‘Cookie Clicker’ has quickly become one of the most popular games on Steam

Classic time-waster Cookie Clicker was finally released on Steam last week (September 1) and the game is already one of the most popular titles on the platform.

According to SteamDB, Cookie Clicker is simultaneously the most popular release and the hottest release on Steam right now. As such, the game currently holds the number one place on their trending chart. Cookie Clicker is also on their list of the top 15 most-played games by concurrent users, with almost 60,000 users playing it at the time of writing. That’s more than Rocket League, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege and Ark: Survival Evolved.

Cookie Clicker was first released in 2013 as a free browser game . The premise is simple enough: click on the cookie to earn a cookie. The more clicks, the more cookies. With more cookies, more upgrades are available to make gathering cookies even easier. As it stands, there are over 500 achievements available for players. There is no end, except to watch the cookie numbers go up.

Cookie Clicker has been in development ever since 2013, receiving over 600 updates in that time as well as being ported to mobile. Since its release on Steam last week though, it’s quickly racked up a healthy playerbase and the reviews have also been good, with 98% of the 5000 reviews for Cookie Clicker being “overwhelmingly positive”.

“Cookie Clicker was made as a joke but took off almost immediately, which perplexed us very much at first,” creator Julien ‘Orteil’ Thiennot told Waypoint earlier this week. “It wasn’t meant to be fun! We just tapped into the core psychological appeal behind a lot of games: getting something done. Life is a confusing mess where progress is often unclear and unrewarding, but video games make goals much more explicit; for idle games it’s as bare-bones as making a number go up.”

In other news, Valheim’s Hearth and Home update will rebalance all weapons, with the bow and two-headed axe getting a more aggressive tweaking. It’s the last glimpse of the upcoming update before it’s released on September 16.