There's a new surprise hit on Steam in the form of TBH: Task Bar Hero. Well, maybe it's not such a surprise, since it's effectively doubled as a free money generator, allowing thousands upon thousands of bots and players to idle for items that they can resell on the Steam marketplace. The developers at Tesseract Studio have consequently been hitting player numbers that most indies can only dream of, but they've had to spend much of their time since launch putting out the fires that their sudden popularity has created.
TBH: Task Bar Hero is a "tiny idle RPG" that plays out on your taskbar. You build a party of heroes that go out and adventure on their own, fighting monsters on your desktop as you pretend to work. Along the way, loot drops that you can use to make your characters more powerful – or you can list those items on the Steam market, selling them for credit you can spend on Valve's store.
TBH is free-to-play, so there's no barrier for anyone who wants to dive into a "get Steam credit quick" scheme, and this sort of thing certainly isn't without precedent. Just look at the wild success of previous free-to-play idle games with Steam marketplace integration. Bongo Cat has hit daily concurrent player peaks above 100,000 pretty consistently since it launched a year ago, and while Banana has dropped off significantly since its height, it once had nearly 1 million concurrents.
With a peak today of 164,507 players according to SteamDB, TBH is already reaching comparable levels of success just five days after its May 27 launch. But that popularity's been a double-edged sword. "Due to a sudden surge in concurrent players, it appears that an issue has occurred with the Steam item server," the developers said in a May 30 Steam news post.
Those server issues are a large part of why TBH currently has a 50% "mixed" rating in the Steam reviews. "Absolutely love the game but please make it playable offline or remove marketplace functionality, it's ruining the game," as one review puts it, and you'll see that sentiment repeated throughout the negative responses.
The issues have continued to persist as the days have rolled on, despite repeated updates and thousands of bans for cheaters. "Since launch, player activity and item volume have far exceeded our expectations, pushing the load on Steam's servers to its limit," the devs explained in a May 31 post. "Steam has confirmed that, because we failed to properly meet their server usage guidelines, the game was sending excessive server requests and causing problems for Steam's servers. As a result, Steam has asked us to reduce the number of items to meet their guidelines, and in order to keep the service running stably, we must reduce the variety of items traded on the Market."
To that end, the devs have cut back dramatically on the items players are allowed to trade. Previously, even the most common drops could be sold on the Steam marketplace. After this update, only items of Legendary rarity or higher can be traded, which should cut down on trade volume. That might make the game a bit less effective for those taking advantage of the free money generator, but for those who actually want to play it, the server issues should hopefully even out.
"We want to make it clear that the current situation is the fault of our development team for failing to follow Steam's technical guidelines," the devs add in yet another Steam post. They add, "We sincerely and humbly apologize to everyone — including the Steam staff and all of our players."
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