203,897 reviews. 199,779 positive. That’s 98 percent.

On Steam — a platform not known for charitable sentiment — the threshold for “Overwhelmingly Positive” sits at 95 percent. Schedule I doesn’t just clear it. The drug-dealing simulator from solo Australian developer TVGS has held at 98 percent across more than 200,000 reviews, a number almost no game sustains at that volume. Most Steam titles with six-figure review counts drift toward the high 80s. Schedule I has been sitting at 98 since launching into Early Access on March 24, 2025, and shows zero signs of slipping.

What the Game Actually Does

This is not a gritty narco documentary. Players build a drug empire in the fictional city of Hyland Point — growing marijuana, cooking methamphetamine, processing cocaine, cultivating psilocybin mushrooms, and distributing product to residents while dodging police. Drugs can be mixed with everything from soft drinks to paracetamol, producing unexpected and frequently absurd effects. Characters have a South Park-ish roundness. The tone lands closer to dark sitcom than cartel drama.

The gameplay loop stitches together business management, open-world exploration, driving, and combat. Players hire dealers, cooks, botanists, and janitors. They purchase properties for manufacturing and front businesses for money laundering. A wanted system reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto kicks in when law enforcement spots something it shouldn’t. IGN’s Travis Northup described the game as one that “mashes its dark subject matter and dirty jokes with surprisingly cozy management mechanics in a way that works really well.”

Player reviews tell the story. One user with 123 hours logged wrote: “suprisingly indepth and polished, some funny little bugs but havent encountered anything game breaking. wonderful game to sit back and relax or to go ham on knocking out cops to pickpocket their weapons haha.” Another, at 31.7 hours: “Literally haven’t played a game that was this good in almost a decade […] keep up the good work Tyler.”

The Right Game at the Right Time

Simon Carless, founder of GameDiscoverCo, traces Schedule I’s appeal to a simulator-game lineage kicked off by Supermarket Simulator’s addictive blend of resource management and small-business grind. “Drug Dealer Simulator always felt more grim and fiddlier than Schedule I, which has South Park-ish characters and wit,” Carless said. “So there’s just something that’s a bit more intuitive and mass market about it.”

Katie Holt, senior research analyst at Ampere Analysis, points to a Grand Theft Auto 6-sized void. With Rockstar’s title pushed to May 2026, players were hungry for crime-world sandbox experiences. “Crime is a subject matter that many major publishers steer clear of, despite Grand Theft Auto proving that there is a massive opportunity for more gritty gameplay experiences,” Holt said.

Co-op pushed the game into the stratosphere. At $19.99, the price was low enough for entire friend groups to buy in simultaneously. Streamers followed — a CaseOh broadcast peaked at over 78,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch, and a Penguinz0 YouTube video cleared 1.7 million views. By mid-2025, 82,000 TikTok posts carried the #schedule1 hashtag. Carless called the streaming potential “a big multiplier of interest.” Watching your favorite creator dive into a dumpster to evade police does the marketing on its own.

One Developer, Nine Figures

Tyler built Schedule I alone. Months before launch, he posted on Reddit’s r/GameDev asking whether the title — a reference to the US government’s classification for controlled substances with no accepted medical use — was too obscure. One user warned that searching “Schedule 1” returned primarily government documents. Tyler, being Australian, acknowledged the term was “very US-centric” and might not translate internationally.

He kept the name anyway. Within months, his game was appearing alongside both the IRS and DEA among the top search results. Schedule I generated an estimated $60–125 million in gross revenue, according to published reports. It won the Breakthrough Award at the 2025 Golden Joystick Awards. As of March 30, 2026, players had collectively sunk 17.8 billion minutes into it — roughly 33,954 years — according to TVGS’s anniversary update.

The one-year anniversary patch dropped March 31, adding headshot damage multipliers, a redesigned delivery app, and a Golden M1911 pistol. TVGS says regular updates are planned for several years before the game is complete.

24,877 concurrent players on a random Sunday in April 2026. Still #8 on Steam’s Top Sellers. One developer. One of the highest-rated games in the platform’s history. And it’s about selling drugs to cartoon characters.

Sources