DLCThey Are Billions - Soundtrack & Art BookLoading store offers
They Are Billions
They Are Billions is a fitting pick for methodical strategy fans: build a colony, manage its resources, then prepare for infected swarms. At 
GOG, it costs ≈ $14.21, currently at the site's tracked low. The pause function gives you room to place buildings and issue orders without rushing, making this opportunity especially relevant if you want a solo game built around deliberate defense. For DRM-Free, Standard is ≈ $14.21; the supported interface languages, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese-Brazil, Russian, and Italian, may help determine whether it fits your setup.
All-time low ~ $18.74across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $20.992024-04Current Low Across Stores~ $29.99Steamvs. Historical Low+43%
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.
DLC
01About They Are Billions
In They Are Billions, build and manage a human colony in a world overrun by infected, gathering resources and defending against enormous swarms. Its real-time strategy can be paused, giving you time to plan construction and direct your army. Steam player reviews: 85% positive from 46,311 reviews. The Steam PC version supports English, German, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese interface languages. English has full audio; listed languages include subtitles.
Credits
Developer
Numantian Games
Publisher
Numantian Games
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$20.992024-04-22 · SteamBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Traditional Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| English | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Show 9 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spanish | Yes | Yes | — |
| French | Yes | Yes | — |
| German | Yes | Yes | — |
| Japanese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Korean | Yes | Yes | — |
| Polish | Yes | Yes | — |
| Portuguese-Brazil | Yes | Yes | — |
| Russian | Yes | Yes | — |
| Italian | Yes | Yes | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-19
02Before you buy
Play style
The Steam PC version is categorized for single-player. Its real-time strategy can be paused while you place buildings and issue orders.
Language
English has full audio; supported languages also include interface and subtitle options in several other languages.
03Frequently asked questions
Can I play solo?
Yes. The Steam PC version is categorized as single-player.
Can I pause the game?
Yes. Pause the real-time action to place structures, command troops, or review game information.
What game modes are included?
The description lists a campaign with 48 missions and a Survival Mode with randomly generated worlds.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected 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
This is a fantastic game. Sleeper hit of the year for me. On the label, this looks like an RTS game with zombies, and neither of those things appeal to me anymore. RTS games have felt rote and stale for more than a decade, and zombies, well, we hit the zombie media saturation point years ago too. The label is deceptive though - They Are Billions combines elements from many different genres and the resulting mix feels decidedly fresh. There's a ton of potential here, not just for TaB but also for something like a new genre: The Part-Time Strategy Game. I'm going to try to list the different unique features of this game to bring out why it feels so interesting and engaging. So this is a turtling PvE RTS where you can pause anytime you like. This gives the players complete control over the APM aspect of the game - rather than an anxiety inducing manic clickfest all the time where the fastest finger always wins, you can play at exactly the speed you want and no faster. In pause mode the buildings you place don't cost money yet so you can make building mistakes without penalty, and even more importantly - in pause mode zambee's can't eat your face. Yet. (They will tho). This isn't just PvE RTS though, it's also got timed waves to beat like tower defense. And unlike most RTS's where everything mostly boils down to a war of attrition between competing production chains and the bigger number usually wins, in TaB all it takes is one zombie to destroy an entire base. This is because in expanding and growing your colony, you are also making lots and lots of humans, aka future-zombies. When a building gets destroyed, all the workers staffing it immediately decide they want to eat your face, and the snowball effect ripples across your entire base very quickly. No matter how big and powerful your base gets, you are always exactly one zahmby away from losing. And there are a LOT of zombii. At least dozens. So even though you can play at the speed you want, the stakes and the tension are always at maximum. You are also locked into ironman mode, so every decision you make matters. It doesn't take very many suboptimal decisions before zombores are eating your face either. They will definitely your face too, and there are a lot of them. Hundreds maybe. If I had to count. So you need a lot of troops and defenses to survive, and you need a lot of resources to make that ♥♥♥♥, so you have to expand. And you have to expand defensively, because anything you build that isn't defended is basically just enemy reinforcements. The loop goes something like this - scout, clear out walkers (without alerting too many of them at once), pick out defensive points, expand to said points and set up prelimary defenses, convert new land into resources, convert resources into troops and D, keep scouting and clearing. And you're gonna be doing all of those things at once, all of the time, or, well, face-eating. Every part of the loop has failure potential, and with the stakes at maximum all the time, the ebb and flow of the game is incredibly satisfying and exciting. The random map generator keeps the loop feeling fresh and interesting, because you're never going to be faced with exactly the same situational parameters twice. Sometimes you have a couple of easy chokes to defend but not enough space to convert into resources, sometimes you've got tons of space but not chokes or resources, sometimes you're wedged in between zumbai cities, sometimes you've got tons of wood but no food or stone, and sometimes a lot of zombies eat your face. I think like thousands? Probably. You have to adjust to your circumstances and do the best with what you've got. There's never going to be an optimal build order for this game. The survival waves add increased pressure to maintain your defensive levels, because the waves can come from any direction and you only get a brief warning as to where the face-eating is gonna happen from. All it takes is one weak point at a bad time and well, you know. Nom nom nom. And did I mention how many ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ zubzubs there are? At any given time there gonna be 10s of thousands of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on the map, and the game engine really does an incredible job of conveying the scope of the conflict and maintaining frames for maximum face eatage. The starting zomboos act like an environmental deterent, and navigating and clearing them even has some stealth elements to consider. Too many guns in the wrong place making too much noise and you could pull too much aggro for you to handle. The zoomba hordes kind of have fluid mechanics, and tend to flow in and around your ♥♥♥♥ like nasty face-eating goo. I've never seen anything like it in an RTS before and it is very impressive. The final wave does tend to lag a lot, but the metric ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of face-eaters on the map at that point means you're going to be pausing like a schizoid on acid anyways. It really is a lot of zompers. More than several. The end result is something totally unique - part RTS production buildup, part tactical high-stakes RNGesus navigation, part tower defense planning, part horde-survival nightmare, part learn-through-failure training, part getting your face et. It's quite polished for a recent EA release, and has already been patched several times. It's very addicting and punishingly difficult. Somehow the only thing I want to do after yelling and swearing at a screen full of recent-humans all up in my ♥♥♥♥ is re-roll the next base. Die again, die better. There are definitely some flaws and annoyances though. If any of these things sound like deal breakers you might want to give it a few patches before trying: -unit pathing is abysmal. you will have to have some patience for some dumb micro. the good news is idiot units tend to get eaten quickly, like they deserve. -the map isn't rotatable and things behind other things don't have outlines. you will have to put up with having some difficulty finding and selecting certain things. -arbitrary space and building limitations make building more awkward than it needs to be. a blueprint tool or copy/paste functionality of some kind would be really nice, but do not exist yet. -the UI has some weird glitches and is sometimes unresponsive. most of the time it's ok, other times you accidentally delete all your walls. so it goes. -units and defenses aren't all that balanced yet. once you've explored the tech tree you're going to be building a lot of snipers, thanatos, and executor towers. Overall though, for me the rough edges are totally worth it. This game is a blast and I don't know of anything quite else like it.Show moreShow less
65.2 hours at review898 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
EDIT: Forum Moderators are censoring criticism, image provided at the bottom of this review. After eagerly waiting for this game to come out of Early access and enjoying the concept but waiting for the full delivery, I have to say I'm very disappointed. The promised and very hyped campaign mode looked promising in the small snippets they advertised, but in reality is the same mission over and over with the conditions increased. Build your population to 400-600-800 by Day 25-30-35, destroy all the infected, sometimes don't. Destroy the infected doom houses and build your population. All of these missions are timed, so even after you've destroyed all enemies on the map you will fail unless you've spammed enough farms for population within the time limit for a "victory". People complained about the absurd difficulty of the survival mode within Early Access, and those who voiced this were told to wait for the campaign for a more streamlined experience that will ease you into the game. This is not the case. Difficulty is all over the place but not in the way you'd expect; many elements are trial and error. You either build perfectly the first time by being a veteran player, or you keep re-trying a level over and over until you get it right as there is no save feature in this game. Infected will spawn in locations at set parts of the map without warning to the player or a horde needed, meaning you either turtle from the beginning (and lose, because you're on a timer), or you expand out, kill all zombies, think an area is cleared and zombies will spawn out of thin air to attack your base. I've made a habit of trying a level, dying after finding out where all the hidden spawn points are, and building walls around them because I now know where they are. Not fun at all. As for the "hero" missions, they are literally sending your unit to walk through a map, watching him/her slowly...and I mean slowly, kill each infected one by one as you Attack Move to the end. Your objective is to grab a box and bring it back to the entrance, and so far out of the 4 missions I've played the mission has been the exact same each time. There are no abilities (outside of consumables you can pick up) and very little thought process for this, just A click and watch your character slowly one shot each zombie...and they are billions. Worst still is there are collectables to find in these levels, but somehow they've ignored every prior RTS game that has included hidden items on levels and managed to design them without any visual cue. Background elements may be collectables sometimes and may not be. Collectables will have no distinct visual difference to other objects in the map, and there is no way to tell what can be picked up or not unless you hover your mouse over it. That barrel texture you've seen plastered throughout the map? Out of that group of 8 barrels, 1 of them is collectable, but you'll need to hover your mouse over it to find out. This gets worse when random decals start to become collectables; a bit of chain on the floor, an identical glass bottle out of a group, and worse yet hidden collectables behind background elements, like trees, only fully visible if you disable terrain graphics. Why care about collectables? They are your EXP to spending your talent tree, and how much resources you get in attack missions, meaning if you miss the smallest thing you are weaker for the rest of the game until you repeat that level. That leaves myself and many people on the forums complaining about spending half an hour in fully completed and cleared missions looking for the last hidden element somewhere in a giant map. Look out for the walkthroughs for this one. There appears to be no voice acting, story, or dialogue outside of an opening cutscene. When a campaign was advertised, some sort of story was expected. The final type of mission I've seen so far are "horde" missions, where your objective is to kill a set number of zombies running at your watch tower as you set up a static defence before the mission starts and see how it fares. After several attempts at this mission I was told by a developer on the forums that I should have taken a certain talent choice to be able to place spike barricades to finish these missions. This talent choice costs a lot of points, is the 4th one down on one branch, and requires a lot of investment to take. If the mission was designed with these in mind, why are they not given to the player as mandatory? As there is no way to respec, you are virtually forced to take this, or absolutely min-max the best possible strategy I haven't thought of yet. After 9 attempts of re-designs, screenshots of zombie pattern layouts to figure out where every choke hold is coming from, and a lot of trial and error, I've come to realise that the balancing in this game is simply not there. There are a few "veteran" players that are essentially shutting down complaints that have been present since the start of Early Access for this game that critique the horrible balancing telling them to git gud, but as a RTS player and huge fan myself who has tried more or less all of them and has gone through the thick and thin of different campaign ideas and evolutions, I can tell you that this isn't just a difficulty problem, but fundamentally poor design. Most RTS games ease the player into understanding fundamental mechanics and slowly unlock units and aspects so they can learn how each work at a streamlined pace, this does not. This isn't the fun type of difficulty either, but the cheap one that forces you to start over because you weren't building optimally since the very start, even at the opening tutorial of the game, leaving very little room for experimentation. EDIT: Criticism towards their game is now also being censored as well. Their forum moderator is calling people impatient and new to RTS games, insulting them if they've only tried their game for 2 hours telling them to put more in (past the refund process) if they criticise it. What a mess. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/518880635545190452/590975894483632128/unknown.png After watching their forum moderator get into arguments and now starting to remove and ban users who are critiquing their game, I sincerely regret supporting this developer in any way and heavily encourage people to avoid them.Show moreShow less
26.8 hours at review5,114 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
This game is brutal. It makes you feel like you're doing really well; it gets you all cheery and confident, giving you the illusion that you may win your first game! Then you see that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ message "THEY ARE BILLIONS". You believe your defence is finally strong enough to take the onslaught of zombies. Everything seems to be going well until they break through a wall. You don't notice it until they have destroyed all you're beautiful stone houses and zombies fill your entire screen. You freak out taking all your troops off their towers and bringing them all to your command center beleiving that maybe, just maybe you could take one last stand and defend from this brutal attack. As you watch your command center's health drop, your units engulfed with zombies, you admit defeat. Your command center falls and the game over screen pops up. You return to the main menu and you start again because this time, this time you might actually win a game. Great game, would recommend. 10/10Show moreShow less
43.4 hours at review683 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I have tried hard to like this game. I don't. I purchased this title in early access. I hoped that campaign mode would improve on gameplay. It hasn't. If anything, it's even worse now. Bottom line, this is a time-challenge puzzle game that looks like a zombie rts. There is no room for flexibility and creativity in the build order. If you don't know and follow the correct build order religiously, you get annihilated at the end, with no clear indication of whether you are keeping a strong enough economic pace to win. There is one right way to play, or you lose. That's not fun for me.Show moreShow less
30.4 hours at review1,620 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
You play for 75 days. You've dealt with hordes, and the occasional Harpy showing up and jumping a wall, causing panic for a short while. You might think you've carved out a little haven where your filthy steampunk peasants can toil for you, and eek out a miserable existance for themselves while you ride high as the Honorable Mayor. Then...day 90 happens. It starts like any other day; you upgrade some walls, build turrets where you think you might need them, and back them up with some garrisoned towers. You make a few more units, and build an advanced farm for more food. "Life is good", you say to yourself, sipping what is probably wine mixed with some form of oil; because steampunk. Then a warning. A horde approaches. "Let them come", you think. Well let me just say that this game doesn't care about your carefully placed walls for symmetry; or your finely organized stone houses that your people live in. It will throw a literal wave of infected flesh at you so dense that even triple thick stone walls can't compete with. You fall back to another wall, then another. You watch the infected tear through the streets like a bull in a steampunk china shop, causing exponential problems as they infect more citizens. You hear the last of your units die in agony as the infected swarm your Command Center. Game Over. TL;DR Game lulls you into a false sense of security, before slamming your head into the nearest heavy, blunt object repeatedly. Would recommend.Show moreShow less
19.6 hours at review510 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
*edit* 11-11-20 oof *edit* 5-25-2022 OOFShow moreShow less
39.5 hours at review983 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Build a colony. Build walls. Build units. Kill zombies. Kill more zombies. Oh god there's so many. Kill thousands of zombies. They won't stop coming. The walls fall. Your units are torn apart. Your villagers get infected and join the zombies. Scream at the rampaging hordes as they rip your head off. Ragequit the game. --- Think about killing zombies. Launch the game and start over.Show moreShow less
55.5 hours at review496 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
I have deleted the walls of text detailing the problems with this game. Here is my condemnation of both this game and the studio behind it, simplified into one (long) paragraph. This game, in all of its many flaws, bugs, broken mechanics and outdated (by early 2000's standards!) programming has a glaring issue above all - the game quite literally cheats. I have logged THOUSANDS of hours into this game - that steam is only showing a fraction of for some reason - years after I first developed an addiction to its simple yet mesmerising gameplay loop. I have spent those thousands of hours over several years meticulously attempting at a micro-level to beat the fifth (of 6) map on the highest difficulty. I have experienced every possible way this game cheats such that it almost seems as if the devs control it themselves during your session to find the most minute and unpredictable and downright unfair pathing, or horde size, or sudden obstacle preventing me in every single one of literally thousands of runs from completing it with a win condition. It's so utterly perfect sometimes in how it thwarts you that you actually start to begrudgingly respect just how flawlessly subtle the game's seemingly built-in anti-player-victory mechanic is. It's made to feel JUUUUUST random enough that you even question yourself. But I've 100% completed many difficult games on the hardest difficulty. Doom: Eternal, Dark Souls, Halo Wars 2, Elden Ring, Shovel Knight, just a few that come to mind. In those games however, you KNOW when you're just not good enough. But in this game, how am I supposed to say It's a skill issue when on day 12 a mutant runs from half the map away to nuke your entire colony that you've been turtling because it heard a ranger, the quietest unit in the game, kill a single zombie from (again) half the map away? This is also what I'd consider one of the more fair failures, to put it into perspective. TL;DR this game outright is designed to make players addicted and never allow them to win the high-end games that are also made to be the most interesting. It deliberately has a lack of mechanics that would save you time and stress, just to waste it and make you addicted, probably to pump up their playtime numbers. It took me 5 years to finally knuckle down and remove this from my account permanently and that's to say nothing of how in the Steam forums and subreddit there is STILL an active Numantian games employee obsessively moderating and curtailing any and all criticism. I'm not allowing comments because I refuse to allow that sad individual to blatantly lie just to save face. I have warned you.Show moreShow less
569.4 hours at review736 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
You will put a lot of effort into building something that will inevitably fall. Just like life. 10/10Show moreShow less
12.3 hours at review470 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
How do I put this.... This is both an excellent and a horrible game. Hear me out, this makes sense in context (sort of). This is a game that wants to appeal to hardcore strategy fans with limited understanding of hardcore strategy games (although what they do understand is pretty solid.) The problems are numerous, however, and the laundry list is quite daunting. First, that it has no save system, and there never will be. Why? "Another often controversial subject of They Are Billions is the Permadeath system that makes it more similar to rogue-like games. We’ve always thought this was the right way to go because it works perfectly for this type of game. It enhances the tension and fear that the colony will succumb to the infection. This way, the game is experienced much more realistically. Recording and loading would ruin the game experience because your decisions while playing in permadeath have real risks and consequences while if you are allowed to reload the game, your actions don’t carry risk anymore as you can go back in time, so to speak, and redo it in another way." This word salad is from their website. Utter nonsense as far as I'm concerned. At least they could have implemented a "concede" button, but no, every time you ♥♥♥♥ up, you have to wait for the zombies to tear apart your base, you literally cannot give up. There are no tutorials. At all. Why? "At Numantian, we’ve never been big fans of game tutorials, especially when the tutorial is external to the game. We prefer the game to be as self-explanatory as possible, with all the necessary help integrated into the interface, becoming easily visible just by moving the mouse. We like to learn through experimentation and exploration instead of following a step-by-step guide. What could be more boring?! Having said that, the survival mode is quite brutal for inexperienced RTS players. That’s why, during the campaign, some game management basic-information messages will appear at the beginning. We’ll keep them to a minimum, so they won’t become a nuisance to the experienced players." So instead of a skipable/minitutorial campaign you literally just omitted the whole thing, not explaining critical info to the players, like the entire noise system, the acid/poison system, when units regenerate health and when don't, the capacity of towers, the maximum amount of stacked walls, how to bypass that restrictrion, and I could quite possibly fill numerous reviews listing mechanics that you fail to even remotely mention anywhere with your retarded attitude. The amount of info you actually communicate to the players is not even a joke, it's insultingly insufficient combined with the rest of the asinine mechanics and lack of quality of life improvement you on purpose omitt to make this game a chore to play. The devs pride themselves in that this is not StarCraft, Age of Empires or Supreme Commander. I agree. However, not because it's so different, but because They Are Billions is so inferior it's insulting to all 3 of those to be mentioned on the same page. Everything TAB does, the mentioned trio does it better, faster, stronger, in a more fluid and more coherent manner, without holding you up with nonsense like "hey, just watch as the zombies tear apart your base because ♥♥♥♥ you." I'm not even addressing the permadeath system. That's too much stupid for me to even approach. Just no. You're idiots. I should have never bought this game. Buyers remorse over 9000. Also, quoting from their own damn site: "Mods, Editing Save Games, and Creating Game Maps IMPORTANT: Any alteration of game files, de-compiling the game or creating external applications to edit maps or save games are not allowed in any case. Any reference to those tools will be banned from the forum. Indeed, that’s a copyright infringement." That's not how copyright infringement works, cretin. Two sentences later on the same page: "And When the game can be modded? When the game is released and finished, we will add the Workshop to mod the game in many ways and it will be officially supported." It's suddenly not copyright infringement then? ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hell, tell me about a flexible legal interpretation...Show moreShow less
22 hours at review481 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.