ABOUT
The value desk for Steam.
Steam BANGERS scores every game on Steam by whether the price matches what you get, and prints the answer as one number from 0 to 100, the BANG Score.
Games are art, and worth is subjective. Length is a design choice; a game built to run six hours is not failing at being twenty. The score reads value-fit: the price against how a game reviews and how long it was built to be. That is how a six-hour game people love can outscore a sixty-hour one people slog through.
The score is absolute, so a game's number does not change because some other game launched.
What goes in
- Value: the price against how long the game really is, floored by what its genre is supposed to be, so a short game built to be short is not punished for it.
- Reviews: the Steam review score, the strongest signal of whether a game delivers. Reviews set the ceiling; price and length only move you within it.
- Engagement: how far players actually get, from public achievement stats. It only gates the very top of the scale, and a poor finish rate costs a game nothing.
- Monetization: in-app purchases drag the score down, graded by how aggressive they are. Cosmetic is a light touch; loot boxes and pay-to-win are heavy. A game documented as having none gets a small credit. Source: PCGamingWiki.
- Players: multiplayer and roguelike games have no ending to divide the price by, so their value reads the player base instead: owners from SteamSpy, and how many are playing now. A big game nobody plays anymore takes a dock. Source: SteamSpy.
- Recent reviews: when at least 50 reviews from the last 30 days run well above or below the lifetime score, the score moves a few points with them. Source: Steam.
- DRM: Denuvo, any other DRM notice, and a required third-party account are small docks, capped so they can never sink a good game. Source: the Steam store page.
- Early access: an unfinished game scores a little lower, because it may never be finished.
- Refunds: the share of a game's Steam-purchase reviews whose writer refunded it, from Steam's own Product refunded label. An unusual share is a small dock. It counts reviewers, so a buyer who refunded without writing anything never shows up in it. Steam keeps a refunded buyer's review and counts it in the review score; this site checked on 2026-08-27 (Gollum's 41% of 829 reproduces only with its 21 refunded reviews counted). The site also shows Steam's own summary of the reviews written inside the two-hour refund window. Source: Steam.
We weigh these into one number. We never publish the weights. The recipe is the one part that stays ours; everything else, sources included, is on the table.
The tiers
How to read a verdict
Every game page opens with one command, derived from the tier and the game's own BANGER price. It means exactly what it says:
- BUY IT: a BANGER or worth it at today's price. No waiting game to play.
- WAIT: the game gets there at a lower price. The page names the exact price to watch for.
- NO RUSH: fair value. Buy it if you want it; a sale just makes it sweeter.
- SKIP IT: the value is not there at any realistic price.
Below the verdict, each input wears a grade from S to D, read from the buyer's side: an S in Reviews means the reviews push the score up hard, a D in Engagement means few players ever finish it. A ▼ marks a dock (monetization, early access, a missing input). The grades explain the score; they never change it.
The honest parts
- Value is estimated from the current price, so if you bought it on sale three years ago the score knows nothing about that. Dollars-per-hour divides that price by the game's length; your own playtime never enters it.
- A great game at a steep price-per-hour can still land at worth it, and that part is on purpose.
- A game needs enough reviews to be scored at all. Better a gap than a guess.
- Predicted scores: an unreleased game carries a PREDICTED BANG Score with an 80 percent band and the odds of landing above the typical released game in its genre, from the studio's and publisher's prior Steam games. It is a forecast and the page labels it one. Backtested on 6,384 releases, the band held 80 percent of them. A game with no studio history gets no number at all, only what a typical game in its genre scores.
- Refunded reviews count reviewers, and a refund inside two hours rarely leaves a review at all, so the share understates what really happened. Use it to rank games against each other; it is too thin to read as a game's refund rate.
- Crawlers pull fresh data every hour and the scores rebuild every six hours. A game's reviews refresh about monthly and its price more often, and each game page dates both under the numbers.
What it does not do
- Not affiliated with Valve or Steam.
- No purchase history and no payment data, ever. Sign in with Steam is opt-in and reads your public library only, to build your own picks. You can delete it in one click.
From the heart
Games are subjective, and one number can't hold what a game means to you. Some of my favorite games of all time aren't BANGERS, because they are too short for the price, or a niche reviews never rewarded, or a slow burn the math doesn't catch. I love them anyway, and a low score doesn't make me wrong about that.
So don't take a low score personally. The BANG Score answers one narrow question for one specific person: the budget-conscious gamer working out where a limited dollar should go. That was me, counting out twenty dollars and needing it to count. A "skip" only means the price is ahead of the value right now, for someone on a budget. If a game looks like your thing, buy it. The right game is always worth the money.
Common questions
What is the BANG Score?
The BANG Score rates every game on Steam from 0 to 100 for value: whether the price matches what you get. Whether the game is your kind of thing is a question it leaves to you.
How is the BANG Score calculated?
It weighs the current price against how long the game really is, the Steam review score, how far players actually get from public achievement stats, how aggressive the in-app purchases are, and whether an unusual share of its Steam-purchase reviews come from buyers who refunded it. Smaller adjustments cover DRM, early access, a recent swing in reviews, and for multiplayer and roguelike games, how many people own and play them. The exact weights stay private; every input and data source is public.
Is the BANG Score the same as a review score?
No. A review score measures whether a game is good. The BANG Score measures whether it is worth the money, so a great game at a steep price per hour can still land at worth it.
Where does the data come from?
Valve and Steam, HowLongToBeat for length, SteamSpy for ownership, IsThereAnyDeal for price history, PCGamingWiki for monetization mechanics, Metacritic for critic scores, and Frankfurter (European Central Bank rates) for currency display.
How often is it updated?
Crawlers pull fresh data every hour and the scores rebuild every six hours. A game's reviews refresh about monthly and its price more often, and each game page dates both under the numbers.
Is Steam BANGERS free?
Yes. Every score and page is free to read. There is also a free API and an MCP server so developers and AI assistants can query a game's value.
Who makes this
Steam BANGERS is built and run by one person, Jordan Allen Lewis. I wrote the crawler, the scoring formula, and every page on this site. The pipeline pulls fresh data around the clock, the formula is deterministic, and no AI writes any of it, so when a score moves it is because the price, the reviews, or the player data moved.
Every guide and collection here is written by me, and the claims come with the numbers that back them. Where the data is missing, the page says so instead of guessing.
Why I built it, and what I got wrong first: the longer version. How the number is actually computed: the method, including where it is weak.
Contact
Found a bug, a wrong score, or have an idea? Email support@steambangers.com.