Desktop Defender is a confoundingly compelling mix of Cookie Clicker and Vampire Survivors. The game sits in a little corner of your computer screen whether you’re emailing people for work or paying your bills for the month. The action consists of a tiny triangle shooting other blips that arrive from offscreen to destroy it. It levels up and earns loot, briefly interrupting your other work as you choose upgrades and look for synergies to help the lo-fi automated ship survive its hostile confines a little bit longer, or at least until you power down your PC. Indie developer Conrad Grindheim made it on a whim in just a month. It wound up being one of the 50 most downloaded 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 told Kotaku over email. “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 ago we had 3 players, today I got this e-mail.
Thank you all so much ♥️ pic.twitter.com/AcG7Q9ltXi
— Conradical (@ConradicalGames) October 20, 2025
Desktop Defender is part of a recent wave of Steam games that mostly play themselves while you do other stuff on your desktop. Some, like Bongo Cat, are minimally interactive. Others, like Bao Bao’s Cozy Laundromat, can be more complex. While some are just fun distractions, others play off the satisfaction many people innately get from watching a fictional measure of progress continually tick upwards. Grindheim wanted Desktop Defender to be slightly more engaging.
“I made Desktop Defender because I really enjoyed this new wave of “screen sitting” idlers, but I hadn’t found one with more integrated long-term strategies,” he said. “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 you may remember trying to DMCA his own game during a public spat with the publisher back in 2023) spends much of his time working on the monster-taming action-RPG Synth Beasts which was Kickstarted with over $20,000 in pledged funds earlier this year. But he also finds time to experiment with shorter releases to try to understand how popular genres and tastes are evolving on Steam. He worked on Desktop Defender solo for about a month, only purchasing some assets for music and icons while making the rest of the UI elements, 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 said. SNKRX uses the elements of Auto Chess to reimagine the classic arcade game Snake, and is a precursor to 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.”
Where Vampire Survivors demands your full attention, Rusty’s Retirement, in which you occasionally help robots automate a Stardew Valley-like farming sim operation, provides bite-sized bursts of problem-solving nestled neatly beside real-life productivity. “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,” mental health researcher Natalie Coyle recently told The New York Times.
It’s the natural evolution of brief, session-based buildcrafting grindfests like Balatro which conveniently let players accrue little nuggets of satisfaction while waiting in line at the store or while sitting on the bus during a commute. But instead of punctuating the mundane moments in our lives, games like Desktop Defender interrupt our existing work flows with extra layers of progress.
The game you play while queuing for other games
Think of them as Pomodoro timers that double as Tamagotchi pets you can 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 said.
But 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 games, if designed well, can achieve more than before if they get that spark of visibility.”
Grindheim credits an unexpected micro-community that popped up around the game for helping give it an extra bump, in addition to events like Steam Next 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 noted. “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.”
