Author - Jerry Paxton

“Best Small Studio” indie game developer Spilt Milk Studios is celebrating its 1-year anniversary since launching their fan-favourite wholesome shopkeeping game Trash Goblin. In addition to this celebration, Trash Goblin also recently won the “Diversity in Games” Award at the TIGA Awards 2025, recognising its commitment to inclusivity and representation.

Originally appearing on Steam Early Access on November 6th, 2023 before its 1.0 launch on May 29th 2025, Trash Goblin has gone on to sell 60k copies and currently sports a ‘Very Positive’ rating across over 900 reviews – with 100% of Steam player reviews in the past 30 days being positive, highlighting the game’s growing and enthusiastic community. To commemorate this milestone, Spilt Milk has put together a few things! There’s the accolades trailer celebrating all the joy and mirth its trinket-restoration-escapist-fantasy has brought to the world.

GOBLIN SCIENCE-FACTS!
In the year since Trash Goblin has gone on sale, it’s accrued nearly a quarter of a million wishlists (with 179k outstanding!) and nearly 5,000 of those goblins have played for more than 20 hours. In fact, our goblins have spent a cumulative total of 376,501 hours playing (That’s 15.5k days, or 43 years – the same age as the game’s creative director). At that rate, we estimate 4.5 million trinkets have been found so far!

The team couldn’t resist taking a look at all the hard work & features they’ve put into the game in that short time – and created this lovely “retrospective roadmap” that shows just how far the game has come:

MORE GOBLIN SCIENCE-FACTS!
The average time played is nearly 8 hrs; our most committed goblin devoted 404 hours to their trinket restoration career (that’s over two weeks in real-time!); the longest time played before a review was left was 271hrs, and the longest playtime of a goblin who left a negative review was 160hrs (they reviewed it after 10hrs, then played for another 150hrs so they couldn’t have been that dissatisfied eh?).

And finally, we’re launching a Kickstarter in January to get some lovely Trash Goblin merch into the hands of our fans all around the world! It will feature T-shirts, pins, posters, stickers and mugs. The campaign will run across January 2026, but you can keep an eye out & follow the Kickstarter campaign here when the landing page goes live on the 6th November – that way you’ll be notified when the campaign kicks off to ensure you can snag your favourite Goblin-themed trinkets before they sell out!

“When we first started making Trash Goblin we were hopeful that people would connect with our cosy little fantasy of eking out a living as a young upstart seeking their place in the world and helping out their community and we’re so happy that our dreams came true with a lovely community supporting our little slice of the gaming landscape,” said Andrew Smith, Creative Director at Spilt Milk Studios. “One year since we launched Trash Goblin our community has continued to grow and support us, so we wanted to give back by making new merch so people can bring a little bit of Trash Goblin with them wherever they may go! Here’s to more goblin adventures in the future!”

More about Trash Goblin
Trash Goblin lets you customise your myriad of already-peculiar goods by combining these trinkets together in almost endless ways, upcycling them into even more strange and wonderful new items to meet the eccentric requests of your colourful customers. Get to know your regulars so you can make custom pieces tailored around their desires – which will fetch you even more money!

Grow your business! Spend your savings to upgrade your shop, buy new and better tools that offer additional ways to restore your trinkets – making them even more valuable – and expand your space, customising it to your tastes.