Video games are expensive things to buy, having recently experienced a rise in RRP up to the £60 level if you’re buying big-name Xbox titles on release. Doing this means you get to experience the best the game industry has to offer at the earliest possible time, but it can get a little wearing on the wallet.
There are a few tactics you can employ to keep costs down, however. Games that have been out for a few months or years aren’t any less entertaining, and you’ll often be able to pick them up for a lower cost just by waiting a little. By doing this you also benefit from the many bug fixes, updates and content patches that are released for games across their lifetimes, things that can significantly improve the gameplay and longevity of a title.
Microsoft’s Game Pass Ultimate subscription service can be a good way to play a lot of games for a monthly fee, rather than buying titles individually, but once you stop paying you will lose access to the games. Buying on the digital store is a convenient way to build up a collection, especially if you have bought extra storage for your console so that you don’t have to keep re-downloading them, but a good way to save money on Xbox games can be to buy them on physical media.
To do this, you’ll need to own an Xbox console with a disc drive, but installing from Blu-ray means you can benefit from potentially lower prices, as the discs can sometimes be found for less than the digital downloads.
The Xbox game catalogue is huge and diverse, and there are bargains to be found across it whether there's a sale on or not - prices vary all the time. Here are some of the best games to look out for.
Best cheap Xbox games at a glance:
- Best for one of the best stories in gaming: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - £13.99, Amazon
- Best for never putting down: Balatro - £8.49, CDKeys
- Best for online adventuring: Final Fantasy XIV Online - Starter Edition - £12, Xbox
- Best for multiplayer shooting: Destiny 2 - £2.49, Xbox
- Best for car football: Rocket League - Free, Xbox
- Best for hack ‘n’ slash: Devil May Cry V - £20.20, Amazon
- Best for cosy nights on the farm: Stardew Valley - £12, Xbox
- Best bang for your buck: Halo: The Master Chief Collection - £31.73, Amazon
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Best for: one of the best stories in gaming
This third-person fantasy RPG first arrived in 2015, but time hasn’t dulled its edge, and it looks good thanks to a visual upgrade that was released in 2022. Based on the fantasy fiction of Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, which has also received the Netflix treatment starring Henry Cavill, the game’s hero Geralt is a Witcher, a mutant monster hunter who makes a living killing the mythological creatures that threaten the inhabitants of The Continent. He’s tasked with finding the last heir to an ancient Elven bloodline, who is being relentlessly stalked by the Wild Hunt, but finds himself getting caught up in all kinds of other trouble along the way.
Buy now £13.99, Amazon
Balatro
Best for: never putting down
It may look like poker, but that’s only on the surface. Balatro is really from a genre of video game called the roguelike deckbuilder, in which you perform many runs through the game, hoping to better your score each time. Balatro uses standard (ish) playing cards to do this, and begins with poker hands such as flushes, but soon adds new types of cards, plus multipliers and jokers that can have wildly varying effects on your hands, allowing you to build scores so high they break the game’s system for displaying them. Once it has its teeth into you, it’s unputdownable.
Buy now £8.49, CDKeys
Final Fantasy XIV Online - Starter Edition
Best for: online adventuring
This massively multiplayer online role-playing game originally launched in 2013, and is still receiving expansion packs and updates all these years later. This Starter Edition contains loads of content and a 30-day subscription to explore, but if you want to stay you’ll need to pay a monthly subscription.
Being a massively multiplayer game, there are other players in the game world for you to team up with and fight against, and while fulfilling many fantasy game archetypes such as magic and sentient animals, this is a game about choosing your best outfit as much as raiding dungeons.
Buy now £12.00, Xbox
Destiny 2
Best for: multiplayer shooting
This could have been Apex Legends, Fortnite or Warframe - free-to-play shooters that allow you to team up and find something to blaze away at. Destiny 2 is riding a wave at the time of writing, however, as it has just seen the release of an expansion pack, The Final Shape, which has added content and modified the way the game works to make it the best it has ever been.
It may take you a long time to work your way through to the new stuff, however, but there's enough here to keep you busy for weeks without having to pay, and that’s the best thing you can say about a bargain game.
Buy now £2.49, CDKeys
Rocket League
Best for: car football
The idea of making a game of football you play while driving a car is one of the greatest and simplest video game concepts, and the fact you can start playing it for free on Xbox just makes it better. Teams of players go up against each other, some driving Batmobiles, to score goals in arenas that are as much about leaving the ground and finding ways to go upward as they are about driving out on the wings and getting an enormous beach ball passed to you. Video games have been home to some excellent imaginary sports, but Rocket League takes the trophy for its blend of competitiveness and imagination.
Buy now, Xbox
Devil May Cry V
Best for: hack ‘n’ slash
The Devil May Cry series has been a console staple since the days of the PlayStation 2, but its best Xbox incarnation, this one from 2019, is well worth playing and reasonably priced on the Xbox store - though you may be able to find it even cheaper as a disc. It’s a game about going after demons with a big sword, but the plot doesn’t really matter - what this game is about is performing ever larger combo attacks and creating the most spectacular violent ballet of gunfire, weapon swings and acrobatics.
Buy now £24.99, Xbox
Stardew Valley
Best for: cosy nights on the farm
An absolute monster of a game that will swallow chunks of your life if you allow it to, Stardew Valley sees you inherit your grandfather’s overgrown farm in a charming village. While bringing the land back to productivity, you’ll befriend the villagers - you can even marry them - explore the mines and vanquish monsters, repair a boat and go sailing to a tropical island, and restore the town’s much-loved community centre. All the while, you’ll be growing crops, raising animals, pickling mushrooms and making jam. The pixel art style may not look that exciting, but this is a game stuffed full of charm.
Buy now £12.00, Xbox
Halo: The Master Chief Collection
Best: bang for your buck
Not one game, but a compilation of six of the finest sci-fi shooters. The Halo series has a long history on the Xbox, and the single-player and multiplayer modes are all present here. You play as a genetically enhanced supersoldier in the front line of humanity’s war against the Covenant, a religiously motivated assortment of alien species, ranging from the small, weak Grunts to the enormous Hunters and intelligent Elites, aiming to wipe out the inhabitants of Earth for reasons that become clear over the course of the games. It can be a forgiving game on easy mode, but crank up the difficulty and there's some of the best tactical shooting on Xbox available here.
Buy now £31.73, Amazon
Verdict
The Witcher 3 is an excellent game, and often appears near the top of ‘best Xbox games’ lists. That it’s available for a price that’s considerably lower than the cost of new releases makes it even more tempting, and if you can get hold of its expansion packs too you’ll have hours of top-quality adventuring ahead of you.
All the games on this list come to, at the time of writing, around £135, and if you were to buy them all you’d have a game library that would keep you busy for many months. Gaming is an expensive hobby, but playing some of the best games out there can be achieved without paying top dollar.
