With Offworld Trading Company, a revolutionary idea takes its tepid first steps

We like watching numbers get bigger.

Perhaps the simplest way of providing positive feedback to players, increasing numbers form the foundation of many different games, and with good reason. It’s the easiest way to show players they’re improving in a quantifiable manner, but more than that, seeing bigger numbers just sets something off in our brains, that we’re doing something right. Real-time strategy games may let you bandy about huge blobs of units in attempt to overcome the other player’s blobs, but what you’re really doing is trying to make your numbers go up faster than the opponents, whether it be resources or units.