📊Steam Check 2- Your daily Steam briefing, updated every day. We bring you everything from real-time concurrent player counts and global/Korean top-selling charts to the latest news, new releases, and updates in one place.
‘TBH: Taskbar Hero’ is a compact idle RPG that runs in the taskbar, and it has seen an explosive influx of users since its official launch on May 27. The game itself has received positive reviews, with many praising its character design, overall polish, and level balancing. It is also well-regarded for being free-to-play and for not requiring DLC purchases to progress.
With the game being free and well-received, the ability to trade items via the Steam Community Market attracted a massive wave of so-called ‘gold farmers.’ This led to a surge in cheating and abnormal item generation requests, pushing Steam servers to their breaking point. As a result, frequent server outages, lag, and bugs made normal gameplay difficult at times.
The developer implemented a policy to permanently restrict Steam Market access for any account caught cheating twice. However, this led to complaints about vague enforcement criteria and appeals from players claiming they were unfairly banned. The developer eventually had to open a separate channel for appeals to mitigate the backlash. Ultimately, it is the regular players who have suffered due to these gold-farming cheaters.
Following an update on the 1st that adjusted item limits and tradeable items, ‘TBH: Taskbar Hero’ proved its popularity by surpassing 143k peak concurrent users despite the controversy. Given the positive reception of the game itself, all eyes are on whether the developer can resolve these issues and achieve even greater success.
ISSUE | Today’s News
■ Issue | TBH: Taskbar Hero | Steam
The free idle RPG ‘TBH: Taskbar Hero,’ which officially launched on May 27, has been met with both popularity and controversy. Shortly after launch, ‘gold farming’ cheaters looking to exploit Steam Market item trading flooded the game, causing server paralysis and a barrage of lag and bugs due to abnormal item generation requests. The developer took a hard line by banning market access for repeat offenders, but faced backlash over ambiguous criteria and claims of innocent players being caught in the crossfire, eventually forcing them to open an appeal process. Nevertheless, the game showed its potential by hitting a peak of 143k concurrent users; its future success now depends on whether it can leverage its solid gameplay to bounce back.
■ Showcase | MIX Summer Game Showcase | YouTube
Summer Game Fest (SGF) has been building momentum with various game showcases over the past week. As the main SGF week begins, major showcases are starting their events one by one. Kicking things off this week is the MIX Summer Game Showcase 2026, hosted by the Media Indie Exchange (MIX). The showcase, which begins at 1:00 AM on the 2nd (KST), is expected to feature over 60 indie games.
NEW | Upcoming Releases & Updates
■ Release | Broken Lore: Follow | Steam
The latest entry in the first-person psychological horror franchise ‘Broken Lore,’ which has consistently tackled social media and psychological issues. This title serves as a prequel to ‘Unfollow,’ released last January. The story begins with ‘Anne,’ a woman haunted by a painful past, waking up in her childhood home. Guided by a sentient childhood doll, she must confront themes of self-acceptance, self-esteem, and her relationship with her mother. Developed with consultation from psychologists to ensure sensitive topics are handled accurately, the game features improved graphics and direction compared to its predecessor, as seen in its trailers and demo.
■ Update | Path of Exile 2 | Korean Service Page
In line with the genre’s tendency to see significant spikes in player counts during seasons or major updates, ‘Path of Exile 2’ has drawn in a large number of players with its 0.5.0 ‘Return of the Ancients’ update. Concurrent users, which hovered around 10k to 20k before the update, surged to 420k—the highest figure since the game’s initial launch. With positive reviews and its free-to-play model, the update is considered a notable success compared to previous ones.
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PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
