Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – The Definitive Edition
Fair · Shooter · 2023
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $19.79. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 30.1h
- Value
- $0.66/hr
- Reviews
- 80% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 2GB / AMD Radeon R9 280 3GB, 19 GB of storage. Windows only.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: It’s the early ’90s. After a couple of cops frame him for homicide, Carl ‘CJ’ Johnson is forced on a journey that takes him across the entire state of San Andreas, to save his family and to take control of the streets.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
July 2026 is where it bottomed out, at $19.79. It has gone on sale 2 times in the 67 days tracked here, most recently in September 2026. Today's $19.79 at 67 percent off matches the lowest price in the record.
At full price it scores 47. The current cut is what makes it a 58.
Value puts it in the top 26 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 98 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Red Dead Redemption ($24.99, scores 74) beats it on value, while it beats Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – The Definitive Edition ($59.99, scores 44).
Steam's global achievement data says about 17 percent of players ever finish it. On a 30.1-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 29 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2026 to August 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 725 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 139 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 52 percent of the 1,509 reviews written there were positive, against 80 percent overall, and those are 10 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 30.1 hours. Doing everything runs 71, 2.4 times as long.
The drop-off
81% start to 17% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
330 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
San Andreas is one of my favorite GTA game from the series. I love the mission slop and the weird content it has. I do prefer a more realistic roleplay game like Red Dead 2, but this game is old school so I love it for that. Sadly the original is gone from Steam. I do like this version better for few things. Whats better: The Hud, and weapon, and music slot is really easy to navigate. The restart and checkpoints for...
I'm replaying every GTA games prior to the release of GTA VI. And I can assure you that GTA San Andreas is still the best GTA they ever made, period. This is when the series really became a synonym of ludicrously large games, filled with content and activities. Upon revisiting I was a little bit worried it wouldn't have aged well and would feel small compared to modern games, like GTA III and GTA Vice City do (they...
They haven't fixed anything. It's still a complete mess. Don't buy it. This is nothing short of a scam.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – The Definitive Edition scores 58/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1547000/grand-theft-auto-san-andreas-the-definitive-editionThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 2, price as of Sep 23.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.