Does buying out your competitors hurt you?

[johnbear16]

Im in the 90's in the game and making tons of money. Ive bought nintendo and can buy any company i want. Sony is about to release their console. I could buy them too and then not compete sales wise with playstation or does having them in the market help game sales so much that you need them? i saw a small boost in sales when i bough nintendo but probably not as much as having them and their millions of sales still in the market.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Here's the thing about NPC consoles: They have preset maximum active users (which varies slightly normally, or more if using "platform popularity" options,) which they reach at a very accelerated speed. The player's consoles, meanwhile, has to go through a slow, painful raise from zero to 1% (of the market share) and this painful raise is not affected by what NPC consoles are available. You're not competing against them, you don't steal active users off other consoles, and other consoles don't steal them from you - active users are a currency that exists for each console separately, the active users of your consoles will magically poof into existence out of nowhere and your consoles will only be competing against other consoles made by you, of the same type. And to top all that off, your potential game sales will heavily suffer from not having the Big Name consoles around, on top of what they suffer from exclusivity.

To say it in less words: You are never "competing in sales" with the NPC consoles. Your console's sales are determined by the console's quality, durability, selling price, number of fans, studio strength, and number and quality of games released for it.

You will sell the same relative number of copies of a game made exclusively for your console even if no other consoles/platforms exist. I've tested this by modding a "last man standing" challenge/scenario where all other studios would appear and close down on January 1976, leaving no competition at all, then comparing it to a normal scenario (and to my "normal" playthroughs with 400+ NPCs, 700+ platforms and 30 genres.) The differences in sales for a game of the same type and setup*, with a relatively similar quality**, released at the same month*** was negligible.

If you want to make the most profit, do make consoles, make excellent games for the consoles with the most active users of the latest available tech (even if they're not your consoles,) and don't bother having subsidiaries - they're money sinks that will, unless playing in Medium or below, only become sort-of-profitable by a time when you are already making millions per week (so they'll be drops in an ocean.) Your consoles will still give you a lot of profit as long as you sell low ($10 profit per unit is good enough,) keep their hype up (unlike games****, consoles' lifelong profit benefit from keeping their hype above 90,) and don't have more than one console of the same type around.

In short, depending on what you want to do and what difficulty you're playing at, buying out subsidiaries without the "subsidiaries keep their consoles" option checked will hurt you. Hurt you like those anime where some dude gets punched through a mountain which explodes from the impact... And you're the mountain. ;)

* Skill/Puzzle, easiest early combo.

** 90%+

*** March 1976, the quickest I can be bothered to release a console when 'cheating,' by using sandbox options to accelerate the process of releasing a console, and removing the monetary factor. Hiring a hundred researchers and a hundred techs does the trick nicely.

**** Hype is not an addition to sales, but a multiplier, and not even that huge a multiplier either, since you can go through the whole game with the baseline 60 hype strong IPs get. If a game was going to give you 20 millions in profit by the end of its shelf time, shoving ten millions in marketing at it to keep it around for a whole five (or even ten) weeks longer will end up making it so the game gives you ten millions (or eleven if you're lucky) in lifetime profit instead. Thinking you're earning more money, and actually earning more money aren't always the same, or even obvious at first glance.