Game Dev. Tycoon Review

Hello everyone! As my weekly blog post, this week I’m going to be doing a game review on “Game Dev. Tycoon”.

Game Developer Tycoon is a business simulation game that was released on December 10, 2012, by developer Greenheart Games. It is similar to other “tycoon” games, where you must run a business with realistic situations, challenges, and rewards. In the game, you own a gaming company that starts out in a garage and can potentially end up in a multi-departmental company. The game forces you to balance the cost of producing games, of living and of monthly expenses, of employees and game licenses, all for hopefully getting high ratings on your games. High ratings result in high profit, which then allow for further research, game development, and employee training. It is meant to simulate the first ~35 years of gaming, with the industry milestones inserted into the game, with comically changed names. For example, there is the mBox, Ninvento, Vena, and Playsystem. It also follows the ups and downs of the companies and popularity trends. Other realistic aspects of the game are publishing deals, employee salaries and raises, employee training, publicity conventions, opportunities to sue and sabotage your competitors, and most importantly, to make your very own games. To me, this part was way too realistic, as I went bankrupt three times.

To put my experience with this game into perspective, I have not played many other video games. I have played most popular iPhone games, along with occasional xBox and Playstation games at my friends’ houses when I was younger, and some Nintendo DS and Leapfrog when I was a child. With this very narrow mindset, my insight into what truly makes a great game was highly lacking, if it was even there. This lead to me getting terrible rating after terrible rating for each of my games. No matter how much I researched or how much money I spent, my downfall was always the combinations of topic/genre/platform and the time allotment during development. This caused me to become so in debt at times that I was forced to take loans from the bank, which would give me money to produce, yet another horrible game, eventually leading me to bankruptcy when I couldn’t repay the bank. This always happened in Level 2 of the game, so every time I went bankrupt, it would return me to the end of year 11. I played this game for about a week, and at the very end I was about 14 years in (which includes the three times I went bankrupt). I finished playing the game with a lot of frustration and anger.

While I played this game, I took very diligent notes on everything. From every decision made in the development of each game, to its reviews, the costs, the decisions I was presented with, the changes and flow of the industry, the timestamps of when anything important happened, and of course my bankruptcies. From those 15 pages of notes, here is an overview of my experience playing Game Dev. Tycoon. (Feel free to laugh and cry at myself)

I first created my gaming company, MMJ.

I quickly moved to create my very first game. For every game you had to first pick the topic, genre, platform, graphics, and eventually audience. For my first game, I picked: space, strategy, G64 (which had a 56.2% market share) and text based graphics which were 5k. For the first development stage, you had to determine how much time you wanted allotted to: engine, gameplay, and story/quests. For the second development stage, you had to determine how much time you wanted allotted to: dialogues, level design, and artificial intelligence. For the third developmental stage, you had to determine how much time you wanted allotted to: world design, graphic, and sound. Below is how I set up all the sliders for Game #1: Spaceeeeee

I was honestly just guessing all of this because I didn’t understand what 4/9 categories meant. After all the bugs were fixed, I finished the game and sent it to market. Clearly, my confusion in development translated to the sales.

With these reviews, I sold 2,429 units in the first week, and 8,850 units generating $61,985 in seven months and three weeks. After each game, I did a game report, which tells you a couple of things about the game; whether certain things were bad, good, or great combinations for example. With this game report, I learned that: space and strategy is a great combination, and that world design seems to be very important in this type of game.

While I could go through every single twist and turn in this game, and all my failures and the the very few successes, I will give a really condensed version of my experience from my first game to my last bankruptcy.

I continued to research new topics, and trying to make better decisions with each new game. As hard as I tried to finesse the time allotment sliders, it rarely worked out in my favor. New gaming consoles got released, I did contract work to make quick money and research points, and I made my own custom gaming engine. I started with monthly costs of 8k in garage, which changed to 83k when I moved into a building. My first successful game was Game #6, a business, simulation, PC, text based game, which got ratings of 8, 9, 9, and 7. It generated $259,336 in sales. I do have to admit that this game combination was not my idea, I got it from a classmate, who took pity on me because of how much I was struggling.

After seven long years, having created 8 games, I moved into a new office! I learned that I now had to train myself and my employees, which cost money, research points, and time. Even with the new office, I still got mediocre ratings. My next successful game was Game #9, a space, strategy, PC, V2 graphics game with Game Engine #1. It got ratings of 10, 9, 10, 9, generating $1.754 million. I was honestly super hyped when this happened; I thought that this was the turning point. It wasn’t. While my succeeding games fluctuated getting ratings of 8 to ratings of 4, I never really was financially comfortable. I spent 260k to create a second game engine, thinking that would improve the quality of my games; it really was a waste of 260k. I tried making a sequel to one of my most successful games, which ended up getting ratings of 5 because I gave too much time to dialogue. I tried a publishing deal to increase my hype for a game, but it totally backfired when I didn’t meet the minimum requirement for ratings, which resulted in me wasting a lot of money in developing a game that got ratings of 4 and 5, and having to pay a penalty of 150k for not meeting the minimum score. This was also my first medium sized game, which means I used all two of my employees in its making.

I continued spending money on making new games, getting subpar ratings, losing money, etc., etc., until I was met with my first bank loan. Its conditions were that they would give me $786k now and  I had to pay the bank back $1.4 million in one year. If I didn’t agree, I would go bankrupt, so of course I took the offer.

At first glance, this seems like a great idea. The bank is giving enough money to cover the cost for one amazing game that will surely put you out of debt and well into a profitable zone, all you have to do is create the game. Yeah, it was the second part of that sentence that I had major problems with. Long story short, I spent the loan on a game that did not generate nearly enough profit, I wasn’t allowed to take another loan, and I went bankrupt in year 15 after making 20 games. I restarted the level in year 11, starting with making Game 15. I continued to just try and try and try, and really nothing worked. It seemed that there was always just one decision that I made about the game development, which proved detrimental to its success. In year 14, I got another bank offer of $757k in return for $1.3 million in one year. I created Game 18, and then went bankrupt once more. Back to year 11 again!

I continued to try and try and try…. I did notice that the game proceeded to give me like 4-6 hints in the Game Report… because I was failing so badly. I then went on to go bankrupt once more. At this point, I was going to give up, but I seeing that I was only 15 years in, when some of my classmates were 60 years in, I wanted to try one last thing. After my third bankruptcy, I used a lot of “helpful guides” *cheats*, to try to create perfect combinations. Here is the link to the website I used: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=216784744

This is one of the tables that I attempted to use.

While this did work for a couple of games, my terrible bad luck prevailed. My ratings continued to be all over the place, and I honestly just had no more heart to proceed. I ended the game in year 14, month 5, week 3, with 25.6k fans and $2.4 million. (Don’t be fooled, I could’ve lost all that money with one bad game).

This review has the bias of someone who failed numerous times, but I do believe this is a very good game. Most of my classmates were successful, and had a lot of fun trying new combinations and expanding their companies. Unfortunately, I didn’t experience that because I was constantly under financial stress. The hardest part of the game was definitely creating successful game combinations. This is due to me not having played a lot of games, so I'm really bad at making the combinations. I also just had really bad luck, because even if I made the exact same game as someone else who was uber successful, I still got 4s. My failure was: spending money on a game, getting low ratings, few profits, if any, going in debt to create more unsuccessful games, accepting loans I wasn’t able to pay back, not breaking even or able to make a successful game, and then going bankrupt (three times). I constantly felt like every decision I made was wrong, such as making a licensing deal, training my employees, installing solar panels (maybe not the best decision, but I wanted to be green), and the game combinations.

All in all, it was a great game, just not at all for me.

Here are all the notes that I took while playing the game: http://minimimiii.blogspot.com/2017/10/game-dev-tycoon-notes.html