I’ve not read through all the above posts, but you need to do publisher contracts to build a fan base first.
Your games won’t sell millions of copies with only 20K fans. I did publisher contracts to build up to 100K or so fans, then started focusing on my own games and now have over 300 Trillion sat in my bank, earning multiple trillions a week.
I have in the past played a game with 36 games launched (of which only 1 used a publisher), and 8 Billion in the bank. Admittedly that king of made cashflow was from abusing the automagical sales boost you get from releasing an MMO expansion (who’d-a thunk it that fans would get so drooly over the 13th expansion for a Fallout MMO?)
The game is way less random than you might expect. This was one of our goals.
Game is good, you need learn how to play, it took me 2 times… 3rd time im still alive and i don’t see bankruptcy in any sight, i’m already publishing large games without help of publisher… is so easy! make millions.
Unique problem of the game is lot time consuming ;_; played for 15 hours straight since i bought today is already 7 AM didn’t sleep… i hate you dev’s(Kidding) ^^
consume in moderation 
And how can it be that sometimes i get an amazing 9.x Hit and the next 5 games having a 2-4 rating? Like in my other thread:
“How can it be that at the beginning of the ps2 era, whatever i do, every single game gets horrible ratings, and i mean everyone, i reload my savegame for about 2 hours and tried every single combination, even the “perfect” combinations doesn’t worked, but than “the one” combination gets an almost perfect rating and a million hit. I know that not every game in the world can become a milestone and a big hit, but at the most time, you only have either a million hit or a minus business, its nothing between it and thats not really realistic.”
I dont get that, sometimes the games are amazing, or absolutely crap, its nothing between it.
after you release a true hit game the idea is that the expectation will rise a bit more for games so you generally can’t expect another hit game immediately afterwards (although that can happen). it seems that in your case it’s that effect plus maybe non-ideal combo publisher etc.
Try to improve on skills (train) and engine parts after hit games but keep a very close eye on the money.
Thanks for the tips, i will look for it, but if you do patches in the future, maybe you work on it a little bit.
If anyone in the real world releases a surprised hit, of course the world is watching for the next game, specially if a company makes a sequel about the Hit game, than everyone expects very much, but not that hard on a whole other franchise and definitely not THAT hard generally. You know our current generation the same like i knows them. Graphics and engines doesn’t changed so fast, specially not in the console sector, that after a 9.x hit, the next will get an 3-4 rating. Thats just wrong and a liiiiiittlle bit unbalanced. Maybe a 8.25 but not that hard differences like the most people get. Its not even a coincidence or something, the most times you can reload your save and get that terrible ratings whatever you do every time and thats not so realistic.
But, maybe your right, maybe your game works “near” perfect and is balanced, but than your game has definitely an other problem. Because than we need more ingame tips, we need clues what we are doing wrong, maybe an estimation what the next rating could be with that settings on the regulator, or with this engine and parts, you know?
I agree that it could work better. We’ll try to get to this but balancing is hard so don’t expect a quick fix.
Appreciate all the feedback to these posts you guys are doing. I know it takes time away from your lives and developing new projects. That you’re acknowledging a balance patch is needed is a step in the right direction.
Just want to say thank you for all the work you guys have put in and will undoubtedly continue to put in.
But, maybe your right, maybe your game works “near” perfect and is balanced, but than your game has definitely an other problem. Because than we need more ingame tips, we need clues what we are doing wrong, maybe an estimation what the next rating could be with that settings on the regulator, or with this engine and parts, you know?
This! I just want to see how well my game was received by a specific audience. Like, the score was 8.0 for the young audience, but since you released it for the PC, none of them had the money to pay for it.
Or maybe just comments by random customers like ‘Meh, this game had no story at all, terrible’, ‘Why is this game using a 4 year old engine?..’ or ‘I love strategy games with a bit of story, nice’. If you can get a few of these per released game, it becomes a lot easier to see why people either love or hate your games. It’s not like real developers do not get these kinds of responses (all these comments proving my point 
)
Currently it really feels quite random. I cannot recall how many times I’ve made a genre combo that I knew was successful in the real world only to get abysmal scores.
It’s not frustrating to lose, it’s just frustrating to lose without knowing why.
Sooo… I had a Dungeon RPG, which have rave reviews (masterpiece was mentioned), but was 3D engine without anything more. Very cheap game, sold some 200K units, big fanbase. So I did sequel. Better 3D with branching storylines, better sound (stereo baby!) and everything. Expensive production. Design and Technology was way off the row, my record. And reviews? 1/10, 2/10, 1/10 etc. WTF? Why? How? Jesus Christ.
Did you click the ‘Create Sequel’ option, or did you merely create the same game immediately after the first? Since your initial sales were 200k, I’m willing to guess you chose the latter path (and thus didn’t actually create a sequel). The reviewers hate it when you fail to innovate, so making the same game twice in a row will tank 99% of the time.
I have a similar, after making a 9.75 Dungeon/RPG, all my new game sucked. I reloaded, because I thought I had did something wrong, but all games I tried got 6s at best. I think, one review mentioned “bad technique”, but I generally have almost everything, you can have.
I’m only like 6 years away from the end and I have a lot of successful games (a lot 9s or better), but for some reason I’m not able to develop a good game anymore and I don’t know why.
Guys, consider ‘real life’.
Sometimes games score really well in the media and they do terrible in sales, and vice versa. If you’re feeling frustrated with unpredictable sales outcomes, imagine what game developers feel like.
You’re asking for pointers to figure out ‘the system’ - a luxury real life game developers don’t have. Keep at it. Most successful entrepreneurs go through a lot of failures before hitting success
One was to balance the game would be to reduce the amount of money staff needs at the end of the month.
I am on year 24 and have made 40 million without ever using a publisher. I don’t think they are necessary.
My biggest suggestion would be to rework the formula that generates total sales. I understand that, in order to prevent on rockstar of a title from netting a billion USD, you have to nerf the sales a bit, but I’m launching AAA and netting 50M in product moved. It seems very unrealistic that titles this big wouldn’t get global results (in the hundreds of millions of copies sold).
This would mean some pretty impressive mathematical gymnastics, but I think the realism would sell the universe of the game even more.
To balance it out, adjusting the cost of advertising for AAA titles, or advancing the cost due to cross platform generation.
I know it’s been well over a month since this post went up (and a new topic was made for it), but I thought I’d put in my two cents. I support the idea of tweaking the balance; right now, the quality drop after a hit seems a bit too punishing. In the real world, expectations may go up after a hit, but people are often favorably predisposed to the company and sometimes there’s only so much you can do with the technology reasonably available. I’ve always thought that the progress of time and technology should factor more into reviews than how many good games were made in the past. Then again, these are just suggestions. I still enjoy the game!
Also, does anyone know how to stop pirates from stealing all of my profits? Just kidding! I bought my copy fair and square, and am looking forward to seeing it on Steam once it’s tweaked and polished.
Sometimes you have to do some creative adjusting when it comes to moving out of the garage. I believe the problem you are having is the fact you don’t have enough fans. So your game is not doing as well. To correct this issue, do what all true game developers do, cheat.
Download Cheat Engine or any program that can search memory. I actually do this step on the first game, when it goes from 0 fans to 13 fans or so. Do a search in memory for 0 first, then when it changes, search for 13. You might have to do it again when it bounces to 27 or so. After about 3 changes, it should narrow it down to the exact memory location you are looking for.
Here it is displayed for research, but fans are more important than research, so do fans first, then research: