X4: Foundations
Fair · Action · 2018
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $9.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Cost per hourS
- $0.15/hr
- Reviews▼
- 80% of 30,581
- Genre rank
- Top 12% Action
Holding it back: AI content, Reviews
Watch this gameOne alert at a price you pick.
Time and effort
- Main story
- 66.4h
- To 100%
- 980.3h 14.8x the story
- Finish
- 15% reach the ending
- Achievements
- 172
Price and sales
- Sales
- 71 on record
- Typical cut
- 60% off
- Steam low
- $4.99 December 2025
- Sale every
- 38d last November 2026
Players and genre
- Online
- 3,696 now
- Recent reviews
- 78% 30 days
- Cheaper than
- 1% of its genre
- Better reviewed
- 81% of its genre
Price and player charts
The drop-off
63% start to 15% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
The value story
The value story
The lowest price on record is $4.99, set in December 2025. It has been discounted 71 times in the 8 years tracked here. The median cut across all of them is 60 percent, about 5 weeks apart.
Its score puts it in the top 12 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 81 percent. Among the games that feel like it, X3: Terran Conflict ($3.19, scores 72) beats it on value, while it beats X Rebirth ($5.99, scores 2).
More about X4: Foundations
Steam's global achievement data puts about 15 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. On a 66.4-hour game, the hours short of it still count in its price per hour. This site sampled 799 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 17 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2026 to October 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 34 percent of the 1,505 reviews written there were positive, against 80 percent overall, and those are 6 percent of everything written about it.
66.4 hours to finish it, 980 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 15 times the campaign.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, so it runs on the handheld without fiddling.
Buy now or wait
Buy now or wait
Discounted in each of its last 8 seasonal sales.
- Next sale
- Winter Sale, Dec 17 to Jan 4
Sources: IsThereAnyDeal, Valve.
What drives the score
Grades: S best, D weakest
S is the best grade and D the weakest, judged as a buyer. ▲ raises the score, ▼ lowers it, ? is an input we do not have, • is a fact this genre's score does not use. How the grades work
What players say
Great game but they don't explain how to do things enough. You'll spend more time googling how the game works than actually playing the game.
2 more reviews, 1 not recommended
A very unique games. Has such an ambititius scope for a smaller studio. This means that sometimes there are some bugs/junk but nothing game breaking in my opinion. I dont think there is a space sim quite like this.
Tofu in space tldr: The game is as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle. The combat is mediocre. The economic gameplay is terrible. The story and atmosphere of the game world are rock bottom. The developers manage to make the game only worse as it develops. A game about space flight doesn't have any proper... space flight - because the developers, in their genius, decided to remove collision from the game. So...
Steam reviews, mixed to its ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
About the game
Your journey to building a vast space empire begins behind the controls of a single ship. Explore, trade, fight, and build as you rise to command fleets, stations, and entire economies in a living, fully simulated universe that reacts to every decision.
Minimum specs
Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, NVIDIA GTX 1060 or AMD RX 5300 or equivalent (Vulkan 1.4 support required), 35 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, Linux.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
X4: Foundations scores 51/100 on the BANG Score (fair value) as of Nov 8, 2026. The developer disclosed AI-generated content on Steam, so the score is docked. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/392160/x4-foundationsReviews set the ceiling, and price against real length moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Nov 6, price as of Nov 7. A number here look wrong? Tell me and I will check the inputs.