Make It Rain: Love of Money

In the spring of 2014 the number one free app on the App Store was a game about being rich, and it was honest about the transaction: nobody hands you the money. You swipe it into existence yourself, bill by bill, as fast as your thumb allows.

Space Inch launched Make It Rain: Love of Money on iOS in April 2014, and the satire caught a wave: it topped the free charts, spread to Android and Windows Phone, and eventually got a 2017 Steam port. It belongs to the first great era of mobile tappers, the same wave that produced AdVenture Capitalist, and it played the money fantasy for laughs at a moment when everybody else played it straight.

What the loop feels like

You swipe. Bills fly off your finger and pile into a counter, and the counter does the thing counters do. That's Make It Rain.

Then the money starts working while you rest your thumb: venture capital, loan sharking, offshore drilling, a portfolio of investments that compound whether you are paying attention or not. The satire is in the menu itself, because those are the industries you graduate into. That's Make It Rain.

And then you die. The game treats this as a feature: your fortune passes on, your legacy inherits the empire, and the next run starts rich. A wealth satire whose final joke is that death does not interrupt compounding. That's Make It Rain.

Swipes, investments and an inheritance

The active half is the swipe, tuned to feel physical: cash bursts across the screen and the rate of rain is your rate of flicking. The idle half is the investment list, where early-game pocket money graduates into venture capital and shadier holdings, each tier roughly a joke about who you have become.

The structural spine is the legacy system. Death is a scheduled event, the handover is a payout, and successive lives stack the fortune higher. It is a light prestige loop wearing a will, which is more thematic coherence than most clickers of 2014 managed.

Where it stumbles

The satire has one register, and once the joke lands, the depth curve stays flat. Next to Cookie Clicker or any of the later prestige-heavy idlers, there is no real meta to solve, just a longer list of things to buy. The App Store version has not been updated since December 2023, so treat it as a finished artifact rather than a live game: it does what it did in 2014, and it will keep doing exactly that.

Playing it today

All three versions survive: the App Store original, the Google Play release under the same Space Inch bundle, and the 2017 Steam port for people who want their wealth satire in a window on a desktop. The mobile versions are free; the Steam build costs a little.

The verdict

A half-hour joke that millions of people turned into a habit, and a genuine artifact of the clicker boom's mobile wave. Play it as satire rather than as a spreadsheet: the money is fake, the thumb workout is real, and the inheritance gag is the part worth remembering.