My arcade games are garbage

[BrowneHawk]

So I was cheating a bit using one of the quick guides on steam that shows what numbers to pick on the sliders. From game start to around 1981 I was doing alright, had a few number one hits and was making money. Best game was an 80%

I unlock the workshop and figure I'll expand and tap into the arcade market. I can't even get above 50% on a game. The 50% game at least made a tiny bit a profit but my other are all operating at a loss.

Some type of trick to making Arcades work or should I just skip them?

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Arcades can be very good at the start of the game, but you need to consider that they need more people to make them good than other platforms (due to being "red" development time platforms.) One way to do this is to make ports of other games to arcade - ports take less time to develop and cost less (and there's an extra bonus to that which will be explained below.) Another way is to have more people.

Also, "guides" tend to treat sliders as the End All to making a game, when they're about 20% of what you need to know. Here's just a few things that will affect your games' review score, and these are more important the higher the difficulty level chosen:

- Slider positions. The closer to "perfect" position, the better.
- Experience. That's the "stars" each item you add to a game have (genres, topics, features, platforms) the more "gold" stars the better.
- Stats. Helped by the two things above, and by the number (and type) of employees you have in all your development-related rooms. There's a threshold that you need to surpass in each of the four stats (and this depends on your game's main genre too) if you have too few stats, then no amount of "perfect sliders" or experience will get you above 80% unless you spend a lot more time making your game, and in MGT2, time is money.
- Genre suitability for arcades. This was added fairly recently, and while the difference it makes is not too harsh, it can still affect your review score, specially if you're barely scratching the surface on all the things mentioned above.

By affecting your review score, these things will indirectly affect your sales and profit too, but here's two things that also affect your sales:

- IP rating. The more games you make that are related to each other, the stronger their "brand" will be, and the better the sales for all future games of that IP will be. Think Final Fantasy: Square can fart on a box, sell it with the "Final Fantasy" brand, and all their fans will buy it (and then complain it stinks, but they still bought it anyways.) Yes, this is why you should make your arcade games ports (either to or from arcade) as being part of a strong IP will help them sell much better.
- Studio rating: This is easy to rise if you're doing all of the above right, it's possible to hit five stars of studio rating before the nineties, which will turn mid/late game into "watch numbers grow simulator."

All in all, if treated nicely, arcades can be quite the money-making machine, but they may require a lot of space and a lot of employees to keep up with the orders. One thing I do is sell them at maximum price: There is little reason not to, IMO. You get money faster, you need less employees to take care of several arcades, and your arcades will last less in the market, which helps minimizing the space needed for workshops.

Edit: Also, if you play the game enough and have information retention skills above those of a rock, sliders are quite easy to remember, specially for "early game" genres, as you will be using them a lot. The "slider hunting" minigame is easy to trivialize and boring, so I don't consider it cheating... Specially when good memory can replace guides without the player even realizing it.

[danloveschrista]

Did you use the secondary rooms to boost the port of the game? You can't just have the Development room port it, you should also use Quality Assurance, Graphics, Sound, etc. The Graphics and Sound take way longer than the actual porting.

[BrowneHawk]

Originally posted by danloveschrista:

Did you use the secondary rooms to boost the port of the game? You can't just have the Development room port it, you should also use Quality Assurance, Graphics, Sound, etc. The Graphics and Sound take way longer than the actual porting.

No I didn't port anything wasn't aware that was the way to go until Ky mentioned it. But with pumping resources into sequels not even sure if its worth doing arcades. I could just pump out more sequels and spin offs.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Secondary rooms are a quick way to bring your stats up, for a hefty sum of money. They may help, but they have a base combined cost of 1.2 million dollars, plus the cost to build the rooms, plus the cost of each improvement, so it's not a "do this ez and get free review score" as many make it sound. If a player's already having issues keeping up with the game's pace, those rooms may be out of their reach already.

An alternative to "specialized" rooms is to hire more programmers/developers and build more development rooms or expand the one(s) you have, which will let you get games done quicker and with more stats added to them, increasing their review score (and thus their potential sales/profit) across the board.

For comparison, by 1981 I'll try to have fifty or more employees, at least ten devs and twenty programmers, and may have the QA room built (cheapest and only one that's really needed before 1985,) but I only use the "polish" option for it.

In any case, arcades give much more money than console/PC games of the same quality, both with or without exclusivity contract - and they can be paired up with exclusivity contracts, since the NPCs won't mind you 'wasting' their contract's time making arcade ports they get no money from.

Arcade games stay a good income alternative to self-publishing or console making, until the very late nineties or early 2000s, and they save you the five or ten millions needed to unlock those two things.

The main problem you may be facing is that, depending on what game difficulty you're using, if your best game was at 80%, then it's not arcades that will sink your company in the long run, they'll just contribute to its downfall. A lot of players do well in the seventies and early eighties, but then crash facefirst into several things that will make their income and their games progressively get worse with little to no way of bringing things back to "doing fine." If you're playing in Medium or below, you shouldn't even having issues getting review scores above 80% unless you're missing a lot of how the game works. Sliders are just a very small part of what makes a perfect game, and you can even make a game of 80%+ review score without moving those sliders at all from their mid-point (if you know how all the other things that will affect review scores work.)

[BrowneHawk]

You're correct I am missing things the game wants me to do past the sliders. Like how many people working on a game is too many? Currently early game I'm getting awat with Owner, and a star developer, with 2 QA guys that pretty much have the bugs crushed by the time the game finishes.

That seems to be good enough to turn a profit until 1980. SO I obviously need to do an expansion of work force and products, just not sure how hard to go on them all. I did experiment with the sound and graphics room and found out how pricey they were, but assumed you have to use them. Just not sure when.

[Great Sage Equal of Heaven]

There's no such thing as too many people. It's always not enough.

By 1980 I have my marketing recruitment office running non stop and 100+ employees

[Great Sage Equal of Heaven]

Except, maybe, in legendary, where too many people too soon might ♥♥♥♥ you

[Kyouko Tsukino]

You can never have "too many people" working at a game, as far as the game's quality goes, more people is always better - as long as the profit of your games is more than the expenses of monthly salaries, you're fine, and in early game, it can pay off to play it risky and hire more people than you think you can afford - that could lead to wonderful discoveries like how making one game per month and managing to make them hit 85%+ can let you steamroll through the initial "always in debt" period and be out of debt by 1980.

But yes, hiring something silly like thirty people in 1976 can be dangerous and can really undermine your efforts in Legendary, but unlike the Fallout 4 joke mobs, that difficulty level does live up to its name.

[danloveschrista]

You can never have "too many" developers. Other rooms might drain your bank account, but if those devs are constantly busy, they're your cash cow until you make consoles.

In my experience, arcades sometimes make a good amount, but I usually crush their sales with regular game sales. The workshop just isn't worth the space that it takes away from development space. I do it if I'm bored playing the same way always. Better to push out good games as fast as you can, and then get into console development asap. Especially with the new feature that genres are platform-specific to an extent, you can really bomb on them.

[Bröthër Gíg Hul Sundín]

Wow, such a primitively easy game, and even with a guide, and you still can't get it right? DAMN.

[Captain Flappy]

Originally posted by Dag:

Wow, such a primitively easy game, and even with a guide, and you still can't get it right? DAMN.

Always one ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that has to join in with no contribution...

[Kyouko Tsukino]

It's best to just ignore those hominids, or pretend to agree with them. They get bored and leave pretty quickly when you do that, unless they're really dedicated to their cause. And even if they are stubborn, if you just ignore them, you won't need to read their "contributions" anyways.

Of course, dropping a report on them to help removing them from any place you frequent is always an option, but most of the time, I prefer to see how many "Blocked user - Show" instances there are in some forums.

[BrowneHawk]

The tips were very helpful thanks all. Now if only I could transfer my Gamedev bank account to real life.

[Bröthër Gíg Hul Sundín]

Better go tell Ms. Teacher on me, you two.