How the Price Picker works

Sources

Price, game and review responses from Steam are cached for up to 24 hours, so a price changed on Steam today can take up to a day to appear.

Choosing similar games

The starting pool is whatever Steam lists as "More like this" on your page. Each game's top 10 store tags are then compared with yours. A game is ticked by default when it shares enough tags with yours, is paid and has a US price. Games below that stay in the list, unticked, with their shared-tag count.

The number of shared tags needed is the bar, and it scales with how many countable genre tags your own game has. A game with only a few genre tags cannot share many, so a fixed bar of 3 would leave it with nothing to compare.

Tags that describe how a game is played or presented rather than what it is do not count toward the overlap: Singleplayer, Multiplayer, Co-op, Online Co-op, Local Co-op, PvP, PvE, Atmospheric, Combat, Indie, Casual, 2D, 3D, Great Soundtrack, Replay Value, Difficult, Controller, Early Access, Colorful, Cute, Dark and Funny. Genre and theme tags (Sci-fi, Story Rich and the like) do count, except that Action, Adventure and Action-Adventure count as one tag between them, and a game whose only shared tags are broad ones (that Action family and Exploration) is never ticked by default. Tags that name one idea under several spellings count once: Roguelike, Roguelite and Action Roguelike; Souls-like and Soulslike; FPS and First-Person Shooter; Platformer and 2D Platformer; Sci-fi and Science Fiction; Pixel Graphics and Pixel Art; Action, Adventure and Action-Adventure. A VR game is only compared with other VR games, both ways; VR itself is the gate and never counts as a shared tag. A game Steam rates adult-only (its Adult Only Sexual Content or Frequent Nudity or Sexual Content notice) is not compared with a game that has neither. The tags shared with your game are shown on each row as the reason it is there, up to four.

When fewer than 5 of the first 12 are priced and close, the pool is widened. The tool reads the lists of the two closest games (up to 30 games in all), then searches Steam's store on your top two genre tags and adds up to 8 results. Added games must be released, priced in the US and clear the same bar. At most 12 games are shown, the best fits first, and a note on the page says what was done.

You can tick or untick any game with a US price and add games by name; an added game is ticked when it has a US price. Everything recalculates in your browser. Games you add or tick by hand count toward the 5 and 8 game floors, but the median-shared-tags test judges only Steam's own suggestions. Each row shows the release year, and games released 5 or more years ago are flagged older pricing because their list price may predate today's market. Games with no US price (free, unreleased, delisted or not sold there) are shown but never counted. When your game is free and 3 or more of its closest games are free, the headline says it covers similar paid games and names the free ones left out.

Evidence level

The level is computed from the ticked games with a US price: how many there are and the median number of tags each of Steam's own suggestions shares with yours. The bars scale with your genre tag count (see the table above). With no Steam suggestions left ticked, the median test has nothing to judge and the game count decides. When the bar is below 3, the reasons say why. They also list how many games were released 5 or more years ago. Strong is capped at Moderate when the top quarter of prices starts at twice the price where the bottom quarter ends, or more, because a range that wide says little.

The level measures how close the comparison is, not how likely a price is to work.

Market benchmark range

All spread maths uses the USD list price (the price before any discount), so a game on sale today does not pull the range down. Steam sends prices as integer cents; they are turned into dollars once, before the spread is calculated. Regional prices stay in cents until they are shown.

The range describes what similar games list for today. It is not a forecast and not a promise that a price inside it will sell. The next-step line under your position is one of three fixed prompts, chosen only by whether you are above, inside or below the range.

Regional benchmark

Prices are read for 10 Steam regions: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, China, India, Japan, Australia, Canada, Poland. Each row compares your list price with the median list price of the ticked similar games sold in that region, rounded down to a whole cent. If Steam does not answer for a region, it is left out and the page says so.

Both numbers are in the same currency, straight from Steam. Nothing is converted. These are competitor benchmarks, not Valve's own regional prices: Valve's Steamworks pricing tool gives its own recommended regional prices, so use both. For a game with no Steam price yet, the table shows the similar median alone.

What players say about price

For up to six ticked games, the tool reads up to 30 of the most recent English reviews. The community pages come 10 at a time and duplicates are dropped, so a game can show fewer than 30.

A review is counted only when it uses a price phrase such as "worth it", "not worth", "overpriced", "too expensive", "for the price", "full price", "wait for a sale", "on sale", "refund" or "cheap". The bare word "worth" does not count, so "worth playing" is ignored. Matching reviews go into one bucket: too expensive or not worth, wait for a sale, good value, or other price talk, checked in that order.

The panel shows the bucket counts, the sample size, the language and the ordering, with up to two quotes per bucket word for word. A long review is cut to a window of up to 140 characters around the phrase that decided its bucket. The counts never feed the range or the evidence level.