Is it okay to have a company just based on action games? obviously I’ll use different game types, like Airplane Action, then Horror Action, then Vampire Action, etc.
I’m wondering if it’ll effect reviews or anything.
I haven’t noticed any penalty to using the same genre all the time (I do almost all RPGs). I have, however, noticed a penalty to using the same topic too much. One of my save files has something like 30 virtual pet games (mostly RPGs, some simulation, adventure, and RPG-strategy mixed in). Whenever I make a virtual pet game, I get average review of around 4-5. Any other topic with the same genre and slider positions gets 7-8.
So if you have an extremely long-running series with spin-offs and side-games, it will crash and burn after 20 something games and that topic will become useless.
You are right about using the same Genre over and over.
But Topics do not “crash and burn” after a amount of games made.
Otherwise it would mean, that if you wanted to make Sci-Fi game company that you run out bussines before year 10.
Huh, weird. I can’t seem to make a virtual pet game that doesn’t suck after making a lot of virtual pet games. And then only because I didn’t unlock fantasy until postgame, that time.
Possibly the problem has to do with Audience and Platform.
Only young audiences like Virtual Pet games and it would have to fit their platform as well.
Young audience on a custom console with +++ for young and +++ for RPG. Virtual Pet/RPG consistently gets 4-5 (previous virtual pet RPGs scored 6-10), but fantasy, sci-fi, cyberpunk, wild west, etc. RPGs get 7-8 with the same engine on the same console.
I played into postgame for a while trying to make another good pony game (switching off to a different topic/genre after each attempt, of course), but no amount of training helped. Making Virtual Pet/Simulation and Virtual Pet/Adventure didn’t go well either (older titles with those combos were also successful). I eventually cheated and made a Fantasy/RPG entry to the series. Which is what they were all supposed to be, anyway, but Fantasy was towards the bottom of the list during that play-through, so I worked with what I had. I’m not sure if I even have that save file anymore.
The only concern with a topic/genre can be releasing two games with the exact same topic/genre in a row. The second one will be considered as another version of the first one by the reviews, and you’ll get flamed.
But you could theoretically make a whole game run with just one genre and two topics, picking alternatively one topic and the second, always with the same genre, as long as you keep switching topics, you should’t get bad reviews.
Keep in mind though that using a new topic/genre gives you a decent bonus in the research points earned during game development. If you keep using the same topic/genre combos, your research will be really slow, and you’ll have trouble training your staff and researching game engine features.