Games with no microtransactions at all
These are games with nothing for sale inside them: no loot boxes, no premium currency, no season pass, no paid convenience. Every game on this page scores a genuine zero on our monetization pressure index, which means we checked its store page and found no purchase available after the initial one.
5 games listed · data last checked · how the score works
#1
Portal
Pressure
000
To ending
003hrs
Scripted ending exists
#2
Hades
Pressure
000
To ending
022hrs
Scripted ending exists
#3
Hollow Knight
Pressure
000
To ending
027hrs
Scripted ending exists
#4
Stardew Valley
Pressure
000
To ending
052hrs
Scripted ending exists
#5
Balatro
Pressure
000
To ending
— — —
No scripted ending — live service
Why a zero is harder to find than it sounds
Plenty of games are described as having no microtransactions when what people mean is that the microtransactions are not aggressive. A cosmetic-only store is still a store. An optional soundtrack is a separate product but not a purchase inside the game. A season pass that is generous is still a season pass.
This page uses the strict reading: after you own the game, there is nothing further the game will sell you. That excludes some well-liked titles with mild stores, and it is worth being clear that mild is not the same as absent — a game with a cosmetics-only shop may well be the better choice for you, it just is not what this page lists.
What you are trading away
Games in this category are almost always bought once at a fixed price, which means the money question is settled before you start and never comes back. That is the whole appeal.
The trade is usually scope. A live-service game funded by continuous spending can afford continuous content; a game that sold you one copy in 2007 cannot. What you get instead is a finish line — most games on this list have a real ending you can reach, and we list the hours it takes, so the commitment is knowable in advance rather than open-ended.
Questions people ask about this
- What games have no microtransactions?
- Games sold once with nothing further for sale inside them. This page lists the ones we have verified against their own store pages, along with the hours needed to reach their ending. The strict test we apply is whether the game offers any purchase at all after you own it — a cosmetics-only shop counts as a store and does not qualify.
- Are there any good games without in-app purchases?
- Yes, and they cluster in premium single-player genres — puzzle games, roguelikes and narrative games that are bought once at a fixed price. The trade-off is scope rather than quality: a game funded by one purchase cannot fund years of new content, so what it offers instead is a defined ending you can actually reach.