I used to play a lot of IO Games a few years back, and they had giant communities with tons of players every day. Nowadays, going to many IO games I saw that there are only like 10 or 20 people some times.
This brought up the question for me, Are IO Games as a whole dying? What led to their decline from millions of players to just a few thousand. It’s really sad because playing these games are some of my fondest childhood memories
Thanks!
Hi! As someone who’s been playing IO Games since the start of Agar.io in 2015, all the way to the modern IO Game industry in 2024, I noticed some very peculiar things.
First of all, the IO Gaming Industry is not dead. Every day, there are lots of new IO Games being released, with thousands of players coming on to play them. Furthermore, the browser games market size was valued at USD 33.07 million in 2022 and is expected to expand reaching USD 63.64 million by 2028. With that being said, IO Games have definitely declined from their peak in 2016-2017 where titles could easily reach tens of thousands of players.
The decline / death of IO Games is mainly due to the fact that many IO Game devs aren’t creative, they reuse and steal other game’s content just to get the most views to their game. This is unfortunate and I hope this changes in the near future. IO Games have also gotten boring for the majority of players, and browsers don’t have as many capabilities as a traditional mobile or playstation game would to do intensive graphics.
While the decline in popularity may make it seem like IO games are dying, I think it’s important to note that the gaming industry is cyclical, and trends come and go. New iterations and innovations in the genre can always bring a resurgence of interest.
This brought up the question for me, Are IO Games as a whole dying? What led to their decline from millions of players to just a few thousand. It’s really sad because playing these games are some of my fondest childhood memories
I hope they are not dead as I am developing another one 
Maybe there are so many various games now that every player can find their niche game and stay there.
Not necessarily. They start falling off around this time and come back in august
They are not dead, but web games as a whole do seem to be dying.
Growing accessibility of regular video games (through free to play models and low poly, performant games) many people (including myself) that did not have the money or the power to play normal games, now switch from playing web games to playing downloadable games.
I was going to make a post like this, but you made it. I also noticed an average decline of io game players. I remember in 2017 when I was only 6 about the hype of .io games. It was a part of my youth. My favorite game was(and still is btw) an io game. But eventually, people realized that .io games weren’t worth it. Despite their average downfall, I do see some io games slowly grow like Florr.io. It is true that the golden age of .io games is well over, but they are not dead yet. I see a hope for io games in schools. If a lot of io games are created, though they are all small communities, it will take too long for schools to block all the links. And I think we are seeing the start of the school io game age.
Yeah r.i.p io games… Some of the best games i’ve ever played were io games:(