SimCity™ 4 Deluxe Edition
Fair · Strategy · 2010
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $19.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 9.4h
- Value
- $2.13/hr
- Reviews
- 82% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 256 MB of memory, 32MB supported Direct3D capable video card with DirectX 7.0 or greater, 1.6 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition includes the bestselling SimCity 4 and the all-new SimCity 4 Rush Hour Expansion Pack. Create the most massive region of cities ever, with a farming town, bedroom community, high-tech commercial center, and industrial backbone.
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
December 2022 is where it bottomed out, at $1.99. 78 discounts in the 14 years on record. They run about 75 percent off, roughly 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 14 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 5 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 92 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 83 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Rail Route ($9.99, scores 76) beats it on value, while it beats The Tenants ($19.99, scores 49).
10 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2021 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 54 percent of the 1,374 reviews written there were positive, against 82 percent overall, and those are 16 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 9.4 hours. Doing everything runs 171, 18 times as long.
Players
331 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
I've played this for over a decade. I also have Cities: Skylines, which is kind of boring despite being in 3D, but SimCity 4 still gets me playing for a few hours a day. This is from back when EA used to make games that were actually good. It's worth adding that the soundtrack is also one of the things really well done in this game. I also really appreciate how well mods work to make the game more playable than it...
i have had this game for over a decade. i think it is about time i write a review for it. Very fun city builder, runs amazingly, occasional crashes but making big cities is really fun, it has almost no bugs and i could spend hours playing it!
keeps crashing. 30-ish minutes in. sometimes almost an hour. but it always crashes.. dumb. keep losing so much progress.
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), achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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SimCity™ 4 Deluxe Edition scores 64/100 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/24780/simcity-4-deluxe-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 1, 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.