Late last year, Clicker Heroes developer Playsaurus announced that the sequel to its popular clicker RPG would ditch the original's free-to-play model in favor of an upfront cost, in no small part because its creators wanted "a cleaner conscience" and didn't want to exploit the big-spending 'whale' players that drive most free-to-play games. At the time, the studio said the change "may or may not work," and that with an upfront cost, the sequel "probably isn't worth nearly as much money." Well, Clicker Heroes 2 is now available on Steam Early Access for $30, and while it remains to be seen if it's as profitable as the original, it is most definitely popular. 

At the time of writing, Clicker Heroes 2 is well into Steam's top 100 with 8,947 concurrent players and a daily peak of 9,350. According to Steam Charts, it's managed an average of 7,336 concurrent players since it launched this past Monday, with an all-time peak of 9,570. Those are strong numbers for any new Early Access game, but for a $30 sequel fighting to shed the free-to-play reputation of its predecessor, Clicker Heroes 2's popularity is astonishing. Just as impressively, its Steam reviews are currently 78 percent positive. There's clearly something to it, so I decided to give it a play myself. And I have to admit, while I'm not the biggest fan of idle games, I found Clicker Heroes 2 quite absorbing. 

Like its predecessor, Clicker Heroes 2 is an idle action RPG where your character moves and attacks automatically and you passively earn money and experience. Your primary input is clicking to attack faster and occasionally upgrading your character. As Playsaurus puts it, it's "a never-ending journey to the top right of your screen." That journey starts with you swinging a wet noodle around dealing 20 damage to monsters that drop 30 gold. Fast forward an hour and you're wielding the fuckin' femur of Zeus (or whatever it is) dealing so much damage and gaining so much gold that their values can only be expressed in exponents. And that's just the beginning. In Clicker Heroes 2, a quadrillion gold is pocket change. I don't get out of bed for anything under a decillion. 

That much hasn't changed, but Clicker Heroes 2 improves on the ideas established in the original by polishing them up and making them considerably more interactive. For instance, you're no longer just clicking stationary enemies. You're also clicking gold piles and energy pylons along the path you're running, fattening your wallet and replenishing the energy you spend on clicks. Apart from energy, you've also got mana which you can spend on skills, of which there are a frightening amount: Playsaurus says the current skill tree has around 600 nodes and that new characters will also get their own unique trees.  

Most of those nodes are passive buffs, but some of them are active skills you can slot into your hotbar. Some skills cost energy and some cost mana, but they all have cooldowns. As a result, a big part of Clicker Heroes 2 is building your own skill rotations—yes, exactly like an MMO, albeit greatly simplified. You can even program skills to trigger automatically using a macro-like system called the Automator.  You can also tailor your character's stats by buying gear with specific bonuses—earn more gold, deal more critical hits, encounter more treasure chests, and so on. 

Finally, Clicker Heroes 2 is a pretty little thing, which is important for a game that's designed to be stared at through a dreamlike haze. Its bright, cartoony art is easy on the eyes, and its smooth attack animations are fun to watch. I especially like the super-click attacks which lob giant cursors at enemies like some kind of Microsoft Office mortar. 

If games like Diablo and Borderlands are loot treadmills, Clicker Heroes 2 is a loot conveyor belt that leads right to your face. It's the videogame equivalent of a bottomless bag of potato chips that you don't even have to reach for because the chips are conveniently shoveled into your gaping pie hole. It's a game about pure, unfiltered catharsis, not challenge. But speaking as someone who generally doesn't like idle games, Clicker Heroes 2 does feel like one of the best idle games out there. 

Clicker Heroes, released in 2015, is a (very) slightly more interactive version of Progress Quest, the faux-RPG that plays itself. You click on enemies, they die, you pick up the gold they drop, and use it to hire more powerful heroes—which is to say, increase the amount of damage you do when you click. It's impossible to die, and if you need to go away for awhile, it will kill monsters all by itself, although at a somewhat slower rate. 

It's ridiculous, and oddly popular, and also free to play: For ten bucks, you can purchase one of four packages that adds a new skin and a high-speed auto-clicker, and there's also an in-game currency called "rubies" that can be used to to buy various boosters and upgrades. The sequel, coming next year, won't be taking that route, however. Instead, it will carry a pay-up-front price of $30, with an option for a full refund for a year after it comes out for anyone who preorders. 

The problem, developer Playsaurus explained in a blog post, isn't that free-to-play didn't work, but that it worked too well. "In Clicker Heroes 1, we never tried to abuse players with our real-money shop, and for the most part we designed it without the shop in mind so that you never have to purchase rubies to progress. Despite this, we found that some number of players spent many thousands of dollars on rubies. I can only hope that these people could afford it, and that they were doing it to support us, and not to feed an addiction. But I strongly suspect that this is not the case," developer Fragsworth wrote. 

"We made a lot of money from these players who spent thousands. They are known to the industry as 'Whales'. Great. If you're rich, please be my guest. But we don't want this kind of money if it came from anyone who regrets their decision, if it made their lives significantly worse as a result." 

Improving the underlying design is also a big factor in the decision. "We want the experience to be good," they continued. "The mere existence of real-money purchases puts an ugly cloud over the player's experience, with the persistent nagging feeling of 'My game could be so much better if I just spent a few dollars'. That alone feels terrible." 

Having a real-money store also impacts how the game is rebalanced in updates, as people who spent money for a particular kind of experience can end up feeling hosed. "We've experienced this many times in the past," Fragsworth wrote. "As a result, Clicker Heroes 1 is kind of a frankenstein of a game, our hands always having been tied by the fact that we couldn't easily change things that people paid for." 

As a premium-priced game, Clicker Heroes 2 can be updated "without too much regard to player process," similar to games like Dwarf Fortress. Players who like the changes can dive in, while those who don't can carry on with the old version, without being unduly penalized. Eliminating microtransactions also opens the door to mods, which is something Playsaurus wasn't able to support in the first game.

Despite the change in direction for Clicker Heroes 2, the original Clicker Heroes will be left as-is. "Most people are OK with how we've handled it. Our unlimited refund policy still stands," Fragsworth wrote. "But going forward we're going to at least try the paid-up-front model for our business. It may or may not work. It probably isn't worth nearly as much money, but at least we can do it with a cleaner conscience."