I ran 45 idle games at once on my desktop as an "idle battle royale" during Steam Next Fest — which, in retrospect, is the only legitimate way to experience forty-five different progression loops simultaneously. Here's how it happened and why it didn't crash:
**The Experiment:** During Steam Next Fest 2023, there were exactly 45 playable demos (each free, each small). David Bisset decided to open every single one at once in a tiling window grid — roughly 12x4. The result was a living wall of progress bars, ticking numbers, and flashing alerts filling the screen. He calls it an "idle battle royale" because the games compete for visual space; there's no real combat between them (a server-side fight would require too much server overhead), but watching fifty different systems tick at varying speeds is pure theater.
**Why It Doesn't Break Your PC:** The secret isn't special hardware — it's idle game architecture. A typical 3D title rendered forty times in one frame would melt any GPU, but an idle game loop is "wait for timer -> add points." Since each tick happens on its own schedule, they don't fight for draw calls or render cycles. You could stack dozens of them and the CPU wouldn't even sweat — it just checks a variable every few seconds and updates a counter. That means 45 instances are trivial, unlike 10 copies of Cyberpunk fighting over your VRAM.
**The Visual Payoff:** There's comedy in the composition alone — different fonts for each game title, varying speeds of flashing "Level Up!" banners, one timer ticking twice as fast as its neighbor. It turns a cluttered desktop into an accidental kinetic collage where you can read 45 separate stories at once just by scanning across rows. It also highlighted how idle games are the only genre that was essentially designed for this kind of stacking — their entire loop is "accumulate without loss," so there's no penalty to running many, and the visual payoff compounds with every added instance until you hit a satisfying wall of pure progression.
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/i-ran-45-idle-game-demos-from-steam-next-fest-all-at-once-for-a-desktop-companion-battle-royale/
**The Experiment:** During Steam Next Fest 2023, there were exactly 45 playable demos (each free, each small). David Bisset decided to open every single one at once in a tiling window grid — roughly 12x4. The result was a living wall of progress bars, ticking numbers, and flashing alerts filling the screen. He calls it an "idle battle royale" because the games compete for visual space; there's no real combat between them (a server-side fight would require too much server overhead), but watching fifty different systems tick at varying speeds is pure theater.
**Why It Doesn't Break Your PC:** The secret isn't special hardware — it's idle game architecture. A typical 3D title rendered forty times in one frame would melt any GPU, but an idle game loop is "wait for timer -> add points." Since each tick happens on its own schedule, they don't fight for draw calls or render cycles. You could stack dozens of them and the CPU wouldn't even sweat — it just checks a variable every few seconds and updates a counter. That means 45 instances are trivial, unlike 10 copies of Cyberpunk fighting over your VRAM.
**The Visual Payoff:** There's comedy in the composition alone — different fonts for each game title, varying speeds of flashing "Level Up!" banners, one timer ticking twice as fast as its neighbor. It turns a cluttered desktop into an accidental kinetic collage where you can read 45 separate stories at once just by scanning across rows. It also highlighted how idle games are the only genre that was essentially designed for this kind of stacking — their entire loop is "accumulate without loss," so there's no penalty to running many, and the visual payoff compounds with every added instance until you hit a satisfying wall of pure progression.
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/i-ran-45-idle-game-demos-from-steam-next-fest-all-at-once-for-a-desktop-companion-battle-royale/