How to Build a Big PC Game Library on a Budget
Practical strategies for growing your PC game collection without spending full price — bundles, wishlist alerts, free giveaways, patience, and how not to waste money.
Bundles: the best value-per-dollar option
The single most efficient way to get a lot of games cheaply is through bundles — collections of games sold at one price, typically far below the sum of individual prices.
Humble Bundle is the most established bundle site. A typical bundle offers 8–12 games in tiers: pay $1 for the base tier, beat the average ($6–10) for more, or pay a fixed top tier ($12–18) for the full set. A percentage of your payment goes to charity. Humble has bundled genuinely major titles: Dishonored, BioShock Infinite, Doom (2016), Prey, Metro Exodus, Borderlands, and many others. A new bundle appears roughly every two weeks.
Fanatical runs similar bundles with slightly different publisher relationships. Their Build Your Own Bundle format lets you select specific games from a pool, which reduces the common problem of paying for games you will never play. Fanatical also runs flash bundles for 24–48 hours.
IndieGala focuses on indie titles, often priced at $1–3 for a set of five to eight games. The quality floor is lower than Humble, but at those prices the risk is low.
The honest caveat: bundles generate backlogs. You will acquire games you have no interest in. The best approach is to gift those extras or accept that a 12-game bundle where you care about four of them is still good math if the price per interesting game is under $3.
Wishlists and price alerts
The most passive and reliable deal-catching method is using Steam’s wishlist system. Adding a game sends you an email when it goes on sale. This costs nothing and requires no ongoing attention.
More powerful is IsThereAnyDeal (ITAD). You connect your Steam wishlist and set a target price for each game. ITAD monitors prices across dozens of stores — not just Steam — and emails you when any authorized store hits your target. If you want a game at $5 and you are not in a hurry, set the alert and forget about it until the email arrives.
Combined with a quick look at the price history to set a realistic target (if the game has never gone below $9.99, setting a $3 alert will never trigger), this removes almost all effort from deal hunting.
Free games: the most overlooked option
Epic Games Store gives away one or more games free every Thursday. You claim them once and they are permanently yours in your Epic library. This has been running since 2018. The list of games given away includes GTA V, Control, Death Stranding Director’s Cut, Alan Wake Remastered, Civilization VI, The Outer Worlds, Borderlands 3, Among Us, and well over 400 others.
If you are not already claiming these weekly, you are leaving real library value on the table. Set a recurring Thursday reminder; claiming takes 30 seconds.
GOG runs occasional free game giveaways, usually classic titles. Check the GOG homepage periodically — they do not always send email alerts for these.
Amazon Prime Gaming, included with an Amazon Prime subscription, offers a rotating selection of free PC game codes each month. Games typically go to your GOG or Amazon Games library. Many Prime subscribers do not realize this benefit exists.
The patience principle
The most reliable long-term strategy is simply waiting. Most games, given three to five years, reach prices that would have seemed impossible at launch:
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launched at $60 and now regularly sells for under $5.
- Red Dead Redemption 2 ($60 at launch) has reached $15.
- Cyberpunk 2077 fell from $60 to under $20 within two years of launch.
- The Outer Worlds dropped from $60 to $6 within three years.
If your current backlog is already larger than you can realistically play in the next year (and most gamers’ backlogs are), waiting costs you nothing in practice. New releases can almost always wait.
Buying smarter when you do spend money
When a sale hits, resist the urge to clear your entire wishlist. A few principles that save money over time:
Only buy what you will play within three months. Buying games you will play “someday” builds a psychological burden and adds no actual enjoyment. The most expensive game is one you bought and never opened.
Buy series together. If multiple entries in a franchise are on sale simultaneously — which is common when a new entry in the series releases — buy the set. You are unlikely to find all three games at 75% off at the same time very often.
Track flash sale timing. Some bundles and flash deals run for 24–48 hours and disappear. Deal aggregators and Discord servers for deal communities are the best way to catch these without actively monitoring stores.
The 1,000-game-library problem
Steam libraries of 1,000+ games with 5% overall playtime are common. More games does not mean more gaming enjoyment. Every impulse purchase at $3 adds noise. Every “just in case” buy sits unplayed for years. Focus on the games you will actually engage with, and the library size takes care of itself.
GameHotDeals makes it straightforward to catch the right moment. The all-time low page shows every game currently at its cheapest across all stores, and price drops shows today’s sharpest discounts. Use it alongside your ITAD wishlist alerts and you will rarely miss a genuine deal.