User Reviews (and Sales) ?

[nosedigger]

After so many play-throughs, I still do not understand how is this value calculated ?
I thought the sales should be straightforward, with Press Reviews having the most important impact, but it's not that case.

So, some games have high user review, some less, for an example Arcade cabinets tend to get a lot of user reviews, but they stay really long on market. MMO and F2P should also have high user reviews.

But the sales I just cant get a hang on even approximately guess. I had games getting 91% selling total of 50 mil $ in early 80s, or I could have Survival made for online PC+Mac, and with user base of 180 million, it sold 10 million copies, where I had AAA Sport game, with customer base of 400 mil users, rating of 95% and selling only 3 mil of copies.

I figure, the user reviews and some other factor must be affecting games, so please if anyone has knowledge to share, here is the place

EDIT:
Im mainly interested in understanding how User Reviews are generated, and what is affecting the sales of the game the most (on release). Features with 5* generate more points, I do understand how to get to 95+% in final Review, so what I need to do to get 100% User Review for a Game.
Low saturated topic/genres +
High number of fans/high reputation +
Removal of yellow point Features that have the game's genre in red +
anything else ?

(Im playing on Hard)

[Kyouko Tsukino]

This comment is awaiting analysis by our automated content check system. It will be temporarily hidden until we verify that it does not contain harmful content (e.g. links to websites that attempt to steal information).

[Chenza]

Randomness built into the game is hindering your ability to reach 100%. Let me explain. Review scores from 98 to 100 are random. with 100% being something like 1 half of 1% chance on legendary. This was done by the developer as a way to increase the difficulty (something i don't agree with). Just know that it is possible. (i take screenshots when it happens) and in my over 1700 hours of playing i have 25 100%'s screenshots saved (yes that's how rare on legendary it truly is).
As for the rest of your questions I'll let Kyouko answer. For they are for more detailed then i would be in explaining the little things that all add up.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

"On Legendary" is just a cosmetic piece for that one game mechanic, though. And this is from someone who is probably at a 90% time spent in Legendary as opposed to other difficulties.

Anyhow, it's just as hard to get 100% in Very Easy or Legendary, which really tells how "right" the design choice was to make it a random chance. It adds no more "challenge" to the game than you would get from having someone randomly punch you in the groin at random times during gameplay, but it does add just as much annoyance as that probably would add. ;)

How I tested the chances of 100% in Very Easy: I set up a game where, thanks to modded automation of "specialized" rooms, I was able to release four "at least 98%" games per month. Then I went overdrive. Went through that test up to 2020, had a whole 3 games hit 100%, less than I may get at times in Legendary. Small sample group, I know, but playing in Very Easy is not a thing I enjoy at all.

[nosedigger]

@Kyouko there is comment since yesterday, but it's a system message saying it is being verified and temporarily hidden

@Chenza
I've played MGT on Legendary way back, but Im too old for that grinding and micro, so I've settled in MGT2 on hard diff. My gameplay is not centered around 100% (it's good if it happens), but usually with some goal - getting first tech 2 Handheld, trying to run the company only on Games and addons etc. But the key factoring is learning about the game mechanics, and then implementing them into my new strategy.

MGT2 p*sses me off in term like, Best games of all time: crappy 86% MMO, that sold 4000 copies, had 2000 peak and had 500 good reviews and 0 bad. And I cant do anything about it, it's stuck there for the whole run. The sheer inconsistency from reported values vs final score and then user reviews and also the non-predictability of sales (as I wrote above RPG selling 45 mil $ in like early 80s and Ecc/Str on 2 platforms overselling AAA Licence 5* sequel)

[nosedigger]

Originally posted by Kyouko Tsukino:

It adds no more "challenge" to the game than you would get from having someone randomly punch you in the groin at random times during gameplay, but it does add just as much annoyance as that probably would add. ;)

Very interesting example xD

Bottom line, I'm trying to understand what is affecting sales, and in which way, since the final % score is clearly not the reason.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

One thing you need to understand about this game: Some things are just figures. Cosmetic. Not really important for survival. "Car spoilers."

I frankly don't look at sales anymore. First off, because in Legendary the number of sales are stunted compared to lower difficulties (this applies to all difficulties compared to the previous ones, too,) and second, because what really matters is profit. Sales won't always mean you're being successful. Selling through a publisher can give you an impressive number of sales, but self-publishing will give you every cent you would earn, instead of a meager $15 per copy maximum. And since "every cent" can be up to $79 per copy... Yeah.

You could be selling hundreds of thousands of copies but be unable to keep up with the tech crawl, while in another run you could be selling a tenth of that and be using cutting edge tech, simply because your profit per week is ten times higher.

Also, low individual sales/profit can be tanked through with high productivity. I'm used to "one game per month" so I'm getting more than enough profit each week to make up for, let's say, Skill games not being "cool" at the moment. Since I tend to play using all genres nowadays, trends also matter little - one of X games will be selling less, but I have the other games making up for it - and at least one of them will be of the genre that's trending, which cancels out the lack of sales of the "non-trendy" game. I also tend to use very few topics (sometimes just two through the whole run) and have 700+ topics around (mods!) so the chances of one of the topics I use being either trendy or unpopular are negligible.

However, the final score will affect sales. Given the same active users, the same genres and topics, the same trends and the same publisher*, a game of 80% will sell a comparatively much higher number of copies per week than a 70% game could, and a 70% game will look at a 60% game and laugh at its small sales figure. But then a 90% game shows up and humbles them all... Until a 98% game walks by, followed by a horde of sales, and all other games look down in shame. ;)

In fact, the difference between each % of the highest 10% review score range (91%-100%) is enough for me to want to get 95%+ if possible, but 90%+ is still survivable in Legendary (and 80%+ is survivable in Very hard, and 70%+ in Hard.)

* You may wonder how I would be able to test this: By using multiple save slots and sandboxing so money isn't an issue, so I can test doing the best possible game, then reloading and cutting down my workforce so I get a lower score, and so on.

[nosedigger]

Originally posted by Kyouko Tsukino:

Also, low individual sales/profit can be tanked through with high productivity

This is what breaks the immersion for me in this game. I'm no longer in position to tank playtime measured in days into something, so as I got older, I'm looking more for the immersion, rather than fighting games on hardest difficulty.

This game boils down basically to churning out high quality games, where the period in between is much much shorter on Legendary. If I'm running a game/software development company, I want each product to mean something. That's why I "love" more Software Inc., where natural span of each software is minimum 3 years, and can go even further, where in MGT2 you just produce and, as you said, lower profit games are supplemented by higher selling ones. Even on Hard, I came down to 2 games in Jan-March, and two for Sept-Nov, with addons, maybe ports, and early contracts for star experience, so I see more clearly the difference in the playstyles. I would be even fine with 2 games per year, with some free work in between, but one game per month seems like a micro/automation stress nightmare xD

Also, I heavily dislike cosmetic numbers, or factors, it just moves the game to more unfinished\unpolished work, that is not thought out 100%. None the less, I do know from MGT that getting highest percentage, you need to mix genres, mix topics (licences are only for boosting sales), where new combos give additional % to final score. One thing that I'm missing is the effect of polishing, I clearly remember that in MGT polishing for a month or two can actually get the score up by 2% (thing that was max), but here, polishing seems ineffective. Yesterday I read that polishing is giving 50% of what is actually producing during development, which sucks.

At the end of the yesterday sessions around 2010, and I started continually producing 98% games, only one 100% for the whole run, but that Survival MMO being the best product ever is still f-ing bugging me.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

In MGT2 polishing can take your score from 60% to 90%+ in one month, as long as you have enough people working on the game. It gives you stats at a slower pace than it would during development (or "improvements") but the thing is, it still gives you stats. If you're three weeks away from the end of the month, the wisest use of your time on a game that's not reached the projected percentage you want is not to immediately release it, but to use those three weeks to polish the turd you could release today, into the diamond it could be in three weeks.

In short, without polish, many of your games could be "CyberPunk 2077 on release date."

However, there's ways to 'enforce' that immersion other old gamers love so much. You can set development time to "Realistic" (which I lovingly call "Namek's explosion" because it makes development take forever for no good reason) or decrease your workers' speed. You can even turn Very Easy into a "fake Legendary" with the right settings. Sandbox Mode is fun like that. I had a lot of masochistic fun with it by setting the starting money to "minus one million" and seeing what difficulty I could actually survive that way (made it up to Hard, Very Hard was where I went "I'm too old for this crap.")

In fact what I love about MGT 2 is that, unlike a lot of other games of its "genre" it lets you choose your pacing. You can get to 2050 in Legendary producing one game per year. It will be much harder, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but it's doable. But unlike games that do stupid things like "fixed development time" or "the more people you use the less dev time but the worse your game will be," in this game, throwing people at problems stops them from being problems. I love that.

"Immersion" to me is one of those things I would not look for in a game. I want games to remind me they're games. Which is one reason I like playing Bethesda games, for all their attempts at immersion, there's always things that take you out of it if you let them ("I'm totally worried about that mutant potato my wife was carrying to the cryopod! I'll go rescue it in a year or five, I swear!")

[nosedigger]

Originally posted by Kyouko Tsukino:

In MGT2 polishing can take your score from 60% to 90%+ in one month, as long as you have enough people working on the game.

Sorry, I can take your word for it, but my experience said different. As I stated, in all of my game-play in MGT2, not once I managed to move 1% in polishing, of the game.

Also, I do not understand how can you move from 60-90% in one month ? If you have enough people you would do 90% straight away, or at least 80+%

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Mostly thanks to marathon or slow speed, short development time, and increased work speed, it can be harder to pull in normal speed, or with less than fifty people developing the game. And yes, you may get to 90%, but if you lack experience (new genres, new topics, new platforms) or are using random sliders, it's harder to get a good enough rating during development. A lot of my random slider runs involve me getting a game done within one week, it having a 50%-70% rating, then by the end of the month it will be at least 70%-90% unless I'm far off way too many sliders and have zero experience in things (in which case polishing still takes it to 60%-80%, almost an okay game.)

I hate things taking forever to get done, unless I can treat the game like an idle game and go play something else while things get done in the background (I do that a lot in Factorio, Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program...)

[nosedigger]

Yesterday I tried a new run, where I would aggresively hire and expand teams, but focused solely on game development. At the beginning I was having always a release for each of the genres on the market, and everything was going good until I reached AAA games in late 80s.

The difference this time around was that I was not looking at the genre saturation, but would just create a sequel as soon as the previous one dropped from the market. However, my first AAA game didnt make profit, but -1.5 mill instead (production was 24 mill, it raked 22.5 mill via 1+ million of copies sold). Then I started noticing pattern that my games are sold, the money in the bank is going up, but the turnover was waaay lower then my previous games.
I've started churning out 98% games, but the profits were not as expected, which brought me back to the main thing that was changed - not counting in genre saturation.

As expected, new genres, with low to no competition sold really well, but popular titles, high score, and even with Licences were selling sub-par standard amounts. Usually I would create a sequel from the bottom 3 releases, but looking at which genre has the least amount of saturation (prompting me to develop sequels for Adventure or Skill after 8-9 years), but it seems that this way, I am guaranteed more sales and bigger turnover/profits

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Going too big too soon can have an adverse effect in profit, since the active users market (and your fanbase) does not grow quickly enough to justify the extra money sunk into those bigger sizes, for a long time. I rarely use AAA games, and when I do use them, they're a 2020 thing. In "late eighties" I am doing B+ games and they give me profit. I may or may not fool around and release an A-size game for my strongest IP, at times, but that's more of a money sink than anything.

[nosedigger]

Originally posted by Kyouko Tsukino:

Going too big too soon can have an adverse effect in profit, since the active users market (and your fanbase) does not grow quickly enough to justify the extra money sunk into those bigger sizes, for a long time. I rarely use AAA games, and when I do use them, they're a 2020 thing. In "late eighties" I am doing B+ games and they give me profit. I may or may not fool around and release an A-size game for my strongest IP, at times, but that's more of a money sink than anything.

How do you release B+ games with 98% score, after early 80s ???

[Kyouko Tsukino]

By using the newest gameplay features and by having enough people in development to pump the games full of stat points.

Using earlier, obsolete features like "pause function" or "local high scores" is just wasting feature slots for no good reason other than "but realism!!!!" whereas if you use the fewer slots in a smart way, you can do "impossible" things like never needing to use AAA games at all. To me, the late development addition of the "AAAA" game size was a cute cosmetic afterthought, a thing that, if used at the right point in time (after 2010, but much easier to use after 2020,) turning the obscene quantity of profit per week the player should/could be earning into an even obscener quantity of profit. Turn the endgame part of the game into Adventure Capitalist, without the predatory micro-transactions.

You can use B games until the early-to-mid-nineties and have them score at least 90%. You can do the same with B+ until 2005 or 2010, and with A games until 2015 or 2020. If your workforce can't get you there, you need more people. I try to have a hundred employees before I hit 1982, unless I'm not using the Warehouse (sometimes I feel like hating myself,) in which case I may reach that number by 1985 or 1988. And from there, the only limit is... My computer's CPU.

But even a potato PC like mine can handle 600 employees without burning to a crisp, so anyone with a more modern PC could be putting a thousand people to work, get those neat AA games done within the week and polish them to perfection afterwards, or make B games in 2010 so fast you could probably Zerg Rush your profit and stay in the positives anyways, if you can handle/mod away the micromanagement hell that playstyle would require.

In any case, there's no real "punishment" for using smaller game sizes, other than the relatively smaller profit. But when a bigger game size is giving you losses or not really giving you any good profit, switching back to smaller games and produce more of them to compensate the lower profit margins may be a good business decision. In my case, I don't mind making one game per month.

[nosedigger]

You, sir, have mastered this game, and I tip my hat to you.

This is all very interesting, you have basically broke the game and force it to adapt to your game-play. I was doing it actually the other way around, where I never fully fill out the features, but as soon as I have more than half features for the next game size, I would transfer. However, I do not over-hire and aggressively expand, as stated before, I try to do as much work possible, with the least amount of the people. So I would start on the B+ as soon as I have 10 features, and move to A with 16 available.

My perception is that bigger size game extend the sales lifespan, am I wrong here ? B and B+ size are up to a year, maybe two years, but AAAA should be there for more than 3 years, or not ? Your "zerg rush" strategy of overproducing basically levels any shortcoming of the game size and profit, and sheer amount of workforce gives you enough points to compensate for bigger game size.

Ok, so the bottom line is, the game size is not that really important if you fill out the game with the newest, most expensive features, and have enough of people to pump and polish it over 90%. The lifespan of the game is not tied directly to the game size ?

EDIT: How do you price your releases, in this tactics ? I either do 19$ with colored manual, sticker and poster, or I set it to auto-price. Didn't have time to fully test which brings in what more. 19$ should be optimal price for the number of units, but I do not know if auto-price is "optimal" for profit. I'm using it in a combo, since the auto-price sells way less copies, and with 10+ printing releases at the same time, it's better to have less units to print.