A brand new free-to-play idle RPG called TBH: Task Bar Hero has climbed onto Steam’s top 15 most-played games list with over 100,000 concurrent players. Nevertheless, its reviews have recently fallen to Mixed attributable to serious allegations and performance issues. An idle game features low-effort gameplay with mostly AFK progression, and the genre has been popular on Steam for quite a while.
Nevertheless, only a handful of indie titles within the genre have reached the identical massive audience as TBH: Task Bar Hero. Probably the most-played idle games on Steam is Bongo Cat, which has a quite simple premise: Each time the player presses a button on the mouse or keyboard, they earn points. Despite its simplicity, Bongo Cat reached an all-time peak of over 190,000 concurrent players on Steam and has remained considered one of the platform’s trending titles since launch. Now, TBH: Task Bar Hero appears to be Steam’s next breakout idle hit, though it’s currently facing several major issues.
TBH: Task Bar Hero Controversy Explained
Released on May 27, 2026, TBH: Task Bar Hero quickly attracted a surge of players, reaching a peak concurrent player count of 104,957 inside roughly 72 hours (via SteamDB). While this could have been a serious milestone for indie developers Nugem Studio and Tesseract, the sport was soon flooded with negative reviews, dropping its Steam rating to “Mixed.” Matters escalated further as some players accused TBH: Task Bar Hero of being spyware, potentially used to gather user data.
Discover the duvet art while scratching off as little foil as possible.
EasyMediumHardPermadeath
The event team quickly responded with a Steam community post explaining the information the sport collects. They stated, “Data is stored only when it is definitely vital. The corporate looks up additional information only when the potential use of cheat software is detected. Consequently, for the overwhelming majority of users, no information beyond a Steam ID is ever stored.” While this clarification may help ease the spyware concerns, TBH: Task Bar Hero can also be reportedly facing significant performance issues. Nevertheless, the developers claim these problems are largely attributable to Steam itself.
Certainly one of the most important issues fans of idle games face in TBH: Task Bar Hero is the random lack of hard-earned items and, in some cases, purchases. The developers explained in one other post that the majority of those problems are attributable to Steam server outages and that they’re working to contact Valve to handle the situation. Additionally they plan to introduce a compensation period once the problems are resolved, aiming to revive all the things players have lost.
Why TBH: Task Bar Hero Is So Popular Right Now
Despite these issues, some players may query why TBH: Task Bar Hero stays amongst Steam’s most-played games. Those that just like the game argue that its premise and visuals are genuinely fresh and fascinating. Despite being a small indie project, TBH: Task Bar Hero offers a roster of over 500 collectibles, all tradable on the Steam Market. It also includes greater than 50 enemy types and multiple difficulty levels, adding a ton of replay value. Briefly, many imagine TBH: Task Bar Hero has solid core gameplay, but is just going through a rough launch.
In the approaching days, it’s going to be interesting to see how the event team handles the present issues and whether TBH: Task Bar Hero can maintain its impressive player base. To this point, the team has released multiple updates and hotfixes aimed toward improving performance. If this regular pace of patches continues, TBH: Task Bar Hero may have the opportunity to beat its current problems and establish itself as a staple within the idle RPG genre.