Early access games - compare prices across 40+ stores

Popularity comes from Steam data: sales, wishlists and player reviews. As of August 2026 the leaders are Subnautica 2, Slay the Spire 2 and Half Sword. With early access one thing matters more than a ranking position: when the last update shipped. A game that has had nothing for six months is effectively abandoned, however well it still sells. Sorting by Metascore helps little here, since games still in development rarely carry critic scores.

You buy a game that is not finished yet and play it while it is being built. The developer gets money to complete the work and feedback along the way, and you get a lower price and some influence over what gets made. Hades, Valheim, Baldur's Gate 3 and Subnautica all came out this way. The risk is real and worth naming plainly: some projects never reach 1.0, and others change direction in ways that stop suiting you. The model is especially common among indie games, survival games and simulation games, where a game grows by adding systems rather than finishing a story.

This is the most expensive category in the whole catalogue by median, and that is not a mistake. The median early access game costs about 50% more than the site-wide median (as of August 2026). The reason is structural: early access holds almost no old, cheap titles, because finished games stop carrying the label. What is left is fresh material. The range is also unusually tight, with the bottom quarter sitting at half the median rather than the third that is normal elsewhere.

Far less often than the rest of the catalogue, and this is the single most useful thing to know here. 31.8% of paid titles carry a discount right now against 39.1% across the site, and the cuts are the shallowest anywhere: an average of 57%, with only 32.2% of them reaching 75% or more. Developers are reluctant to discount a game they are still building, and many state outright that the price will rise at 1.0. In this one category waiting can cost more than buying now, the opposite of everywhere else in the catalogue.

For 25.8% of early access games the cheapest offer comes from a keyshop, with a median saving of 56.9%, the shallowest of any category. Keyshops also cover early access least often, because games still in development reach indirect distribution less often and later. Before buying a reseller key, check the date of the last update in the official store, since keys for abandoned titles stay in circulation long after the work stopped. The list of stores is on the stores page.

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Keyshop or official store?