I’ve found, through painful experimentation, that large games are good for just about nothing in Game Dev Tycoon. With Large games, that cost more time and money to produce, I end up with about the same amount of profit (after all expenses) that I would’ve gotten from Medium games. The standards for a good game get harder and harder as the size goes up, too. Making a good Medium game is much easier than making a good Large game.
It’s both easier and better to produce a Medium 9.5 than it is to produce a Large 8.5. This truth was obscured in my early playthroughs because I sized up as fast as I could. My most recent playthrough revealed what a mistake that was. Large games are just not more profitable than Medium games.
AAA games are actually more profitable than Medium games, but I’m not convinced they’re enough better to make up for the absurdly high standards they’re held to, nor for the extra time required to make them. The one thing that AAA titles do indisputably well is MMOs, and even there… that MMO better be downright legendary, or you would’ve been better off doing it as a Large game instead. Only at the extremes of quality does the investment in AAA pay off.
I ran a playthrough on mostly Medium games and leapfrogged my second-best scores in the process. What really motivated me to post this was an embarrassing event at the end of that playthrough. I produced a 9.75 Medium game with my Y30 team. I squeezed it in the last year. It had just finished tallying sales and gone off the market when the game ended. A game that was produced quickly and cheaply sold 14.7M copies, gained 259,444 fans, and earned 157.3M in profit.
The kicker? When it passed 10M units sold, a dialogue popped up and told me, ‘this game truly deserves to be called AAA’. Eeyup.
Large games are really useful actually. But you can’t make a large game the same way you make a medium game. Before you make a large game you should make a new engine with as many things as you can research in it. When creating a medium game I would spend about 1 million per game, and get 10-50 million profit. When I make a large game I spend about 5.5 million, and I get 50-200 million profit. The more things you add using an engine, the better ratings you will get. My last game was Fantasy-RPG for Everyone on the PC. It cost 5.5 Million and got a profit of 172.4 Million. By making large RPG games I know have 912.8 Million Cash right now and this is my second time playing. The more money you put in a game the more you get as profit, only if you have the sliders in the right spot.
[quote=“MacyMouse, post:3, topic:5780, full:true”]
Large games are really useful actually. But you can’t make a large game the same way you make a medium game.[/quote]
The only difference in making Large games vs Medium games, is that it requires more staff in order not to have too much workload and Large games require at least 2D v4 or 3D v3 for graphics.
Game sales are not calculated by the amount of money you put into a game.
First of all a game needs a good rating.
Second hype increases sales if the game has a good rating.
The amount of fans you already have, affects the amount of sales you have.
As for sliders ‘in the right spot’ is kind of a myth.
Sliders do not have a absolute perfect position. Every genre has ‘important’ sliders and ‘unimportant’ sliders and most of them are neutral.
Sadly many people still believe that slider positions are an exact science.
If you have a lot of fans Large games will make more profit than Medium games. And yes, having more staff will result in having no one being overworked, which is helpful.
Making a Sequel to a great game with a new engine with more things included in the engine really helps.
Having more engine features in a game really helped with the amount of units sold, it didn’t help too much with ratings, only slightly, but overall having more engine features really did help, but only if the features fit with the type of game I was making.
There is important and unimportant sliders as you said. That is what I meant, if the sliders were completly opposite so important sliders were at the bottom than it would really effect the game.
To get a good rating, you need to use the sliders and engine features. To increase hype you spend money on marketing.
Also, by the time you are able to make a Large game you should have a lot of fans, which will increase sales. You should have a lot of fans because to be able to make a Large game you would have needed to of released great games before this point.
A sequel already provides a bonus to the ‘Game Quality’ which then results in a higher game score, thus better review scores.
You can make a great sequel without adding any new features.
Making a Sequel can sometimes be successful, not all the time though. But when making a Sequel with a new engine, most of the time the review scores are better than the first game. If you make a great game you can’t keep making Sequel after Sequel without upgrading to a new engine. Otherwise your reviews will start to go lower since you are adding nothing new and it is exactly like the last game.
–This is my last reply for today since it is 3:30 am and I must sleep. Goodnight.
