Free weekends
Times anyone could play a paid game free on Steam: free weekends, and giveaways that let people claim the game and keep it. For each, the game's players before, during and after, from our own player counts.
How it is calculated
Steam's store details name a running free weekend with its start and end times; we read them about every 3 hours for busy games and weekly for the rest, and count a game's players at least hourly while its free weekend runs. Free weekends before that are read from the developer's own news posts (titles such as "Free Weekend"), on the dates the title gives, or else from when the post went up for 4 days. Before is the average of our hourly counts over the 7 days before the start; during is the average and highest count from start to end; after is the average over the 7 days after the end. Where our counts do not reach back far enough, the month before's average stands in for before, and during and after come from our own counts where we have them, otherwise from the event's month and the month after.
- Window
- 7 days before, the free weekend itself, and 7 days after
- Unit
- players
- Definition version
- 2, from 29 October 2026
Caveats
- Dates read from news posts are approximate: a post can go up a day or two before or after the free weekend starts.
- Monthly figures spread a few days of free players across a whole month, so they show a free weekend's effect much smaller than it was.
- A sale, an update or a big streamer often lands at the same time as a free weekend, so not every change is the free weekend's doing.
Source
Steam Web API, IStoreBrowseService/GetItems (documentation, terms). Data from Steam. Not affiliated with Valve.