Players want more relaxing games. So much that its demand has grown by 1000% in the last five years

Pandemia and confinement of a few years ago changed the industry forever In many ways. One of the most notorious was the consolidation of a genre that has always existed, but virtually hidden. The search for titles that distract us from a depressing and abusive reality made a legend to many titles and generated a new way of understanding the games. As confirmation that we live a golden age of the titles CozyNetflix announces an online multiplayer in which we will not have to strangle anyone.

What are Cozy Games? Games of any kind that offer a relaxing, comforting experience, without stress. Of often contemplative and little demanding rhythms, they usually value exploration without goals, the creativity of their proposals, the emotional connection with the player. The competitive is usually out of its proposals, as well as macabre issues or that can generate the slightest anxiety in the player. That is, it is a more spiritual or thematic classification than of genres: within the Cozy There are rpgs, puzzle games, graphic adventures or even Arcades. But all very low of revolutions. Like the meme, also very pandemic of the anime girl and the cat studying with Lo-Fi music.

Diffuse origins. Sometimes the legendary ‘Little Computer People’ is mentioned, a precedent of ‘THE SIMS‘For eighty microororders as one of the first Cozyand some reason there is: it demanded a minimum interaction and its great attraction was to observe the behaviors of the small inhabitants of a house. A kind of digital fishbowl that set in the 2010s, with the explosion of indies titles, such as ‘Journey’, ‘Stardew Valley’ or ‘Harvest Moon’, which favored new approaches to the environment beyond commercial titles.

Pandemic relaxation. Animal Crossing: New Horizons arrived at Switch in March 2020 and became one of the sensations of that year, with more than 13 million copies sold in a month and a half. Take care and cultivate a farm and establish relationships with the neighbors who went beyond the usual in the rest of the games became one of the favorite activities during confinement, establishing a psychological parallelism between what was being that season in hell and what the players aspired to be: an idealization of the “moving away from the worldly noise” that was not working so well in real life.

The Cozy explosion. In the last five years, gender has gained incomparable relevance with any other. For example, Games labeled as “Relaxing” In Steam it increased 309% between 2019 and 2023, from 523 to 2,142 games. The “Cozy” label grew no less than 1,091% In the same period, from 15 games in 2020 to 371 in 2024. It is a growth that shows interest in this type of games.

And now, Netflix. It is the last company to get into the car of the Cozy Gamesand has done it with ‘Spirit Crossing‘, which has just opened the possibility of signing up to a closed beta. It is an ambitious anime style MMO developed by Spry Fox, creators of one of the relaxing fashion canonical games, ‘Cozy Grove’and that it may well be its most ambitious bet to date: it is significant that it belongs to the genre more in vogue in recent years. The game focuses on cooperation between players, allowing them to build communities and participate in collective activities such as parties, as well as the exploration of a world in constant evolution and full of secrets.

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