i played this game for only 1 day now, and i really liked it at once. it got a good balance between simpleness and complexity in my opinion. and you are never save from bankruptcy. i felt so save after my first playthrough. i had a maximum of about 400M cash and my MMO was quite successful - but then i failed to stop it. while i was developing the expansion for the MMO, the costs of it drove me into bankruptcy.
i am also into design, graphics and programming - so this game really inspired me to think about making my own business once again.
but in my opinion there are a few things which could make this game even so much better and raise its replayabilty by a lot.
A) issues which already seem annoying in the first playthrough:
(and their possible improvements)
-
popup-windows with text: after 10 times of getting those messages with the “running” text it already seemed a bit annoying to me. double-clicking it makes the text go faster, but still doesn’t show you an instant message, like i would prefer it. it also gets annoying to have to wait for the visitor counter to count up everytime.
improvement: option which lets you choose to show the message-texts instantly. and an option to stop lesser important messages from being displayed (f.g. “gameling will be published in 2 months…”). -
popup-messages in general: they stop the game all the time which can really be annoying if you just wanted to do something else. most of the messages displayed are not important at all.
improvement: option to display unimportant messages (which require no decision) on the bottom of the screen. they should not stop the game in any way. -
the action menu is getting annoying as soon as you move out of the garage: it’s nice in the garage - you left-click somewhere and get the menu for everything you need at that time. but as soon as you move to the next building, you want to train your own character or your employees. you just miss them by a few pixels and get to the action menu. there is also a bug which keeps the action menu open when you are getting popup messages.
improvement: match the general action menu to another mouse button, maybe the middle- or right- button. fix the issue with the action menu which stays open. give employees a marker, maybe a border around them, when you hover over them so you get a feedback that your next click will trigger their menu. -
unsatisfying overviews of a couple of things: if you just wanna know about the skill of your employees it’s annoying to have to click them and then click on “train” to see their stats. it’s also unsatisfying that you have to click on “develop a new game” then on platform to see the most important platforms, their marketshare and hints. and what also is a pain in the neck for me is that you can’t see how your last custom engine was called when you create a new one.
improvement: show employee skills when hovering them. make a seperate overview of the currently available platforms and their marketshare (plus other stats). this is so important, you could also show the platforms on the left hand side all the time (maybe with an option to trigger this window on and off). show at least the name of the last custom game engine, when making a new one. -
marketing options and gamescon booths are getting boring already in the first playthrough due to lack of transparency and lack of further improvement options. i can’t really see the benefit of using marketing and booths. they seem to barely change anything about your fans or your gameselling numbers. if your business is running good, you are able to pay for the largest booth and biggest marketing option everytime - which is getting pointless.
improvement: give more transparency to the advantages that booths and marketing give to you. tell me how many fans/sales i got by investing into the large booth or the biggest marketing option. point out the hype they give/gave to your game. give more levels of improvement to marketing and gamescon. maybe another bigger international gamescon where you can get a booth later on. and more marketing options which are getting more expensive. maybe also more research levels for marketing. -
the bank is kinda harsh to successful companies: it’s ok that you can easily get bankrupt in the first years of a moderate succesfull company. this makes the game harder when you are unlucky, and i like it. but the bailouts and the bank’s tolerance aren’t well scaled for more successful companies in my opinion. i had a company which had more than 450M cash and shortly after my former successful MMO was ruining me. i have been developing the expansion at that time, but the bank showed no tolerance, after one bailout and then falling under the -2M overdraw limit.
improvement: let the bank’s overdraw limit and bailouts scale better throughout the game. the bank should never let you go bankrupt when you have been very successful just a few months before and currently are developing something.
B) ideas which could raise the replayability of this game by a lot:
- randomize the platform releases when the game is getting replayed after the first playthrough. there could be also a setting to turn it back to normal (historical accurate). the success of particular platforms also could be randomized. it’s getting boring, when you already know the G64 will be successful in the beginning but soon gets out of business and so on.
- bring in more random events (maybe some of them only availabe after the first playthrough). i really liked one random event where one of my employees wanted to do a coding contest within the company, which improved everyone’s tech-skills when accepted (but this just happened to me a single time). please bring in more useful random events like this - and also more events which could harm your company by a 50/50 chance. the other random events like the “pay for a secret” or the fraud stuff are boring, cause you are getting them over and over again.
C) general improvement ideas
- the game could be even more challening if it’s a big decision which platform you wanna develop games for. you have to pay some license money for consoles, but it’s not a huge deal. would be more fun to have to decide which coding skills you wanna learn. for example you decide to develop PC games, so you need your PC coding skills. they only help you a little bit if you suddenly wanna do a playsystem game, for example. there could be a stat for coding in general, and then other stats for coding for particular platforms.
it’s kind of unrealistic (yes, i know it’s just a game, but still…) if you made three moderate successful PC games in a row, then suddenly develop a playsystem blockbuster just because it’s the most successful platform at that time.
this could be also funny and exciting when you replay the game with randomized platform history like mentioned above.
so for example you have to specialize your team on PC, Apple, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and so on… -development. if you specialized for Nintendo but Sony is suddenly more successful, you still have to get along with your team’s knowledge or invest a lot of RP to get them some Sony development skills. - let only useful techniques on a particual platform lead to a successful game. for example it’s useless to develop a 3D game for the “gameboy”. if you do that, it just should not work out and your development investments should be lost. you could pair this by giving the players specs about the platforms (for example: gamelinger capable of v2 2D graphics, improved conversations … and so on).
sorry for the long text, but i really thought a lot about this game. i hope my feedback and ideas are a bit useful to someone (or i just wasted a few hours of thinking and 2 hours of writing). and i’d also appreciate feedback to my feedback as well 
EDIT/PS: english is not my native language, so i am sorry if it’s bad at some points.
