Key facts
- Cheapest right now
- € Standard · Steam Gift · Global · Gamivo
- Live offers
- 9 offers · 5 stores
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Half-Life: Alyx has never been cheaper since we started following it. Our records on the PC version go back almost seven years, and the floor of the whole series was set on 15 and 16 September: €12.23, before payment fees and before any coupon. It is still sitting there.
\nTwo warnings before the wallet comes out. The first one stops a lot of people in their tracks: this is a virtual reality game and nothing else. Without a VR headset plugged into your PC it does not start, so the price is only a bargain if you already own the hardware.
\nThe second one is the reason for this article. There are nine live offers on the PC page and every single one of them is a Steam Gift. Not one Steam Key in the lot. We took the readings on 17 September at 05:45 UTC and shop prices move daily, so read the figures as a photograph of that morning.
\nNine live offers, nine Steam Gifts
\nOpening a page and finding the same format from the first line to the last is unusual. Valve's prequel to Half-Life 2 normally turns up with a mix, and today it doesn't. Whatever the shops' reasons, the practical consequence is the one that reaches you: whichever of the nine you pick, what arrives is a present sent from another Steam account, not a string of characters to paste in.
\nGift, code or somebody else's account
\nA Steam Key is a code. You type it into Steam, the game drops into your library and it belongs to you from then on. That is the format most people picture when they buy at a reseller, and today it is the one that isn't here.
\nA Steam Gift finishes in the same place, your library, by a different route: someone sends you the game from their own Steam account and you accept the gift. Plenty of shops ask you to add the sender as a Steam friend first, so delivery is not always instant, and the shop's support desk is your only way back if something goes wrong. Once accepted, though, the game is yours and it stays there.
\nThe format worth refusing is the Steam Account: you log into an account that belongs to somebody else, the game never enters your library, and the owner can cut off your access whenever it suits them. None of today's nine offers is one of those, which is a small piece of good news, but the difference is worth knowing for the day one shows up at the top of a page.
\nWhat the shops were asking this morning
\nThe cheapest is Gamivo at €10.40 with the coupon GCDKGamivo (€11.76 with fees), Steam Gift, and there are two Gamivo listings at exactly that price. Behind them:
\n- \n
- Kinguin: €12.15 with the coupon SEPGOC10 (€13.47 with fees), Steam Gift. \n
- Driffle: €14.99 with the coupon GOCDKEYS10 (€15.93 with fees), Steam Gift. \n
- Kinguin: €14.83 with the coupon SEPGOC10 (€16.36 with fees), Steam Gift. \n
- G2A: €16.83 (€17.12 with fees), Steam Gift. \n
- G2A: €20.01 (€20.30 with fees), Steam Gift. \n
- G2A: €20.23 (€20.52 with fees), Steam Gift. \n
- HRKGame: €63.14 with the coupon Gocdkeys12 (€64.98 with fees), Steam Gift. \n
That last line is not a typo. Same game, same format, more than five times what Gamivo charges. Nine offers are enough to open a gap of fifty-odd euros between the top and the bottom of one page, which is the entire argument for not buying from the first shop you land on.
\n
Driffle and Kinguin swap places once the fee lands
\nLook at the third and fourth lines again. Driffle advertises €14.99 and Kinguin €14.83, so Kinguin arrives 16 cents cheaper. Add each shop's payment commission and Driffle ends at €15.93 while Kinguin ends at €16.36: 43 cents apart, the other way round. The two of them finish in the opposite order to the one they start in, and you can only catch that by reading the second figure on every line instead of the headline one.
\nThe cheapest we have ever logged
\nEverything in this section comes from our own measurements of the PC version, always before fees and before coupons. We hold 2,126 readings taken across 1,570 different days. The median of that series is €47.89 and the highest figure we have ever written down is €73.33.
\nSo €12.23 is roughly a quarter of what this game normally costs, and it is the lowest point of the entire history, not the lowest of the month. The €10.40 Gamivo asks for is that same €12.23 with a 15% coupon applied on top.
\nThe monthly floors say more than the median does. This month, €12.23. In August, €52.50. In July, €13.74. In June, €14.40. In May, €56.70. Alyx does not slide gently downwards: it collapses for a couple of weeks and then spends long stretches above fifty euros. Nobody has announced when the next drop is due, so if you would rather wait for a number below this one, set a price alert and let it keep watch for you.
\nIs this the moment to buy it?
\nIf you already have a headset, there is not much to discuss: today is the bottom of a history that is nearly seven years long, the format on offer ends up in your own library, and the first and last offers on the page are separated by more than fifty euros. Choose a shop you trust and buy Half-Life: Alyx key there, with the coupon applied before you pay.
\nIf you don't have one, €11.76 with fees is a cheap game you cannot launch. Alyx is VR-exclusive, the headset costs many times the game, and this price will come back around at some point. Park the alert and forget about it.
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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