Irish developers tap booming cosy gaming market with mindful, low-stress titles

Twenty-six years after The Sims first let players tend to virtual families without winning or losing, a quieter kind of game has taken over. There are no boss battles, no leaderboards, no moment when you finally beat the thing and move on. Instead, millions of people are spending their time arranging digital fridges, power-washing virtual fire engines, tending crops that will never wilt, and solving puzzles at their own pace. This is cosy gaming, and it has become a genuine market force.

The shift accelerated during the pandemic lockdowns, when people who had never thought of themselves as gamers suddenly found themselves playing. The numbers tell the story: Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold between 44 and 50 million copies when it launched in 2020. Stardew Valley, a farm-simulation game, has moved more than 50 million copies across all platforms. In 2020, Steam listed just 19 games tagged as cosy; today, searching that same tag returns thousands. The Sims franchise itself has sold over 200 million copies since 2000.

Brendan Rooney, director of the media and entertainment psychology lab at University College Dublin's school of psychology, describes the appeal in precise terms. "Your mind is always trying to be busy," he says. "The right busy is when it's not overly stimulating, not overly challenging but can give your mind something to do, almost like a treadmill or chewing gum, something like a rocking chair for the mind." The genre has also redrawn who counts as a gamer. The average gamer is older than the stereotype suggests, and women make up a far larger share of players than most people assume. Games have simply become broader.

Two Irish developers are now betting on this market. Neil O'Sullivan Greene runs Greene Rapture, a Cork-based studio preparing to launch Sushi on Wheels, a management game where players inherit their grandmother's sushi truck on Japan's Izu Peninsula. The player's job is to build the business, serve customers, upgrade the truck, and eventually open the permanent restaurant the grandmother never lived to see. Greene spent six months in Tokyo and traveling the Izu Peninsula before conceiving the game. He had originally planned a horror title based on Celtic mythology but reconsidered. "I was going to be looking at this every single day for a while, and how enjoyable is it to make something with loads of gross monsters versus making the funnest, cutest animations?" he asked himself. More importantly, he wondered whether he wanted to add fear and anxiety to people's lives when there was already so much of both around. He chose comfort instead.

Beyond the Bark, based in Limerick, found a cult following with Éalú, a handcrafted stop-motion game starring a wooden mouse. The project began when Ivan Fisher-Owen wanted to give a mouse character a better fate than falling through darkness—a leftover from a music video collaboration. He initially considered a TikTok short film with audience participation but grew uneasy with the platform itself. "I was taking a look at TikTok as an application, and it really disturbed me – not so much the content but the way in which content was presented and the algorithm was driving it," he says. "I realised I had no idea how any of this works and I felt like I'm also in a maze." He and his collaborators—musician Will Wood, programmer Benjamin Orr, and illustrator JT Paton—decided to make a game instead, one that would explore algorithmic loops and the possibility of escaping them through a silent, handmade narrative.

The production was painstaking. Fisher-Owen wanted photorealistic stop-motion, with every shadow and reflection rendered by hand. There were no digital shortcuts available to the team, so they animated everything with the mouse physically present in the frame. The final game required about 18,000 photographs and 1,200 hours of work. Fisher-Owen drew inspiration from Myst, the 1993 puzzle game he played as a child with his sister, notebook in hand, solving mysteries together. "It is a piece of art," he says. He wanted to recreate that collaborative, meditative experience for a modern audience. Players have responded by sitting down together and working through the puzzles as a group, talking through solutions.

Research by Sago across five European countries and the US found that more than half of cosy-game players were seeking stress relief, using games as a way to manage anxiety. But Rooney cautions that this is only healthy if it's part of a broader toolkit. "If we continue to do it from a place of 'I can't cope', 'I don't want to think; things are too much,' 'I'm going to get lost in this game,' then we're training ourselves to not regulate our own emotions or look after ourselves," he says. The key is diversity—cosy gaming as one option among many, not the only escape route. When people have real choice in how they manage their minds, they keep their agency. When they don't, they lose it.