A 90 percent discount does not mean the game is bad

There is a reflex that kicks in at about 75 percent off. If it is this cheap, what is wrong with it.

I went looking for evidence of that, expecting to find it. The catalog appears to agree at first. Sorting every live sale by how deep the cut is, the average BANG Score falls as the discount grows:

That looks like a rule. It is not. It is a trick played by who ends up in each row.

The same table, with the shovelware removed

Restrict it to games with at least a thousand reviews, meaning games a real number of people actually bought and played, and the pattern turns around completely:

Every band jumps by twenty-odd points, and the direction flips. Among games with an audience, the deeper sales are on the better-value games, not the worse ones.

Both tables are true. Only the second one is about the question you are asking.

What the first table was actually measuring

Age.

A game discounted 10 percent is, on average, a 2025 release. A game discounted 80 percent is a 2020 release. Publishers do not cut a new game hard, and they stop protecting an old one.

The shallow band is stuffed with brand new games carrying 480 reviews between them, because a game released last month has not had time to gather any. Small, unknown, recent games drag that first row's average down, and the deep-discount row gets the games that have been around long enough for a hundred thousand people to have an opinion. The score gap in the first table is the gap between famous and unknown, wearing a discount label.

So what does a big discount tell you

That the game is old, and that its publisher has stopped defending the launch price. Neither of those is a defect. Most of the best value on Steam is a five year old game at 80 percent off, and that is not a coincidence, it is the whole mechanism.

The discount tells you almost nothing on its own. It is a percentage off a number the publisher chose, and the publisher chooses it knowing you will read the percentage.

What to look at instead

The floor, not the percentage. Across the games I track a price history for, the lowest recorded price averages 55 percent below list. If today's cut is 40 percent and the record is 75, the sale is not the sale you are waiting for. Every game page here prints its own recorded low.

Whether it is at the floor right now. Of the games discounted today, 69 percent are sitting at the deepest cut their history has ever recorded. When a sale lands it usually lands at the bottom, so a cut that is nowhere near the floor is unusual and worth ignoring.

The first sale takes about four months. Measured across 34,640 games with both a release date and a discount on record, the first discount arrives an average of 125 days after release. If you are waiting on something new, that is the number.

Where this is weak

The two tables use averages, and averages hide the shape of a distribution. A thousand reviews is an arbitrary line and I picked it because it is roughly where a game stops being invisible, not because anything happens there.

The bigger hole is that this only sees games that got discounted at all. A game nobody ever put on sale has no row in the price history, so the whole analysis is conditioned on a sale having happened at least once. That biases everything here toward games with publishers who run sales.

And the release year is the Steam store's date. Ports, re-releases and games that spent three years in early access all carry a date that means something different from the one next to it.