Picture the scene. It’s 11pm, you**’**ve had a hard day at work or at school and the last thing you want is the added stress of trying to figure out how to kill a final boss in the Elden Ring.
What you need is something more basic, more relaxing when you turn on the console. Going to your farm and watering some virtual tomatoes, for example.
It may sound silly, but for many people, that gesture is the only real moment of peace all day.
‘Cozy games’ are video games with a leisurely pace, gentle aesthetics and a deliberate lack of pressure – the exception being the turnip market in ‘Animal Crossing’. It’s a genre of game that has been quietly growing for years, becoming one of the entertainment industry’s most relevant phenomena. And these games are more than just a genre; they are a cultural diagnosis of a generation.
COVID-19 and the ‘origin’ of it all
When ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ was released in March 2020, the world had been locked indoors for two weeks. The timing was so perfect it almost seemed planned. In the game you are assigned an island, you plant flowers, you chat with animal neighbours, you fish, and you have no specific goal beyond being there.
Nintendo sold five million copies in three days. Today, the game accumulates more than 46 million units and an active community that keeps posting photos of their islands on social media like family albums.
If we look at the reports of the last few months, the numbers are dizzying. We are talking about a global market that is already close to €171 billion.
What used to be a niche for small games is now a mighty cake worth more than €855 million. And everyone wants a slice.
This boom is not only reflected in the quantity, but also in the relevance of the titles.
Traditionally associated with low-budget productions, ‘cozy games’ are beginning to attract the attention of big studios. Franchises such as ‘Pokémon’, ‘Tomodachi Life’ and the well-established ‘Animal Crossing’ saga point to a change in trend that broadens the scope of the genre.
The growth of the genre also fits in with the habits of gamers. Recent studies indicate that 58% of users play games to relax or relieve stress; 80% believe that video games help to reduce stress; and 70% say that they help to reduce anxiety.
In this context, the rise of ‘cozy games’ seems to respond to both a market opportunity and an increasingly widespread emotional need.
Burnout has its own pixels
Today’s 25-40 year old generation grew up with the promise that hard work would always lead to better results, but two crises (banking in 2008 and COVID-19 in 2020) dashed the dreams of teenagers and adults alike.
Talking about ‘cozy games’ without talking about anxiety is only half the story. The profile of the majority of gamers, adults between 25 and 44 years old, 60% of whom are women, according to the Quantic Foundry portal, does not fit the classic stereotype of the video game player. They are people with jobs, bills and pending notifications who find in these games a space where time works differently.
The irony of the matter is that we end up doing on the screen the same things we are too lazy to do at home: washing up, cooking, or putting up with the neighbours. But in pixel version and without consequences. Nobody will shout at you if you don’t water the tomatoes. Nobody will be offended if you don’t answer a mail.
The mechanics are the same; the pressure is different.
I still remember the first time I played a ‘cozy game’.It was called ‘Unpacking’ and the title leaves no room for doubt. You have to unpack all the boxes in the room and place the objects correctly. Despite the stress involved in moving houses, the slow music and the satisfaction of placing everything in the right way gave me peace of mind.
From there it was a constant cascade of games that, after a horrible day at work or a series of stressful qualifying games, help me to bring down the revolutions of everyday life. And my Steam list keeps growing: ‘Unpacking’, ‘Stardew Valley’, ‘A Short Hike’…
A study published in 2019 in the Journal of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking already documented how slow-paced video games and safe environments reduced cortisol levels in gamers with high levels of work stress.
The effect is not so much like forgetting the problem, but more like regulation: the brain found in these predictable environments a way to calm down before facing the unpredictable again.
One man alone in a flat changed the market
Stardew Valley is probably the most important title in the genre and its story says a lot about how the industry works. Eric Barone spent four years alone developing the game (programming, design, music, illustration) from his flat in Seattle. No studio, no outside funding, no team.
In an interview with the specialist media ‘Polygon’, Barone described the process as a way of proving to himself “that I could do something worthwhile”. Time has clearly proven him right. The game has sold more than 30 million copies and to this day, it continues to receive updates that add more content to the game despite it launching in February 2016.
That’s very unusual in the industry. Big game releases cost hundreds of millions and employ thousands of people. Stardew Valley’ basically cost four years of a person’s life and an internet connection. What makes it relevant is not the romantic story of the lone developer, but what it demonstrates about the genre. In cozy games, budget matters less than tone, and people don’t pay for graphics, they pay to feel a certain way.
This has opened the door to a huge number of small, independent studios that have found a viable niche in cozy. The result is the 321% catalogue growth mentioned in the statistics. Quantity which, as always, does not guarantee quality, but it does confirm that there is a market and that the market knows there is a market.
The non-competing community
There’s something about the community in these games that doesn’t fit with what we tend to associate with internet gaming. There is no toxicity, or much less of it. The ‘Stardew Valley’ or ‘Animal Crossing’ forums function more like sharing groups than arenas of debate. People post their farm, ask how to get a certain item, thank you for the advice, and everyone is happy.
This has to do with the very mechanics of the genre. When there is no competition, there is no hierarchy. No one is a better ‘Stardew Valley’ player than anyone else. You can have the most beautiful farm or the most chaotic farm, but that’s not a marker of skill, it’s a marker of taste. And as the popular Spanish proverb says: “There is nothing written about taste”.
Youtuber Andrea Compton, one of the most followed content creators in this field in Spanish, has described this on several occasions. Many people who come to these games did not consider themselves gamers and are surprised to find a community that does not treat them as beginners who have to catch up. “The sharing part gives me a lot of happiness,” she has said. It’s a simple sentence but it sums up pretty well why this community works differently from others.
Nintendo and the next step
And the phenomenon doesn’t stop. Just look at the hype surrounding the recent release of ‘Tomodachi Life: A Dream Life’. After years of requests, Nintendo has finally released this instalment in which you can see your friends (or exes, if you’re a risk taker) living together on an island.
It’s the perfect example of what we’re looking for now: not just a peaceful world, but a place where social relationships, even if they are between ‘Miis’ (the characters in the game itself), feel safe and fun. The 46 million copies Animal Crossing has sold were not a mirage of the pandemic, but a warning of what was to come.
Whether that is escapism or something more complicated is a question for each player to answer in their own way. What is clear is that there are millions of people willing to pay for a pixel farm, and that deserves more than a condescending smile.