Sid Meier's Pirates!
BANGER · RPG · 2005
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $2.49.
- Length
- 10.2h
- Value
- $0.24/hr
- Reviews
- 94% positive
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Windows only.
Sail the Caribbean, marauding all on the high seas or ally your ship and crew as a privateer in search of riches - the life you choose is up to you. Face dogged enemies, raid unsuspecting villages, woo fair maidens, avoid capture or dig for buried treasure. Discover what it takes to become one of the most famous pirates in history!
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
The lowest price on record is $1.99, set in August 2015. Its cuts run 75 percent off as a rule. There have been 77 in the 14 years tracked, about 7 weeks apart. Today's $2.49 at 75 percent off still sits 25 percent above the floor, so a deeper cut exists in its history.
At full price it scores 87. The current cut is what makes it a 92.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 61 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 98 percent. It outscores the games it most resembles, including Windward ($9.99, scores 58) and Sea Dogs: To Each His Own ($14.99, scores 26).
$11.36 is where it would stop being a BANGER. Today it is $2.49.
Of the 460 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 1 comes from a buyer who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 83 percent of the 657 reviews written there were positive, against 94 percent overall, and those are 11 percent of everything written about it.
Players
108 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
The more that I played the new Black Flag, the more I wanted to come back and play this instead.
Classic! (pro-tip) if you're on a laptop, make sure it has a Number-pad, or you have a plugin one handy. lol other than that have fun sailing the high seas, discovering extended family was much larger than you realized, Dancing...*shivers* more than a Friday night stripper & the sweet sensation of kicking some spanish/french/dutch/english Bootie! arg
This is a remake done right. It takes away some features from the original while adding in new mechanics and animations. It easily sits atop my list of top "Cozy Games" which I can play casually, or crank up the difficulty to Rogue & Swashbuckler difficulties for a challenge. For a game its age, there is surprising depth to the underlying mechanics. Again, not perfect. Sometimes the random generation of treasure or...
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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Sid Meier's Pirates! scores 92/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/3920/sid-meier-s-piratesThe 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 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.