Key facts
- Cheapest right now
- € Standard · Steam Account · Global · Difmark
- Live offers
- 26 offers · 15 stores
- Our pick
- Standard · Steam Key · Global · Gameboost — €
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Bus Simulator 27 is out today, Tuesday 8 September, on PC. Simteract built it, astragon Entertainment publishes it, and the official price on Steam is €29.99. There is a demo sitting on the same store page.
What makes this morning worth a look is that the resellers did not wait for the doors to open. Codes were already under the official rate before the game unlocked, and they still are.
The cheapest copy costs €10.20 less than Valve asks
CDKeys has the Steam Standard edition at €19.79. Against the €29.99 Valve charges that is €10.20 of difference, 34 per cent under the official rate, and it is a code you redeem into your own account this morning, not a preorder or a promise.
Fifteen offers are live on our PC page and Steam, at €29.99, is the most expensive of the fifteen. In between sit Gameboost at €20.10, GamesPlanet at €20.68, Gameseal at €21.09 with the Standard edition, Kinguin at €21.20, K4G with two offers at €22.06, Gamivo at €22.41 in the global region, Driffle at €25.33, a third K4G entry at €26.47 and Playerland at €26.99.
Eleven of the fifteen come in under €23. From the cheapest to Playerland there is a spread of €7.20 for the same download on the morning of a launch, which is wider than most new releases manage in their first week.
Fourteen of the fifteen sit below the official rate, and the one that does not is Valve. Even Playerland, the dearest reseller of the group, is €3.00 under Steam. K4G is worth a second look while you are there: it appears three times, twice at €22.06 and once at €26.47, so the shop name on its own tells you very little about what you are about to pay.
Three offers at €19.99 are somebody else's account
Difmark posts all three, at the same €19.99, and none of them is a code. They are Steam accounts. You sign into a profile the seller owns, the game sits in that library and it stays there. It never lands in yours, you cannot gift it or resell it, and the day the password changes your access goes with it.
Now hold that against the offer one step above it. The account asks twenty cents more than the CDKeys code and hands you less for the money: a login instead of a game, in second place on a page where first place is cheaper.
GamesPlanet adds two buses for 89 cents more
Our reading of the GamesPlanet euro store today is €20.68, which puts it 89 cents above CDKeys. Preorder there and the Deluxe Pack comes at no extra cost: two more buses and four decorations. On its US store the game is advertised at $29.99 with 20 per cent off, so $23.99.
Which reduces the PC decision to one line. Eighty-nine cents, or two buses and four decorations. Nobody else on the page is adding content to the purchase, so if the extra vehicles appeal at all, that is where the money goes.
508 readings since June, and a floor that has only stepped down
We have been reading this page since 17 June and hold 508 readings of it so far. The cheapest price has never dropped in one move. It has come down a step at a time: €20.39 in August, €19.99 from the 27th to the 31st, and €19.79 since the 1st of this month.
Today's €19.79 is the lowest figure we have ever logged for this game. What that history cannot do yet is worth saying plainly. Fewer than three months of readings is not a pattern, and it will not tell you whether a real sale is two weeks away or half a year away. Read it as a record, not as a forecast.
Launch-day reviews read Mixed
Our record from this morning puts the Steam verdict at Mixed, with 117 positive reviews out of 192. Those are launch-day numbers, written by the people who bought first, and a day-one verdict shifts as the sample grows over the following weeks.
No Metacritic or OpenCritic average has reached our page, so there is nothing on the critic side to set beside it. If the split gives you pause, the demo is the cheapest way to answer the question with your own hands on the wheel.
Felicia Bay, twin cities and twenty districts
The setting is Felicia Bay, a fictional southern European region inspired by Spain and Portugal. Two twin cities, Alcaztelar and Mequina, with twenty districts between them, built in Unreal Engine 5 with dynamic weather and a day and night cycle.
The loop has two halves. On one side you run the operator: plan the routes, set the timetables, hire drivers, keep the fleet serviced and listen to what the passengers make of the service. On the other you drive it yourself, in real time, where turning up on schedule and keeping the ride comfortable for the people behind you is the entire job.
Console buyers have nothing to gain today. The PS5 page carries two live offers and both ask €29.99: Media Markt ES with the standard edition and Difmark with an account. Our last reading of the PlayStation Store there is from July, so we leave it out of the comparison.
On PC the saving is real and it is available on day one. You can buy Bus Simulator 27 key from the cheapest of the fifteen offers we track, and that first position has read €19.79 every single day since the month began.
I have been a gamer for as long as I can remember, and for the last 14 years I have been making life easier for other gamers. CEO and co-founder of Gocdkeys.
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