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 44,000 games for under $5 in the Autumn Sale? And the answer is "yes," according to SteamDB anyway: The "sales" option on the site lets you filter games by a range of options, including price—cap the list at five bucks and that's what comes out.
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.
Okay, my numbers were a bit off when the sale first went live. I was technically correct that more than 2,000 games are currently available on Steam for less than $5, but this is one of those cases where 'technically correct' actually isn't the best kind of correct. So, now that SteamDB isn't getting hammered quite so badly, it says there are actually 44,048 games available for less than a fiver. Sorry for jumping the gun.
