Steam's second most-played game right now is reportedly a bot-filled marketplace that can get you banned

If you check in with Steam's player population data as much as I do, then you'll know it's pretty common to see an idle game towards the top. Bongo Cat has been sitting up there for basically a year. Banana holds the title of tenth-highest all-time concurrent player peak on Steam.

Out with the old, and in with the new, as Task Bar Hero launched at the end of May and reached a height of roughly 450,000 concurrent players overnight. Just this weekend, it hit a new all-time peak of 526,596 concurrent players. That puts it below Counter-Strike 2, but above the likes of Dota 2, PUBG, and Path of Exile 2.

I'm partial to an idle game (Ropuka's Idle Island, mainly), but I was sceptical of how a taskbar idle RPG would spread like wildfire. Turns out, the items you're passively earning can be sold on the Steam marketplace, similar to Banana's banana JPEGs. From a quick parse of the listings, most items are pretty worthless, but there are a few weapons and armour 'worth' anywhere from £50 to £150. There's currently also a legendary bow that someone's hoping to sell for £1,183.16.

The point is, it's almost certainly a bot farm flogging massively inflated items and gaming the economy. For those who weren't paying attention to the banana-clicking sensation of 2024, Banana became controversial over concerns about botting and marketplace trading. I suspect this will follow the same trajectory, if that ship's not already sailing.

The reviews so far don't help the optics. It's currently sitting at a 48% positive, mixed rating, with lots of players calling out the supposed bot farming and various game-breaking bugs—including valuable items just disappearing.

The real kicker is that it's reportedly the culprit for false flag bans, which will show on your Steam profile. Because it's an idle game that lives on your taskbar, you'll naturally open other programmes while it weasels away in the background. This can apparently trigger the game's anti-cheat system and put a mark on your account—a system that only exists in a single-player idle game thanks to the marketplace trading.

"Wish I had read this sooner. They tarnished my profile for no reason whatsoever," one (I'd assume ex-) player wrote in a post on Reddit.

In a recent statement from the developers, it's amping up its data collection now that it's running on private servers: "As the game's structure changes to a server-based model, the amount of information we collect will increase…additional data will be introduced to help identify users of unauthorized programs." The data the developers claim is being tracked is what you'd expect from a game tied to the Steam marketplace—your user ID, game version, device information, that sort of thing.

It's up to you whether a few bucks of tradeable items is worth it to you, but I'll be building a utopia for my pet frog Ropuka instead.

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