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.
