Black Desert
Skip · Multiplayer · 2017
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $0.99.
- Length
- 93.7h
- Value
- $0.01/hr
- Reviews
- 74% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, GeForce GTX 970, Radeon RX 480, 80 GB of storage. Windows only.
Played by over 20 million Adventurers - Black Desert Online is an open-world, action MMORPG. Experience intense, action-packed combat, battle massive world bosses, fight alongside friends to siege and conquer castles, and train in professions such as fishing, trading, crafting, cooking, and more!
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 $0.99. That was October 2021. It has been discounted 65 times in the 9 years tracked here, typically at 70 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today's $0.99 at 90 percent off matches the lowest price in the record.
Value puts it in the top 36 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 67 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 61 percent. Among the games that feel like it, RIFT (free, scores 37) beats it on value, while it beats Dungeons & Dragons Online® (free, scores 28).
This site sampled 799 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 8 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written April 2026 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 32 percent of the 4,575 reviews written there were positive, against 74 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it. It carries the aggressive kind of in-app purchases, and the score already docks it for that. The sticker price is where the spending starts.
HowLongToBeat players log 93.7 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 2060, 22 times as much.
9 years after release it still had 14.3K people in it at once.
Players
14.3K 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
Very fun combat but insanely P2W, there's lots to do but if you don't pay then best of luck.
The graphics are nice, that is about it. Basically if don't like having to press multiple buttons for the simplest of things or finding no intuitive logic for that or even if you try it doesn't work, if you don't like having no choice on the way you wish to play it or if you are looking for a simple MMO to relax, those are nice thoughts, but none will be in this game.
You would have to have no life at all to put time and money into such a pointless game.
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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Black Desert scores 32/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/582660/black-desertThe 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 11, 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.