Europa Universalis IV
Worth it · Strategy · 2013
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $49.99.
- Length
- 96.2h
- Value
- $0.52/hr
- Reviews
- 88% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 / AMD Radeon HD 5850, 6 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Rule your land and dominate the world with unparalleled freedom, depth and historical accuracy. Write a new history of the world and build an empire for the ages.
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
It has never been cheaper than $4.99. That was November 2024. Its cuts run 75 percent off as a rule. There have been 104 in the 13 years tracked, about 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 12 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 92 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Victoria II ($19.99, scores 87) beats it on value, while it beats Terra Invicta ($19.99, scores 59).
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 3 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written July 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 55 percent of the 3,187 reviews written there were positive, against 88 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.
96.2 hours to finish it, 1626 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 17 times the campaign.
13 years after release it still had 12.4K people in it at once.
The drop-off
28% start to <1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
12.4K 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
This game has taken many hours from me for many years across so many different and interesting runs that I can't entirely express how much I love this game. For me this is the best strategy/country sim game that I've ever played surpassing any of their other their titles and other games that I enjoyed quite alot such as Stellaris (though they soured my opinions of that game quite alot over the years compared to...
lost all my money to buy all dlc but still keep playing with my laptop at macdonalds wifi
One of the best games I've ever played. It's truly something special, I can't get enough of it and i always eventually come back, the gameplay loop is just too addictive and at some point it really absorbs you into the game. 9/10 no further comments.
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.
Cite this score
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Europa Universalis IV scores 77/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/236850/europa-universalis-ivThe 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 Sep 10, 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.