The 10 Best Crime Games to Play Right Now (November 2026)
CRIMENET Popularity Index: November 2026
Everybody wants to be a criminal. Apparently, 119,581 people also want to operate a suspicious shop on a dystopian space station, which tells you something rather worrying about the state of modern entrepreneurship.
Grand Theft Auto V remains the most popular crime game in our latest SteamDB snapshot, but Probably Stolen has arrived out of nowhere and nearly stolen the crown. PAYDAY 2 is still robbing banks thirteen years after release, Schedule I continues running its drug empire, and GTA IV refuses to die despite Liberty City being one of the most thoroughly miserable places anyone has ever voluntarily visited.
Welcome to the November 2026 CRIMENET Popularity Index, ranking the ten most popular crime games to play right now.
This isn't a critic's ranking. Nobody gets extra points for winning awards, looking beautiful or making us nostalgic for a time when installing a game required six DVDs and a minor religious ceremony.
The question is simple: Which crime games are people actually playing right now?
Chart Key
▲ Climbed
▼ Dropped
▬ No Change
NEW First Appearance
RE Re-entry
Popularity checked: November 2026
The November 2026 Chart
Rank | Move | Game |
1 | ▬ | Grand Theft Auto V / GTA Online (Enhanced + Legacy) |
2 | NEW | Probably Stolen |
3 | ▬ | PAYDAY 2 |
4 | ▼ 2 | Schedule I |
5 | ▬ | Grand Theft Auto IV: The Complete Edition |
6 | ▼ 2 | Scam With Your Friends |
7 | ▼ 1 | Watch Dogs 2 |
8 | ▬ | Mafia III: Definitive Edition |
9 | ▼ 2 | Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (original + Definitive Edition) |
10 | ▼ 1 | Crime Scene Cleaner |
Grand Theft Auto still runs the underworld, but the crown doesn't pay the bills. If you're already planning your next crime spree, start with the latest GTA Online Weekly Grind and see which jobs are actually worth stealing this week before Rockstar changes its mind again.
#10 ▼ Crime Scene Cleaner
Most crime games let you kill people, steal things and generally behave like the sort of individual who gets mentioned in a neighbourhood WhatsApp group.
Crime Scene Cleaner asks a far more interesting question.
Who's going to clean up this fucking mess?
Playing as Kovalsky, you work for the mob, removing blood, disposing of bodies, collecting evidence and making sure the authorities don't discover that somebody has recently redecorated the living room with a human being.
There's something magnificent about the entire premise. While the gangsters are busy shooting each other over territory, you're arriving afterward with a mop, bin bags and the sort of industrial cleaning supplies that would make a professional janitor deeply suspicious.
It's organised crime viewed from the least glamorous position imaginable.
And somehow, it's tremendously satisfying.
The Getaway: A surprisingly satisfying criminal cleanup simulator that turns other people's horrific decisions into your full-time employment.
#9 ▼ Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Carl Johnson returned to Los Santos in 1992 and immediately found himself surrounded by corrupt police officers, gang wars, family problems and people who thought drive-by shootings were a perfectly reasonable method of settling a disagreement.
More than two decades later, people are still returning to Grove Street.
San Andreas remains one of Rockstar's most ambitious crime sandboxes. Gang territories, criminal missions, vehicle theft, robberies and an enormous world stretching across three cities helped establish the foundation for everything GTA eventually became.
It also allowed CJ to become enormously muscular, dangerously overweight or remarkably fit depending on how much time the player spent eating fast food and visiting the gym.
Few crime games have ever made the physical consequences of an enthusiastic burger habit quite so visible.
The original remains remarkably popular, although the Definitive Edition has attracted its own audience despite a much more divisive reception.
The Getaway: A legendary criminal sandbox that still attracts players long after most games from its era have been consigned to the digital retirement home.
#8 ▬ Mafia III: Definitive Edition
Lincoln Clay doesn't particularly want to join the criminal establishment of New Bordeaux.
He wants to dismantle it, murder the people responsible for betraying him and take everything they spent years building.
Mafia III tells a brutal revenge story against the backdrop of organised crime and racial tensions in 1968 America. Lincoln attacks criminal rackets, takes over territory and recruits lieutenants while systematically destroying the organisation that betrayed him.
The setting is excellent. The story has genuine weight. Lincoln is a compelling protagonist.
Unfortunately, the mission structure occasionally behaves like a manager who has discovered one particularly tedious task and decided that everyone should repeat it until retirement.
Take over a racket. Damage an organisation. Eliminate somebody important. Repeat.
Then repeat again, because apparently organised crime has adopted the administrative practices of a particularly unpleasant regional insurance office.
That repetitive structure remains one of the game's biggest weaknesses, reflected in its relatively poor Steam reception.
The Getaway: A powerful gangster revenge story whose criminal empire is considerably more interesting than some of the work required to build it.
#7 ▼ Watch Dogs 2
Most criminals require weapons, masks and a getaway vehicle.
Marcus Holloway can cause an astonishing amount of trouble with a smartphone.
Watch Dogs 2 takes players to San Francisco, where the DedSec hacking collective uses technology to expose corruption, infiltrate organisations and generally make life miserable for people who have placed entirely too much faith in connected security systems.
Cameras become surveillance tools. Vehicles can be manipulated remotely. Restricted areas become opportunities for drones, hacking and creative problem-solving.
The satisfying part is that you're often allowed to approach an objective without simply shooting everybody standing between you and the exit.
Of course, you can also create complete chaos, because giving someone access to an entire city's electronic infrastructure and expecting restraint is an extraordinary leap of faith.
Its cheerful tone doesn't always sit comfortably alongside the seriousness of the surveillance issues it explores, but the underlying sandbox remains one of Ubisoft's more inventive achievements.
The Getaway: A creative cybercrime playground where the most dangerous weapon is frequently a device that also lets you order pizza.
If the actual robbery is your favourite part of any crime game, see our current heist-game popularity ranking.
#6 ▼ Scam With Your Friends
Welcome to your new job.
You'll be working in a scam call centre, manipulating fictional customers, extracting information and trying to meet your targets.
There's a manager breathing down your neck, colleagues making everything worse and the constant pressure of performing well enough to avoid disappointing the organisation.
In other words, it's an office job.
The only difference is that the company has finally stopped pretending its business model is ethical.
Released into Early Access in October 2026, Scam With Your Friends turns telephone fraud into cooperative dark comedy. Players interact with AI-powered callers, attempt elaborate scams and discover that convincing somebody to trust you becomes considerably harder when your colleagues are laughing uncontrollably.
The idea has enormous comic potential, particularly because the game's criminal fantasy revolves around social manipulation rather than traditional gunfights or car chases.
There are problems, however. The developers acknowledged AI and voice-recognition issues around launch, and the game's Steam reception is noticeably more mixed than that of several other titles on this list.
Still, the popularity is difficult to ignore.
The Getaway: Cooperative criminal office comedy where meeting your performance targets is somehow even more questionable than the business itself.
#5 ▬ Grand Theft Auto IV: The Complete Edition
Niko Bellic travelled to America hoping to escape his past and build a better future.
Unfortunately, his cousin Roman had been slightly economical with the truth about his financial situation, and Liberty City turned out to be populated almost entirely by criminals, opportunists and people who consider attempted murder an acceptable opening negotiation.
Grand Theft Auto IV remains Rockstar's most grounded modern GTA story.
Its criminal underworld is ugly, its protagonist is deeply troubled and the supposed American Dream frequently resembles an unpaid debt accompanied by threatening phone calls.
The driving physics still divide players. The PC version has its share of technical baggage. And Liberty City is considerably less interested in offering carefree entertainment than Los Santos.
But that's precisely why the game remains distinctive.
Niko doesn't approach crime with the cheerful enthusiasm of a man who has just discovered a particularly profitable business opportunity. He's trapped in a world where violence repeatedly creates more problems than it solves.
And then Roman calls.
Would you like to go bowling?
No, Roman. Your cousin is currently being hunted by several armed men because the American Dream turned out to be a timeshare scam with firearms.
The Getaway: Rockstar's bleakest modern crime story continues attracting players who prefer their gangsters troubled and their American Dreams severely damaged.
#4 ▼ Schedule I
Building a successful business requires dedication, careful planning and a willingness to work considerably harder than anyone sensible would recommend.
Schedule I understands this perfectly.
It simply replaces the ordinary business plan with an illegal drug operation.
Starting small, players build their criminal enterprise through production, sales, distribution and expansion while avoiding unwanted police attention.
Before long, the fantasy of becoming a powerful drug lord begins to resemble running a logistics company with an unusually aggressive compliance department.
There are products to manage, customers to satisfy, employees to organise and an expanding operation that requires constant attention.
You wanted to become a criminal mastermind.
Congratulations. You're now responsible for inventory management.
What makes Schedule I so appealing is the progression from small-time dealing to something increasingly complex and profitable. Every improvement creates another opportunity, another responsibility and another reason to postpone going to bed.
The Getaway: A criminal entrepreneurship simulator that somehow makes running an illegal distribution network feel like an exciting career decision.
#3 ▬ PAYDAY 2
PAYDAY 2 was released in August 2013.
Thirteen years later, thousands of players are still putting on clown masks, robbing banks and discovering that the most dangerous member of any criminal organisation is the teammate who doesn't understand the meaning of stealth.
There's something genuinely impressive about that.
PAYDAY 2 remains one of the strongest cooperative robbery fantasies in gaming, combining planning, equipment selection, stealth, gunplay and the inevitable moment when somebody makes a mistake and the entire operation turns into a national emergency.
A carefully coordinated robbery can feel magnificent.
Everyone knows their role. Guards are avoided. Security systems are handled. The crew moves through the building with professional precision.
Then somebody accidentally alerts a civilian, and within minutes the police have deployed enough personnel to invade a moderately sized country.
The job has become considerably less elegant.
Despite its age, PAYDAY 2 continues offering the combination of criminal teamwork and spectacular disaster that made it popular in the first place.
The successor arrived. The old gang looked at it, shrugged, and went back to robbing banks.
The Getaway: Thirteen years later, PAYDAY 2 remains one of the most popular ways to commit cooperative armed robbery without actually risking imprisonment.
#2 NEW Probably Stolen - Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Sim
Running a shop should be a relatively straightforward business.
Acquire merchandise, sell merchandise, pay the rent and try not to go bankrupt.
Probably Stolen complicates matters by placing your business aboard a dystopian space station where wealth is concentrated, corruption is rampant and the stock has the sort of mysterious origins that would make an accountant immediately resign.
Released on October 28, 2026, the game follows a former scavenger who has secured a storefront and now needs to make enough money to buy it outright.
Players craft, trade and smuggle goods, navigate competing faction interests and make decisions about how far they're willing to go to keep the business alive.
The real enemy, however, may be something considerably more terrifying than organised crime.
Rent.
Humanity has apparently mastered the technology required to build enormous settlements in space, yet nobody has managed to eliminate landlords.
An extraordinary achievement for civilisation.
What makes Probably Stolen particularly interesting is its interpretation of criminal life. Rather than building another game entirely around gunfights, robberies and wanted levels, it explores the economy of questionable goods and the decisions involved in surviving inside a corrupt system.
The criminal fantasy is commercial.
You're trying to run a business, remain solvent and avoid being crushed by forces considerably wealthier and more powerful than yourself.
Which, depressingly, also describes running an ordinary shop.
Whether the enormous launch audience remains over the coming weeks is another matter. New releases can experience dramatic spikes before their long-term population settles.
The Getaway: A cyberpunk shopkeeping simulator that has turned suspicious merchandise, faction politics and an existential fear of rent into one of Steam's biggest criminal success stories.
#1 ▬ Grand Theft Auto V / GTA Online
Grand Theft Auto V is thirteen years old.
Thirteen.
When this game launched, the PlayStation 4 hadn't even arrived in shops. And yet here we are in November 2026, watching Los Santos comfortably retain its position at the top of the criminal food chain.
GTA V's story follows Michael, Franklin and Trevor through a spectacular collection of robberies, betrayals, shootouts and personal disasters.
GTA Online, meanwhile, has evolved into an enormous criminal economy where players can operate businesses, organise heists, acquire property, smuggle goods and spend extraordinary sums of money on vehicles that may or may not survive their first encounter with another player.
There's something deeply amusing about GTA Online's transformation over the years.
In 2013, the criminal fantasy was stealing an expensive car and escaping the police.
In 2026, you can find yourself comparing business investments, calculating production efficiency and wondering whether your latest property purchase will generate a reasonable return.
You've spent years building a criminal empire only to discover that you've become a middle-aged businessman.
With considerably more explosives.
The remarkable thing is that GTA Online continues providing reasons for people to return. The combination of open-world freedom, criminal businesses, cooperative heists, competitive chaos and ongoing updates has given it extraordinary longevity.
An enormous criminal sandbox built over thirteen years is being challenged by a game about selling suspicious goods in space.
Somewhere at Rockstar, a marketing executive must be staring at a spreadsheet with the expression of a man who's just discovered that the competition has arrived on a bicycle and overtaken his Ferrari.
The Getaway: The king of modern crime games remains undefeated in our current SteamDB snapshot, but the gap at the top has become remarkably narrow.
Biggest Story This Edition
The most interesting story in this month's ranking isn't that GTA V is still number one.
It's how close Probably Stolen has come to overtaking it.
A game released just four days before our snapshot has already attracted 119,581 concurrent players, putting it within striking distance of one of the most established criminal sandboxes in gaming history.
It's an astonishing debut, although one that deserves some perspective.
Launch-week excitement is not the same thing as sustained popularity. Probably Stolen will need to retain a meaningful portion of that audience before anyone starts arranging a coronation ceremony.
Elsewhere, PAYDAY 2 remains third, while Schedule I has dropped two places to fourth. Scam With Your Friends also falls two positions, and Watch Dogs 2 slips to seventh.
Mafia III and GTA IV hold their positions, while San Andreas and Crime Scene Cleaner each move down as the competition at the top reshapes the list.
Who Dropped Out?
Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition occupied tenth place in the previous ranking, but its 902 concurrent Steam players are no longer enough to remain in the top ten.
That's no reflection on its quality. It remains one of the most enjoyable undercover crime stories in gaming, but this ranking follows current player activity rather than historical reputation.
Mafia: Definitive Edition also narrowly misses inclusion with 1,117 players online, just 83 behind Crime Scene Cleaner.
The margin at the bottom is close enough that a different snapshot could produce a different result.
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