GAME · released

Banished

Shining Rock Software LLC

Quick read

Banished is a harsh village sim: food, firewood, and a winter that does not care whether you named the dead. A famine is a schedule you wrote when you built one house too many.

What kind of game is it?

Colony needs without combat spectacle. You schedule wood and grain. The settlement is the character; nobody adventure-parties out of a famine you caused, and the next sitting is a winter you can already see coming on that calendar.

Who is it for?

For players who chase a winter they can already see on the calendar they wrote.

How it plays

Loop: Running a colony
Sessions: Long sessions
Progression: A world that stays
Players: Single-player
Structure: Systemic
Tone: Deadpan · Challenging

Game DNA

What playing it feels like, out of 100. Our reading, separate from Steam reviews.

Progression80
Estimate
Social18
Estimate

Key Steam facts

Steam store figures, checked 17 Aug 2026.

Release

released

2014-02-18

Review score

90%

Checked 17 Aug 2026.

Steam positive percent.

Review count

43,276

Checked 17 Aug 2026.

Store price

€18.99

Checked 17 Aug 2026.

Languages

Demo

Early Access

Players

Single-player

How many people play Banished?

Estimates from public Steam data, not figures from the studio. Ranges, not exact numbers.

Estimated copies

1.1M – 2.4M

Steam reviews × 25 to 55. For a free game: players, not sales.

All-time peak players

24,568

Most people playing at the same moment, per SteamCharts.

Average players, Aug 2026

449

Peak that month: 710.

Median playtime

56 h

Half of 300 recent reviewers played 21.5–153.3 h. 2% under 2 h.

Players over time

Sept 2023Aug 2026

Where the players are

Languages of the last 300 Steam reviews. A proxy for regions, not a country split.

English60%
Portuguese (Brazil)7%
Simplified Chinese6%
German5%
Russian4%
Turkish3%

Steam data checked 4 Oct 2026

What makes it different?

No adventure party. The settlement is the character.

Core mechanics

Similar games

Full games-like page →

Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress is a colony sim: you dig a fortress into a generated world and manage dwarves whose moods, needs and mistakes write the story.

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Prison Architect

Prison Architect is a management game where the product is a facility that can riot if the toilets and the regime disagree. A census is the HP bar, and the yard is a plan you will defend on the news.

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They Are Billions

They Are Billions is a colony RTS that ends when the horde finds the hole you left in the wall — a campaign of postponing that minute.

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Medieval Dynasty

Medieval Dynasty is a first-person village: hunt, marry, tax, repeat. A house becomes a street, and the save is a family that still needs grain.

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Related games

Nearby games. Not always a direct substitute.

Shared: Procedural generation, Crafting, Base building, Creativity

Terraria

Terraria is a 2D sandbox that outgrew the '2D Minecraft' shorthand: bosses, classes, and a craft tree that keeps rewriting the world. Co-op is optional; the map is persistent.

Open →

Shared: Procedural generation, Crafting, Base building, Survival

Valheim

Valheim is a Viking survival sandbox: you gather, build, sail, and fight biome bosses on a world you keep. Co-op building is the spine.

Open →

Genre / subgenre

Subgenres: Colony sim.

Steam genre: Survival.

Related rankings

Sources

Store price checked 17 Aug 2026.

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