plusone is the weekly incremental games newsletter. I've been a part of this community for awhile, and this is my solution to having a place to find out about all the new games and notable updates, without having to go through each place games may get posted to individually, and without having to read through marketing posts on reddit for the same games already posted last month.
In addition to the weekly posts, the first post of each month will have an article on some aspect of the genre, which will also get posted to the r/incremental_games subreddit. There is also an annual survey at the end of the year on how the community feels about various aspects of the genre. You can take the current survey or view previous years’ results here.
How it Works
The site has an automatic script that checks incrementaldb, steam, itch, and galaxy for new games and updates a couple times a day. Each game will also determine if it’s paid, released, has a demo, uses generative AI, and submitted to a game jam. It’ll also look for links to the other platforms for the same game and merge them together.
Next, they’ll either be automatically marked as not featured - this happens to unreleased games and games that use generative AI as of plusone weekly #48 - or added to the curation queue. The curation queue shows a game at a time and all new updates for it as a card that can be swiped tinder-style to feature it or not. It shows all the information about the game and has links to the game on each platform to more deeply look into it. The card also lets me (the curator) update the game’s information or merge it with other games that are suspected duplicates (due to their names being highly similar but the links not matching).
The final decision to feature a game/update or not is subjective - and I don’t believe there would be a truly objective way to handle this. That said, I also don’t think I could produce a well-defined set of criteria I use when evaluating games/updates, which is something I believe can be done and want to produce at some point. Part of the issue is its still in flux, and I don’t want to crystallize the criteria and make it less flexible to the changing trends in the genre.
Further Reading
I only found out about this blog post well after starting plusone, but Working on the plumbing in a small web community does a cool job at explaining the motivations behind their newsletter and related projects for the emacs community.
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