Gaming

How to get paid-for PC games FREE every week

£100s worth of premium games for the grand total of £0

Features Writer

Created 30 July 2025 | Edited 27 April 2026

With the latest blockbuster games hitting price tags of £70 to £80, there’s really no reason to rush out and buy them when a) they'll be half that price in a few months, and b) so many great games are regularly given away for free. I'm not talking about obscure indie projects cobbled together over a weekend (though some of those are great too), but modern premium games that are normally full-price and are being given away for a limited time.

I have comfortably over 500 games I've gathered for free over the years - all the Bioshocks, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 Civilization, and other all-time greats among them - and am here to help set you on the same path as me. Here are six sites, subreddits, and games platforms you should visit regularly to fill up your games library with quality titles for free. Also see our guide to finding cheap PC games. WARNING: This blog might cause your gaming backlog to grow uncontrollably.

Caution. Please read the safety notes in the sections on Itch.io and Reddit to ensure you're using them safely. And see our note on abandonware games.

1. Weekly giveaways on the Epic Games Store

In 2018, games publisher Epic (of Fortnite fame) launched a digital storefront with the goal of rivalling the biggest PC gaming platform Steam. A big part of its strategy to attract gamers has been to give away one or more games (that are usually full-priced) for free each week. Several years on, it’s not looking like Epic will topple Steam any time soon, but its weekly giveaways continue on Epic Games Store and its PC app.

The giveaways refresh every Thursday, and at some times of year (such as Christmas), it even gives away a different game every day for a set period.

My free Epic Games Store library sits at over 300 games (most of them gathering digital dust, inevitably) and includes Sid Meier’s Civilization VI: Platinum Edition, Dead Island 2, BioShock Dishonored, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. That’s comfortably over £2,000 worth, with some very high-quality titles among them.

You can also now get free mobil;e games via Epic's Android and iOS mobile apps. It's given away some great games too, such as Super Meat Boy Forever, Star War: Knights of the Old Republic, and Chicken Police.

2. Claim free games via Amazon Prime

One of the lesser-known perks of an Amazon Prime subscription is that each month it gives away a slew of PC games for 'free' via Amazon Luna* (formerly Prime Gaming). Some of these are redeemable through digital storefronts GOG.com and Epic Games Store, while others you play through the free Amazon Games app.

You need a Prime subscription to redeem the games (£95 a year or £8.99 a month, but newbies can get it free for 30 days). Once you redeem a game, it's yours to keep, even if your membership expires. You can also redeem the games during a free trial period for Prime. Alternatively, keep an eye on Reddit, where gamers sometimes give away their codes.

The games up for grabs are a mix of old and new, obscure and famous, great and eh-so-so. Giveaways have included Mafia trilogy, Lego Lord of the Rings, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, and Saints Row IV, as well as classics like Baldur’s Gate, Fallout 76, BioShock, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

A Prime subscription also gives you access to the Amazon Luna Cloud Gaming library. Cloud gaming lets you stream games from the internet instead of installing them locally on your computer. The plus sides of this are that you can play games instantly, they don't take up any space on your hard drive, and their performance isn't dependent on you having a powerful PC (because the hardware is way over wherever Amazon's servers are).

The flip side is that you need a stable internet connection to play games, and even then you may experience some latency (delayed registering of inputs on your controller).

Either way, Prime members have nothing to lose in giving it a try. Amazon's Cloud Gaming library is constantly growing, and features games such as Skyrim, Hogwarts Legacy, Tomb Raider, Hollow Knight, and even 2025 Game of the Year contender Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

You can also link your accounts from GOG.com, Ubisoft Connect, and Epic Games Store to play games you own via the cloud.

3. IsThereAnyDeal

IsThereAnyDeal is a handy site for saving money on PC games as it scours a large number of storefronts to find the best prices. You can set alerts based on target prices (such as ‘historical low’ or when it drops by a specified percentage) for the titles you want, and as soon as they hit those prices you’ll receive an email or notification.

For free games, it has a dedicated giveaways page that keeps track of freebies (including those on Epic Games Store, GOG.com, Steam, and Itch.io), so keep your eye on it to grab them as they pop up.

4. Freebies on Itch.io

Itch.io is a loosely moderated platform for independent game developers, giving them a space to showcase their new creations. The games are usually low-budget, but many that debuted on it have gone on to become fully-fledged (and in some cases very successful) titles released across multiple platforms.

Itch.io alumni include the likes of Night in the Woods, Celeste and Doki Doki Literature Club, so there’s always a chance you might discover the next big thing through it. You can even find games that have already received wider release, such as Brutal Legend (starring a guitar-wielding Jack Black), which was recently given away for free on the platform.

There are over a million free games on Itch.io. You can whittle down the selection by sorting them by popularity and rating, and also by filtering by genre, platform, multiplayer features, and session length.

Safety note. While most developers use Itch.io in good faith, you're still effectively downloading files that other people upload and as such should exercise caution. (For more on protecting your computer, see Free antivirus software.)

One good way to minimise risk is to read the comments on a given game to see if people have picked up on anything suspicious, and stick to downloading games that have a lot of ratings, which means that plenty of people have played them.

Also, Itch.io can sometimes feature NSFW (Not Safe for Work) or adult games. The site has recently increased moderation on this front, making sure that NSFW games are harder to find and don't just pop up on the homepage. Itch.io has also started banning more games that violate its content policy, but some salacious content may still slip through the net.

5. Follow freebie hunters on Reddit

Over on Reddit, there are a couple of excellent communities. Between them, r/FreeGameFindings and r/GameDealsFree post almost every free game promotion available, including ones beyond the mainstream channels.

Here you'll find the usual freebies given away on Epic Games Store and Amazon Luna, but these communities also uncover free giveaways on Steam, as well as other limited-time events. For example, one user showed how to claim one of several fairly modern games – including Assassin’s Creed: Mirage and Total War: Warhammer III – by signing up to Intel’s Software Advantage Program (though sadly the offer has now expired).

If you miss the window for a game giveaway, keep an eye on that game's thread on these subreddits, because people who already own a game often give their extra codes away for free. This way, you can also grab games given away on Amazon Luna without needing a Prime subscription.

Safety note. These long-standing and trusted subreddits (forums, essentially) are moderated by both bots and people, so generally the content they link to is legal and safe. But when you read a thread for a giveaway, as an extra precaution, do read the comments before clicking through to see what other people say about it.

You'll generally be clicking through to reputable sites, but in the unlikely case that your browser warns you that a given site isn't safe, you should heed that warning and not click through. More info on protecting your Mac or PC in Free antivirus software.

6. Get stuck in on Steam

As the most popular gaming platform on PC, Steam has a huge selection of free games. Unfortunately, there isn't a dedicated section for ‘free’ games – instead there's a free to play section. This bundles together games that are 100% free with games that are, as the title suggests, free to play but will encourage you to spend money via optional in-game purchases (also known as microtransactions).

That said, some of the free-to-play games are excellent. Titles such as Destiny 2, Team Fortress 2, Apex Legends, Counter-Strike 2, Paths of Exile, and PUBG: Battlegrounds are all free to play, and even though they offer in-game purchases (mostly in the form of cosmetics, skins, and costumes), you don’t need to pay to enjoy these games in full.

There are nearly 12,000 games in the free to play section, so you can narrow your search using tags like ‘single-player’, where you'll find such titles as The Sims 4, eFootball (formerly Pro Evolution Soccer), and Crusader Kings II.

Steam allows users to share their libraries with friends and family via the Steam Families feature. A single Steam family can have up to six members, all of whom have access to each other's games (so, potentially, hundreds of friends' and family members' games you can play for free).

To invite people to your Steam family, go to Steam > Settings > Family > Manage your Steam Family > Invite a Member.

Once you've sent an invite, you need them to sign into their Steam account on your home network – whether on their own device or yours – and accept the invite. That person is then part of your Steam Family.

There are a couple of caveats to this:

You can't play the same game at the same time.
You can't be part of more than one Steam Family at once.
If you leave a Steam Family, you need to wait a year before joining another one.

See the Steam Families FAQ for more info.

Sell Steam Trading Cards, get free games

If you play a lot of Steam games, you could be sitting on £10s of Steam credit and not even know it. As you play games on Steam, you earn digital trading cards simply by playing your games. After several hours of playtime you'll usually get three to eight cards (though not all games have trading cards).

The value of these digital cards ranges greatly, from around 3p all the way to £1-plus for rarer ones, and you can 'sell' them on your Steam Inventory page, with the earnings being added to your Steam wallet to spend on other games.

It can take a while to list all your games, as you need to set the selling price as well as confirm each transaction via the Authenticator in the Steam mobile app (hint: instead of listing then confirming each card, list all your cards first, then you can quickly authenticate the whole lot via the app).

It took me around 20 minutes of faffing, followed by several days of waiting as people bought my cards, to earn enough in my Steam Wallet to get a game I'd been wanting for a while in a sale (Stronghold: Definitive Edition for around £5).

There are handy tools that can speed up this process, such as the Steam Inventory Helper Chrome extension, or a tool that silently 'plays' your games in the background to farm trading cards for you, but there's a lot to go into there so we'll save that can of worms for another guide.

While hunting for free games, you may come across 'abandonware' – old games where the copyright isn't being actively enforced. This typically happens when a developer or publisher shuts down, merges, or changes hands, leaving it unclear who owns the rights (as per the cult classic PC game No One Lives Forever, pictured below). Or when a game is no longer available to buy through any legal channel, indicating that the intellectual property (IP) holder has no commercial interest.

These games can easily be found for 'free', but abandonware is technically piracy. Sites that host them often operate in good faith, removing titles if they return to commercial availability. Their justification is preservation — they see it as archiving works of digital art that would otherwise vanish.

But make no mistake, under UK (and most international) copyright law, these games remain protected for decades. So even if the rights-holder is inactive, uninterested or unknown, downloading abandonware is still legally risky.