Tony Wang12 min readThe Hidden Console Tax: What Steam vs. PlayStation Really Costs
Cross-checking 44 top-selling games between Steam and PlayStation: an 11x sale-frequency gap, a real indie price markup, and lopsided exclusivity.
Steam and PlayStation sell a lot of the same games. They rarely sell them the same way. We cross-checked 24 of Steam's best-selling titles against the PlayStation Store, then ran the comparison in reverse — 20 of PlayStation's own top sellers checked against Steam — and pulled two catalog-wide cuts on top: how often each storefront runs a sale, and how Steam's long tail of barely-reviewed games has grown over time. The receipts, with exact numbers.
Steam runs a sale 11x more often — but not a deeper one
At the exact moment we pulled this, 41.6% of Steam's non-free game catalog was actively discounted, against just 3.65% of PlayStation's. That's an 11.4x gap in how often either storefront has a sale running on any given title.
What's not different is how deep the cut goes once a sale starts. In a 100-title, popularity-weighted sample from each platform, the average discount was 69.5% off on Steam and 66.4% off on PlayStation — close enough to call a wash. So this isn't a story about PlayStation being stingier when it discounts. It's a story about Steam simply running far more sales, far more often, on far more of its catalog at any given time.
The publisher, not the genre, predicts the price gap
Cross-checking Steam's best sellers against PlayStation pricing surfaces real, repeatable markups — but only for a specific kind of game.
Most of the markup cases are small or solo-developer studios self-publishing a survival/crafting title — Re-Logic (Terraria), Studio Wildcard (ARK), Pocketpair (Palworld), Facepunch (Rust), Bohemia Interactive (DayZ). Most of the parity-or-cheaper cases are major publishers: FromSoftware, CD Projekt, ConcernedApe's own fixed-price policy, or Sony itself on some of its own titles (Helldivers 2 and Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered are both self-published by Sony and both parity-or-cheaper on PlayStation). Publisher tier explains most of the spread — but not all of it.
Sony marks up two of its own biggest franchises the same way the small studios get marked up. Ghost of Tsushima DIRECTOR'S CUT and God of War Ragnarök are both +17% more expensive on PlayStation than on Steam — self-published by Sony on both storefronts, no small-studio economics involved. God of War Ragnarök is worth naming as a genuine edge case: its PS5 bundle listing is +17% over Steam, but a separate PS4-only edition on the PlayStation Store prices at exact parity with Steam, $59.99 either way — the same title, two different PlayStation SKUs, two different answers to "is this marked up." Publisher size predicts most of this pattern, not all of it.
And then there's the outlier that doesn't fit on a percentage chart at all: Unturned is free on Steam and $24.99 on PlayStation — the same game, one price tag with a $0 in front of it and one without. It's currently 60% off on PlayStation, down to $9.99, and it's still not free.
Full forward-direction cross-check (24 of Steam's top-50 titles by owners, plus 3 Sony first-party titles checked separately)
| Title | Steam | PlayStation | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ghost of Tsushima DIRECTOR'S CUT | $59.99 | $69.99 | +17%, Sony first-party |
| God of War Ragnarök | $59.99 | $69.99 (PS5) / $59.99 (PS4) | +17% on the PS5 bundle listing, exact parity on the separate PS4-only edition |
| Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered | $59.99 | $49.99 | -17%, cheaper on PS |
| PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS | Free | Free | — |
| Apex Legends | Free | Free | — |
| Grand Theft Auto V | $0* | $39.99 base | *Steam listing showed a temporary promotional $0 price at pull time |
| Black Myth: Wukong | $59.99 | $59.99 | parity |
| Unturned | Free | $24.99 | most extreme gap found |
| Palworld | $20.99 | $29.99 | +43% |
| Terraria | $9.99 | $19.99 | +100% |
| Rust | $39.99 | $49.99 (Console Edition) | +25% |
| ELDEN RING | $59.99 | $59.99 | parity |
| Stardew Valley | $14.99 | $14.99 | parity |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | $59.99 | $49.99 | -17%, cheaper on PS |
| The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt | $39.99 | $39.99 | parity |
| War Thunder | Free | Free | — |
| ARK: Survival Evolved | $9.89 | $14.99 | +52% |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | $14.99† | $59.99 base† | †both mid-sale at pull time, not a clean base-price comparison |
| Rocket League | Free | Free | — |
| DayZ | $49.99 | $54.99 | +10% |
| Phasmophobia | $19.99 | $19.99 | parity |
| HELLDIVERS 2 | $39.99 | $39.99 | parity — Sony self-published on both |
| Counter-Strike 2 | $0 | absent | never released on PlayStation |
| Team Fortress 2 | Free | absent | never released on PlayStation |
| Left 4 Dead 2 | $9.99 | absent | never released on PlayStation |
| Garry's Mod | $9.99 | absent | never released on any console |
| Lost Ark | Free | absent | PC/mobile only, no console version ever shipped |
Steam's junk tail is a real, growing trend — not just a big number
The oft-cited stat is that most of Steam's catalog barely gets reviewed. That's true — 83.7% of Steam's full catalog currently sits in Steam's own "insufficient reviews" band, games that never accumulate enough reviews to earn any rating tier at all. But a single snapshot could just mean recent games haven't had time to catch up. So we isolated cohorts old enough that time-to-review isn't the explanation: every year below has had at least 6 years to accumulate reviews as of today.
Even holding maturation time roughly constant, the junk-tier share climbed from 51.7% of 2014 releases to 70.9% of 2020 releases — real growth in the share of Steam games that never find an audience large enough to rate them, not an artifact of recency. PlayStation's dataset has no equivalent field at all: its certification gate means there's no comparable "never got enough attention to be rated" bucket to even measure.
PlayStation's own hits are the harder ones to port
Run the exclusivity check in the direction gaming press rarely bothers with — not "how many Steam games reach PlayStation" but "how many PlayStation hits reach Steam" — and the result flips the expected story.
That runs against the consensus gaming-press narrative since Sony's PC-porting push began in 2020 — that console exclusivity is steadily dying. Measured here, going from Steam to PlayStation is still the easier crossing.
But the 7 PlayStation absences aren't all the same kind of "exclusive." Only 2 are genuine no-PC-port holdouts:
- Own-launcher exclusivity (3): Minecraft, Roblox and Genshin Impact all route around Steam entirely — Microsoft/Mojang's own launcher, Roblox's own client, and Genshin's own launcher/Epic Games Store. None of these ever attempted Steam distribution; it's a business choice, not a technical gap.
- Genuine no-PC-port holdouts (2): Bloodborne is the standout — 11 years since its 2015 PS4 launch, still no PC version, despite FromSoftware's own Elden Ring and Sekiro proving there's massive PC appetite for the studio's games. The Last of Us Part II is the other: Part I got a 2023 PC remake, but Part II Remastered hasn't followed.
- Different SKU exists on PC (2): the specific "Last of Us Remastered" (2014) SKU is absent, but it's effectively superseded on PC by the separate Part I remake — the franchise is on Steam, just not this exact version. Same logic for World of Tanks Modern Armor, which is the console client; PC's "World of Tanks" is a wholly separate product on Wargaming's own launcher, not Steam.
Full reverse-direction cross-check (20 of PlayStation's top sellers by reviews)
| Title | PlayStation | Steam | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rocket League | Free | Free | — |
| Apex Legends | Free | Free | — |
| Warframe | Free | Free | — |
| eFootball | Free | Free | — |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | $59.99 base | $14.99† | †both mid-sale at pull time |
| Fall Guys | Free | Free | — |
| War Thunder | Free | Free | — |
| Call of Duty: Black Ops III | $59.99 (Zombies Chronicles Ed.), 67% off | Free‡ | ‡converted to free-to-play on Steam in 2024 after Activision shut down the original online services — not a like-for-like discount |
| DC Universe Online | Free | Free | — |
| Destiny 2 | Free | Free | — |
| Brawlhalla | Free | Free | — |
| The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt | $39.99 | $39.99 | parity |
| Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 | Free (lite) / paid | $4.99 (on sale) | — |
| Minecraft | $19.99 | absent | own launcher (Microsoft/Mojang) |
| Roblox | Free | absent | own client |
| Genshin Impact | Free | absent | own launcher/Epic Games Store |
| Bloodborne | $34.99 | absent | no PC port, 11 years on |
| The Last of Us Part II | $39.99 | absent | no PC port (unlike Part I) |
| The Last of Us Remastered | $19.99 | absent | superseded on PC by the separate Part I remake |
| World of Tanks Modern Armor | Free | absent | console client; PC version is a separate Wargaming product |
The honest caveats
- PlayStation's data is
region=usonly. No non-US storefront coverage — every price and availability finding here is US-specific. - Sample, not census. The forward check covers 24 of Steam's top-50 titles by owners plus 3 additional Sony first-party titles; the reverse check covers 20 of PlayStation's top sellers by reviews, deduplicated by concept. Both are real cross-checks, not exhaustive catalogs.
- Snapshot pricing. A few titles were mid-sale at pull time on one or both sides (Red Dead Redemption 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Grand Theft Auto V's anomalous $0 Steam listing) — those are flagged in the tables rather than folded into the headline percentages.
- Discount depth is a 100-title sample per platform, weighted toward the most-reviewed titles — directional, not a full-catalog average.
- Some titles ship under multiple PlayStation SKUs (different editions, or a PS4 vs. PS5 listing) at different prices — we generally picked the primary/flagship listing, but that choice can change the answer, as God of War Ragnarök shows above. Where we found more than one live SKU, we noted both rather than picking silently.
That's the trade you're actually making by picking a platform: PlayStation prices most of its biggest names the same as Steam — though not even always its own — and discounts less often; Steam runs sales constantly but lets its small-studio hits, and occasionally Sony's own biggest franchises, charge a real premium on console. Track either catalog directly through the Steam games dataset and the PlayStation games dataset, or the Steam charts tracker for what's live right now.
Frequently asked questions
Is it cheaper to buy games on Steam or PlayStation?
It depends entirely on the publisher, not the platform in general. For most AAA titles, price parity holds exactly — Elden Ring, Stardew Valley and The Witcher 3 all match ($59.99, $14.99, $39.99), and Cyberpunk 2077 is actually $10 cheaper on PlayStation ($49.99 vs $59.99). But small-studio survival/crafting games carry a real, consistent PlayStation markup: Terraria costs exactly twice as much on PlayStation ($9.99 vs $19.99), ARK: Survival Evolved is 52% more, Palworld is 43% more, and Unturned is free on Steam but $24.99 on PlayStation.
Why does Steam have so many more sales than PlayStation?
At the exact snapshot checked, 41.6% of Steam's paid game catalog was actively on sale versus just 3.65% of PlayStation's — an 11.4x gap in how often either storefront runs a discount. When a sale does happen, the average discount depth is nearly identical on both platforms (about 69.5% off on Steam vs. 66.4% off on PlayStation), so it isn't that PlayStation discounts are shallower. Steam simply runs far more sales, on far more of its catalog, at any given moment.
Is Steam's catalog full of low-quality games?
A large and growing share, yes. 83.7% of Steam's full catalog currently sits in Steam's own 'insufficient reviews' tier — games that never accumulate enough reviews to earn any rating band at all. It's a real trend, not just a big snapshot number: among release-year cohorts old enough to have had 6+ years to accumulate reviews, that junk-tier share climbed from 51.7% of 2014 releases to 70.9% of 2020 releases. PlayStation's certification-gated storefront has no equivalent tier in its data at all.
Are PlayStation exclusives coming to PC more than ever?
Less than commonly assumed, measured in the direction gaming press rarely checks. Cross-referencing PlayStation's own top-selling titles against Steam, 35% (7 of 20 checked) are absent from Steam entirely — a higher absence rate than the 20.8% of Steam's top sellers absent from PlayStation. Of those 7 absences, though, only 2 (Bloodborne and The Last of Us Part II) are genuine no-PC-port holdouts; the other 5 simply route around Steam by design — Minecraft, Roblox and Genshin Impact all use their own launchers, and two more exist on PC under a different product/SKU entirely.
What's the single biggest price gap between Steam and PlayStation?
Unturned: completely free on Steam, $24.99 base on PlayStation (currently 60% off to $9.99) for the identical game — an undefined, effectively infinite percentage markup, and the most extreme case found in this cross-check of 44 titles.