Desktop Defender is a confoundingly compelling mixture of Cookie Clicker and Vampire Survivors. The sport sits in just a little nook of your laptop display screen whether or not you’re emailing folks for work or paying your payments for the month. The motion consists of a tiny triangle taking pictures different blips that arrive from offscreen to destroy it. It ranges up and earns loot, briefly interrupting your different work as you select upgrades and search for synergies to assist the lo-fi automated ship survive its hostile confines just a little bit longer, or a minimum of till you energy down your PC. Indie developer Conrad Grindheim made it on a whim in only a month. It wound up being one of many 50 most downloaded video games during the October 2025 Steam Next Fest.
“We launched the demo with 200 wishlists and I was hoping for maybe 20 concurrent players,” he instructed Kotaku over e-mail. “When we reached 36 I was super happy because we had basically doubled our goal. Lo and behold…we ended up reaching over 1,500, landing us in the top 4 most played Steam demos, as well as getting a special commendation and a feature from Steam. To say that this was unexpected would be selling it short, but I could not be happier.”
1 week in the past we had 3 gamers, at this time I received this e-mail.
Thanks all a lot ♥️ pic.twitter.com/AcG7Q9ltXi
— Conradical (@ConradicalGames) October 20, 2025
Desktop Defender is a part of a latest wave of Steam video games that principally play themselves whilst you do different stuff in your desktop. Some, like Bongo Cat, are minimally interactive. Others, like Bao Bao’s Cozy Laundromat, will be extra complicated. Whereas some are simply enjoyable distractions, others play off the satisfaction many individuals innately get from watching a fictional measure of progress frequently tick upwards. Grindheim needed Desktop Defender to be barely extra participating.
“I made Desktop Defender because I really enjoyed this new wave of “screen sitting” idlers, however I hadn’t discovered one with extra built-in long-term methods,” he mentioned. “I’m thinking more like NGU Idle or Cookie Clicker‘s endgame. In combination with the extra tactility that the shooting tower adds, I felt that I could really bring something new to the genre. To many, the appeal of these games is to see numbers go up while doing something else, but I feel there’s an extra section of the playerbase that also really enjoys strategizing over long periods of time.”
Turning idling PCs into productive escapes
Grindheim (who it’s possible you’ll bear in mind trying to DMCA his own game throughout a public spat with the writer again in 2023) spends a lot of his time engaged on the monster-taming action-RPG Synth Beasts which was Kickstarted with over $20,000 in pledged funds earlier this 12 months. However he additionally finds time to experiment with shorter releases to attempt to perceive how in style genres and tastes are evolving on Steam. He labored on Desktop Defender solo for a couple of month, solely buying some property for music and icons whereas making the remainder of the UI parts, characters, and enemies in-house.
“The aesthetics are really inspired by SNKRX, and the gameplay mechanics as well to a certain extent, although the two games still feel very different,” he mentioned. SNKRX makes use of the weather of Auto Chess to reimagine the basic arcade recreation Snake, and is a precursor to video games like Vampire Survivors. “I really enjoyed playing Rusty’s Retirement and I felt like combining something like that with my interest in games with synergistic loadout building (e.g. roguelikes or RPGs) would make for a super fun time.”
The place Vampire Survivors calls for your full consideration, Rusty’s Retirement, during which you sometimes assist robots automate a Stardew Valley-like farming sim operation, supplies bite-sized bursts of problem-solving nestled neatly beside real-life productiveness. “These games can offer a happy medium between not staring at a textbook for eight hours straight and the mental exhaustion that can come with constantly getting ourselves back into the productivity zone,” psychological well being researcher Natalie Coyle lately told The New York Times.
It’s the pure evolution of temporary, session-based buildcrafting grindfests like Balatro which conveniently let gamers accrue little nuggets of satisfaction whereas ready in line on the retailer or whereas sitting on the bus throughout a commute. However as an alternative of punctuating the mundane moments in our lives, video games like Desktop Defender interrupt our current work flows with further layers of progress.
The sport you play whereas queuing for different video games
Consider them as Pomodoro timers that double as Tamagotchi pets you’ll be able to min-max in-between Excel sheet macros and anxiety-inducing Slack alerts. “I envisioned myself playing an idle game between work sessions or while compiling my games and how fun it would be to have a strategic throughline through that,” Grindheim mentioned.
However Desktop Defender‘s 15 minutes of Steam fame also points to the changing ways people play and discover games as the market becomes more and more flooded with them. “You look at games like Megabonk and while they launched with a sizeable wishlist count, it punched miles above its weight,” he said. “I think we’re seeing that smaller video games, if designed effectively, can obtain greater than earlier than in the event that they get that spark of visibility.”
Grindheim credit an sudden micro-community that popped up across the recreation for serving to give it an additional bump, along with occasions like Steam Subsequent Fest. “Tons of players on our Discord server and in community groups are constantly discussing the game’s most optimal builds and there’s a social aspect to that,” he famous. “Because people can play Desktop Defender and other idle games while in queue for online games, I feel it slots perfectly into how people are playing nowadays.”
