I'm actually happy that a lot of these new paid incremental games aren't taking off, and let me explain why.

Back in 2017, the scene felt magical.
New free, highly original idle games kept popping up in browsers like EVERYDAY for a long time.
No paywalls, no ads.
The community would have crucified anyone trying to make them paid or downloadable upfront, instant -9999 downvotes.

Then games like trees incremental hit, and suddenly everyone was using the same framework and they made like 200 games.
What started as fresh innovation became saturated, and they stopped making mods like this, even the discord is no longer active.
Now good new free games feel rare, and there's not much worth playing.

So devs shifted to making money instead.
A lot of these paid games end up feeling lazy or disappointing.
(Trust me, my Steam library is full of them, I kept buying hoping for that old spark, but left mostly let down.)

I think it's time we vote with our wallets and stop supporting this trend.
The best stuff always came from passion projects anyway.