Ladies and gentlemen, it's time.
You know the drill. Deep discounts up the wazoo, stickers to earn, and new stuff in the Points Shop, all of it adding up to Valve-powered seasonal trauma inflicted on your personal finances.
And I know what you're thinking: Are there really more than 2,000 games for under $5 in the Autumn Sale? And the answer is "yes," or in that neighborhood, anyway. If you hit the "sales" option on the eternally handy SteamDB website, you can apply all sorts of filters to narrow things down as you like. Set the maximum price on the right-hand menu at $5, and blammo, there you go. (Hey, if it was hard, I wouldn't be doing it.)
The one bump in this road is that SteamDB is getting hammered right now, so the price update queue is a bit jammed: The site says there are 2,105 games currently discounted, but I don't want to commit to that 100% just in case it's off. You can perform similar magic on Steam itself while browsing games via the price slider, but it actually gives me a lower number—1,243 discounted games, to be specific. I think it may be filtering more stringently, though.
In any event, it's a whole lotta deals, and the sheer volume of discounts on Steam means that some of these deeply-cheap games—maybe even a lot of 'em—probably aren't top-tier stuff. You might therefore want to apply more filters: You can set genre and feature tags, release dates, a minimum user rating or number of reviews, and all sorts of other things to winnow it out a bit. I like browsing as much as the next guy, but 2,105 games is a lot to dig through.
Alternate idea: PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield previously put together a list of 31 must-play games going for $5 or less in the Steam Summer Sale, and I'm going to see if I can bully him into doing it again. No promises, but Ted's a pretty good guy, and his taste in games is solid too. (Just please don't get him talking about Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.)
The 2026 Steam Autumn Sale is a one-weeker, meaning it comes to an end on October 8.
