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Due to its heightened discoverability, promotional features, and fairly visible user data, Steam is probably the most trend-driven storefront in all of gaming. Hits beget imitators, and that goes double on Steam. When there's a Steam hit, there are sure to be distant ancestors inspired by that success, especially when that hit doesn't take long to imitate. We're still seeing loads of Vampire Survivors-likes, for example. This year, another big trend has exploded on Steam, and it's almost entirely thanks to Rusty's Retirement.
Rusty's Retirement was released on Steam in April 2024 by Haiku, the Robot solo developer Jordan Morris of Mister Morris Games, now and perhaps forever known as the Rusty's Retirement guy – which is "completely fine by me," he says. It's become a life-changing success for Morris, who says Rusty has sold about 550,000 copies to Haiku's 200,000.
That, you may have gathered, perked up some ears. This year alone, partly looking at a current "bottom-of-your-screen" Steam bundle that also includes Rusty's Retirement, we've seen heaps of similarly styled idle games that tick away at – you guessed it – the bottom of your screen. My Little Life. Ropuka's Idle Island. Tiny Pasture – Morris' pick for probably "the most popular one after Rusty."
With about six months of work on Rusty's Retirement, a fraction of Haiku's two and a half years of development, Morris catalyzed a genre renaissance. It certainly wasn't the first idle game, but it has become the flagbearer for this kind of idle game.
With Haiku, Morris says he was "very inspired by Hollow Knight, which is the biggest in the genre" for Metroidvanias. (Our best Metroidvania games list agrees! Also, I wrote the Hollow Knight entry.) With Rusty, he looked at another genre-defining giant: Stardew Valley.
When we at GamesRadar+ first saw Rusty's Retirement, our reaction was, like many people: oh look, a tiny, idle Stardew Valley. It turns out we were bang-on. That said, we missed one of the key inspirations: Microcivilization, a 2023 clicker strategy game that compresses a huge world to a strip of vistas.
"So I saw a game called Microcivilization, which is a full screen game, but you see the world through this very horizontal bar," Morris tells me. "That sort of strip, I thought, what if the game is just that strip? That's it, and you just essentially, like, watch it. And I was talking to some friends about it, and the idea that came up was Idle Valley. That's the project name. It's called Idle Valley. I was like, what if this thing sits at the bottom of your screen, and it's a little farm that you just take care of, and everything's automated so you don't have to do anything? It's just pleasant to look at.
"Originally, it was going to be a free game. I was going to make it free and then promote Haiku through it. But when I posted it on social media, because, even if it's a free game, I think you should still advertise it and build wishlists and all these things that are common for indie developers, and I saw the response, it went way bigger than than anything I had ever seen, anything that I had ever posted on social media. So I was like, okay, this is something else. I don't think it should be a free game, but I should spend some more time on it and try and make it into a good game where you can strategize but also have a casual playthrough.
"So yeah, the project file is literally still called Idle Valley. The concept is an idle Stardew Valley at the bottom of your screen. I probably have a Discord message somewhere where it says literally those exact words."
We'll have more from Morris in the coming days. For now, here are the best farming games to keep the top of your screen occupied, too.
