Publishing Companies - It’d be cool to be able to start your own publisher, be it through money like the office system or R&D lab and have “NPCs” choose to publish under you.
Larger staff - It’d be cool to allow players to “simulate” larger companies by allowing them to have more staff. Personally the way I’d do it would be allowing the user to appoint a dev to managing a section of staff (no more than 6?) to work on a side project you could have the NPC decide on the game or give the user control and basically allow them to push out multiple games of choice or have a set of staff simply dedicated to pushing out DLC for your hit game.
DLC changes - I’m not sure if these have been changed or if I’m forgetting how it work’s (it’s been a while since I’ve played), but it’d be nice if we could make DLC for games that aren’t MMOs and also if the penalty for making games of the same genre/category was removed for DLC, it’s pretty annoying making a hit MMO then having to push out a bunch of low quality games so you can get around the penalty to make DLC quick enough so your MMO doesn’t start going into negative profits.
R&D lab internet services - “Cloud” servers: It’s a bit strange how the current MMO system works, where your playerbase goes down by expenses stay the same or go up. It’d make sense if the expenses stayed the same, because you bought a ton of hardware outright, so I was thinking maybe using the R&D lab on virtualization tech, that way you could scale down the network as more players started to quit.
MMO changes - Add a stage for planning, you could have sliders for amount of servers to purchase or virtual servers to rent (see above) and depending on the amount of hardware, you could have a successful launch or a complete burning mess, like diablo 3. It’d also be cool to see events like macroing and/or goldfarming becoming an issue and causing players to quit (see RuneScape for a good example of this), this could lead into more things like researching into anti-bot technology and then releasing a DLC/Patch to combat bots, etc. Another event could be a private server epicdemic where the amount of server emulation ends up really hurting the official game (once again see RuneScape for a good example).
Additional companies - It’d be cool to be able to open additional side companies that would work in similar ways to the larger staff suggestion, allowing you invest some money into building a new company that way you could take risks with games you normally would be too afraid to try due to your massive fan base.
Porting to PC event - So you’ve turned to the side of the console mouth breathers and left PC out completely on your new game? Well now you’ve got an angry mob of PC gamers demanding you to port Dark Moles II to PC! Refusing might save you money, however it’d also lose you fans.
Demand modding support - So maybe you’ve given in to the elitest PC gamers and decided to put your console mouth breathing fans aside for a while to focus on a PC port of Dark Moles II, however you completely ignored modding support and now you’ve developed a half-assed port! Everyone is upset and now you’ve got to decide whether or not to lose fans or money.
Mod events - You’ve developed Super realistic shooty man simulator II and now a basement programmer has decided to release his mod - Tupacalypse: The Revengening and everyone and their mother wants to play the mod! So what effect does this have on Super realistic shooty man simulator II? Well it has massively increased the sales of course!
Hacking epidemic and anti-cheat technology - So you’ve developed Concurring-Strike: Binary and lo and behold everyone is aimbotting and speedhacking! What should you do? Of course! Use your R&D lab to develop SAAC (Super Awesome Anti Cheat) and then release a DLC bundled with the new anti-cheat to destroy the hackers (until they bypass it of course).
Multiplayer - I’m sure this has been suggested a thousand times, but it’d really make the game A LOT more fun if there was some sort of interaction, personally I think it’d be cool to do it similar to my larger staff idea.
Customize your workplace - So maybe it’s time to upgrade from your Pentium 4 workstations and grab some ballin’ machines with some crazy fast i7s to speed up development time or grab some cool new chairs, this time with proper back support so you can overwork your employees with less complaints of this so called “Vacation”.