Railroad Tycoon 3
Fair · Strategy · 2007
The verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $2.49. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 26.2h
- Value
- $0.10/hr
- Reviews
- 77% positive
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Windows only.
Railroad Tycoon 3 features 25 scenarios challenging players to recreate magnificent feats of railroading history from around the world. Players can lay track (including tunnels and overpasses), pick from over 40 locomotives from early steams to modern bullets, choose to haul over 35 types of cargo in a dynamic economy, and participate in...
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 $2.49, set in November 2014. 63 discounts in the 14 years on record. They run about 75 percent off, roughly 8 weeks apart. Today's $2.49 at 75 percent off matches the lowest price in the record.
On value it sits in the top 14 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 70 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 69 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Railroad Tycoon II Platinum ($1.24, scores 80) beats it on value, while it beats Sid Meier's Railroads! ($2.49, scores 31).
Of the 410 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 1 comes from a buyer who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 39 percent of the 204 reviews written there were positive, against 77 percent overall, and those are 18 percent of everything written about it.
Players
42 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
Game holds up after many years. I played this elementary and middle school, and now as I pursue my masters, I still love it
My favorite game of all time, was literally playing it last night, this morning, STEAM UPDATE BRICKED THE GAME!!! I AM BEYOND PISSED, EDIT: FIXED find the discussion thread for running on win 10/11, Mr. Skinny, it worked for me
The economy simulation is very fun, even if the graphics are dated. Look up a tutorial for fixing the crashes and resolution and afterwards it runs fine even on Windows 11
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
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Railroad Tycoon 3 scores 51/100 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/7610/railroad-tycoon-3The 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.