Whenever you make a new, original, self-published game, it creates a new Intellectual Property (or IP for short). This IP belongs to your game studio and is treated like an asset. In essence, it symbolizes the legal rights you have to a game for the purposes of using it for a sequel.
When you make sequels to an IP, the original and every sequel made to that game will appear in a special IP screen, showing you all the titles, their average sales, scores and any changes to the topic/genre made over time. Making a sequel to an IP that has high average reviews will cause the sequel to gain a healthy amount of free hype, as the IP is seen as a āgoodā one and people will eagerly anticipate the next edition. IPs with an average to poor history of reviews wonāt get any bonus hype. This gives you an incentive to maintain quality on your IPs, and re-use high quality ones for the free hype.
In order to make a sequel to a game, you must have the legal IP rights to the the series itself. There are a few things that can cause you to lose this legal right.
If the āFan Gameā event fires and you choose not to shut it down, you lose the IP rights to that game and cannot make a sequel to it. (There is a reason why your legal team advises you to shut it down)
If the āPeople are pirating our gameā event fires and you choose not to sue, you lose the IP rights (for not enforcing your copyright).
You may randomly be offered cash by a major TV/Movie studio for the rights to an IP. How much cash they offer depends on the year and what the average reviews of the IP series are. The event has a chance to trigger whenever a new trend begins. If one of your old IPs matches the trend (IE you made an old Military action game 5 years ago and suddenly action games become trendy) you may get an offer for that IP as soon as the trend hits. If you accept the offer, you get paid the cash, but lose the rights to the IP and cannot produce any sequels to it. There is no penalty for declining the offer.
Any games made with a publisher will NOT create a new IP right for you, as the publisher will maintain ownership of the property. There is no change to the mechanics of publisher contracts; you just canāt make self-published sequels to them later.
The amount of free hype you get is directly proportional to both the average review scores of the series AND the number of titles in the series. Having a high average review score in an IP is good, having a high average AND a lot of entries in the series is even better. Any IP that has an average review score of 7.75 or lower will not get any bonus hype. The closer the average review score is to 10.0, the more and more bonus hype will be given to new games produced. The bonus hype is then boosted by an extra 20% for every title in the series besides the first. Youāll still get the 1.2 review score bonus for making a proper sequel, to IPs with low review scores, you just wonāt get any bonus hype. Likewise, you wonāt get any more than a 1.2 review score bonus even from a highly praised. The ālater than 40 weeks and on a new engineā rule still applies to all sequels, and will turn into a penalty if you make a sequel too soon or without innovating.
If you make too many changes to a sequel, it will be labeled a āspin-offā instead. It will show up in an IPās information page, but not count for any of its averages. The game itself will only get a 1.1 sequel bonus instead of the 1.2 bonus, and will only receive half the bonus hype it would have. You may make ONLY one change to a gameās topic, genre, or target audience total and still have the game called a proper sequel. (For example, if you change a gameās topic, its genre, 2nd genre and target audience would have to remain exactly the same for the new game to count). Changing platforms, game engine or a gameās size does not count against this āonly one changeā limit. Changing the target audience from young directly to mature, or mature to young would count as two changes.
What is the point to all this?:
By restricting the accessibility to IPs, and making highly-rated IPs more valuable, your company will come to rely on a couple cornerstone IPs to make and re-make with each new engine due to the free hype you get in addition to the 1.2 sequel bonus. (Just like game studios do IRL) It gives you an incentive to make sure you do a really good game when making your sequel, so as not to damage the average review score of your prized IP. This will make you grow more attached to a specific IP during a playthrough and thus care more about its success or failure. It also makes cultivating a long-running high-quality IP very profitable too. Imagine taking the game that was your smash hit that got you out of the garageā¦ taking great pains to make every sequel you make of it a 9.0+ gameā¦and then capping the series off with an epic MMO sequel in year 25 that sells like crazy because of the thousands of points of hype built up over the years. (Picture World of Warcraft, after all the quality titles built up throughout the warcraft IP over the years from the early days)
It also creates some negative consequences to picking the āgood guyā responses to the pirate and fan game events, that mimic how copyright law (at least in the US) works. This turns these no-brainer events into actual choices with valid reasons to pick either side.
The events to buy the rights can be a boon for newer players who might struggle with cash in stage 2. A little influx of cash for the rights to their 9.75 garage smash hit might help a struggling player keep out of the red and make another few games that might pull them up out of bankruptcy.
TL:DR
Make sequels harder to get and keep, but give you bonuses to hype if you do them right.
