X4: Foundations
Fair · Action · 2018
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $49.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 66.4h
- Value
- $0.75/hr
- Reviews
- 80% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when X4: Foundations is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
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.
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.
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 $4.99, set in December 2025. It has been discounted 69 times in the 8 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 2 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 6 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 79 percent. Among the games that feel like it, X3: Terran Conflict ($15.99, scores 72) beats it on value, while it beats X Rebirth ($29.99, scores 2).
Steam's global achievement data says about 15 percent of players ever finish it. On a 66.4-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 799 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 18 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2026 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 34 percent of the 1,499 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.
It came out 8 years ago and 2.1K were still playing it at the last check.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, so it runs on the handheld without fiddling.
The drop-off
63% start to 15% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
2,141 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
Steam Review **1386 hours in X4: Foundations - and I'm still not done.** I've been playing games since the 1980s, so I've experienced a lot of games and a lot of different eras of gaming. I've also played **every X-series game**, and X4: Foundations is easily one of the most impressive space simulation games I've ever played. After **1,386 hours**, I can honestly say this game has an incredible amount of depth. The...
Played now and then over the years. Solid game, keeps me entertained. DLCs are nice additions but definitely the base game can stand on it's own. If you don't mind a bit dated graphics and animations in the characters this game has a lot of different things to offer: * Main story quest * Side quest/missions * Sandbox trading * Sandbox piracy / Anti-Piracy * Station building (mostly building pieces for production...
Definitely did NOT hit the spot for the space sim itch. The flying feels absolutely terrible, the combat felt horrible through the tutorials and the few beginning missions in both timeline and foundations, I was woefully disappointed how empty and useless every station I sat foot on was. Dont expect to talk to and interact with NPCs, cuz no one has anything to say. Being in spacesuit was needlessly horrible. Im...
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).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
X4: Foundations scores 60/100 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/392160/x4-foundationsThe 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 13, 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.