Look, let's be honest: when two local indie studios collaborate, you usually expect something modest. Yet, 'TBH: Task Bar Hero' is currently tearing up the charts. Just 10 days after its launch, it has smashed through the 260,000 Concurrent Players mark, leapfrogging Apex Legends to clinch the 5th spot on Steam’s daily peak charts. However, that meteoric rise has hit a rather nasty patch of turbulence, leaving player sentiment in a downward spiral.

So, what exactly is Task Bar Hero? It’s an idle hack-and-slash RPG that runs in a window precisely the size of your Windows taskbar. You build a party of Knights, Rangers, and Mages, and they get on with the business of slaying monsters while you pretend to work. With over 500 items and a 10-tier gear system to grind through, it’s designed for multitasking. While it opened on the 27th with fewer than 10,000 Concurrent Players, it surged past 100,000 in just four days, hitting 267,545 players by the 5th.

But there's a catch—a big one. The integration with the Steam Marketplace has proven to be a double-edged sword. Once it became common knowledge that in-game chests and items could be traded for real money, the floodgates opened for illicit macros and bot farms. The resulting server instability has caused lag, missing items, and chests that simply refuse to drop. To make matters worse, the developers’ desperate attempts to fix this—by temporarily disabling crafting and alchemy—have only served to punish the legitimate players, stalling their progress entirely.

This cocktail of mismanagement and server woes has predictably tanked the user reviews. As of the 5th, Task Bar Hero sits at 'Mixed' (based on 11,671 reviews, with only 43% positive), and in the domestic market, it has plummeted to 'Mostly Negative'. Players who just wanted a cheeky little idle game are rightfully annoyed that they can’t even progress, and the feeling that patches aren't addressing the root cause is only stoking the fire. With the marketplace debacle largely unaddressed, the review score is looking increasingly grim.

The development team did announce on the 4th that they’ve increased the interval for chest drops and server response times to lighten the load. They also claim to be working on adjustments to align with Steam’s guidelines. But let’s be real: until they tackle the fundamental rot in the marketplace system, the backlash isn't going anywhere.

Meanwhile, the global top sellers list saw Gothic 1 Remake climb to 4th place just a day before its launch, building significant anticipation. Following that, a sale on the Resident Evil franchise has pushed the latest title, Resident Evil: Requiem, into 5th place with its first 20% discount, while Resident Evil RE: 4 holds steady at 6th.