, payment problems or anything else, gets dropped from what we track.
As stated before, we are actively adding more stores each month. Each store goes through an internal vetting procedure. We have a few stores in the backlog. If you think we are missing a specific store, feel free to reach out to: [email protected]
How we worked this out: prices were pulled from KrakenKeys’ own pricing data, covering the 30 days prior to publication, comparing Steam’s listed price against the lowest price from any store KrakenKeys currently supports on the same day. Cases where Steam itself was already the cheapest option were excluded, since that is a separate question about official sale timing, addressed below. We track data daily, so we have a lot of data. Each game mentioned in this article has also been hand checked - just in case.
Does waiting for a Steam sale get you the same result
Not reliably. Around 82% of games do get discounted on Steam itself within six months of release, at a median cut of 30% when it happens. Which shows Steam sales are still decent, but it’s about half the saving that’s available through other stores.
The other 18% either never see a discount in that window, or the timing simply cannot be planned around. A game can sit at full price for months, then go 30% off for a week, then return to full price with no warning either way. Miss the week it happens, and the discount is gone.
Checking a price comparison site skips all of that. The saving is there today.
We also offer price alerts, which cover Steams sales too. If you create a price alert, you can set a target price. Once the game reaches that price - we will notify you, so you can grab it.
The bottom line
- About one in four games we checked was cheaper elsewhere right now, and when it is, the saving tends to be large rather than marginal.
- Waiting for a Steam sale is a gamble. The average saving is smaller, and there is no way to know when it will land.
- Nineteen different stores turned up as the cheapest option across games we checked. The saving is spread across the market, not one shop undercutting everyone else.
- The pattern holds across the whole catalogue, not just the games people already search for by name.
Checking this yourself
The comparison above can be run for any Steam game individually, or for an entire Steam wishlist at once using KrakenKeys’ Steam Wishlist Calculator, which totals a wishlist’s cost on Steam against the cheapest price available elsewhere for every game on it.
About this data
KrakenKeys tracks daily prices across 173,305 games from 21 active stores, in five currencies, with price history going back to 1 August 2025. The figures in this article come from a single check run across all 114,397 eligible games in the catalogue, real, released, paid titles, comparing the last 30 days of tracked pricing. The games named above were additionally checked by hand against the live store listing. Checked on: 12th September 2026.
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