Nine thousand four hundred and eighty-two people are playing BidKing right now. The game has three reviews.

Something doesn’t add up, and nobody seems to know what.

BidKing launched April 15 on Steam as a $2.99 multiplayer auction strategy game — think poker-room psychology applied to collectible appraisal. Developer MindSurge Network & Games and publisher Elegoose Games pitched it as a contest of bluffing and bargain-hunting. The concept is fine. The player count is absurd.

By any normal Steam metric, a game with fewer than a dozen user reviews should be invisible. Most titles in that range are lucky to crack 50 concurrent players. BidKing is sitting on the New Releases chart with a population larger than many mid-tier MMOs, and its entire feedback corpus consists of a sarcastic “Game of the year 2026!” (negative, 0.7 hours played), a latency complaint calling the game “unplayable,” and one brave soul who showed up just to note they were “an English comment passing by” in what appears to be a heavily non-English player base.

That last detail might be the key. The game’s Steam page lists simplified and traditional Chinese language support prominently, and the lone English review reads like a tourist sighting. This has all the markings of a regional viral moment — possibly a streamer-driven surge in China or Southeast Asia — though without Steam’s regional breakdown, that’s educated speculation.

What’s not speculative: the numbers are real, the reviews are brutal where they exist, and the player count makes zero sense next to every other signal Steam offers. Either BidKing cracked some hidden formula for attention, or 9,000 people collectively decided to spend three dollars on the same auction game on the same Tuesday.

If they’re all having a great time, nobody’s writing about it. If they’re not, nobody’s leaving.

Sources