Best Time to Buy PC Games: Free, Cheap & Co-op Picks

The best time to buy PC games is almost never launch day. If you can wait a few weeks, seasonal sales, cheap key stores and free giveaways turn a bloated wishlist into a stocked library for pocket change. This guide front-loads the answer: when to buy, how deep discounts usually go, and 16 specific games worth pouncing on the second they drop.

Last updated: June 12, 2026. Prices checked: June 2026. Sources: Steam, Epic, publisher pages and partner stores. We refresh prices and sale notes regularly.

Best picks at a glance

• Best cheap pickup (under $3): Hidden Through Time, a relaxing seek-and-find that goes dirt cheap every sale.
• Best budget RPG: In Stars And Time for story lovers, Tower of Time for tactics fans.
• Best premium (worth full price, better on sale): Pentiment and FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time.
• Best for 2 players: 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel, a genuine brain-melter.
• Best for big groups: No Time to Relax, online party chaos for a full table.
• Best couch co-op: Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, four hands on one spaceship.
• Best 4-player co-op: Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide, still brutal and now near-free.
• Best cross-platform: A Hat in Time, a joyful 3D platformer on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch.
• Best solo time-sink: My Time at Portia for cozy crafting, Mad Games Tycoon 2 for management nerds.

Quick list

The best time to buy PC games (sales calendar)

Most PC discounts run on a predictable rhythm. Learn the calendar and you rarely pay full price again.

• Steam Spring Sale (mid-March): A solid first chance for titles that launched the previous autumn to take their first big cut.
• Steam Summer Sale (late June to early July): The deepest, broadest event of the year. If a game has ever been on sale, it is usually on sale now.
• Steam Autumn Sale (late November): Lines up with Black Friday, so you get Steam plus aggressive key-store and publisher pricing at the same time.
• Steam Winter Sale (late December into early January): Matches the summer event for depth and is the best window for catching up on a whole year of releases.
• Publisher and franchise weeks: Throughout the year, individual publishers run focused sales that often beat the seasonal price for their own catalog.
• Epic free games (weekly): Epic gives away at least one PC game every week, permanently yours once claimed. Check our giveaways tracker so you never miss one.

Those are rough averages for catalog titles a year or more old. Brand-new releases discount far less, so patience pays the biggest dividend on the things you can stand to wait for.

Best cheap and free-ish picks

These are the games to grab without a second thought when a sale lands. Even at full price they cost less than a sandwich, and on sale they are basically rounding errors.

Hidden Through Time is the easiest recommendation here. It is a calm, hand-illustrated seek-and-find with community levels, and it falls under three dollars constantly. Timespinner gives you a full pixel metroidvania with a great soundtrack for around five dollars on sale. Blades of Time is rougher and older, but if you want straightforward hack-and-slash action for the price of a coffee, it delivers. For something a bit deeper, Tower of Time packs a meaty tactical RPG into a budget-bin price.

Want zero outlay? Watch our giveaways page. Plenty of the games in this guide have appeared in free promotions over the years, and claiming them during a giveaway is genuinely the best time to buy: it costs nothing.

Best for 2 players

Not every co-op game needs a full squad. 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel is the standout duo pick, a head-to-head strategy game that adds time travel and parallel boards to chess until your brain quietly files for divorce. It is perfect for two players who like a long, thoughtful match.

A Hat in Time also shines as a pair thanks to its online co-op mode, letting a second player drop into its colorful platforming worlds. It is one of the friendliest games on this list to share with someone new to the genre.

Best for 3-4 (co-op)

This is where the squad games live. Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide supports four players carving through endless rat-men, and because it is an older title it now sells for next to nothing. It remains a brilliant, tense co-op crawl. Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime puts up to four of you inside one neon spaceship, each scrambling between stations, and the comedy of nobody manning the guns at the right moment never gets old.

For pure chaos, No Time To Explain Remastered runs co-op for up to four players across its absurd gun-recoil platforming. FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time rounds things out with cozy online play, letting friends craft, fish and adventure together in the same relaxed world.

Best for 5+ (party)

When the group gets big, No Time to Relax is the call. It is a digital board-game party built for a crowded table, online or local, and it scales happily past four. Grab it on sale before a games night and you have an evening of entertainment for a couple of dollars per head, or less.

Best couch co-op

For two-to-four players on one screen, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime earns its second mention because it is one of the best couch experiences money can buy, especially with kids or non-gamers. A Hat in Time also works beautifully on the sofa with a controller each. Both pair perfectly with a Steam Deck hooked up to the TV.

Best cross-platform

If you want a game you can also play on console, prioritize titles with wide releases. A Hat in Time, Pentiment, My Time at Portia and Tower of Time all span PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch, so you can buy on whichever platform is cheapest that week and still own a version that fits your setup. In Stars And Time covers PC, PlayStation and Switch, which makes it an easy handheld pick.

Best solo time-sinks

Some of the strongest value on this list is single-player. My Time at Portia is a hundred-hour crafting and town-rebuilding sim that regularly drops to around six dollars. Mad Games Tycoon 2 is a deep, endlessly tweakable studio-management game for anyone who loves spreadsheets with personality. Pentiment tells a gorgeous hand-drawn medieval mystery, In Stars And Time wrings real emotion out of a time loop, and Timelie delivers clever rewind-the-clock stealth puzzles. Browse more in our RPG and indie hubs.

Honourable / adjacent picks

These are great, but they do not slot neatly into the categories above, so they live here instead of as core co-op or party picks.

• Blades of Time is fun budget action, but it is single-player only and shows its age, so it is a value pick rather than a headline.
• Timelie is a fantastic puzzle game, yet its later co-op-style mechanic is really one player controlling two characters, so do not buy it expecting multiplayer.
• Mad Games Tycoon 2 is a brilliant solo sim that some people expect to be a fast arcade tycoon. It is slow, deep and management-heavy, so it suits planners, not button-mashers.

FAQ

When is the best time to buy PC games on Steam? The Summer Sale (late June to early July) and Winter Sale (late December) are the two deepest events of the year. The Spring (March) and Autumn (November) sales are still strong and worth a look, especially since Autumn overlaps with Black Friday pricing.

Is it cheaper to buy from Steam or key stores like Eneba and Kinguin? It depends on the title and the week. During major Steam events, Steam itself is often competitive, but third-party key stores like Eneba, Kinguin and GOG frequently undercut catalog prices the rest of the year. Comparing both is the whole point of our price-comparison catalog.

Should I buy PC games at launch or wait? Wait, unless you are sure you will play it immediately. New releases rarely discount in their first few months, and many take close to a year to reach a meaningful cut. If you can be patient, you often save 50% or more.

How big are Steam sale discounts usually? For games a year or more old, 50-90% is common, and many older indies hit their lowest-ever price during summer and winter. Recent releases tend to land closer to 10-30%.

Are Epic free games actually worth claiming? Yes. Epic gives away at least one PC game every week, and once claimed it is permanently yours. Even if you never play some of them, the occasional standout makes it worth a thirty-second weekly check on our giveaways tracker.

Is it safe to buy cheap keys from Eneba or Kinguin? Generally yes, when you stick to well-rated sellers and a marketplace's buyer protection. Read seller ratings, check the region the key is for, and avoid deals that look far too good to be true.

When do new releases first go on sale? Most first see a small discount during the first seasonal sale after launch, then a deeper one around the one-year mark. Wishlisting the game is the simplest way to catch that first drop the moment it happens.

Does a wishlist really help me buy at the best time? A lot. Steam notifies you by email whenever a wishlisted game discounts, and the order of your wishlist nudges what gets surfaced to you during sales. Combine it with our deals and Steam sale pages and you almost never miss a low.

The takeaway

The best time to buy PC games is rarely now and almost always soon. Wishlist what you want, wait for the next seasonal Steam sale, compare it against key stores, and claim the free stuff while you are at it. Whether you are after a three-dollar co-op night with Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide or a cozy solo hundred hours in My Time at Portia, the patient buyer wins every time.

Start with our live deals and the full price-comparison catalog to see exactly what each game costs across Steam, Epic, GOG and partner stores right now.

Alex, Scout Team