More than 11,000 games have been released on Steam so far this year, and for the developer behind idle Stardew Valley-like Rusty’s Retirement, the reception to his game is a major lifetime milestone.
Rusty’s Retirement is an idle farming sim that plays out at the bottom (or side) of your monitor, allowing you to make use of various farming robots to plant, water, and harvest your crops. It’s adorable, even if I did try to turn it into a Palworld-inspired mecha-hellscape one time. It’s also been a runaway success for its solo developer, Jordan Morris, who noted that its 200,000 sales in just its first couple of weeks was “life-changing.”
As the year has run on, plenty more games have come out. As of a post yesterday, Morris notes that there have been 11,000 Steam releases in 2024 alone. But despite all that competition, Rusty’s Retirement has continued to thrive – Morris notes that of all those thousands of games, Steam250, a site that ranks games based on a mix of their popularity and user reviews, currently has his game as one of the top 50 best-reviewed games of the year.
The exact position has jumped around a bit since Morris recorded that video, but Rusty’s Retirement is still sitting in 39th place at time of writing. “My little game is in the top 50 of the highest-rated games released in 2024,” he says. “This is definitely my biggest life achievement.” Now, it’s just a case of waiting to see whether the idle genre Morris spawned can challenge for his crown.
Here’s our pick of the best farming games you can play right now.
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