Cookie Clicker’s latest incarnation is as a paid Steam game which has made over half a million $$$ in its first few days after release and still getting massive sales (more than most of the top games in fact). It looks to me like it’s essentially the same game as the free version a few years ago: you can buy more grandmas, factories, mines, etc to produce cookies automatically or give your index finger a workout clicking on the big cookie to generate cookies manually. The goal is simply to rack up trillions or quadrillions of cookies (I’m not sure what the technical numerical limit is but there obviously must be one).
My question is: why is this such a huge commercial success? I can see the novelty of it (I played the free version briefly a few years ago and thought it was kind of funny, but I also thought it got old extremely quickly). Is the attraction simply to feel that your cookie empire is a success even if everything else in your life is going badly? Most production games are about strategy and careful balancing / adjustment, but in this case there doesn’t seem to be much strategy aside from figuring out which of the handful of production options will optimize cookie production the most efficiently, which could probably be done with some fairly simple calculations.
It’s a generations first clicker game. Playing it on the browser is what most kids did in school instead of working.
It’s probably a mix of nostalgia for now money earning adults, people who want to support the devs behind it, and people who are just jumping into something that’s popular at the moment.
Because it is the very first one, one of a kind genre-defining thing everybody knows of.
If you make your game known to a hundred million people (for example), then offer them to pay 8 years later, then even if 0.5% of them pay, that is going to be a huge sum.
And no, you most likley wouldn’t be able to repeat this kind of success.
The game is highly addictive, because people would want to get more cookies.
There is a strategy. There are multiple possible upgrade paths, and it is not clear if investing in one of them will make you get cookeis faster than investing into another. You’ll eventually try to invest into them all, but the paths are infinite, and you’re left wondering if picking one is more efficient than picking another. To check that you’d want to try again.
There are unlockable blurbs of info that depend on your actions and you’ll keep wanting to unlock more of them.
Power Wash Simulator is doing great too.
Well, sure: its blurb contains attractive lines such as “Wash away your worries with the soothing sounds of high-pressure water.” And the trailers show that you can knock over lawn gnomes with a laser-like stream of pressurized H2O. Games-stats.com says it has made $3 million so far.
I’m obviously doing something wrong.
“Modern art? I could do it. Yeah, but you didn’t”
^^^ That pretty much explains it.
Someone comes up with a simple stupid idea EVERYBODY could implement, but they did it first, actually finished the product and because of that they took all the money.
To earn millions you have to try. Trying to does not guarantee that you’ll succeed.
But if you do not try, then you are guaranteed to get nothing.
Sure, but the vast majority of “simple stupid ideas” fail dismally and it’s seemingly impossible to predict which ones will succeed. Cranking out thousands of simple, stupid ideas until one succeeds just isn’t feasible if it takes months to make each one. And BTW, the Power Wash game does not look simple to actually make since 1) they must’ve done some type of fancy shader work to allow the mud/dirt to be removed on complex surfaces across numerous objects which all seem to start out uniformly filthy on a vast scale. I’m not even sure how they programmed the removal process. 2) The game seems to have quite a few locations with nice assets such as carousel horses that look like real antique carousel horses (very nicely done), so unless they just purchased / found stock assets it must have taken quite awhile to make all that stuff, for a game that would not have been an obvious winner and seems unlikely to represent a personal passion (hosing dirt off stuff?) so it seems to have been a big gamble.
i thought a lot about what sort of stupid simple games I could make just for the sake of money. But I just cant do it. If it’s not something I really want to play, there is no way I make any serious effort to actually build it.
I still try to simplify my ideas as much as possible. And I don’t like complex games anyway. Probably in the future I veer towards horde shooters because that’s probably my favorite type of game, it’s relatively simple and has plenty of example to draw from.
I can understand how people like power washing games and cookie clickers, but honestly it makes me depressed that they do. It seems like a sad state for the species that people are so bored and beat down that they spend free time virtual power washing or building a meaningless cookie empire.
Anyway, that’s why I can’t make a games like that, even if it is a more practical approach to making a living from games. Luckily for me I don’t actually have to make all my money from games. Maybe I’d have a more mercenary-like mindset if I did.
I can think of simple but unique / creative games easily, but it takes too long to actually make them to justify the time, given the tiny chance of success. And I don’t understand why so many of the successful ones succeeded. I played the online version of Cookie Clicker again yesterday, and I quit after about 5 minutes of tedious clicking and upgrading the cursor only to find that it still took lots of tedious clicking to get to the next unlock (I never managed to unlock the grandmother, so I quit). I had a similar experience with the online version of Loop Hero. I’ll be told, of course, that I’m just an incompetent idiot for being unable to understand the attraction of these games, but I still don’t see the attraction.
Yes. You can’t predict success. But if you do not ever try, you will get nothing.
It is not fancy.
If you can implement shadowmaps, you can implement projective painting.
If you can implement projective painting, then you have power wash shader
I could implement this kind of mechanic without any issue. With modern shaders and render targets it is not exactly special.
There are other games that have similar mechanic, by the way. Tank Mechanic simlator comes to mind. Farming Simulator 2019 had a power wash for very, very dirty tractors. The we have house flipper which has window cleaning mechanic and a broom/vacuum for dirt (I think).
That particular game is incredibly addictive for some people. But not for everybody. Not experiencing the effect does not make you an idiot. It makes you a person who is not addicted to those type of games.
I believe I already explained the effect before.
- “Must. Get. More. Cookies!” (greed)
- “Are there other blurbs to read? What’s going to happen if I get more cookies? When does the story end?” (curiosity)
- “Could I get to a high number of cookies faster? Which strategy does maximize the speed?” (desire to experiment)
It is fairly easy to end up being glued to it for a few hours the first time you encounter it. Now you probably won’t come back to it, but you can easily lose a night when trying it for the first time.
One game with similar addition mechanics is Factorio. Some addiction elements are very simlar.
- “Must. Get. More resources!” (or “The factory must grow!”)
- “What other techs are there to unlock? What can I do with them”
- “Couldn’t I optimize the whole thing?”
I’m not sure if I told this before, but in my opinion, your mistake is looking for clues in success stories. People who achieve success and profitsss, in my opinion, do not look for those in the first place. Instead they do what they love to do, and in the process stumble upon an unused niche, and because of that they earn money.
For example, the guy who made cookie clicker years ago probably didn’t think of the money at all, and made it for fun. he had a blast, implemented the thing and set it free.
By doing that he planted a seed, of sorts. The game became a hit, became popular, and widely known. And he got nothing for it.
Then, years later, he thought… hey. Everybody loved this game, so why not sell it. Just charge a small amount for it.
And he got plenty of money. Because the seed he planted ages ago grew into a tree or forest he could harvest.
That’s my opinion.
I think, that in general, success is accidental.
A person either stumbles upon a niche and utilizes it, OR they try many things, those things fail, but eventually by trying many times they plant a lot of “seeds” for their future income, and years later some of those seeds sprouts grow into trees that produce fruits.
probably games like this just appeal to an audience you are too different from.
i read an article about the guy who made flappy bird. Certainly he is no genius but when he made the game he did have a certain audience in mind. He knew people played games while on the subway and he wanted to make a game you could play with one hand.
I would never think of anything like that. Not the type of games I ever played, in fact i didnt even know games llike this existed until recently.
I think the appeal of these types of games (at least for me) is that they’re generally a sure-fire way to de-stress after a tough day at work. No complex thinking, strategizing, or getting your heart broken by a dramatic story. Definitely more “chill” games.
Cookie Clicker is dangerously addictive for people of a certain personality type. I think more analytical types or those wanting more action would be pushed away from those types of games.
neginfinity really kind of nailed it. Success really is kind of unpredictable. It’s just a matter of hitting the right niche at the right time.
I will argue that the “Wholesome Games” niche is one that is often underfilled.