I would describe most games that grab my interest online currently as "free dopamine generators." They're games that are clearly meant to grow into lots of things happening on the screen at once in a juicy and fun way. Some common features: juicy UI that bounces way too much, themeless/abstract setting OR straight up casino themed, choose 1 out of 3, aforementioned dopamine-filled screen. There's nothing wrong with this kind of game, many of them are very fun, but it's a clear pattern.

While I haven't followed the rise of the skill tree incremental genre as closely as I did for VS-likes, the first one I played was Nodebuster right when it came out, and it was pretty fun. Many more have come out since then and some of them have made some nice additions to the idea, but it largely remains the same. This type of game is a good example of what I'm talking about.

While I could argue that competition isn't real among indie developers, we're all actually competing against short-form content. The calculation any potential game player runs is: do I want to buy and learn to play this game, or do I want to open TikTok/YT shorts and scroll? It's easy to see how the latter wins most of the time. It's also easy to see why, then, games with low initial cognitive demand will do better in the market. The incremental games fit this nicely, on top of having clear and well-defined progression and ending.

However, it's worth it to consider the meta here. If the competition is against short-form content, you can compete on the enemy's terms and try to out brainrot them, or you can go a different direction and offer things people can't get from that kind of content. This ends up being, in the most general sense: meaning and commitment. Incrementals get the commitment portion of it somewhat due to progressing and ending properly, but do not nail the meaning. So I would say that possible differentiation strategies will take what incrementals do well, but build on top of what they're missing.

There are many possible ways to approach this. Stuffed Wombat in Systems and Content delineates between both, saying that "Systems repeat. Content disappears." It's possible we may simply want to focus more on content than systems and that might work. My intuition, as a contrarian, was actually to just go the entire opposite way of what the incrementals settled on: no more themeless/abstract settings, only games with deep lore you can get autistic about; no more juicy UI that bounces like a clown, only diegetic insane UIs like in them old games, if the UI can be easily coded with a standard UI kit, it's over; no more choose 1 out of 3, only deep skill trees, insane complex ability systems, 10000 viable (actually viable) builds.

The correct line probably depends on the project. We may have games that are short, low initial cognitive demand, hand-crafted, narrative linear games that are meaningful and good and end, just like we may have games that are long, high initial cognitive demand, system-based build machines that never end. We may have games that are anything in between. But I do think the most important thing is to actually cover what short-form can't cover, which are meaning and commitment.

I am not saying this is what will be successful in the future or anything like that, I have no way of knowing. And I am biased. The idea that drives me now involves writing various books and telling deep lore stories on top of making games that take place in those worlds, aiming at producing high meaning values, so of course I would think that what I'm doing is what's actually good and framing it against what the average indie developer is doing, after all, I am so superior to them! Well, bias or not, this is what I think currently.

I don't think all my games will aim for this, the dopamine games can actually be really fun, and I'm not above making one of them if I happen to hit an interesting design, but this spectrum is something I've been thinking about often recently.