The best strategy

[FTSTrooper]

I'm unsure about:

- focus on just one IP
- focus on arcades
- have 3-4 IP and release DLC for them

When I focused on just one IP and ported my games that were worth making to the arcade, later in the game I even managed to buy SONY. But even though I bought it, I was slaughtered in the console wars in the next version. I believe technology 6. In portables, you simply can't beat Mindendo.

That said, I would like to know your opinion on which is the best or if you use another way.
Playing just focusing on the game I survive, but I end up losing the fun of the game.

This play was played at very hard, normal game speed, without adapting the work mode to speed.

[Great Sage Equal of Heaven]

The strength of your IP influences sales. You'll always sell more from a five star IP than a zero star, all other things being equal. It makes sense to maximise it quickly.

The console wars are going to be tough to win because your fictional consoles are competing against historical sales numbers of NPC consoles. No matter what you do, you won't be able to sell as many as quickly as your opponents do.

You have two choices .. you can live with it, or you can win by buying out the opposition. There's a certain satisfaction in buying out Nintendo, Microsoft. But if you do, their consoles will be taken off the market, which means you will not be able to develop games for them, and miss out on a large %age of possible sales. It's a tradeoff.

Personally I always buy them out and get them working on games exclusively for my consoles. But that's not optimal.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Depends on what you want to do with the game. Do you want sales, or quick, easy progression, or "roleplay"?

For quick, easy progression:

- Focusing on one IP lets you increase both your studio rating and IP rating quicker, which will increase sales, and obviously also profit.

- Arcades can be focused on, but depending on your playstyle, it may lead to having to expand way sooner than expected (when you have 20+ arcade games out at once, you'll need a lot of employees to take care of the actual money making via building the cabinets.) It's always best to just sell them at maximum price, to increase the profit per week ratio, and also make it so you need less people in the workshops for the same amount of games.

And "focusing" on arcades past the 2000s is just not profitable enough, because of the built-in decay of arcade usage leading to them not selling enough to be worth keeping around, except as an "I want to port my stuff to arcades because roleplay reasons."

- "DLCs" (add-ons) are the single most "not worth wasting time with" thing in the game (not counting things that show up by endgame, like MMOs/F2P, mobile games or the Game Pass.) They slightly increase the longevity of a game that's already making you money, and make a bit of money on the side. They will also only slightly increase IP rating, and have higher chances of failing to give you experience for game elements than normal games or contract games have.

Making a whole new game, on the other hand, will let you get a whole new fresh batch of money, raise your IP a lot quicker, have the highest ratio of experience gain, train your employees a lot more.

You can have the "best of both worlds" with a bit of what some people call roleplaying. Make a spin-off to your main game, let's call that game, a Skill/Puzzle game, "Sirtet" (yes I just did that,) and pretend the spin-off is an add-on. MGT2 will insist it isn't, but everything can be real if you imagine hard enough. So you will have Sirtet, its "DLCs" called Sirtet Karting, Sirtet Knights and Sirtet Tennis (because if the Mario IP can be silly, why not yours?) You'll even be able to package them in a bundle. They're totally DLCs and not spin-offs. ;)


Anyhow, nowadays, I tend to make one game per month at 90%+ score, which makes getting one IP to 5.0 before 1985 very possible (even in Legendary) and I get my studio rating to five stars before that, thanks to 90%+ games being award farms. And if I'm making that many games per year, I can actually stay with B-sized games until the late nineties, as their lower profit will be compensated by me flooding the market with them. This method allows me to treat AAA and AAAA games as optional game sizes I never need to use at all. AA games can still score 90%+ in 2030 and beyond, and take 1/4 of the people to make than AAAA games take, so it's a win/win.

It can get a bit annoying at times to keep pausing the game at the start of each month to make This Year's Sequel To This Month's Spin-Off" but when I do get bored, I have other games to play until I get the itch to play this one again. I'm not game-monogamous at all.

All in all, "fun" is a subjective matter. I have fun finding out (and utilizing) the most effective (for my way of playing games at least) path through business simulation games. Other people will call making 50+ games for the same IP by the 2000s "boring." Their loss/win/neutral.

[FTSTrooper]

Originally posted by Prosecutor Godot:

The strength of your IP influences sales. You'll always sell more from a five star IP than a zero star, all other things being equal. It makes sense to maximise it quickly.

The console wars are going to be tough to win because your fictional consoles are competing against historical sales numbers of NPC consoles. No matter what you do, you won't be able to sell as many as quickly as your opponents do.

You have two choices .. you can live with it, or you can win by buying out the opposition. There's a certain satisfaction in buying out Nintendo, Microsoft. But if you do, their consoles will be taken off the market, which means you will not be able to develop games for them, and miss out on a large %age of possible sales. It's a tradeoff.

Personally I always buy them out and get them working on games exclusively for my consoles. But that's not optimal.

so in very hard mode i could not buy more than one of the biggest of consoles in tech 6 year 2010.
and also, i would like to have a competition with me to make the game fun hehehehe

[FTSTrooper]

Originally posted by Kyouko Tsukino:

Depends on what you want to do with the game. Do you want sales, or quick, easy progression, or "roleplay"?

For quick, easy progression:

- Focusing on one IP lets you increase both your studio rating and IP rating quicker, which will increase sales, and obviously also profit.

- Arcades can be focused on, but depending on your playstyle, it may lead to having to expand way sooner than expected (when you have 20+ arcade games out at once, you'll need a lot of employees to take care of the actual money making via building the cabinets.) It's always best to just sell them at maximum price, to increase the profit per week ratio, and also make it so you need less people in the workshops for the same amount of games.

And "focusing" on arcades past the 2000s is just not profitable enough, because of the built-in decay of arcade usage leading to them not selling enough to be worth keeping around, except as an "I want to port my stuff to arcades because roleplay reasons."

- "DLCs" (add-ons) are the single most "not worth wasting time with" thing in the game (not counting things that show up by endgame, like MMOs/F2P, mobile games or the Game Pass.) They slightly increase the longevity of a game that's already making you money, and make a bit of money on the side. They will also only slightly increase IP rating, and have higher chances of failing to give you experience for game elements than normal games or contract games have.

Making a whole new game, on the other hand, will let you get a whole new fresh batch of money, raise your IP a lot quicker, have the highest ratio of experience gain, train your employees a lot more.

You can have the "best of both worlds" with a bit of what some people call roleplaying. Make a spin-off to your main game, let's call that game, a Skill/Puzzle game, "Sirtet" (yes I just did that,) and pretend the spin-off is an add-on. MGT2 will insist it isn't, but everything can be real if you imagine hard enough. So you will have Sirtet, its "DLCs" called Sirtet Karting, Sirtet Knights and Sirtet Tennis (because if the Mario IP can be silly, why not yours?) You'll even be able to package them in a bundle. They're totally DLCs and not spin-offs. ;)


Anyhow, nowadays, I tend to make one game per month at 90%+ score, which makes getting one IP to 5.0 before 1985 very possible (even in Legendary) and I get my studio rating to five stars before that, thanks to 90%+ games being award farms. And if I'm making that many games per year, I can actually stay with B-sized games until the late nineties, as their lower profit will be compensated by me flooding the market with them. This method allows me to treat AAA and AAAA games as optional game sizes I never need to use at all. AA games can still score 90%+ in 2030 and beyond, and take 1/4 of the people to make than AAAA games take, so it's a win/win.

It can get a bit annoying at times to keep pausing the game at the start of each month to make This Year's Sequel To This Month's Spin-Off" but when I do get bored, I have other games to play until I get the itch to play this one again. I'm not game-monogamous at all.

All in all, "fun" is a subjective matter. I have fun finding out (and utilizing) the most effective (for my way of playing games at least) path through business simulation games. Other people will call making 50+ games for the same IP by the 2000s "boring." Their loss/win/neutral.

i want more money asap to build my console.
so you don't do arcade, you just keep creating spinoof games?
even after creating a Sirtet Karting spinoff, do you create another one after that, or do you create a sequel to it?
because it seems to me that a spinoff gets a decrease in rating sometimes.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

I didn't say I don't do arcade, but I try to not use them much because they make early game too easy. I also don't care about consoles in nine out of ten of my playthroughs, so technicians are there to make arcades and nothing else. Nowadays I'll only port the "main" game to arcades, so I can get away with only having 5-10 techs around until the nineties.

As for spin-offs, there are mechanics in place to make it so your IP doesn't grow as fast if you "rush" your spin-offs and sequels. The slowdown is minimal with my "stupid fast" game release speed, but if you do want to make the most out of less games, keep in mind that you need to space sequels to be at least 12 months apart (once a year.) In my case, that means eleven spin-offs (or five when I'm taking it slow and only making one game every two months) before a sequel is released - and then I do a sequel to every spin-off, because of course "Mega Sirtet Sisters Punching Party" needs to have fifty sequels.

If you see a decrease in ratings when making any game, that simply means something in that game's lacking. It could be that you didn't give it as many points as the last game (if same genre) or you didn't focus in its main stat (if a different genre) or that your experience with something you used was way lower. For example, if making a Racing spin-off (40% graphics/30% sound) of a Skill (10% graphics/sound) game, you'll need a lot more graphics points, so you should tune your percentile sliders to 0%-45%-45%-10% and then return them to their "perfect" position before launch. And if you notice you have too few Control or Design points later on, you can further modify the spread to give a bit more of those. This of course depends on your employee spread as well, I normally have no graphics/sound employees in my dev room and use the percentile sliders to compensate for it, because devs and programmers will still give you points to gameplay/control even if you set those to zero.

I also focus on using as few topics as possible (it help knowing which ones work beforehand via memory,) and try to only make games for the four platforms with the most active users, to minimize the number of games that will have less than five "experience" stars on everything. "Trends" and "overcrowding" are way, way less important than way too many people seem to think, and you can be a billionaire by the 2000s just by releasing RPG/Action games about Druids and Anime and tanking through whatever negligible debuffs the game throws your way simply by trying to at least have 90% rating every time, which will let your IP become an awards farm (and then you can use those awards as wide-AoE paintings for your corridors, or place them in your rooms to reduce the need for rugs.)

[FTSTrooper]

I get it, in very hard mode I only get game of the year and developer of the year awards, the others I rarely win, even when the game hits about 96%, and now when I want to make an RPG close to the 80s, I need to clear the room of graphics, it seems that they made this difficult earlier than before

[Kyouko Tsukino]

The main "trick" I use is something I call "throw more people at problems until they stop being problems." When in doubt, hire more people (of the right specialization, and without flaws or useless/situational perks.)

Having 50+ employees by 1980 makes the game oh so much easier. It's a bit harder to do in some maps than others (Warehouse is my favorite map, with the bunker being a close second,) and may affect how quickly you can expand, but eventually you have enough space for hundreds of employees, and I utilize most of it for exactly that. I "sacrifice" server rooms (which are only useful for things I consider "too little too late" content,) and since I'm usually not doing consoles, I have a lot of free space for getting more people to make games with. Even the European Manor can let you have a lot of people working at games, but for that one map you may have to also avoid self-publishing (or make games at a snail's pace to be able to publish them without overwhelming your production and stock rooms,) which will slow down your progress.

[FTSTrooper]

hmm... i thought it wouldn't do to have more graphics staff in the 80's would help with that, good to know, i'll test it in a new gameplay.

Do you think it's more valid to have a subsidiary release your games or is self-publishing more valid?
I get a little lost with the mechanics of self-publishing, I don't know whether to lower the price or increase it and when I have to increase the number of production machines.

For example, sometimes my games simply don't reach 90%... then I think about selling cheaper to compensate for that...

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Self-publishing gives you the most money per game. Money, not sales. Sales are just window dressing IMO, you can't use sales to research new tech, only money. ;) Of course sales increase your profit, but there's people who care so much about sales that they'd rather sell 10k copies and earn $5 for each, than sell 5k and earn $40 for each (quick math will tell you which one's the most profitable.) I don't care about "leaderboards" so as long as my games make me a billionaire by the 2000s, they can be #55000 in the "most sold" chart if they want to.

Anyhow, recently I was made aware that the $39-$49 price range gives you the most total profit per game, and that's what I've been using. Compare to the meager $15 per copy you could get from a subsidiary publishing your game - you're losing $18 per copy (since your final profit is $33 from $39,) by selling through a subsidiary, so you would need to sell around 50% more copies (or so) to break even - and then there's the fact you're bleeding money just by having subsidiaries, so if you took that into consideration, depending on the subsidiary's cost, you could be getting a net loss.

Also, I don't ever touch prices, with the amount of money I get by making a lot of games I don't need to be penny-pinching. My strategy is simply to steamroll through any debuff/mechanic the game has in place to stop people from "breaking" it. The strategy has survived (with some modifications along the way) from very early access to this day, even going through a period where everyone was going "OMG U MADE LEGENDARY INPOSSABULL NAO!" (may or may not be the actual spelling used by some people,) while I was... Having some difficulties making money, but after some corrections on my playstyle, Legendary was still "hard but possible" and has stayed that way.

Edit: Slightly wrong numbers up there... Fixed now.

[FTSTrooper]

hmmmm... got it... thank you for the information provided, both of you helped a lot.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Also for graphics/sound employees: I don't use them in dev rooms, but the whole point of the "specialized" rooms is to give those employees a place where they can actually be useful. I try to unlock the graphics and sound studio before the nineties, and that helps my games stay good. I also avoid graphics-heavy genres (making Puzzle or Skill your special genre and spamming games of that chosen genre = early game won.)

[Great Sage Equal of Heaven]

Hows the $39 price point working for you? Does it feel like you're making more money?

[FTSTrooper]

there was a gameplay that I tested this, but it was on hard and not very difficult difficulty... but the price of 39 seemed to be the most ideal... the game pays for itself faster... as for a total profit, I don't know to say

compared to lower prices, it was superior in the long run as well.. but I haven't tested it with higher prices

[Kyouko Tsukino]

In the long run, yes. It can slightly increase difficulty if you're used to how quickly money floods in at $79, but I just had to slow down hiring employees and expanding, and now I get to be a billionaire sooner since I'm getting more money per game (instead of per week.)

Edit: $59-79 will give you more money each week, but you'll be losing quite a chunk of the total potential profit of your game, so while it's useful for times you quickly need money, it's overall a worse price range.

[Panda]

Just to chime in here about two points -

Subsidiaries you own will actually pay you $20 per copy (and a maximum of 15 to others).

$20 a copy makes addons a nice bonus. Self publishing the game, and giving the addon to your subsidiary. This can make addons worth 100s of millions of dollars (late game obviously), very little development time and the additional sales for your main game.