What Is an Incremental Game? Idle, Clicker and Tycoon
Updated October 2, 2026
What is an incremental game, in one sentence?
An incremental game is a game built around numbers that grow faster than you can spend them: you buy something that makes more of the resource, which buys more of that thing, until the scale changes and new systems appear.
Idle and clicker games are both kinds of incremental game. The difference is what your hands do: a clicker pays you for clicking, an idle game pays you for leaving, and most modern incrementals start as the first and turn into the second. A tycoon game looks similar on the surface but grows by filling space, not by orders of magnitude.
Updated September 2026.
How do idle, clicker, incremental and tycoon games differ?
The cleanest way to separate them is to ask what the player does in a typical minute, and what happens when the player stops. Genre labels on store pages blur all four, so the table below sorts them by behaviour instead.
| Type | What you do in a typical minute | What happens when you walk away | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clicker | Click the main button; the click is most of your income | Very little, or nothing at all | Cookie Clicker in its first minutes, one cookie per click |
| Idle | Check in, buy the next upgrade or manager, leave again | Production keeps running, often with the game closed | AdVenture Capitalist, Melvor Idle |
| Incremental (the umbrella) | Decide what to buy next as new layers unlock | Depends on the game; the defining trait is the growth curve | Universal Paperclips |
| Tycoon | Place, price and repair: rides, shops, staff | The park runs while unpaused, but it fills the map rather than multiplying | RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic |
The first three share a curve. Costs and income both climb exponentially, so sooner or later the numbers stop fitting on screen and the game switches to shorthand like “1.2T” or scientific notation, which the Wikipedia article on incremental games lists as one of the genre’s markers. A tycoon game rarely does that. Its limits are space and customers, so a thriving park earns more than a new one without ever needing a new word for the number.
What makes a clicker game different from an idle game?
A clicker game is one where the click is the engine. Cookie Clicker, released on the web in 2013 by Julien “Orteil” Thiennot, starts with one big cookie that gives you one cookie per click. Within minutes you buy Cursors and Grandmas that bake for you, and from there the click matters less every hour. That handover is the whole shape of the genre: the game teaches you to click, then pays you to stop.
An idle game is designed around the stop. AdVenture Capitalist says it on its store page: hire a manager for a business and “money keeps accumulating while you’re offline.” Melvor Idle simulates up to 24 hours (as of September 2026) of the skill you were training while the game was closed, then shows you a summary of what happened. Cookie Clicker only earns offline once you buy a specific heavenly upgrade, and even then at 5% of your normal rate for the first hour (as of September 2026), according to the Cookie Clicker wiki’s offline production page.
So Cookie Clicker is a clicker that becomes an idle game, and Melvor Idle is an idle game from the first screen. Both are incremental.
Why is “incremental” the umbrella term?
Because the growth curve is what all of these share, and neither clicking nor idling is required for it. Universal Paperclips, Frank Lantz’s 2017 browser game, is the clearest case. Every interaction is a button press, the game is built around decisions rather than time away, and nobody would call it anything but an incremental game.
What it does instead is change scale. You start making paperclips one at a time, then automate them, then run a marketing budget, then a computing budget, then drones, then space probes. Each time growth plateaus, the game hands you a new system that makes the old numbers look small. That is the “until the scale changes and new systems appear” part of the definition, and it is why people who hate clicking still finish Paperclips.
Kittens Game, which Lantz named as an inspiration in Wired’s 2017 piece on the game, works the same way: a village of kittens gathering catnip becomes a civilisation with a space program. The unlocks are the story. We cover that branch of the genre in games like A Dark Room.
How does prestige work in an incremental game?
Prestige is a voluntary reset. You throw away most of your progress in exchange for a permanent bonus that makes the next run faster. It exists because exponential costs eventually outrun exponential income, and a reset is the only way to feel fast again.
Cookie Clicker’s version is called ascension, and it is the easiest one to do the maths on. Your prestige level is the cube root of (cookies baked across all runs ÷ one trillion), rounded down, and each level adds a permanent 1% to production once you unlock it with heavenly upgrades. The Cookie Clicker wiki’s ascension page and the Wikipedia entry both describe the cube relationship; the figures below follow those rules as of September 2026.
| Cookies baked, all runs | Prestige level | Permanent production bonus (fully unlocked) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 trillion | 1 | +1% |
| 8 trillion | 2 | +2% |
| 1 quadrillion | 10 | +10% |
| 1 quintillion | 100 | +100% |
| 1 sextillion | 1,000 | +1,000% |
Read down the first column and the design goal is obvious. Doubling your prestige takes eight times the cookies; ten times the prestige takes a thousand times the cookies. The first ascension feels generous, and every later one asks you to push further before resetting. That tension, “reset now or push another hour”, is the main decision the late game gives you, and we look at other loops built on that kind of tension in the most satisfying progression systems.
Some games stack several prestige layers. Antimatter Dimensions asks you to reach Infinity for an Infinity point, then keeps adding layers beyond it; its own store page says “after Infinity the game has just begun.”
Do incremental games have an ending?
Most do not. Cookie Clicker and AdVenture Capitalist are built to run for as long as you keep coming back, and Cookie Clicker’s store page says it has been actively developed since its 2013 web release. A smaller group names a finish line. Universal Paperclips ends when all matter in the universe has been converted, and one of its two closing choices restarts you with a bonus. We track that group, with the time each one takes, in idle games that actually end.
Whether a game ends changes how it feels to play. An endless incremental rewards the habit of checking in; a finite one rewards pushing through the next wall, because you know there is a last wall. If you want the psychology behind that pull toward a finish, our post on the psychology of completion in games goes into it.
Where our game fits
Our own game, Sam, We Talked About This, is an idle incremental game with a finite goal, which puts it closer to Universal Paperclips than to Cookie Clicker. You scrape data, train text, image and video models, let the models win subscribers, and turn subscribers into cash for more disks, bigger machines and a bigger crew. The loop feeds itself and speeds up, and AGI is waiting at the end. It is unreleased, due on Steam in Q1 2027, so there is nothing to play or point at yet. If the loop sounds like your kind of number, the Steam page for Sam, We Talked About This is live.
Quick answers
Is Cookie Clicker an idle game or a clicker? Both. It opens as a clicker, one cookie per click, and within the first hour most of its income comes from buildings that bake on their own. It only produces while closed after you buy a specific heavenly upgrade.
Is every idle game an incremental game? Yes, in practice. Idle games all rely on production that compounds while you are away, which is the incremental growth curve with the input removed. The reverse is not true: Universal Paperclips is incremental, and it asks you to decide far more than it asks you to wait.
Is a tycoon game an incremental game? No, in most cases. RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic grows by filling a map and pleasing guests, and its money stays in ordinary ranges. Incrementals grow by orders of magnitude and add new systems when growth stalls.
What does “prestige” mean in an idle game? It means a voluntary reset for a permanent bonus. In Cookie Clicker, one trillion cookies baked across all runs buys prestige level 1, worth +1% production, and each further level costs more cookies than the last.
Key takeaways
- Incremental is the umbrella; clicker and idle describe what your hands do inside it.
- The test for a tycoon versus an incremental is the curve: space-limited growth versus orders of magnitude.
- Prestige trades progress for a permanent multiplier, and cube-root formulas like Cookie Clicker’s make each reset cost more than the last.
- Most incrementals never end. The ones that do are a small, specific group worth seeking out if you like a finish line.
