Can you make money from a free game on Steam?

On September 14, 2026, 312 of the 668 free games tagged Indie on Steam with at least 1,000 reviews had nothing to buy on their store pages. If you made a free game players still care about, you can sell something beside it without taking it from anyone. Here is what the choices look like.

Almost half have nothing to buy

We read Steam’s own data for the 11,767 games in its store search filtered to Free, Games and the Indie tag, and kept the 668 with at least 1,000 reviews. Of those, 312 had nothing to buy on their store pages: no In-App Purchases label, no paid DLC, and no paid edition, subscription, other game or bundle.

In this group, games with fewer reviews were likelier to have nothing to buy. Among games with 1,000 to 4,999 reviews, 49.7% had nothing. Among those with 20,000 or more, 29.6% did.

1. 1,000 to 4,999 reviews (457 games)49.7%
2. 5,000 to 19,999 reviews (157 games)43.9%
3. 20,000+ reviews (54 games)29.6%

668 free games tagged Indie on Steam with 1,000+ reviews. Nothing to buy means no In-App Purchases label, no paid DLC, and nothing else with a US price on the store page. Steam store data, pulled September 14, 2026.

Most of them are well reviewed. Of the 312 with nothing to buy, 253 are rated at least 80% positive, and 76 carry Steam’s Overwhelmingly Positive label.

Nothing to buy on the page doesn’t always mean nothing for sale. Emily is Away, one of the 312, has two paid sequels on Steam that its store page doesn’t offer.

Two in three games with nothing to buy still had players

Steam reports how many people are in a game right now. We asked once for each game, between 17:14 and 17:22 UTC on Monday, September 14. Of the 312 games with nothing to buy, 210 had at least one player, 67%. The median was 2.

The games that sell something had more: 82% had someone playing, with a median of 10. That doesn’t show selling brings players. The sellers differ in other ways: 47% are multiplayer or co-op, against 22%, and they have more reviews, a median of 2,963 against 2,290.

One eight-minute snapshot misses anyone who plays at other hours. It does show that two in three of these games still had someone in them on an ordinary Monday.

You can switch it to paid, and Valve says free licenses stay

Valve’s pricing FAQ covers it. You ask through its support form and give players at least a week’s notice in a News Event, so they can claim the free license and use up any in-game currency. Valve says players who have the free license “will continue to own and be able to play the game” afterwards.

That was not always what developers heard. In 2021, a developer who moved a small free game to paid posted Steam Support’s reply at the time: free players would lose the game once they uninstalled it. Valve’s written policy now says the opposite, so confirm with Valve for your game before you announce anything.

What a switch costs is the players who haven’t found the game yet. Everyone after the switch pays. If being free is why strangers try your game, that is a real cost. The players you already have keep what they have, but the door they came through closes.

What you can sell without taking anything away

Among the 356 games that do sell something, DLC is the usual route. 255 have paid DLC, soundtracks included, and 155 have in-app purchases, 64 of them both.

At least 26 offer something else on the store page: a paid edition, a subscription, another game or a bundle. For 10, that is the only thing to buy. At least 29 have DLC named as a supporter pack, supporter edition or donation.

• DLC. Steam supports free and paid DLC. The base game’s store page shows up to five DLC items under the purchase button, and its library page features DLC that is new since the player last played. A soundtrack is its own special app type.
• In-game purchases. They go through Steam’s microtransaction API, paid from the Steam Wallet.
• A bigger paid edition, or a sequel. A new product on Steam costs $100 through Steam Direct, recouped once it earns $1,000 in adjusted gross revenue.
• An update worth coming back for. Update visibility rounds can put a major update in front of people who have the game in their library or on their wishlist, for up to 30 days or a million homepage impressions. Each product starts with five.

DLC gets no visibility rounds of its own. Valve suggests announcing it and running a round on the base game. Here is why visibility matters once launch is behind you.

Doki Doki Literature Club did the first and third. It has been free on Steam since October 2017, with a $9.99 Fan Pack of wallpapers, soundtrack and concept art booklet as DLC.

In June 2021 came Doki Doki Literature Club Plus, an expanded edition with new side stories, released as a separate paid game at $14.99 with a publisher. The free game is still free.

Emily is Away took the sequel route. The 2015 original is still free; Emily is Away Too (2017) sells for $4.99 and Emily is Away <3 (2021) for $9.99.

We found no reliable public numbers for what DLC earns on a free base game. How To Market A Game’s 2026 DLC benchmark got too few responses from free-to-play games, found the results “all over the place”, and left them out.

When leaving it free is the right call

Some free games are finished in every sense that matters. A jam game, a gift to a community, a portfolio piece, a story that ends where it ends. Keeping it free and walking away is a legitimate choice, and nothing in this data says otherwise.

Selling something also turns players into customers, and customers are owed support. If you have no time or appetite for that, a soundtrack or supporter pack you never have to touch again is about the most you should add.

And if nobody is playing any more, there is no one to sell to. Check that before you build anything.

What to do next

1. Look at who is still there. Recent reviews, current players, and whether the community hub is still active. Those numbers tell you whether a next step has an audience.
2. Start with what already exists. A soundtrack or an art book asks nothing of players who don’t want it.
3. Add before you switch. A paid thing beside the free game, whether DLC, a bigger edition or a sequel, keeps the free door open. Switch the game itself to paid only if you are sure new players will pay to walk through it.
4. Decide who does the work. If you want to move on but think the game has more in it, a partner can build the next chapter. Strike Two is one, and our FAQ says free games count, so weigh this point with that in mind.
5. Or hand it over. If you would rather let the game go entirely, here is what happens to its reviews and players on Steam.

How we counted

On September 14, 2026, we listed the games in Steam’s US store search filtered to Free, Games and the Indie tag. Steam’s review endpoint gave each one’s total reviews across all languages. For the 672 with 1,000 or more, we read Steam’s store data and priced every DLC in the US store.

Four of those dropped out: three cost money that day, and Steam returned no store data for one.

A game counts as selling something if it has Steam’s In-App Purchases label, a DLC with a US price above zero, or anything else with a price on its store page. We opened the store page of every game without the label or paid DLC to look for those.

The limits are real. Only the game’s own store page counts, so a paid sequel it doesn’t offer, and sales on itch.io, Patreon or a developer’s site, don’t show. Developers declare the In-App Purchases label themselves. Steam tags come from developers, players and Steam moderators, and delisted games aren’t in the search.

The search reported 11,774 games and returned 11,767, so a few were likely missed while paging. This measures what is on offer, not what anything earns.