Steam’s fourth most played game doesn’t really make any money, and its developer says it’s better off that way

Bongo Cat, currently the fourth most played game on Steam – a placing it’s held for a few months now – doesn’t actually make any money. Despite having had around 150,000 daily concurrent players since April, making it at this moment more popular than blockbusters like Elden Ring: Nightreign and Dune: Awakening, Bongo Cat isn’t able to recoup the miniscule development costs it has.

“I’ll just share it publicly,” Marcel Zurawka tells me in a video call, he being the creator of Bongo Cat and co-founder and CEO of Irox Games, the development studio that made it. “Because some people said, ‘Oh you’re now rich.’ That’s bullshit. I didn’t make it for the money at all.

“So the first month of March, we made $2000 net, after Steam cuts and everything.” Then in April, he tells me, which is the month the game received press attention and blew up, Bongo Cat made $4050. In May, the figure dropped to $3800, and as of 24th June, which is when I speak to him, the monthly tally is $2800. “It’s not even paying a developer for us,” he says. “If you just look at the numbers, it’s actually losing us money in the end.”

But income and profitability were never the point of Bongo Cat, and they never will be.

Bongo Cat is only loosely a game. Really, it’s more of an application, which overlays a cute kawaii cat somewhere on your desktop which then paw-bops a counter every time you press a key or click your mouse. It’s unobtrusive, doesn’t make any sound despite the bongo name, and other than catching the animated paw-bops in your peripheral vision – and occasional colour changes and hat swaps – doesn’t distract you from what you’re doing. Bongo Cat paw-bops and counts. It’s the sort of thing you forget about and then suddenly notice again, and marvel at your rapidly growing score.

Which computer-based worker doesn’t want to see how many button presses they accrue in a day, after all? I’m on 90,000 presses after a couple of days’ work. You can even overlay Bongo Cat on the games you play, which makes for a ridiculous contrast in tone if you’re playing something intense like Elden Ring: Nightreign, or something scary like Phasmophobia.

Zurawka created Bongo Cat as an experiment. The inspiration was Rusty’s Retirement, an idle farming simulator that sits on your desktop taskbar, though Zurawka wanted something less intrusive than that. He also wanted to experiment with Steam Marketplace sales, where people sell game items for real money, in the way he’d seen

viral clicker game Banana do. So in the quiet end of December 2024 he gave himself a programming project.

His first idea was a stone. “I initially had the concept where there’s a stone in your task bar and there’s a small mining drill going against the stone and hitting it,” Zurakwa tells me, “and then it’s like a pixel flying away and the counter going up. And it’s always global, always present, and it reacts to every key press.”

He liked the prototype immediately. “It felt so satisfying to just smash your keyboard,” he tells me, grinning, “and also to write an email.” Enthused, he then took his laptop around the office to show other people there. “Try it! Try it!” he said. “It feels so good!”

But a stone, he discovered, as I’m sure you probably have, lacks personality. Zurawka wanted his game to elicit an emotional reaction in the way a Pokémon card does, and what better way to do that than with a pet, a companion. “And then someone in the office said, ‘Hey let’s do a cat!’ And then someone else said, ‘Hey let’s do Bongo Cat!'” So they did. “They prototyped it in a week.”

Note: Bongo Cat was a meme started by StrayRogue and FitzyFlama and spread on Tumblr in 2018. There, you can see Bongo Cat doing all kinds of things – singing songs, actually banging bongos, and much, much more.

The whole game only took three weeks to make, so by February 2024, a demo was ready to put out. Irox put it in Steam’s Idle Fest, where it proved popular, and then quietly launched the game in a Next Fest event in March. Slowly, people noticed, and then in April, when the press around the world started to pick up on it, “We went through the moon,” Zurawkwa says.

But the incredible player numbers Bongo Cat attracts each day are misleading.

To start with, you don’t play Bongo Cat in the same way you play a game like Dune: Awakening or Elden Ring: Nightreign. You don’t give it your undivided attention. Bongo Cat runs on your computer as a background application, meaning you can have it active while you do other things, such as work. In terms of topping a Most Played chart, then, it’s bending the rules.

A bigger issue is not all of the people playing Bongo Cat are real. As many as half the player-number are bots, Zurawka tells me. “Our guess is roughly 50 percent,” he says. And it really is a guess. “We have no clue exactly what the number is,” he adds. But by comparing the numbers with the amount of active people on the Bongo Cat Discord, and looking for unnatural behaviour on the Most Played graphs, it’s possible to estimate.

Bongo Cat’s actual player count is probably half what you see, in the ~70,000 players range, which puts it closer to 20th position in the Most Played chart, rather than top five. Banana, which currently has ~90,000 players, suffers from the same botting problem. Look at the forums and places where real players should be active, Zurawka tells me. “It’s completely dead.”

Bots – application scripts – grind items to sell on Community Marketplaces, potentially making the botter money. That said, Bongo Cat’s items are selling for tens of pounds whereas in Banana, it’s hundreds and sometimes thousands. And the emphasis placed on this kind of trading, and the money made from transaction fees in Bongo Cat, is minimal. It’s roughly half or less of the miniscule income Bongo Cat makes. Most of the money comes from sales of the £1.87 cat skins you can buy on Steam. These are items added primarily as a way for people to tip the developers making the game.

There are plans to throw some “stones” into the game’s code to trip the bots up, but the only surefire way to remove them is to charge for the game, which Zurawka doesn’t want to do. Steam’s rules mean there’d have to be a minimum charge of a pound or so, which is too much, he says. “I want to have it as an easy companion tool for everybody and don’t want anyone to pay anything. For me, it should always be as accessible as possible. I don’t want to pay-wall anything.”

What, then, if not making money, is the purpose of Bongo Cat? Simple: marketing.

Last year, in September, Irox released a game called EcoGnomix, a roguelite city builder which took far longer than three weeks to make. And it flopped. “It fell flat right after release,” Zurawka says. This was an unknown studio trying to launch a new game in an intensely crowded marketplace. Like so many games today, it had a vanishingly small chance of discovery or success. Bongo Cat has changed that.

The only apparent trace of self-interest Bongo Cat has is in pushing the studio’s newly announced game Oku, a watercoloured adventure about a monk on a spiritual journey. It reminds me of Okami. Wishlist and Follow the game on Steam and you’ll get a hat for Bongo Cat. Watch Oku’s reveal trailer and you’ll get another hat. Join the Discord and you’ll get another hat, and so on. “It’s an insane marketing tool,” Zurawka says. “We are now converting people to the next game from us.” Suddenly, people are taking notice. Publishers who previously didn’t respond are responding. “People are like, ‘What’s your next project?'”

There was one occasion when a publisher emailed asking how Irox had such a strong Wishlist to Follow ratio for Oku, to which Zurawka started to explain: “As I mentioned in the meeting before, we have Bongo Cat…” Then he received a follow-up email with a screenshot showing the person’s screen, and there was Bongo Cat overlaid on it. “Oh now I understand,” the emailer said.

Understandly, Zurawka likes the newfound attention, but there’s a tinge of frustration in there too. “It feels like, ‘Hey, before, we knocked on 50 doors; now, they are coming to us. It’s a bit disappointing to see that it takes you to have to be successful to be successful.”

Bongo Cat has helped drive around 50,000 Wishlists and Follows for Oku, which is huge for Irox. But it still only places Oku somewhere like 750th on Steam’s Most Wishlisted chart. That’s the kind of saturated marketplace Irox and every other small developer is up against today. Even Bongo Cat’s success can’t upend it.

However, Bongo Cat’s biggest days may yet be to come. There’s an update in the works that I’m not allowed to tell you about but which sounds brilliant and has the potential to spike numbers significantly, and to change the way the game is played. The plan is to drop it in July or August. Maybe then we’ll see Bongo Cat climb to the top of that Most Played chart.

Bongo Cat isn’t quite what it seems, then. Its motives are surprisingly earnest, and I believe that’s the secret to why it’s been accepted and attracted what seems to be a nice crowd. It’s probably also why the original creators of the Bongo Cat meme – StrayRogue and FitzyFlama – and the Tumblr community are okay with it, because no one’s getting rich off it. Zurawka doesn’t hide where Bongo Cat came from, and he isn’t trying to claim ownership of it. “The backlash was really, really tiny,” he says.

But success like this won’t go unnoticed. And indeed it hasn’t gone unnoticed, as Zurawka has already been approached by publishers asking how much Bongo Cat cost to make. Should they try to emulate Bongo Cat with grubbier intentions, the tables of public perception might turn, and there’s already a fairly blatant copy in Bingo Pet, which hasn’t had great reviews. There’s also a chance Steam might change its mind about the category these ‘games’ belong to and remove them from the games chart.

These idler games, though, which run in the background and are powered by your button presses and clicks, aren’t anything new. There’s an entire category dedicated to them on Steam. Take a quick look there and you can see Screen Cats and Desktop Cat Cafes and games like Tiny Pasture, which lets a menagerie of creatures mill around on your desktop taskbar and occasionally take a poo there. There are games like Cookie Clicker that have been around for a while but there are scores more released recently, with plenty more upcoming. Their existence and increasing presence suggests Steam won’t suddenly change its mind that these are, indeed, games.

Quite the contrary: Steam seems to be embracing them. This year, the platform ran its debut (as far as I’m aware) Idler Fest, which seems like a vote of confidence, though I must say it jars with my idea of the games people play on Steam. I’m used to it being a place for gamey-games; look at the Most Played list again and you see Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, PUBG, Delta Force, Apex Legends, Elden Ring: Nightreign, Rust. Those are the kinds of games I expect to see there. But now amongst them are Bongo Cat and Banana. The question is: are these anomalies or a sign of something bigger going on?

Tastes change as new generations find and connect with platforms like Steam. Gen Alpha will want different things from games than Gen Z, and both will want different things to Gen X and Millennials like me – I’m on the border between the two. Younger gaming habits might also have been shaped by quick-fix mobile games, or by the intensely crowded marketplaces of platforms like Roblox. I expect social media and short-form video have had an impact too. Younger people might want different things from Steam.

But so might people like me, people around the 40 years-old mark. I spoke to a friend working in the industry who specialises in helping teams take game projects to Kickstarter, and though he didn’t have specific data at hand, anecdotally he’s noticed a significant rise in wholesome and cosy game projects in the past few years. Maybe we want different things from games, he said. Perhaps it’s not the influx of younger generations at all, then, but the changing tastes of older gamers pushing these trends. I’ve had Bongo Cat installed on my PC for the entire week; granted, I’m writing a piece about it, but I had a rush of anxiety this morning when I turned my computer on and it wasn’t there. It’s become a kind of comforting and maybe slightly obsessive presence on my taskbar. I like having it there.

This isn’t a Steam-exclusive thing. Animal Crossing has been proving for years that cosier, less intense gaming experiences are in high demand. Perhaps there’s also a parallel between the Animal Crossing boom of the Pandemic and the associated rise in these kinds of digital blanket that comforts us. Out there in the real-world, things seem more volatile than ever, so it’s nice to have somewhere safe to escape to.

Or, maybe Bongo Cat is a response to Steam’s much-lamented discovery problem – Zurawka doesn’t hide that this is the case for him. But what if other companies follow his example and release hype-maker games of their own – what happens to an already overloaded marketplace then? Does it become a deafening place of digital sandwich boards all trying to corral us towards different studio’s games? And what if in amongst all that noise it suddenly stops making sense to spend years on a game when you can turn a better profit, and risk less, making a quick-fix game instead?

I’d like nothing more than these concerns to blow away in the wind because I don’t want the ambition to be pulled out of games, but no amount of hoping will change that there’s a problem here that Steam, and that the wider industry, needs to address. Until we do, maybe more Bongo Cats will arise, as organic solutions to a problem being faced. Marcel Zurawka hopes his studio Irox won’t forever be defined by it, and that one day we’ll know Irox for having made something else. But as for him personally? “That was probably my peak,” he says, and laughs.