On the storefront, everything looks familiar: major releases have long gone beyond the $60 mark, and premium editions easily raise the bar to $100–150. But that is only the top layer. Once you sort products by price, it becomes clear that the real records do not belong to flashy blockbusters.
At the top of such a list, you often find not games at all, but specialized programs, such as VR software and professional applications. Games do appear next to them, but usually with a price tag of around $1,000. It looks wild. However, the real ceiling on Steam is shaped not so much by the price of the game itself.
The main blow to the wallet is often delivered not by the base version, but by an endless line of add-ons. There are projects where the game itself costs like a standard release, while the full set of DLC adds up to the price of a car. That is already a different story about the "most expensive purchase on Steam" — not about a single "Buy" button, but about the cost of trying to complete the collection in full. In this selection, we are talking only about games that are themselves listed at outrageous prices, without any caveats about hundreds of add-ons or deluxe editions.
The Leverage Game
A digital version of a tabletop "business game" for teaching entrepreneurship. Its closest analogue is "Monopoly." On its Steam page, it is positioned as a management decision simulator: players move around the board, land in different situations, and try to lead a company to stable profit.
In terms of gameplay, this is a classic turn-based board game: players take turns, move across the board, and must solve various challenges tied to different sectors. Depending on the type of space, the game offers different courses of action — for example, investing in development, covering sudden expenses, or taking out a loan. The game constantly tests whether the player can maintain a balance between growth and cash gaps.
In addition to a single-player mode against AI, there is also a four-player mode and online play. There is even a mentor role — a host who helps interpret decisions and turns the session into training rather than just a digital board game.
The main problem with the game is its price. In Russia, it costs 90,500 rubles. In other countries, prices slightly below $1,000 can be found. But that does not mean there are no ways to save on the purchase. In Indonesia, the game costs 85,000 rupiah, or 379 rubles.
The review situation is modest: only two user reviews on Steam. In forum discussions, however, the same idea comes up most often: the project is seen as a niche tool for business and education rather than entertainment for a mass audience — and that is precisely how people explain the unusual price tag.
True Love
True Love comes across as a very personal project. The author had one idea: the player wanders through the world and tries to find seven characters designated as knights. This is not a story-driven attraction and not a relationship simulator, but a minimalist walking game with rare interaction points. According to the developer's description, it was created as a way to pour out emotions.
The gameplay is built around a simple loop: explore locations, reach the necessary places, and encounter danger. Each knight is guarded by a creature that pursues the player. If it manages to catch them, the game starts over from the very beginning. There is no saving, so every attempt becomes a risk of losing progress.
Transport is placed around the world for movement. This adds at least some degree of dynamism, but does not change the basic feeling of emptiness. The world design is a white space populated with characters and other objects taken from a free asset library.
The average price is $500. Given the lack of content, this feels like provocation. User reviews include both positive and negative opinions. But all of them raise the question of price and the common sense of making such a purchase.
In the end, True Love is a strange mix of a personal statement and a primitive survival game with a sky-high price tag. You can buy it to try to understand the developer's "tragedy." However, there is already a game today about the personal experiences of authors — The Beginner’s Guide. It does a much better job of drawing the player into its story and costs significantly less.
Zekertune
On its Steam page, the game is described as a standard rhythm game: notes fall from above, the player catches the timing, builds combos, and fills a gauge that increases the score multiplier. The game has different difficulty levels, leaderboards, and tempo settings to adjust the speed to your own habits.
In reality, the game is discussed not because of its tracklist or mechanics. It costs $615 — that is the price tag that stands out and raises questions about the project. However, it is explained by the developers' original idea.
Zekertune is not so much an attempt to enter the mass market as it is a meme game about the "most expensive" game within the local Indonesian community. The game's connection to Indonesia can be understood from the logo and the price tag of 10 million rupiah. In this reading, the price works as part of the joke and as a way to make the game noticeable in the news cycle.
Because of this positioning, it is difficult to evaluate the game by standard measures. In the public space, it is noticeable that there are almost no real reviews, and there are too few user reviews to judge the quality with confidence: the main question still becomes why a rhythm game has such a price tag and what the authors wanted to say with it.
The Official GamingTaylor Game, Great Job!
An indie author project by Taylor Marsh, the creator of the YouTube channel GamingTaylor. This matters for context: the game is positioned as a "project from a YouTuber," not as a studio release. The game has an official teaser on YouTube, whose description states that the project was made very quickly and with minimal development experience.
By genre, this is a simple first-person zombie shooter. The player clears out a "once-great castle" infected by plague and fights off hordes of the undead, choosing weapons according to the situation. On the storefront, everything is presented plainly: action, levels, guns, and a minimum of mechanics.
The reason for such rapid development was the GameGuru Engine. This is a construction-kit engine that allows a simple game to be assembled quickly from ready-made elements. This approach is convenient when you need to rapidly create a prototype or a first game, but it comes at the cost of depth: implementing intended ideas becomes harder, and the presentation looks more primitive.
The strangest part here is not the gameplay, but the pricing policy. In the United States, the game is sold like a normal indie title for $10, but in all other countries the price soars to 800 euros. And that already fits the scale and presentation of the project very poorly.
This leads to the main conclusion: this game is supposed to attract attention with its content. It works as a demonstrative example that a solo creator is capable of making a game and bringing it to release in the store. In that logic, the developer tried to bring the idea to a working state, but did not explain what guided the pricing decision.
3D PUZZLE
3D PUZZLE is not one game, but an entire franchise, and this is easy to miss if you look only at a single store page. The full picture emerges when you start studying the developer cards of PUZZLE Games and see dozens of nearly identical releases under the common name.
The most unusual thing here is the approach to content. Usually, developers release one game and then expand it with add-ons. In 3D PUZZLE, they went the opposite way: one level becomes a separate product. That is why the series spreads into subtitles like Bedroom, Building, Underground, and so on.
The price also raises questions: many entries are sold like full releases — on Steam, a base price of $60 for one game with one location can be found. And since there are many such projects, a complete set can cost several thousand dollars. At the same time, the developer actively promotes these games during sales with giant discounts of up to −98%, which makes the series at times almost dirt-cheap compared to the original prices.
The gameplay in all parts is extremely similar and described directly: you need to walk around the scene and move objects to highlighted places, assembling a picture from scattered items. In feel, it is close to the hidden object genre, except that instead of a list on the screen, there is the physical arrangement of things in three-dimensional space.
Against the overall background surrounding the series, the main question is not about the mechanics, but about the pricing policy: it is hard to explain the high price tag when visually this looks like a set of simple scenes and standard objects. Because of this, the franchise is regularly perceived as a storefront trick built around huge discounts, and serious suspicions also surface around it, including talk of a hidden miner and fake reviews — without any confirmation on Steam itself, but with a noticeable trail of distrust.
Verdict
Our selection shows well that an outrageous price tag on Steam can work in different ways: as an attempt to emphasize "premium" status, as a storefront trick for giant discounts, as a strange marketing experiment, or simply as an error in regional pricing settings. But the mere fact of a high price proves nothing by itself. It does not make a game richer in content and does not guarantee that the product corresponds to the amount being asked for it.
At the same time, another motivation cannot be ruled out — a social statement or provocation. The price tag becomes part of the idea: developers understand in advance that the mass audience will pass by, and the purchase is possible perhaps only for very wealthy collectors or investors who are less interested in "playing" than in seeing what the authors were trying to express through the very existence of such a product.
Still, for an ordinary player, the conclusion is pragmatic: projects like these should be treated cautiously and without illusions. In this niche, the price is often not a measure of quality, but an element of the concept — and paying it makes sense only when you clearly understand what exactly you are spending money on: a game, an experiment, or curiosity.