The majority of the most popular PC and browser incremental games now have iOS and Android releases. One of the biggest changes, and sources of growth, has been a growing presence in mobile gaming. I think it’s telling that there are virtually no incremental games on game consoles, for example, since that’s an environment of dedicated play, and incremental games’ strength is in interstitial play.
The ease of having one going on your phone, on a browser tab, or idling in the background makes for a low transaction cost of playing, which can be attractive to a number of people who play games. They’re games that can be played for very short periods (such as while commuting, or at work or school), they are easy to start and stop playing, and they have systems that unfold gradually over longer periods. In addition to the qualities we outlined last year, incremental games tend to excel at accessibility. I don’t think this should surprise us much. Ownership of Sakura Clicker, another popular incremental game (data via SteamSpy) As another bellwether, since the beginning of 2015, we can see the number of subscribers of the incremental games subreddit has nearly doubled too. While concrete player numbers are hard to find across the variety of platforms that incrementals now appear on, the growth in popularity seems clear.
Those are astounding numbers, and that’s just on a single platform! AdVenture Capitalist and Clicker Heroes, both of which released Steam versions in the spring of last year, each has more than 3 million owners and a 2-week active player count more than 250,000. That was only just beginning to change last year, but now the most popular incremental games are seeing soaring numbers of players on various platforms.
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These were still primarily “indie”-style games, though, typically modest and played for free in the browser, and rarely monetized other than with adjacent advertising on platforms like Kongregate. The current boom in incremental games started in 2013 with games like Cookie Clicker and Candy Box, which were followed by a growing number of similar titles.