Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition
Fair · Shooter · 2009
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $19.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 26.4h
- Value
- $0.76/hr
- Reviews
- 82% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 7 GB of storage. Windows only.
Prepare for the Future™ With Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition, experience the most acclaimed game of 2008 like never before. Create a character of your choosing and descend into an awe-inspiring, post-apocalyptic world where every minute is a fight for survival.
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 2013 is where it bottomed out, at $4.99. It has been discounted 84 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 60 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 20 percent on value. It is pricier than 81 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 63 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Fallout: New Vegas ($9.99, scores 92) beats it on value, while it beats Fallout 4 ($19.99, scores 54).
91 on Metacritic, 82 percent from players. A gap this way round is usually launch damage or a slow decline.
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 19 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written November 2025 to August 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 725 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 71 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 60 percent of the 9,230 reviews written there were positive, against 82 percent overall, and those are 21 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 26.4 hours; clearing it takes 106, which is 4.0 times the campaign.
Players
318 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
One of my favorite games of all time. People love to say it's bad but when I was a kid it was neck and neck with New Vegas. I wish it wasn't an actual broken mess on PC (Where are the achievements? Why does it only read the Launcher but not the actual game?) but regardless, it's a blast to play. My favorite game to play on my ROG Ally. Extremely excited for the remastered version.
Not quite on the same level as Fallout: New Vegas, but a much, much better game than the dull, boring Fallout 4. Only finished the main story, but it was a fun and enjoyable experience from start to finish. It did feel a bit too short though-I finished the main story in under 20 hours. There are still plenty of side quests, locations, and DLCs left for me to experience, and I can't wait to return to the Capital...
Fallout 3 is a good example of how not to make a Fallout game. Few of your choices matter, the worldbuilding is broken as hell, the gameplay is mediocre, and the writing is bad. I highly suggest installing a few mods to fix the gameplay and worldbuilding before playing this. If you enjoyed playing this, that's perfectly okay. I just think the base/vanilla game doesn't meet the standards for what a good game is...
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: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition scores 63/100 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/22370/fallout-3-game-of-the-year-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 3, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.