Free games are 13.2% of titles and 49.5% of players: Italian prices on Steam on October 17

Free games weigh heavily on players, and little on the number of store pages: those 41 titles are 13.2% of the list. In the top 10 at the same hour, seven are free and add up to 1,856,096 players online. The three paid ones are WARDOGS at €39.99 (195,074 players, early access page), ARC Raiders at €39.99 (93,345) and Call of Duty, whose Italian price on its page is “from €69.99” (81,939). The Free-to-Play genre label, in this file, coincides with the games marked as free: the same 41 titles and the same 2,672,487 players. The median for free games is 17,928 players online. The median for the whole list is 3,802.

Early access is a small and highly concentrated group. Thirteen games carry it on their page and add up to 464,742 players, 8.6%. At the top is WARDOGS, a paid game. Next comes Slay the Spire 2, at €22.99, with 68,018 players online and a release date on its page of March 5, 2026. Further down, the label also covers old games on the same page: Project Zomboid is listed as early access with a date of November 8, 2013 and had 47,508 people that morning. The label describes the commercial status, not the age of the game.

The prices are those of the Italian store at the time of collection, discounts included, not the historical launch price. Seven paid games are listed as “Not on sale” — among them Grand Theft Auto V Legacy and Rocket League — and add up to 52,869 players: they are left out of the price bands. Among the other 262, the band where the listed price is between 30 and 40 euros has the most people online: 45 games, 691,418 players. It includes WARDOGS, ARC Raiders, Rust (64,212 people at €39.99) and Helldivers 2 (41,838 at €39.99). The 40 to 60 euro band has more titles, 65, and fewer players, 526,551. The 20 to 30 euro band has 42 titles and 456,445 people.

Below 20 euros there are 98 games and 838,839 players: 40 titles priced between 0 and 10 euros (350,884 people) and 58 between 10 and 20 euros (487,955). From 60 euros up there are 12 games and 164,849 people, the band with the fewest titles and the fewest players online. Call of Duty falls here because the figure written in its price is 69.99, preceded by “from”. In the same band, that day, EA SPORTS FC 27 had 28,427 players online at €69.99 and Forza Horizon 6 had 14,242, at the same price.

The shelf price and players online measure two different things, and this reading does not see revenue. A free game can have tens of thousands of people in it and income that the file does not record. A €69.99 game may have sold well and, on a Saturday morning, have few people online. In the October 17 reading the 30–40 euro band is where price and presence meet at the highest number of players online. For anyone setting a PC launch price, the comparison makes sense on the same day and the same list, and needs to be redone: a discount moves a game into a different band even though the product is the same.