Premium, Still Worth It

Out of 708 games priced at $40 or more, nine clear a BANG of 78. That is the entire list. Average BANG in that price band is 24.5. Drop the bar to 70 and you get 25 games. I left it at 78 because a lower bar just surfaces the least bad expensive games, and the question I wanted answered is whether any full price release is defensible on value at all.

Baldur's Gate 3 tops it at 94.2, 73.1 hours of main story, 850,647 reviews. ELDEN RING is 83.3 for about 60 hours, with 1,146,561 reviews behind it. Split Fiction is the strange one, 91.9 for 13.7 hours, which tells you the score is leaning on review quality rather than dividing dollars by time.

The list filters on a live price, so it moves. A game that drops under $40 leaves without changing in any way that matters, and during a real Steam sale this collection can nearly empty itself. There is a structural bias too. At the top of that band the only way to survive the value term is length, so nothing short and expensive shows up here even when it is very good.