Task Bar Hero has normalized real money item auction houses, and Blizzard must be raging

Published: July 26, 2026

The fifth most popular game on Steam, right now, is Task Bar Hero. Over the last few days, I've become semi-obsessed with it. It's a side-scrolling RPG that sits on your desktop while your PC is on. Your interaction is theoretically mostly zero: the fun is spending your gold, your experience points, and building a team of fighters that will happily run dungeons and collect loot while you pretend to work from home. 

I'm finding Task Bar Hero absolutely entrancing. Partly it's because it's hard. I know that sounds ridiculous for a game that plays itself. But precisely because of the expectation that this will be running full time; leveling and upgrading takes an inordinate amount of time. When you're exchanging time for equipment and gold, the price of progress is high. 

There is a shortcut. TBH has full integration with the Steam Marketplace, and you're free to buy and sell items mostly at will. What's wild is the price of such items. As so many are being generated by players at any one time, and because listing is so easy, particularly at the earlier levels, even the highest-tier weapons and armour are available for pennies. There's a meta game to this where I'm selling off Steam Trading Cards and Dota items to get Legendary Swords; but I've never spent more than three pence per item. 

Three pence! For an arcana-grade scepter for my Priest. Is this okay? I don't know?

It's so confusing to me. 

I so clearly remember the backlash to Diablo 3's real money auction house. What a naive time. The ferocity of the online reaction was so fierce that Blizzard CEO Mike Morheime gave a full-throated apology. Years of work and preparation were thrown in the bin because of the impact on the game.

Yet, in 2026, we have a community arguing that there isn't enough trading taking place. The game is currently being semi-review bombed because the devs have disabled the auction house for high-level items - presumably because the opportunity for dupes and frauds is so high. Gaming in 2026 is so weird. 

Before I give a full recommendation: some warnings. The game is totally unbalanced. Some classes are straight up better than others. You feel the devs are catching up with their success and racing as fast as they can to patch and improve on some wacky development decisions. I'm pretty sure that the game is deliberately designed with choke points that require you to shell out on items. 

And let's address the endangered elephant in the room: running your PC for hours and hours just to earn fake gold is an ethical and environmental disaster. Please just run it while you're "in calls." 

Yet here I am spending thrupence to equip my Priest with a new sceptre. And I'm not even bothered? Maybe this is how early bitcoin mining felt: leaving your PC on overnight and hoping that magic money might appear to you? Instead of solving maths for beans, I'm watching sprites kill rats for pants. What a world we live in.