Shop Titans
Kabam Montreal, Inc. · RPG, Idler, Management
Overview
Shop Titans is the ultimate RPG shopkeeper simulation. Craft powerful equipment, stock your shop and sell to aspiring heroes… at a markup! Hire heroes and explore dungeons to gather valuable materials to craft with. There’s never a dull moment in the world of Shop Titans!
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As a thriving new shop owner in a bustling adventurer city, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work! Craft, haggle and sell your way to the top and you are sure to attract many colorful characters to your shop… perhaps even the king himself!
BUILD YOUR OWN SHOP
CUSTOMIZE YOUR SHOP: Carpets, racks and stalls… or simply tons of cat statues! Design the shop of your dreams and your customers will love you for it!
DRESS TO IMPRESS: Choose among dozens of hairstyles, clothes and accessories to make your shopkeeper truly stand out!
GET CRAFTING
CRAFT: Craft from an ever growing collection of items including swords, shields, boots, guns and much more!
UPGRADE: Become a master craftsman. The more items you make, the more powerful and valuable they’ll become!
ENCHANT: Enchant powerful elemental and spirit effects to any item and awaken their true power with over a million possible combinations!
ASSEMBLE HEROES AND QUEST FOR LOOT
PERSONALIZE YOUR PARTY: Recruit and customize Heroes among 18 classes and equip them with items you made yourself!
MEET THE CHAMPIONS: Team up your Heroes with unique and powerful Champions, characters with powerful abilities and unique stories.
BATTLE MONSTERS: Send out parties of Heroes to battle monsters and gather valuable crafting materials!
A MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER WORLD
JOIN A GUILD: Team up with other players around the world and invest together to create a bustling city!
TEAM UP: Compete with your guild, in events like the Lost City of Gold. Big rewards are dropped the further you progress!
PLAY THE MARKET: Rack up the gold (and gems!) by participating in a worldwide, player-driven market!
From the game's Steam store page.
THE GAMEQ VERDICT6,336 reviews analyzed
What players are actually saying
1. Summary
Players who stick with Shop Titans describe a cozy, oddly compulsive loop: craft gear, haggle with heroes at the counter, send your own adventurers into dungeons for materials, and reinvest in a town you build with a guild. Plenty of them run it on a second screen beside work, school or another game, and a long-running group of guild players say they have logged in daily for years. Even some negative reviews praise that loop before turning to the money.
Money is the catch, and it takes up more of the conversation than anything else. About half of the longer reviews (51%) bring up monetization: workers and whole crafting lines that can only be unlocked with real cash, a monthly subscription that decides whether broken hero gear can be repaired with gold, and offers that appear from the first minutes. Players split sharply on whether that makes it pay to win or simply pay to go faster, and the argument runs through the whole review history. Other complaints follow: timers that stretch from seconds to hours as you level, a heavy dependence on finding an active guild, and, in later years, updates that broke events or locked players out.
2. What keeps coming up
What players praise
A relaxing game to run beside something elseHigh
About 20% of the longer reviews call it relaxing, chill or a background game, and hundreds of short recommendations say the same. People describe leaving it open on a second monitor while working, studying, streaming or waiting in other games' queues, then clicking through a few sales every few minutes. One player called it "the best screensaver you can get to occupy a second screen when working", and another wrote: "Perfect no brains game to relax and waste time." A few mention playing it while sick and liking that progress kept ticking while they rested. That slow rhythm is also what frustrates players who want to sit down and play actively (see the timers theme below).
An addictive craft, haggle and sell loopHigh
"Addictive" appears in 12% of longer reviews, often as a warning. Players like the details of the loop: crafting items, mastering blueprints to make them cheaper and better, surcharging or discounting customers to manage energy, and selling to the King for five times the price. "Turns out selling overpriced swords to heroes can be pretty addictive," one review says. Detractors agree the hook works. A negative review that tears into the monetization still says "The shopkeeping loop is dangerously good." Players who dislike it describe the same loop as clicking the same buttons on a timer.
Heroes, quests and the player market add depthMedium
Beyond the shop, players like how the systems feed each other: heroes you hire, gear and send on quests bring back the materials for higher crafting tiers, and the global market lets you buy low, sell high and trade for gems. Several players say selling on the market is how a free player earns gems. Min-maxers enjoy building heroes. On the downside, some find the auto-battles dull, a few complain that random hero skills take many rerolls (or gems) to get right, and others find market pricing hard to read and full of undercutting.
Seamless play across phone and PCLow
About 5% of longer reviews single out cross-play: the same account runs on Steam, iOS and Android. "I can stop on one device and pick it up on the other without waiting for a data sync," one player wrote, and some say they check sales on the phone and do longer sessions on PC. A minority report the reverse, with linking that failed, an overwritten account, or a Steam patch that briefly locked out phone players still on the old version.
Shop decorating and character customizationLow
About 6% of longer reviews bring up designing and decorating the shop and dressing the shopkeeper and heroes, mostly with pleasure. The complaint attached to it is that most furniture, outfits and wallpaper cost gems, and that faces and hairstyles are limited, so shops and characters start to look alike.
Where players are split
Guilds: the best part and a requirementHigh
Guilds come up in 26% of longer reviews. Supporters love the asynchronous teamwork: everyone invests in the same town, events pool progress, and some say the people are why they still play. "The guild system is awesome and perhaps the best part of the game," one wrote. On the other side, progress beyond the early levels effectively requires an active guild, which puts off solo players and those who wanted a plain shop game. Players explain that investment costs rise with each player's contributions, so a solo town stalls, and that when a big investor leaves, the town's buildings drop a level. Some describe being kicked or demoted after a few days away ("I leave on vacation for 2 weeks and the game demotes me in my own guild"), dead guilds full of inactive members, and a lack of in-game tools for recruiting or managing a guild.
Is it really free to play?High
This argument runs through the whole review section. About 13% of longer reviews use the "pay to win" label, while roughly 11% insist you can play well without spending. The free-to-play camp points out that there is no PvP and no forced ads, that gems can be earned through the market and events, and that the King's Caprice event lets you unlock old paid blueprints over time. "Never spent a penny and still enjoying!" one wrote, and defenders add that a game with no PvP and no ending has nothing to win. The other camp answers that you can still be locked out of content: some crafting lines have no free route at all, the leaderboards belong to heavy spenders, and progress after the mid-levels slows sharply without the subscription. Other reviews settle in between: fine if you treat it as slow and casual, expensive if you want to keep pace.
Constant eventsMedium
Events appear in 16% of longer reviews. Fans like the rotating schedule (King's Caprice, Lost City of Gold, Tower of Titans, dragon invasions, seasonal and crossover events) because there is always a goal and the rewards feel worthwhile. Others say the same few events repeat month after month, leave little downtime between them, need a highly active guild to finish, and are much harder without paying. One player wrote that the game is "much better" with the subscription, especially "during the Lost City of Gold event, where it is hell without it." A reviewer in August 2025 welcomed new difficulty settings for events, while another said an easy setting chosen by a guild leader cut their rewards.
"A mobile game on Steam"Medium
About 15% of longer reviews describe it as a mobile game or port, and they don't agree on whether that is a problem. Some accept it on those terms and say it is one of the better ones ("it's a really GOOD MOBILE GAME which practically don't exist anymore"). Others, some within their first hour, say timers, gems and starter-pack offers have no place on Steam: "It's basically a mobile game wearing a Steam costume." The specific PC interface complaints are covered under frustrations.
What frustrates players
Paid-only workers, packs and a subscription that gates repairsHigh
Monetization comes up in about half of the longer reviews, more than any other subject, and the complaints are specific. Reviewers list crafters who can only be bought with real money (the engineer for guns and crossbows, the scholar for wands and runestones, Mundra, the summoner and later additions), and the crafting lines they unlock have no in-game route. Reviewers' running totals for buying every paid worker climb over the years, from about $50 in 2020 to "178$ for all of them" in 2025. They also describe seasonal blueprint packs every couple of weeks, some on sale for only a few days. The Royal Merchant subscription, $10 a month by reviewers' accounts, comes up in 15% of longer reviews. Some call it the one purchase worth making ("Probably the one sub in a game that is worth having from all the games I've played"), while others resent that it unlocks basics such as gold repairs and full quest loot; one review complains that "EVERY SINGLE dungeon run shows you additional loot that you cannot earn unless you pay a $10 a month subscription fee". Long-term players also complained about a card system with large paid boosts, in 2023 reviews, and a 2026 autocrafter. Defenders note that most paid items can be bought from other players on the market: "you can just buy them off the player market from people who DID buy those workers."
Timers that stretch and progress that slows to a crawlHigh
About 20% of longer reviews bring up grind, waiting or timers, often as a complaint. The early game is fast, then crafts move from seconds to minutes and eventually hours, shop and furniture upgrades take hours or days, and only one furniture upgrade can run at a time unless you pay. One new player was stopped by the jump in shop expansion times: "how do you go from 10 minutes, to 16 HOURS?!?" Several reviewers name a wall somewhere between level 20 and level 50, where upgrade costs balloon and leveling slows. Some also find it less idle than its tag suggests: nothing sells while you are away, every sale needs a click, and there is no automation. "Why is this game labeled as an idle game if it clearly isn't?" one asked. New content tiers made the wait longer for veterans. An April 2021 review said the newest crafting tier "effectively added hours of RNG dependent crafting," and a February 2026 review was furious about a patch that moved a slot unlock from level 85 to 99.
Hero gear keeps breakingMedium
About 7% of longer reviews mention gear breaking on quests. Items have a percentage chance to break, and some players insist the real rate feels far higher than shown, including on easy quests and legendary gear. Without the subscription, repairs cost rare repair kits or gems, which reviewers tie directly to the subscription. One free player gave up on equipping heroes at all: "I started sending naked hero parties."
Updates that break the gameMedium
Bug and crash complaints run through the whole history, in about 8% of longer reviews, and they rose in 2026, to 13 of that year's 83 longer reviews. Players describe updates that break something: event rewards that don't work on PC, a loading screen that never finishes, a tutorial bubble that never appears ("I'm currently locked out of my game on both Steam and mobile, because a speech bubble doesn't pop up"), disconnects, and broken bounties or quest counters. Several say fixes take days or wait for the next monthly patch, and that subscription time lost to outages isn't refunded. Reviewers say an August 2023 update added a strobing effect that hurt players with light sensitivity. A few report the game running their CPU or GPU hot for such a simple game.
Offers on every screenMedium
About 7% of longer reviews complain specifically about pop-ups: starter-pack offers during the tutorial, "curated for you" bundles, NPCs who walk into your shop to sell paid packs, a prompt to spend gems whenever a craft rolls a higher quality, and offer icons that never go away. "10 packs/deals with less than 15 minutes of playing," one veteran counted. Players also describe misclicks that spend gems because confirmation buttons sit where you were already clicking, and a few say they lost gems this way.
Slow support and harsh account bansMedium
About 3% of longer reviews describe dealing with support, mostly unhappily: tickets that take a week or more, copy-pasted answers, and issues closed without a fix ("I have never seen such a slow support team in my life"). A smaller, angrier group describes bans: market bans after a refunded or disputed purchase that also left a negative gem balance, permanent bans for having a second account (including a partner's account on the same tablet), and one player "banned from market for 36499days". Long-time players say this kills their trust in spending money.
A clunky PC interface and a forced tutorialLow
About 5% of longer reviews criticize the interface: inventory and market lists that scroll horizontally ("I only get one small row I have to scroll horizontally through"), weak sorting and search, few hotkeys, and, in one review, no exit button. Some first-time players say they quit over the long, unskippable tutorial, and one says it kept them away from the volume settings for minutes. "The way the game holds your hand so tightly is way too annoying," one wrote.
No restart and one account per playerLow
A handful of returning players want to start over and can't: "Unable to restart from scratch without deleting your account and waiting 30 days." Combined with the one-account rule, that leaves players stuck with early choices they regret, such as permanent champion upgrades.
Pricing and store frictionLow
A few reviewers raise store problems: no regional pricing, so prices feel steep in Brazil, Turkey and Canada; gems bought through Steam being locked out of the market for 48 hours as an "untrusted platform"; and expansions that can't be bought as Steam DLC.
3. The player conversation
Most recommendations are a line or two calling it fun, chill or addictive, while the long reviews read like ledgers, listing prices, timers and bans, and some recommendations come with a warning about spending. Many reviewers mention years of play on phones before or alongside Steam, and dozens of reviews carry later edits made as the game changed.
What players raise depends on how long they have played. Longer reviews from players with under two hours are the ones that most often call it a mobile game and complain about the tutorial, which experienced players rarely mention. Players with 500 or more hours write more about support, bans, guild economics and updates that change systems they have invested in.
Sentiment has stayed in a narrow band. Reviews in the May 2020 Steam launch month were 69.7% positive (534 reviews). Late November 2020 brought a burst of short positive reviews, 416 in two weeks at 91.6%, a few of them written for the Steam Awards nominations. From then on each year sat between 74% and 79% positive until 2026, the lowest year at 72.8% (250 reviews), when more reviews complained about broken updates and changes such as the Tier 16 update ("after the t16 update many of the veterans quit and i see why"). Monetization comes up in roughly half of longer reviews in every year through 2025, so the money argument has been there from the first month.
4. What the developers could do
- Give the paid-only workers an earnable route. Reviewers single out the locked crafting lines, and a few suggest pricing those workers in gems so long-term free players can work toward them.
- Separate gold repairs from the subscription, or make gear break less often. Reviewers tie gear breaking directly to the subscription, and one free player says they started sending heroes out with no gear at all.
- Ease the mid-game slowdown. Allowing more than one furniture upgrade at a time and smoothing jumps like the 10-minute to 16-hour expansion would address the wall players describe between levels 20 and 50.
- Test updates before release and compensate outages. Reviews from 2025 and 2026 describe events, loading screens and quest counters broken for days after patches, and subscribers want lost time credited back.
- Speed up support and make bans appealable. Players describe week-long ticket waits and permanent market or account bans over refunds and second accounts with no review, and long-time players say that stops them spending.
- Let players dismiss offers and quality-upgrade prompts. Players at every playtime level complain about the pop-ups and the gem prompt after quality crafts.
- Build real guild tools. Players want in-game recruiting, management for leaders, and softer penalties when an investor leaves or a member goes quiet, since the game depends on active guilds.
- Polish the PC version. Sortable inventories, item search, more hotkeys and a skippable tutorial answer what PC players complain about in their first hours.
