“This is definitely my biggest life achievement”: Idle Stardew Valley-like Rusty’s Retirement hits top 50 highest-rated Steam games among the 11,000+ released this year

That’s 11,219 and counting

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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 Retirementis 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-hellscapeone time. It’s also been a runaway success for its solo developer, Jordan Morris, who noted thatits 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.

I’ve peaked folks 📈 pic.twitter.com/PzVDyuxULIAugust 29, 2024

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 seewhether the idle genre Morris spawned can challenge for his crown.

Here’s our pick of thebest farming gamesyou can play right now.

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I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.

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