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Action racing sits at the center of Need for Speed™ Payback, a 2020 release from Ghost Games published by Electronic Arts. On Steam it has 31,504 reviews with 85% positive sentiment, and its initial price is listed at $29.99.
Overview
Need for Speed™ Payback is a 2020 Action game developed by Ghost Games and published by Electronic Arts. On Steam it has gathered 31,508 player reviews, 85% of them positive, which counts as a very positive reception among indie titles in the Action category. The game is available on windows, and launched at $30. The pairing of developer Ghost Games with publisher Electronic Arts is one of the studio-publisher relationships indielist tracks, letting players find comparable games and letting developers and investors study how Action projects reach the market. indielist's white-box method estimates its lifetime sales at roughly 1.5 million to 3.5 million units, with the full Boxleiter factor breakdown shown on this page rather than a single black-box figure. Within indielist's catalog of indie games mapped to their studios, publishers, and funding, Need for Speed™ Payback can be compared against similar Action titles and benchmarked on review counts and estimated sales.
Reviews
31,508
Positive
85%
Steam appid
1262580
Engine
Unknown
Sales estimate
vv1.01.5M to 3.5M
units (median: 2.5M)
≈ $25.9M to $60.5M net revenue (Steam cut + refunds + regional discount applied)
+ - How is this calculated?
| Factor | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| base | +50 |
| year_2020 | +15 |
| price_$30 | +5 |
| positive_85% | +10 |
| final NB | 80 |
Confidence range: median × [0.6, 1.4]. Boundary protection: NB ∈ [15, 150].
Methodology & limitations
Sales estimates use a multi-factor Boxleiter method against public Steam review counts.
They are not authoritative sales data. Actual sales can deviate by
±50% in either direction. Free-to-play games, deeply discounted titles, and games
with heavy bundle distribution have larger error margins. Algorithm version
v1.0.
indielist estimates lifetime unit sales for Need for Speed™ Payback at roughly 1.5 million to 3.5 million copies, with a median around 2.5 million, derived from its 31,508 Steam reviews using a multi-factor Boxleiter method (version v1.0). That median maps to approximately $43.2M in net revenue after Steam's 30% cut, regional pricing, and refunds. Unlike black-box trackers, the full calculation is shown on this page: a base review-to-sales multiplier is adjusted for release year, launch price, review sentiment, studio size, and genre, and every adjustment is listed so developers, publishers, and investors can audit exactly how the figure was reached. The range itself reflects genuine uncertainty — review-to-sales ratios vary widely between games — so indielist publishes a low, median, and high band rather than a false-precision single number, and treats free-to-play, heavily discounted, and bundle-distributed titles as having wider error margins still.
Price history
90d · low $17.24Over the last 90 days the price ranged from $17.24 to $29.99, averaging $28.48 across 2 discount windows, with a historical low of $17.24 on 2026-06-06.
Synthetic series for demo. Real ITAD price history loads after Day 3 ingest.
Where to buy
Affiliate disclosure- Steam reference$29.99 Buy
- Green Man Gaming
- Fanatical
- Humble Store
- GOG.com
Live prices from public feeds, cheapest first. Some are affiliate links — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.
Platforms
windows
Frequently asked questions
- How many copies has Need for Speed™ Payback sold?
- indielist estimates Need for Speed™ Payback has sold between 1,512,384 and 3,528,896 units (median 2,520,640), derived from its 31,508 Steam reviews with the white-box Boxleiter vv1.0 method. The full breakdown is shown on the page.
- Who developed Need for Speed™ Payback?
- Need for Speed™ Payback was developed by Ghost Games and published by Electronic Arts.
- When was Need for Speed™ Payback released?
- Need for Speed™ Payback was released in 2020.
- How many reviews does Need for Speed™ Payback have on Steam?
- Need for Speed™ Payback has 31,508 Steam reviews, of which 85% are positive.
Ecosystem
indielist positions Need for Speed™ Payback within the Action segment so players can surface comparable titles by shared tags and genre rather than by storefront promotion. On the developer side, Ghost Games's other releases and Electronic Arts's wider catalog are one click away, letting developers benchmark where Need for Speed™ Payback sits among a studio's body of work and how its publisher's portfolio performs. Because indielist maps studios, publishers, games, and funding into one connected graph, the same Need for Speed™ Payback page serves three audiences at once: players hunting their next Action game, developers studying how comparable projects were positioned and what they sold, and investors tracing which teams and labels are active in the space. A machine-readable markdown mirror of this page is published at the same path with a .md suffix for AI assistants, and its review, price, and sales-estimate figures are refreshed on a schedule rather than frozen at launch.