when i hire new employees i let them train 2 or 3 times in some stats und let them doing contract work and wait min. a year (so make a pause of 1 year without any development) and then release a sequel to a game,
i only release sequels when i have new employees, in that way i get 9+ ratings all the time
also i hire 2 staff members when i reach level 2, when i’ve got 100k fans i got to the next 2 staff members, and last 2 after i researched large games and had 500k fans
i’m avoid using publishers cause the deals are mostly crap in terms of the genre/topic/audience/platform combies, usually only every 5 or 6 years i had one good combie for the publisher deals, also remind the “killing” date for the platforms, don’t develop a game for a platform which killing date is near the next 18 months
hopefully this will help anyone who struggles in level 2