Since the beginning of the next generation, the price of a home-based host game has reached the 70-dollar threshold, and the industry has spread from $80 to $100 to become a new normal. On the contrary, many statistics show that the price of the PC game, especially the Steam game, is declining, and that the median price for new and hot-sellers has dropped significantly. However, the more games on the platform, the more games are unplayed, the more they are evaluated in places or even zero.
The long-term data from February 2023 to October 2025 (exclusion of free games) were collated by the foreign media GameDiscover Co, during which the median and average prices of the top 50 games with the highest first monthly sales were distributed on the Steam platform, as shown below.
As can be seen, in February 2023, Steam’s average price for the 50 games before the monthly sales was US$ 21.80, which was US$ 21.41 in October 2025, with only about 2 per cent falling in two and a half years, with little overall change, presumably the result of a slightly cheaper, cheaper, high-priced game.
However, the median price for the first month of sale shows a different trend. The median price of the first 50 works fell from $19.50 in February 2023 to $15.64 in October 2025, a fall of up to 20 per cent, showing a marked increase in the number of low-priced games over the past two and a half years, in sharp contrast to the initial offer of three As with a universal mainframe platform of 69.99.
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Sales do not amount to income contributions, after all, the game is priced differently. If you look at it in terms of income rather than sales, the results are similar, except for about $3 to $5 per number.
The average price of Steam ‘ s 50 games before the start-up month was $26.20 in February 2023 and $25.76 in October 2025, a similar decline of about 2 per cent; the median fell from $23.70 in February 2023 to $20.35 in October 2025, a decline of about 14 per cent.
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What do these numbers mean? GameDiscoverCo argues that the price belt competition between the “under $20” and “60-70” ends seems to be more difficult, and that for new ideas that lack visibility, pricing above $25 will make it harder to get out of the market.
Even with a human brand or a development team (issuer), higher prices are associated with greater risk, but it is relatively difficult to set a price above $25 if new IPs are built from scratch and the team has no past reputation.
Recent successful cases confirm this trend, such as the production of an independent team, which sold the popular multi-person climber, PAK, at a price of only $7.99 and a regular special price; and the distribution operation by Korea’s giant, Nexon, which at the end of the year sold ARC Raiders.
It was also developed by a well-known author team to sell Dispatch, a popular superhero dispatching centre, for $29.99; the initial sale price of Vacant Knights: A Song of silk, which had been fired for several years, was maintained at $19.99, with a “pricing shock.”
GameDiscoverCo notes that where the player’s purse is tight and there are many alternative works, the benefit strategy is increasingly important in the PC market.
In addition, overall spending on the game market declined after the outbreak, and the continued high number of PC zero components, such as graphic cards, memory, etc., increased the reluctance of players to spend $60 to $70 on new ones, and increased the price pressure on free games (F2Ps) to pay for new ones in comparison to those independent games that cost $10 to $15, bring in a lot of time to play and value very high.
The report adds that there are still a number of exceptions to the various types of games, such as some survival-building games, which still have a chance of success in pricing between 25 and 40 dollars.
Gamé DiscoverCo, a long-term source dating back to 2020, observed that after 2023, Steam’s new sales prices began to move down significantly.
March 2024 was a representative month, such as the terror game that warned “Content Warning” , the farm of “Rusty’s Retiration” , and the gambling terror of “The Devil’s Wheel” all entered the top 10 sales lists of the month at a price not exceeding $10.
The report analyses that the ability of independent developers to produce system-oriented and replay-oriented games at low cost is one of the main reasons for the many successes of low-cost games. Further details of the study may be found in the original language.
On the other hand, the more the Steam game sells, the more the game is distributed, the more the game is distributed, the more the game is unplayed, the more the game is evaluated in single digits and even the more the message is left.
According to statistics from the third-party data site SteamDB since 2006, the number of newly launched games on the Steam platform has been rising year by year, and the number of new releases as of November 2025 is close to 180,000, and at a pace of over 1,500 entries per month, it will soon exceed the total number of new entries in 2024.
Almost half of Steam’s new section 17,889 in 2025 was hardly seen by players, of which 2,113 were zero evaluations and 6,595 were single-digit evaluations, with a total of 48.7 per cent being in a “hidden” state of total lack of discussion.
At the same time, only 1,092, or 6.1 per cent, of the 500 works that can be evaluated above and are considered to have a real player base and subjectivity, with a very high market concentration and a growing concern among players about falling on a few popular works.
The main cause of this result is the rapid increase in the number of new jobs per year by Steam, from 436 in 2013 to close to 18,000 in 2025, although the growth in the number of works evaluated by more than 100 has not been significant.
New competition is increasing and independent games are the most affected, and SteamDB statistics show that new editions of 8,730 from 2025 to the present date are 200 more fast than last year. However, stand-alone new entries under 10 last year accounted for 46.24 per cent, and the half of the year (52.1 per cent) remained silent.
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