2025 incremental games player survey

These initial questions will tell us more about who is answering the survey than the actual distribution of incremental game players. Throughout the rest of these results we should keep in mind we're skewing towards web and desktop players who play a lot of games regularly.

In addition to the pre-made responses, a lot of participants wrote in "watching numbers go up", which honestly I should have included in the pre-made responses. Other popular write-in responses included the games being easy, and experiencing unfolding mechanics. Overall, it seems a lot of people play these games for "something to do" more than anything else. Perhaps they're "second monitor content".

I've discussed this phenomenon before, but I've found that the incremental games player base has a much higher rate of game developers than is usually reported for other genres or the general population. These results work out to about 20% of players also being developers.

The remaining questions in this section were only asked of those who said they were a game developer, and thus have much smaller sample sizes:

While most questions were optional, all the questions in this section should treat "Neutral" as also meaning the participant chose not to answer for any reason. Also, a word of caution to any developers wishing to use these results for designing their games: this should not be taken as a simple checklist of things to include in your game. Ultimately I think you should make the games you want to play, rather than shaping your game based on your perceptions of what will maximize players. That line of thinking restricts innovation and homogenizes the genre, and players can tell when your heart isn't in it. Ultimately you should choose the pacing based on what feels right to you and what makes sense for your game.

This is not anywhere near an exhaustive list of mechanics. Honestly I was kinda targetting the recent trends with these specific mechanics, particularly nodebuster-likes and vibe coded games. It seems "traditional" incremental game mechanics very much reign supreme.

I find it really interesting that TMT and Profectus both encourage more often than discourage players. I was under the impression while participating in the galaxy.click community that TMT was suffering a sort of fatigue from its overuse, and perhaps that's been overblown. In hindsight, I should likely have also included options for Unity and Godot, given their recent popularity on both web and desktop incremental games.

This was quite the interesting result - both in terms of how the responses are all essentially the same for rewarded ads, paid expansions, and paid base game, but also in how many participants were encouraged by different forms of monetization. This certainly runs counter to what my experience has been reading comments on game posts; perhaps there's a vocal minority that this survey revealed.

Most questions didn't have obvious incompatibilities with other questions, but I found it a bit humorous how both offline progress was popular amongst participants but active play being required was as well.

I found the results on idle play interesting, and wish we had data on that question in particular for previous eras of the genre. The overwhelming popularity of having discrete endings also is interesting. I also think the supporting keyboard-less players (e.g. mobile) users and displaying more formulas to the player are good ideas, based on these results.

It's interesting that, despite the genre's origins arguably involving a lot of facebook games, social aspects were all more discouraging than encouraging. I can only speculate as to why; I think some of these may be down to not wanting the pressure of limited time events or synchronous play, which are at odds with things like offline and idle progress. I also wonder if this is an association participants made with these features and other, less desirable features (like hyper monetization, perhaps). Perhaps we just need good incremental games with social features.

Those who were encouraged by the items in this section were all highly mutual (.4-.55 NPMI) - that means it's the same players that tended to want all these social features.

I asked this question in the anticipation that certain aspects would be more disliked than others. However, interestingly enough generative AI really appeared to be all or nothing; all forms of it are about the same levels of encouragement and discouragement. In fact, all of these questions were highly mutual (.54 NPMI or higher), especially between the text-based ones like names of mechanics or the game itself (.75-.8 NPMI). Basically, most people held the same position on all forms of generative AI.

I think the most interesting of these is the support for Story in incremental games! The discouragement of political themes is also interesting. I am firmly of the belief that the lines of political vs apolitical are remarkably arbitrary. Perhaps games like antimatter dimensions are truly apolitical, but there's still examples of popular yet political incremental games, like universal paperclips. Can one truly depict ideas of infinite growth or space colonization without it being political? Anyways, here's a video essay on how cookie clicker is actually a commentary on capitalism.

Also, those who were encouraged by mature themes and political themes were highly mutual (.52 NPMI). Those who were discouraged by story and audio were also decently mutual (.4 NPMI).

The recent nodebuster-likes trend has stirred a bit of a quality vs quantity debate, and these results show people definitely skew towards playing games they know will take awhile to beat, but they can certainly still overstay their welcome.

Perhaps this question could've used some more granular options, but I'm sure it fluctuates enough that it would've quickly become too confusing on how to answer. I think it's still interesting to note that most players are typically playing more than one game at a time.

It should be noted that a lot of people didn't pick any response here. Even still, auto clickers are still quite popular, but other tools not so much. Those who used the more advanced tools tended to be fairly mutual (.3-.5 NPMI).

I included this question because of how often I've been playing these sorts of games as part of the curation for plusone. Honestly I was expecting Never and Rarely to be higher percentages than they are.

Incremental games skew cheap, so it's not surprising to see the larger amounts at the bottom of the list, but I'm surprised at how few responses "None" got.

To be honest, I kinda expected demos to have a bigger positive difference than they did.

Popular write-in responses included YouTube, friends, Roblox, and Github (perhaps via the TPT modfinder?). This question and the following one are quite telling with respect to the samplying bias of this survey. A lot of the respondents are redditors!

The overwhelming majority of write-ins were something to the effect of "nowhere", which I'd intended as the "no answers selected" response. There are over 500 of those "no answers selected" responses to consider. I think this result is likely to be overly skewed by the fact those would would voluntarily fill out a survey being more likely to participate in the community in general.

I think this result is interesting, as the results in the earlier sections of the survey would have led me to expect this question to have "Yes" or "I'm a fanatic" be the most common. Perhaps this is an artifact of incremental games being considered a "casual" game genre.

I think this question will be more interesting once tracked year over year.

This lines up with the general gaming population, and I believe is mostly due to amounts of free time than anything else. I don't think there's any generational trends here, for example.

I suspect these results more or less reflect the expected composition of the places most survey participants originated from - reddit and discord, or places that primarily got their userbases from reddit and discord.

I think this response only matters in the context of the general population, and unfortunately I can't confidently state the general rate of neurodivergence. I see a lot of claims that neurodivergence occurs in about 15-20% of the population. However, there is reason to believe the number is much higher, as our understanding of neurodiversity improves and becomes destigmatized, allowing more people to unmask. For example, this article over a more recent study claims 53% of Gen Z identify as neurodiverse. I honestly find that fairly reasonable to believe over the 15-20% number, and if true it means incremental game players may just mirror the general population in this regard.

I think these results are pretty expected. Those with more free time are more likely to be playing incremental games, and science and technology correlates with math and game development.