With its soft color palette and cheery cow mascot, Milky Way Idle doesn't look like the sort of game that would throw gamers into a fit of unbridled rage. And yet, according to one of the developers behind the galactic RPG idler, the game has been at the center of an ongoing bullying campaign that shows no signs of letting up. It all started with a single banned player, the developer says.
Milky Way Idle is an early access PC game on Steam that also exists online as a web browser experience. Like many idle games, the idea is that you can make progress on things like experience points, resources, and crafting while not actively playing the game. What sets Milky Way Idle apart — aside from its setting — is that the game features multiplayer, so fans can trade items, explore dungeons together, and join guilds.
When Milky Way Idle was first released on Steam, it was mostly well-received. In the Steam reviews from its launch window, many fans compared the experience to Runescape, but with a strong gameplay loop. "You set up your actions once, walk away, and when you come back, your in-game dude has built a house, fought a dragon, and probably filed his space taxes," one review joked.
"This game basically plays itself, and somehow makes you feel like the genius," it continued.
Things seemed to be going well for Milky Way Idle developer Cheze, until around June 2025. As the creator tells it on Reddit, that's when he banned a particular Chinese player who Cheze claims was incessantly messaging him with "rude remarks." The ban came after a series of lighter punishments, like muting the player from global chat and expelling the player from the game for a short period of time.
Speaking to Polygon via email, Cheze revealed that the fan was irate over a balance change that nerfed an aspect of Milky Way Galaxy that the player liked. Like with Slay the Spire 2 recently, the player was reacting to adjustments on the game's test server, before the tweaks went live to everyone. Cheze says that this led the user to repeatedly call the developer a "stupid c*nt," among other things.
What Cheze wasn't expecting, however, was that the ban would turn into a full-on cultural war. Apparently, the problematic player self-identified as a "whale," that is, someone who spends an inordinate amount of money on a game. As Cheze interpreted it, the ban "sparked a massive drama because a lot of Chinese players come from a gaming culture where it's expected for businesses to treat 'whales' like gods and just accept abusive behavior."
In the original gamedev subreddit post where Cheze detailed his conundrum, he made it clear that he did not want to condemn an entire populace of people. While there are plenty of examples of Western players throwing fits over silly things, there's no getting around the fact that the bulk of the players who rallied around the banned user were Chinese.
Not long after the ban, Milky Way Galaxy started undergoing a review bomb on Steam where hundreds of users were leaving negative feedback on the game. Some of these negative reviews cited in-game balancing as the source of displeasure, while others pointed to the implementation of Battle Pass as the reason for the negative review. Another theme in the reviews was anger over the developer's moderation tactics, which some fans believed stifled any negative criticism against the game.
Cheze, however, maintains that the studio has a zero-tolerance policy against harassment. The developer also maintains that the review bomb was "unquestionably" motivated by the player ban, not a gameplay element. The barrage began within an hour of the ban, the dev says.
As time went on, more and more reviews expressed a belief that the developer had an agenda against Chinese players.
"Dev/owner/admin/whatever went off the wall, mass banning/targeting chinese community," one review reads. "Doesn't matter the reason, this is blatant racism and just messed up beyond belief."
"Didn't expect my first actual review on Steam is on a cow idle game but this current timeline is crazy," another review read. "main dev is probably one of the most unprofessional devs i've seen in a while and should not be interacting with the community."
Who in their right mind would believe we discriminate against Chinese players?
The campaign went beyond negative reviews, however. The developer claims that during this same period of time, fans were flooding the global game chat with hundreds of defamatory remarks, insults, slurs, and even comparisons to Nazis. For Cheze, the racism accusations are bewildering. For one thing, half of the development team is composed of his wife, who is Chinese. Cheze says he has also lived in China for many years.
"We literally spent endless effort working with volunteers to translate tens of thousands of words of in-game text into Chinese," the developer wrote on Reddit. "Who in their right mind would believe we discriminate against Chinese players?"
Cheze tells Polygon that the harassment campaign has slowed down compared to the initial few months after the ban. But the bullying still isn't gone completely — and much of it is still tinted with nationalist rhetoric, the developer claims. In the original Reddit post, Cheze included an image of a support ticket he had sent Valve in the hopes of receiving some type of assistance. The message included links to dozens of Steam posts, nearly all written in Chinese, all full of vitriol.
The primary motivation for posting about this publicly on social media was to express frustration that Valve was not doing enough to help him. Cheze claims that, while Valve did ban some players, it did not get rid of all the abusive messages. The developer also alleges that, while Valve has taken some action, the publisher apparently takes weeks before responding at all. Cheze tells Polygon that a decent portion of the harassment hails from the web browser version of Milky Way Idle, but Valve's conduct rules for Steam express an expectation that users will be "a good online citizen and not do anything that prevents any other Steam user from using and enjoying Steam."
Valve did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As far as Cheze is concerned, the mob against Milky Way Idle has weaponized nationalism against the game. Cheze reiterated the belief to Polygon that cultural differences explained some of the behavior. Cheze thinks that "some cultures" encourage paying customers to feel a sense of superiority, whereas businesses in the United States might be more likely to take action when a customer abuses staff. But while Cheze himself has a specific policy regarding customers when it comes to his game, American culture gave rise to the popular retail idea that the customer is always right. Cheze does acknowledge that the segment of Chinese players misbehaving is a tiny segment compared to the 20,000 Milky Way Idle users from the region.
"I want the focus of this discussion to remain strictly on the toxic behavior of the harassers, and Steam's systemic failure to protect developers from it, rather than condemning an entire demographic of people," Cheze wrote on Reddit.
What, if anything, might make the barrage stop? Cheze believes that players are still expecting a formal apology from the developer. It won't be happening anytime soon.
"We find this wildly unacceptable, as we are the ones on the receiving end of a massive amount of abuse, which was initiated by a player persistently harassing our staff," Chez tells Polygon.
The developer says that he has contacted Valve around five times, but most of those interactions seemed like scripted responses where the developer was instructed to manually flag individual reviews. "We want Steam to actually enforce their own rules and protect indie developers from organized harassment," Cheze says.