I literally just got these ideas and decided to post them instead of working on any of the various things I should be working on. Hooray for procrastination!
My first thought is merchandising. After the release of an AAA game (or possibly a large game as well?) it would be cool if you could develop tie-in merch based on it. Things like resin figures, posters, t-shirts, bags, etc. Developing merch would take very little time (gotta get that stuff out before the game goes out of style, right?) but cost a LOT of money. Merch sales would be based on fans and game sales. It would only be worth it on the best selling games. Merch development would use exclusively design points, and more design points mean better merch.
You could also find a merchandising deal. Pay an initial fee to skip the development process and vastly increase merch sales, but you only receive a percentage of the merch income. Again, only worth it on best sellers. Merch deals would have a high design point score by default, higher than an action-specialized team would reasonably pull off, but not as high as an RPG-specialized team could probably pull off.
Now on to my other idea: re-releases. I’m not talking about from-the-ground-up remakes like the DS release of Final Fantasy III. I’m also not talking about single digital media re-releases, as I assume those happen in the background as soon as you research GRID. I’ve always interpreted GRID as every game you’ve ever made, and DLC for recent titles, available for paid download (income really should be based on number of released games and fan count instead of just a fixed sum).
Anyway, what I mean is bundled re-releases ported to a new system and possibly with updated graphics or redone text. Like Square’s Final Fantasy Origins/Anthology/Chronicles packs, or the Hitman or DMC bundles for PS2, or the more recent Hitman and DMC bundles on a single PS3 disc with HD graphics and trophy support. Or those HUGE game packs Capcom and Namco and Sega have done, with oodles of their old titles on one disc.
You could choose which games to include in the re-release. As many as you like, but each additional game costs more money (either a percentage of its production cost, or a fixed price based on game size). If re-releasing the games on the same system (like the PS2 bundles I mentioned above), only a short time would be needed to design packaging (as the games are already finished for that platform), and the games are back on the market. If updating games for a new system (like every other example), you’d have to go through a development process like making a new medium game.
All re-release bundles would sell for the price of a single game, so it would be more profitable to re-release games in 2s or 3s, but bundling more games is a better deal and would attract more fans. Like sequels, you should wait a while before bundling a recent game. Unlike sequels, there is no option to change genre or engine (it’s a re-release, not a remake, only tweaking is needed and only if on a new system).
For example, say you’re making a long series of games. 3 titles on TES, 3 titles on Super TES, 3 titles on Playsystem. You unlock re-releases during the Playsystem phase. You make 3 re-release bundles of 2 games each or 2 bundles of 3 each (or 1 bundle of 6 if that’s what you want?), porting all of the TES and Super TES titles to the Playsystem. When Playsystem 2 comes out, you can bundle your 3 Playsystem titles, or you can bundle the re-release bundles you made for the Playsystem, remastering all your old games for Playsystem 2. Imagine the first six Final Fantasy games on one PS2 disc. Glorious… Now imagine I-IX including Tactics on a single PS3 disc (with trophy support) and try not to faint.
I don’t know how hard these features would be to code, but I think they’d be a lot of fun. Particularly the re-releases. I tend to make a lot of serials (my most recent play-through saw 18 Pony Quest games, not counting direct sequels and spin-off titles), so the ability to retouch and bundle them is definitely something I’d like to see in a future version (or a sequel?)
Then again, I suppose I could just make a new game, name it after the series, and pretend it’s a bundle. Hooray for role-playing, I guess?