I like to browse the Steam charts sometimes. It’s partly for fun, just to see what weird games are climbing up the rankings, but it’s also partly for work, as I now get to tell you that Bloons TD 6 is suddenly one of the top games on Valve’s platform. Yes, that’s the latest entry in the Bloons Tower Defense series, those games you probably remember playing in your browser over a decade ago.
Bloons TD 6 peaked at 43,629 players today, as SteamDB shows. That makes it the 23rd-biggest Steam game for the day, sandwiched right between venerable hits like Terraria and Civilization 6. The game’s daily highs have been steadily rising just before Christmas, when the Steam Winter Sale brought the price down just under one dollar.
What can I say? Tower defense is fun, Bloons is cute and nostalgic, and one United States dollar is a fine price to pay for any videogame. A number of Twitch streamers, including xQc, picked the game up during its sale period, which certainly added to the popularity, as well.
Bloons TD 6 first launched in 2018 for mobile devices, and hit Steam on December 17 of that year. It’s quietly had a robust playerbase throughout much of that time, but the peaks of the past few weeks have been by far the biggest. And the game’s still getting regular updates, too.
So if you need a casual way to scratch your itch for strategy games, well… Bloons is still right there.