Can You Get Slime Rancher for Free? Family Sharing, Giveaways and Cheaper Copies
Slime Rancher is a paid PC game. What a Steam Family copy, a giveaway or a reward app can and cannot do for you, and where to compare prices.
Slime Rancher is a paid game, not a free one. Because it is a single-player game, a family member's Steam copy is a practical option, and you can compare PC stores before paying. The card below leads to our price comparison, where some store links earn us a commission.
Is Slime Rancher free to play?
No. Slime Rancher is a paid game from Monomi Park, released on 1 August 2017 and rated Everyone 10+ by the ESRB. You play Beatrix LeBeau, a young rancher who moves to a distant planet called the Far, Far Range and tries to earn a living by catching and raising slimes.
Any site that offers the whole game as a “free download” is passing around an unlicensed copy, and those downloads are a frequent source of malware. Get your ranch from a licensed seller, a family library, or a promotion the store publishes itself.
Players still like it a lot: on 2 October 2026 its Steam reviews were 98 % positive out of 157,557, and 1,356 people were playing on Steam that day.
Ranching on someone else’s purchase
The family library route
Slime Rancher was listed for Family Sharing on Steam when we checked on 6 October 2026. If someone in your Steam Family (Steam’s household grouping of accounts) owns it, you can install it from the family library and play with your own saves and achievements, while the game stays theirs.
A shared licence can’t run on two accounts simultaneously. For Slime Rancher that is rarely a problem, since there is no multiplayer to join: you simply take turns with the owner. Slime Rancher has to actually appear in your family library, so look there first.
Store giveaways
Stores sometimes give a game away for a few days. Our free games page lists whatever is free to claim at the moment.
Reward apps
Some apps pay points for playing mobile games or completing tasks, and let you exchange the points for gift cards that can be spent on games. Which apps and offers you get depends on your device and country; collecting enough can take days or weeks; there is no guaranteed amount; and each app sets its own age limits and payout rules. You still buy the game, with credit you earned. We have no commercial relationship with any reward app.
Finding a cheaper PC copy
The card shows every store we currently track for the PC version, and which one lists the lowest price right now. Steam sells a single edition, called Slime Rancher, so you are comparing the same game everywhere.
To time your purchase around the next seasonal sale on Steam, see our Steam sale dates.
A game that is often cheap
With more than two years of prices on record, the pattern is clear: Slime Rancher sold below Steam’s list price at a store we track in 12 of the last 12 months. Its deepest monthly low, in October 2026, was 90 % below today’s Steam list price. Month-by-month figures are in the Slime Rancher price history.
Light on hardware, wide on languages
Slime Rancher is easy on a PC: Steam’s minimum is 4 GB of RAM and only 1 GB of storage. Steam lists requirements for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Gamepad players are covered: Steam’s page on 6 October 2026 marked full controller support, and the game’s text came in 10 languages, Swedish, Korean and Latin American Spanish among them.
Store links on our game pages may be affiliate links: if you buy through them, the store may pay us a commission at no extra cost to you. How we earn money.
Questions
Is there a sequel?
Yes, Slime Rancher 2 is a separate game with its own price page; buying one does not give you the other.
Can two people play one copy together?
No. Slime Rancher is single-player, and a shared family copy runs for one account at a time.
Guides written and checked by the SuperDuperBundle team against our own price data and the stores' published policies.