Steam Week in Review: 54 idle games released on Steam last week, and many look eerily similar

When Cookie Clicker and Candy Box both released in quick succession in 2013, I remember them being received mostly as a joke, or else as an amusing parody of “watch numbers go up” RPG gameplay. Then something weird happened: all my colleagues became fixated on Cookie Clicker. So did I. Lots of people on the internet, on Twitter and in various forums like Reddit, confessed to having become addicted to it.

Cookie Clicker did have an antecedent in Ian Bogost’s Cow Clicker, which was a very deliberate satire. But Cookie Clicker wasn’t presented as satire. And yet, it was so transparently meaningless that people doubted it could be anything else. You click a cookie repeatedly to generate more cookies. Once you earn enough cookies, you can invest those cookies into various ways of expediting the cookie making process. You click and watch numbers go up. It’s stupid.

Fast forward more than a decade later and idlers, also known as incremental games, are massive on Steam. Last week, 54 games with the tag “idler” released. In total, there are 4,314 games with that tag on Steam.

Some of these look pretty good as far as idlers go. Next Reign: Kingdom has pretty handmade pixel art, atmospheric music and strategic elements. We Need More Humans! Has a novel premise—you have to become increasingly proficient at abducting humans—and, as far as this genre goes, a distinctive art style. Zad Archery‘s art style, on the other hand, is very generic but it has nearly 700 “mostly positive” reviews, so it must be doing something right.

None of those listed above are likely to rival genre heavyweights like Bongo Cat (currently being played by 135,803 people), Task Bar Hero (66,292 people) and Banana (3,628). But they have at least managed to rise above the onslaught of idler AI slop. The vast majority of the idlers that released on Steam last week have an AI disclosure.

And many of them look oddly, almost uncannily similar. Compare the UIs in the gallery below:

There’s a special fondness for a roughly similar shade of blue, isn’t there? They are not pleasant UIs. What is going on here? Why do these games all look roughly the same?

A quick look at their AI disclosures may be telling. Vespera has “AI generated images and other AI made components”. Nexus: “Some assets were created using AI. I’m not as [sic] artist lol.” Brainrot Clicker, fittingly, has “some pre-generated visual assets, written content, and development-related creative work”, while Path of the Idle Cultivator used AI “for UI and some translations”.

These are just four examples: browse the raw unfiltered list of Steam idler games and you’ll find many, many more examples of games with loosely the same approach to UI, both in terms of layout and that gravitation towards a dark blue background colour.

The amount of games bearing the idler tag spiked dramatically last year, according to SteamDB. In 2020 there were 100, in 2024 there were 647, last year there were 1033 and this year—so far!—there are 1811. There are 1119 coming soon and 380 “TBA”.

I don’t mean to be too dismissive of the idler as a genre: there are decent examples. But the whole situation feels almost implausibly silly: Steam is being flooded with thousands of mindless “numbers go up” games developed primarily with the aid of generative AI. It’s got to be the quintessence of brainrot.

If you’d told me in 2013 as I dumbly clicked on cookies that this was the future of the idler genre, I wouldn’t have believed you at first. Then, maybe five minutes later, after giving it some thought, I’d probably have to admit to the inevitability of it.

Top Steam games by revenue (August 25 – September 1)

Star Wars Zero Company tops the list, which wasn’t necessarily guaranteed: yes, it’s a Star Wars game, but it’s also a strategy RPG in the style of XCOM. Unfortunately, the offices at Bit Reactor probably aren’t thrumming with post-launch elation: 80 percent of its workforce has reportedly been furloughed.

The Blood of Dawnwalker and Onimusha both released after the period tracked by this chart, but for what it’s worth—and perhaps that’s not much—The Blood of Dawnwalker’s pre-orders had it at 17, while Onimusha came in at 28. Given The Blood of Dawnwalker has already sold a million units just three days after release (across all platforms) but we don’t know how Onimusha has done.

Elden Ring Tarnished Pack came in at 29, which is quite low considering it’s Elden Ring DLC. Most reviews suggest it’s not worth the $5 wasn’t worth it: “Not worth the money,” one Steam user wrote. “Should have been free as it is a very small update made to promote the launch of the game on the Switch.” A lot of reviews are in agreement.

Last week’s Steam deep cuts