Idle clicker TBH: Task Bar Hero is probably at the top of Steam's charts because of bots

There’s likely some funny business at play with TBH: Task Bar Hero

There’s a new game at the top of the Steam charts alongside old standbys like Counter-Strike 2, PUBG, and Dota 2. At the time of publishing, TBH: Task Bar Hero has around 518k concurrent players, according to SteamDB, making it the third most-played game on the platform. It’s a fantasy-themed idler where you deploy adventurers to earn loot, and it came out a few weeks ago on May 27.

It’s unusual enough for something new to rise so high in the rankings so fast, but the numbers make even less sense when looking at the game’s reviews: it’s only been rated by 3,699 users. For context, Dota 2, which is at a fairly similar concurrent player count at the moment, has almost 830,000 reviews.

These numbers seem quite fishy, and there’s a pretty straightforward likely explanation for why the game’s concurrent player count is so high: bots. Because the game is free-to-play and lets you earn items that can then be sold on the Steam Community Market, there’s a good chance people are using bots to farm items. Most of the equipment listed on the market sells for pennies, but a few rarer ones have been going for $20 to $30.

For those who haven’t paid attention to this strange phenomenon, quite a few Steam Community Market-enabled idle games have climbed to the top of the Steam charts in recent years, such as Banana, a clicker about earning, well, bananas, and Bongo Cat, which is still going strong at over 100K concurrents. These games let players earn items and then flip them for Steam funds. As a Banana developer previously told Polygon, “it’s a legal ‘Infinite money glitch.’”

The main difference between TBH and other popular idle games is that it hasn’t fared quite as well in its Steam user reviews. 96% of players recommend Bongo Cat, while only 48% do the same for TBH. Players complain that bots have ruined the game’s marketplace, that bugged chests don’t reward loot, and that ranged characters are way too strong at the moment. Another huge problem is that if a user runs another game at the same time as TBH (a fairly common occurrence, given it's an idle game), this can trigger TBH’s anti-cheat software, which will place a permanent game-ban warning on the player's Steam profile.

TBH’s developers revealed that Valve forced them to make changes after the game put too much load on Steam’s servers, and now only certain high-level items can be listed on the marketplace. The change doesn’t seem to have particularly hurt the game’s numbers. If there weren't enough speculative markets for people to lose money on, Steam games seem to have opened a bold new frontier in that regard.