This Christmas, I bought my brother-in-law’s vintage 2004-era gaming laptop for cheap, so now I have a PC for playing games again. Besides being old, its screen is broken, so Daniel, having graduated and gotten a Real Job, passed it on to me, who is still in college. Anyway, I installed Steam and bought Commander Keen and Half-Life. Commander Keen for the memories and Half-Life because I was curious how an FPS could get a metacritic score of 97. I don’t play FPSes and mostly associate them with people yelling “Boom! Headshot!” and “Holding a knife makes me run faster". Anyway, I’ll probably write about those games later.

Commander Keen is only $5 (though it includes only the two famous games of the series), so being the Poor Grad Student that I am (see above), I went trolling through Steam’s store to see what else I could find for Cheap.

Since I am a Poor Grad Student (see above), I also compiled statistics on the prices to see how the long tail shows up in digital distribution. The table is followed by an exciting summary.

Table

$4 - $5
$8 - $10		← Psychonauts here
$15 - $20
$25 - $35
$40 - $50
$60 - $100

Summary

Steam’s catalog consists of 1108 items. But this includes trailers, demos and source code. The first 565 items are free; though I didn’t search exhaustively for free promotional games, I only turned up two: Peggle Extreme and Sam and Max 104*. I would recommend the second if you like political satire. Or sarcasm.

The remaining 543 items start at $4 and go up to $100 for every game Valve has made. Seriously.

There are only 2 games at $4, although one is Geometry Wars, and 52 more at $5. So 10% of Steam’s games are $5 or less.

203 of the games are $10 or a little less : 37%. So almost half of Steam’s games are bargain bin prices. This includes a lot of old (4-year-plus) big name games like Prince of Persia, but also a number newer games that are either worthless or indie. Or both. It’s hard to tell from a paragraph-length description.

160 of the games are $15 or $20 : 29%. This includes most games 2-4 years old like Half-Life 2. For me $20 is the limit for purchasing something based on a high recommendation online. Anything more expensive is a result of a personal recommendation from friends or blind brand-name loyalty (which is to say, Zelda). Still, that’s three quarters of Steam that I’d be willing to try assuming that I had a computer that could run the games.

61 of the games are $25 - $35 : 11%. This is the range I associate with ’small new game’, like a DS game or Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, or with a blockbuster game a year or two old.

48 of the games are $40 - $50 : 8%, which I associate with ‘unpopular new game’ to ‘new game more than a month old’. This, however, is probably an incorrect reflex left over from consoles, because the remaining 16 items that cost $60 and up are all collections from various publishers.

Note: I bet that Amazon would turn up a similar ratio if you went and sorted all PC games by price. I don’t have the patience to do that. It might be fun to go lurk in the local Best Buy, though. I bet the ratio there skews significantly toward more expensive games.

*Season 1, Episode 4: Abe Lincoln Must Die!