The Frugal Gamer’s Manual: Amassing High-Quality Steam Games for Nothing

Quick Links

• Finding the Best Free Steam Games With Steam Search
• Checking Trending Games on Steam
• Using Third-Party Websites to Find Free Games

Key Takeaways

• Use Steam search filters to find all free games and refine by genre, tags, and more.
• Check trending free games to find newer releases with good user activity and reviews.
• Utilize third-party websites like Reddit and SteamDB for free promotions and giveaways.

There are plenty of good free games on Steam, but it can be hard to find them. Even if you look up lists of free games on Steam online, there’s a chance they won’t be up-to-date and miss some of the newer releases. Fortunately, you can take matters into your own hands with these handy ways I use to find great free games.

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## 1 Finding the Best Free Steam Games With Steam Search

There are plenty ofreasons to use Steam , but one thing I really like about it is how easy it is to find well-rated free games. To do this, go to the Steam store front page (it doesn’t matter if it’s in the client or on the website). Then, click themagnifying glass icon to the right of the search box to bring up the search tools.

Look at the filters on the right side of the results. At the very top, you should seeNarrow by price . Drag the slider all the way to the left so that the filter readsFree .

Now you have every free product on Steam at your fingertips. This will include products you likely won’t have any use for, such as free DLC for games you don’t own. To fix that, go down to theShow selected types filter and checkGames .

If you want, you can also take the time to go through the filters and refine what games you see. For example, you can select relevant tags, how many players the game supports, or whether or not it has been verified for the Steam Deck. If you’re taking the latter route, remember that you canshare your mouse and keyboard with your Steam Deck if you think it’ll help with a particular genre.

Finally, we want to see what the best games are. To do this, click on the drop-down box next toSort by and clickUser reviews . Now, Steam will sort all of the games based on the ratio of positive to negative ratio the games have—the more positive reviews, the better.

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## 2 Checking Trending Games on Steam

The above search trick is great for finding the best free games—but after a while, the search gets a little stale. The same few games stay at the top of the rankings, and if you play them all, you’re pretty much stuck until another blockbuster game comes out.

Fortunately, there is a way to find good, free games that have just been released. Head back to the Steam storefront, then hover over theNew and Noteworthy category at the top and selectNew Releases .

Scroll down until you see the list of games, then click on**Popular New Releases** .

Like above, set the slider to**Free** and check the**Games** filter. By going through the popular new releases, Steam will now serve up games that are both seeing a lot of user activity and are rated well. You can see this in the review column: all of the games will have at least a "mostly positive" rating.

If you applied the same filters to the regular new releases list, you’d see free games that are either unrated or rated poorly, so this method is best to find games that are worth playing.

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## 3 Using Third-Party Websites to Find Free Games

Things get a little trickier if you want to find games with free special offers or giveaways. If you want to go this route, you’ll need to take advantage of some third-party websites.

Reddit has a few subreddits dedicated to finding free games, including titles that are having a free promotion period. TheFreeGameFinder andFreeGamesOnSteam subreddits are good places to check out; the latter is particularly good at weeding out games that are only free for a weekend, or during a beta test.

You can also check outSteamDB’s free promotions filter for more titles. This will include DLC titles, but if a game is having a 100% off sale, it’ll pop up here for you to check out.

And finally, if you’re looking for an older game, there’s always a chance that you can get it for free elsewhere. Check out thesesites where you can download old games for free for more information.

Finding free Steam games is easy, but finding titles worthy of your time is a little trickier. Now you know how to locate the well-rated Steam games, plus some places to find titles that are having free-to-keep promotions.