How we price
Last updated 30 August 2026.
Every game page carries a price comparison table. This page explains where those numbers come from, what we mean by the best price, and what we will not do.
Where prices come from
- Official first-party stores are listed on every game page whether or not they pay us anything. PlayStation Store, Xbox Store, Nintendo eShop, Steam, the App Store and Google Play run no public affiliate programme, so we earn nothing from them and list them anyway because they are usually where you should buy.
- Authorised resellers such as Green Man Gaming, Fanatical, Humble and GOG sell keys issued by the publisher. Several run affiliate programmes. Every one of these is marked in the table.
- Grey-market key marketplaces are marked separately as key resellers. Their prices are often the lowest on the table. The trade-off is regional activation restrictions, no publisher support, and limited recourse if a key fails.
How often we check
Prices move hourly and vary by country. We do not display a price without a date next to it, and we would rather show an empty cell than a stale number presented as current. A price with no check date has not been verified and should not be relied on.
What counts as the best price
The best price flag marks the lowest verified price among the offers listed, for the United States, in US dollars, excluding tax. It is not a judgement about which store you should use. An official store at two dollars more is frequently the better purchase, and the table marks store type so you can make that call yourself.
Where a game is included with a subscription you already pay for, we say so at the top of the section, because that is usually cheaper than any price in the table.
Regional pricing
Publishers set different prices in different countries, sometimes by a factor of three. We publish US prices because that is the market most of our readers buy in. Buying outside your own region to exploit a lower price violates most storefront terms, and we do not publish guidance on doing it.
Price alerts
[Not built yet. If you add alerts, this section must state: what triggers an alert, how often prices are polled, which stores are covered, what data you store about the subscriber, how they unsubscribe, and that an alert is not a guarantee the price will still be live when they click. Link that back to the privacy policy.]
Affiliate links
Some links on this site are affiliate links, and every one of them is marked in the table and disclosed above it. If you buy through one we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
Affiliate arrangements never influence a review score, a ranking, which games we cover, or which stores appear in a table. Stores that pay us nothing are listed alongside stores that do. Affiliate links carry rel="sponsored nofollow", which is what Google requires.
What we will not list
We do not link to pirated copies, cracked builds, repack sites or ROM archives, and we will not publish instructions for obtaining them. This is not a judgement about anyone who does. It is that distributing or linking to circumvented copies is copyright infringement, and this site is built to be a legitimate publication that publishers and storefronts can deal with.
If the question behind that is how to play a game cheaply, the honest answers are on every game page already: subscription services, authorised key resellers, regional sales and simply waiting. Games get cheaper.