Stardock Entertainment released the final major update for its political strategy/simulation game, The Political Machine 2024 today. The new version adjusts the top political issues along with voter enthusiasm as of October 2024.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2512090/The_Political_Machine_2024/

“We are seeing a lot of movement on voter enthusiasm,” said Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock Entertainment. “The election is solidifying around a handful of key issues such as inflation, abortion and the border.”

For the enthusiasm update, Stardock has attempted to simulate the effect early voting is having on turn-out and how it might affect the election.

“It’s been challenging to have the game’s underlying model factor in voting that occurs over multiple days,” said Wardell. “But I think we are getting there. We will see how close we are soon enough.”

As for the game’s much-celebrated deep-election simulation features, where AI Donald Trump runs against AI Kamala Harris in pure sim mode, the outcome remains too close to call but with a slight edge for Trump.

“The model continues to call out North Carolina as a state we should be keeping an eye on. We are still investigating why it thinks North Carolina and not Pennsylvania is the linchpin state,” said Wardell.