Bookshop Simulator

Bookshop Simulator turns stocking, checkout, and shop expansion into a business sim, with rare books offering additional abilities. It costs $13.59 at Steam. Full controller support and the listed play modes are useful buying details; whether that price fits your budget is the main consideration. The next announced Steam sale window is Dec 17, 2026 – Jan 4, 2027; that does not guarantee participation or a discount.

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92%Steam Reviews1.5K reviews

Released: Jul 20, 2026

Simulation · Management · Economy · Singleplayer · Trading

Steam·Platform:·United States Steam official price~~~ $15.99~~-15%~ $13.59Buy now

GAMIVOBookshop Simulator EN/DE/FR/PL/JA/RU/ZH/ES Global·Platform:·Checked 2026-10-19from~ $21.81(~ €19.43)Buy now

All-time low ~ $11.99across Steam & third-party stores

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Price History

Past 36 months · Updated daily

Historical Low~ $13.592026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $13.59SteamAt its historical low now

Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.

01About Bookshop Simulator

In Bookshop Simulator, build a bookstore by ordering stock, filling shelves, and running the register. Put earnings toward decorating and expanding your shop, hiring staff, and managing additional locations. Rare books and a shop cat add other goals to the business routine. Steam players rate the game 92%% positive across 1,542 reviews. The Steam PC version supports single-player, multiplayer, and co-op. Full controller support is available.

Credits

Developer

Blep Games

Publisher

Blep Games

Steam player reviews

92%positiveVery Positive1,542 Steam reviews

Lowest recorded in 36 months

$13.592026-07-20 · SteamBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.

Language support

Language	Interface	Subtitles	Audio
Simplified Chinese	Yes	—	—
English	Yes	—	—
French	Yes	—	—

Show 8 more languages

Language	Interface	Subtitles	Audio
German	Yes	—	—
Spanish	Yes	—	—
Japanese	Yes	—	—
Polish	Yes	—	—
Russian	Yes	—	—
Portuguese-Brazil	Yes	—	—
Italian	Yes	—	—
Korean	Yes	—	—

Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-20

02Before you buy

Modes and controls

The Steam PC version supports single-player, multiplayer, co-op, and full controller support.

Languages

English, Simplified Chinese, and other interface languages are listed. Check the displayed language list for details; audio information is separate.

03Frequently asked questions

What do you do in the game?

Order books, comics, board games, and other stock, fill shelves, and run the register to earn revenue.

How can the shop grow?

Use profits to decorate and expand the shop, hire staff, and manage additional locations.

What can rare books do?

Boxes of used books may contain rare mythical books with abilities that improve profits and capabilities.

Can you have a cat?

You can adopt a cat and provide food, a bed, and other items for it.

Popular Steam reviews

Native-language selection · 10 reviews

Selected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.

RecommendedSteam player

12/02/2025

As a lover of all things books, I really want to recommend this game. So I will, but very cautiously >.> The bare bones of a great game are there. The gameplay loop has the potential to be so satisfying. You do everything from ordering supplies, keeping shelves stocked, checking out customers to decorating your very own bookshop. My favourite part is that you can also sell used books and uncover rare editions. And it wouldn’t be a true bookshop experience without board games and cats!! I’m enjoying all the genres and their quirky titles. Despite all this, the game feels lifeless and robotic. I’m not a fan of the art at all. Feels like it just lacks creativity. The decorating options are lacklustre. When I think of building up my own bookshop, I think comfy and cozy. The options are just limited and lack variety to create anything unique. The colour palettes and patterns are very bland. The customers and hired staff are all expressionless and mimic the same movements. There is no vibrancy to the world at all. I really do enjoy the simple and relaxing gameplay loop. There is an option to hire staff but I found this to take away too much from the gameplay, leaving you with nothing to do all day but stand around and watch. I would only recommend this on sale at the moment. In addition to desperately needing varied content, I hope to see more creativity and liveliness. The world and shop environment just feels so dead. I don’t feel the passion for books at all, and that is the biggest disappointment. Decent start to a shop management but not enough as it stands to keep me coming back.Show moreShow less

4.9 hours at review85 people found this helpful

Written during Early Access

Not recommendedSteam player

07/13/2026

I REALLY wanted to like this game, but I feel like whoever designed it has never been inside a bookstore, let alone run one. I know it is a game, and I know it is in Early Access, but I genuinely thought it would offer a completely different experience and go in a much more interesting direction. Here are the things that bothered me: 1. Customers buy around 20 books at a time, sometimes taking four or five copies of the exact same book. 2. You restock the shelves in the morning, and by noon every single shelf is empty. 3. Customers come in endlessly. There is no natural flow, no quiet period, and no rhythm to the day. 4. The customers feel completely lifeless. They do not ask questions, make comments, request recommendations, or look for anything specific. They simply walk around the store and grab two of everything as though they were shopping for vegetables. 5. There are no visible preferences or buying patterns. Every customer seems to like every genre. It feels less like a bookstore and more like someone entering their favorite 7-Eleven and buying the entire inventory. 6. I thought the game would be about building a good bookstore, not running a book outlet. 7. One customer bought three new copies of the same book and then also bought another copy from the used-book shelf. 8. By the second day, I already had 4,000 coins. How did I triple my money in only two days? The economy feels incredibly unbalanced. 9. The font is enormous. The active-task display takes up a huge portion of the screen. 10. When you open a used-book box, the game shows you the contents so you can check whether there is a rare book inside. Then it packs the box again, drops it on the floor, and makes you pick it up and open it a second time. It is completely unnecessary. 11. One customer bought two rare books and eleven regular books from the store. That single sale gave me around 600 coins. 12. Where are the male customers? It simply does not feel like a bookstore. I wanted to struggle with bills and decide which new releases I could afford. I wanted to speak to customers, recommend books, help them choose between one or two titles, or convince them to try something outside their usual genre. I wanted reviews, bestseller displays, genre trends, regular customers, special orders... anything related to actually selling books. As it currently stands, the bookstore could be replaced with an outlet selling clothes, vegetables, electronics, car parts, or even trash, and the gameplay would remain exactly the same. Customers seem willing to buy everything in sight, regardless of what it is. This game’s motto is apparently: “It is on the shelf? I’LL BUY IT.”Show moreShow less

0.9 hours at review541 people found this helpful

Written during Early Access

RecommendedSteam player

01/11/2026

This game has a lot of potential, and I am definitely enjoying it. The book titles are so nice and funny. I love that you can customize almost everything and even get a pet! I love how the books look an the fact that they differ in size and design. Well, since it's early access, I do have some points where this game could improve: 1) The amount of books the customers buy is way too many, and so are the customers ariving. I have almost every customer buying 8+ books. This is not realistic and also makes it almost impossible to run you bookshop yourself. It forces you to get staff. If you sell less books, I do get that you make less money, but it would be way more realistic. It makes for a more cozy/slow game if the customers and books they buy would be a little less. Now it feels kinda rushed. 2) I would really appreciate it if there was an option in your buy-app to sort the books on how many you have in stock, this way ordering would be way easier. It also changes back to "name" as soon as you buy or click something. Should be able to lock it on "genre" for example. 3) I would like a stockroom for my shelves and boxes. It being in the store doesn't look that great. It would also be nice if my worker put boxes on the stockshelf instead of dropping them in front of the bookshelves. 4) The option to put in real money. I'd like to play with Euro's and can imagine others playing with Dollars, if it is possible. 5) Don't sell rare books right away. If these books are so rare, it is not very believable if they dissapear of the shelves right away. This also makes for an almost always empty bookshelf. 6) Just a little thing I was pondering; How fun would it be to customize the bag the customers receive to your own bookshop?! Overall, really enjoyable, can't wait where this game goes. But for me to keep playing, the pace should be a little less fast, and maybe add goals and special events. For now it's pretty easy to just get whatever you want, which also makes it to be less of a challenge.Show moreShow less

1 hours at review50 people found this helpful

Written during Early Access

Not recommendedSteam player

07/20/2026

It's the same as all the other ones. Place shelf Put product on shelf Set price of product Click product at counter Click buttons to give change As with all of them you don't need to work out the change, you don't need to know market trends, you don't have to strategically place your products for visibility. NPCs will just come and buy every book you have, sometimes doubles. No interaction other than sales, lifeless animations. More slop for the slop god. <Edit> Clearly the people replying to this review are incapable of reading my last paragraph. I understand what is involved in business ownership. That some of you think all there is to small business ownership is purchasing goods, selling them, and decorating your store is indicative of your inexperience and/or age.Show moreShow less

0.4 hours at review123 people found this helpful

Written during Early Access

RecommendedSteam player

06/04/2026

This is such a perfect idea for a simulator for me, because I love books and reading. I'm just getting into my simulator era, and this game caught my eye in a big way because of the theme and also the good reviews I'd seen. It's doing a lot of things really well, including a lot of good QoL features. That's definitely not to say my experience was flawless and perfect, though. So here's a more long-winded, deeper breakdown: THINGS I LIKED ♦ THERE ARE CATS. You can have cats. Numerous cats. You can pet the cats. This is good. ♦ The books are parodies of real books. There's a lot I loved about this game, but this is my absolute favorite thing. The books are based on real books, with silly quirky twists for the titles and authors. ♦ There's a lot of books, and even more in the workshop. You get to unlock several at the beginning, and then pretty quickly you get to a point where unlock a new book every time you level up as a player. I am level 57 and there are still so many books I haven't unlocked. I've also added several more from the workshop, so there's a lot of longevity here with how long you can spend unlocking new titles. ♦ There's a lot of cool ways to display books. I do wish there were more sizes for standard book shelves, but there were some cool shelves themed around different genres, a cute table for featuring books that would increase sales, special shelves for manga and comics, etc. I also like that you could change how books were displayed on each individual shelf. ♦ There are a lot of great QoL features. My favorite is the handheld scanner that lets you easily reorder books while on the go. You unlock this fairly quickly. I also like the teleporter, which I think is a newer feature. One of the most useful features was having shelves be highlighted while carrying a box of books, so you know where that book is already placed or stored. ♦ You can open boxes of used books, which might contain special editions or legendary books. This is a super cool feature. You can order what's basically a blind box of books. The majority of books inside will be used editions, but some will be first editions or signed, and they're worth a good chunk of money. You can also find legendary books, which when displayed on special stands in your store, will grant you benefits depending on the book. And there are a lot of legendary books to find, and so many of them offer really handy benefits, like increased sales on specific genres, increased employee speed, etc. ♦ The pacing is well done. You have both a player level and a level for each store, and can unlock different rewards based on these levels. I like that every time you start a new location, you kind of have to go back to basics and work as the only employee until you level up that location more. You can unlock new employees at a good pace, and they can level up as well, and the levels actually feel like they make a difference. A stocker at level 40 restocks significantly faster than a stocker at level 5. I do feel like the cafe gets overloaded with customers at the start when you first place it, but other than that I felt everything was spaced well. It does start to drag at the end after you've unlocked everything besides additional books, but it's early access still so this will likely improve later. THINGS I'M IN THE MIDDLE ON ♦ You can have multiple locations. I typically do not like this feature in games, because it feels like too much work to manage multiple areas. This game does let you ignore whichever locations you want without consequence which is nice, and you can earn passive income from the locations you're not actively managing. But I still only used 2 of the 3 locations to level up and unlock things and besides that, I've spent 90% of my time in the Paris location basically pretending the other two don't exist. ♦ The "snap" feature exists and is fine, but could be a lot better. You can press a button as you're placing furniture to have it "snap" into place. Sometimes it worked great, and it made it especially easy to snap bookshelves into each other on the walls. But other times... it could be super finnicky and inconsistent, especially when dealing with oddly sized furniture like cafe counters. If you're not snapping something right to the wall, just out in the open, then it's anyone's guess if it will cooperate or not. ♦ There were definitely bugs. Nothing game breaking, just... odd. A cashier for my cafe mysteriously vanished mid-shift. I went from the Paris location to the Japan location, and there were just random book posters floating over the walkway several feet from the store. Random stuff like that. But I'm putting this in the "middle" because bugs are expected in EA games, and nothing that happened was really that bothersome. THINGS I DIDN'T LIKE ♦ Having to turn the lights on every day drives me batty. It's weird that my biggest gripe is something so seemingly small, but this was driving me insane. Every damn day, you have to hit a switch on the wall to turn on the lights in the store. I forgot to do it constantly, and then it'd be growing dark in the store suddenly and I'd be like DAMMIT NOT AGAIN. It's so small but it's also just so unnecessary. ♦ The storage system is fine for once you're farther along, but really isn't helpful when you're just starting out. There are only two sizes for storage shelves: a smaller shelf that holds 4 boxes each of 4 different titles, and a larger shelf that holds 4 boxes each of 8 different titles. By the time you have a larger store with a lot of inventory, this is just fine. But when I was newly started and only needed MAYBE one box each for each title, the storage shelves just felt like bulky, wasted space because they couldn't hold more titles. ♦ The decorations need more variety. As I mentioned in my intro, I'm newer to simulator games, but it really feels like decorations are just not a high priority for any of them. They usually have some decor items, but a very tiny amount. This game is no exception. I do really like that you can use the book covers as posters, but there are very few plants, very few lamps, very few chairs, etc. I really hope they continue to add more decor options and more wallpapers that aren't as bright/gaudy.Show moreShow less

39.3 hours at review40 people found this helpful

Written during Early Access

Not recommendedSteam player

04/28/2026

TLDR: Until the game gets a proper update, you won't see me touching this again As a bookworm and a big fan of simulator games, first, I was pleasantly surprised. I love the book covers, authors' names and the funny titles. Overall, this game is a great idea, but needs some serious polishing! I'll wait if there's gonna be some updates, because this game is very bland without any improvements. As the game is right now, it's not worth the price. I played for about three hours, and experienced everything I needed to form this opinion. Until the game gets a proper update, you won't see me touching this. It feels like the developer was focusing too much on the bigger picture instead of making the very basics work to make the game immersive enough. It's lacking a lot of stuff, it's missing a soul. PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THESE THINGS: Characters/NPCs are lifeless, dumb robots (no dialogue, no complaints, no feedback, not asking for help, NOTHING) NPCs have literally the same face, regardless of gender Every other NPC buys 2-4 copies of the same book, this is not realistic AT ALL NPCs have clumsy animations, and there are no idle animations: for example, when they sit on an armchair, they just sit still and stare straight ahead, also they don't stop to look at the books first, as if they were thinking which books to buy, but immediately grab a shtload of books and march to the checkout??? Not enough variety in items to decorate with, once you unlock and buy the ones you want, there's aesthetically nothing to look forward to, and decorating the bookshop doesn't affect anything since there's no rating system and the NPCs don't have opinions No special events like book releases, campaigns, sales, etc. NO DIALOGUE WHATSOEVER, NPCs don't spontaneously ask for book recommendations, they don't have any opinions on your bookshop, they don't complain about anything (even if they end up standing in the queue for like an in-game-hour or so) A great idea turned into a sloppy product (for now!) with a price tag too high. That's what this game is like right now.Show moreShow less

2.9 hours at review28 people found this helpful

Written during Early Access

Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.