Steam’s Free-to-Keep Promotion Explained

The game industry is rife with great deals, perhaps more than ever before. While controversial trends like all-digital consoles have undermined consumer rights and savings in some ways (it’s much harder to find pre-owned games these days, for instance), myriad promotions, subscription services, and full-blown free game giveaways are also abundant. If you’re a PC gamer, you’ve almost certainly already heard of Game Pass and the generous Epic Games Store giveaways, but you may not know that Steam has regular giveaways of its own.

The service, if it can even really be called that, is generally referred to as the Free-to-Keep promotion, and it’s precisely what it sounds like: occasionally, certain games will be marked as 100% off on the uber-popular storefront for a limited time. But unlike, for instance, the Epic Games Store’s free giveaways, these Free to Keep promotions are not exactly issued regularly, nor are they centralized and organized by Steam itself. Rather, they are initiated by the publishers of the games in question and are therefore a bit more inconsistent and low-profile than their equivalents on Epic, PS Plus, and so on.

The Free-to-Keep distinction is important, since there are obviously a great deal of video games on Steam that are free-to-play, such as Fortnite, Counter-Strike 2, and Halo Infinite (multiplayer). To be clear, the Free-to-Keep promotions in question here are limited-time offers run by game publishers where they are quite literally giving one or a few titles away for no charge whatsoever.

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There are essentially no strings attached here, either. So long as you have a Steam account and you redeem the Free-to-Keep games within the promotional window, they will be added to your library just like any other game. There’s nothing about Steam’s Free-to-Keep games that is necessarily different from their full-priced counterparts, although publishers may choose to offer lower-tier versions of their games, rather than Deluxe Editions or anything similar. That said, sometimes DLC is given away for free during these promotions as well.

A key difference between Steam’s Free-to-Keep promotions and the Epic Games Store giveaways, another no-strings-attached freebie program, comes down to motivation. Epic gives away in-demand games regularly to attract players to its platform, whereas Steam’s Free-to-Keep deals are publisher-initiated and more about bringing players to individual games, rather than Steam as a platform. After all, Steam is the most popular PC launcher already, so Valve isn’t incentivized to give away free content the same way Epic is.

What Free-to-Keep Games Are Available on Steam Right Now?

From now until April 23, Steam users can claim the following games for free:

• Sentience: The Android’s Tale
• Legend of Keepers: Career of a Dungeon Manager

Sentience: The Android’s Tale is a 2017 indie game that follows a newly “born” android exploring a ragged and destroyed world. It places a premium on player choice and control, boasting “at least a dozen possible endings.” It also aims to interrogate definitions of life and consciousness through its sci-fi narrative, and while its presentation is a bit archaic, its choice-based mechanics are admirable.

If you’re looking for something a bit more action-oriented, dungeon-crawling roguelite Legend of Keepers: Career of a Dungeon Manager might be more your speed. Coming from Goblinz Studio in 2021 and currently sitting at a comfortable Mostly Positive rating on Steam, Legend of Keepers is a tongue-in-cheek turn-based game where you hire fantastical characters to fight alongside you, face off against intimidating monsters, and upgrade units with special bonuses. There’s also a smattering of tower-defense, which helps keep the game interesting throughout its relatively short runtime.