We’ve all looked at the stock market and thought: “I could definitely do better than those people”.
Well, now is your chance to prove it.
Without losing your actual house.
Conradical Games and publisher Oro Interactive have released a playable demo for Screen Stocks, an upcoming multiplayer trading game that combines a constantly moving simulated stock market with the progression and questionable decision-making of an incremental clicker.
Players can buy, sell and short stocks while competing against other traders operating in the same market, with the full game currently scheduled to launch through Steam in October 2026.
Everyone is trading the same market
The key idea behind Screen Stocks is that you are not quietly playing against a collection of predictable computer-generated traders.
Everyone is making moves in the same real-time simulated market.
That means buying heavily into a stock can help push its value upwards, while a wave of people suddenly selling can drag the price back down again.
You can buy into something you expect to rise, short a stock you think is about to collapse or potentially work with other players to manipulate things in your favour.
Completely simulated financial manipulation, obviously.
Please do not get ideas.
Different stocks behave in different ways too. Some may climb relatively steadily, while others fluctuate wildly or appear to do very little before suddenly moving.
The complication is that everyone else is watching those same movements.
Spot something promising too late and another trader may already have piled in.
Wait too long before selling, and the market may turn against you.
Essentially, Screen Stocks is trying to transform all those terrifying financial charts into competitive multiplayer chaos.
There is a clicker game hiding underneath it
The stock market is only half of the equation.
Screen Stocks also borrows heavily from incremental and idle games, giving players a constant progression loop alongside all the trading.
You begin with relatively limited resources before gradually increasing your income and building a larger portfolio.
Levelling up lets you improve things such as dividends, base income and the number of stocks you can purchase, while later upgrades introduce automated actions and improved offline returns.
New stocks also become available as you progress, providing more markets to gamble your entirely fictional fortune on.
Eventually, players can choose to Go Public.
This serves as Screen Stocks’ prestige system, resetting your bank balance while giving you improved starting statistics for the next climb.
All that money disappears.
But you come back slightly better at making even more money disappear.
Classic capitalism.
Designed to live in the corner of your desktop
Screen Stocks does not necessarily expect your undivided attention.
The game can be played normally in full screen, but it is also designed as a desktop companion that can be shrunk into the corner of your display while you do something else.
Work.
Watch YouTube.
Write an article.
Pretend you’re listening during a Teams meeting.
The market continues moving while Screen Stocks sits beside everything else, allowing you to periodically glance over, make a trade and then return to whatever you were supposedly doing.
That could make its combination of incremental progression and multiplayer trading particularly dangerous.
Idle games already have an impressive ability to occupy a tiny section of your brain for an entire day.
Adding the possibility that another player is currently wrecking your favourite stock probably isn’t going to help.
Buy, sell or short your way upwards
There are several different approaches players can take.
Playing cautiously and collecting steady dividends is one option.
Aggressively buying stocks in the hope of pushing prices upward is another.
Players can also short stocks, effectively betting that their value will fall rather than rise.
Then there is the multiplayer element.
Traders can cooperate and attempt to push particular stocks in a desired direction, although there is presumably nothing preventing your new financial best friend from deciding that selling everything at exactly the wrong moment would be much funnier.
The Steam page describes Screen Stocks as an online multiplayer trading game, with Steam Achievements and Cloud support also listed for the full release.
The demo is available now
The Screen Stocks demo launched on Steam on 14 September and is free to download.
It offers an early chance to try the game’s trading and incremental systems before the full release currently planned for October.
Conradical Games is developing Screen Stocks, with Oro Interactive handling publishing duties. Oro’s current catalogue also includes games such as Roadside Research, Dead Format, Easy Delivery Co. and Machine Party.
Our take on Screen Stocks
There is something wonderfully dangerous about combining a clicker game with a multiplayer stock market.
Incremental games are already built around watching numbers increase until something in your brain decides that this is enormously satisfying.
Screen Stocks then adds other human beings who can potentially ruin those numbers.
The desktop companion element might be the cleverest part, though.
Rather than demanding constant attention, having the market quietly ticking away in the corner of your screen makes it sound like exactly the sort of game you check for five seconds before accidentally losing the next 40 minutes watching imaginary stocks.
And because it is all simulated, you can make the sort of catastrophically irresponsible financial decisions that would normally result in a very uncomfortable conversation with your bank.
Screen Stocks is currently targeting an October 2026 release on Steam, with the free demo available now.
Buy low.
Sell high.
Or panic and dump absolutely everything the second a graph turns red.
That sounds more realistic anyway.
For even more gaming news, click right here.
