Why are you guys going bankrupt?

[Buttcatcher]

Even in my first playthrough, it was easy enough to figure out how to properly make money, and not overspend. I didn't even encounter any penalties if I was paying my idols only a minimum wage.

A mistake that can be made though is maybe to producing to much CDs while having only a few fans.

[Doctrine Dark]

Some people miss managed but it should be figured out for most people by now thanks for the input. Glad your not having a issue.

[Prinny]

i have over 10m fans. an Ad campain failure still makes me profit from the singles sales. but they can't all buy the singles anyway because it cost an astronomical amount to make them. since I focus on Ad campain that means production cost is a bit higher. But to make enough for "every fans" it would cost me far above the 1b yen threshold because somehow they all want 3-4 singles EACH.
For now I keep making like 1-3m singles at a time, it cost me everything but even with a critical failure i'd sell to minimum 20% of my fans (my critical failure only reduce the total sale by 73% right now. so I sell to about 2,7+m minimum) so in the end i'm always sold out : Because sales seems to be dependent on total fans rather than total produced.
Not sure if the latest patches changed that.

But to be honest, I got multiple Game over by bankruptcy before I understood that. I wasted a lot of time and energy (and money). I also took a while before changing the policies to "manual wage" for my idols and over grinded my staff too fast. it's a simple mistake from the gamer mentality that : higher skill means better and faster means faster result. It's a powerful trap here.
You don't need to grind coaching skill at all. working on single and deals will increase the idols stats anyway. it's better to get "development" staff instead and ignore coaching altogether for a LONG time. only get a stylist for the policy and buffs from styles (not the stats, the actual style).
Only make singles once every few months and never make more than half your fanbase (depending on your ad campain of choice.) also, try not to overuse the same "center" idol even if it seems like it would be bad to put another one in the center. Stats might be great for a gold idol, but if you want better concert, change the center from time to time, otherwise you'll lose that gold Idol for years on end because of badluck, injury, overwork or something like that. it takes 30 stamina PER SONG/SINGLE when making a concert, and that stamina is taken from the CENTER only. Making concert with only 1-2 song is bad for money and hype.
Don't let the shows go on for too long, don't re-launch them too often. they're never going to net you any profits at first. make sure you have enough money for at least 10 shows (price is the same for every episode, if TV, it's a million each time) and make sure not to overspend the idol's stamina. don't underestimate how fast it depletes especially for a tv show...
and finally... hardcore fans are your best ally no matter what. Promotion is your strongest tool, right next to break room and spa day.

It's only when I understood all that that I started making money instead of losing everything in 2 years max. Looking at the big picture is fine and all, but this game won't let you "win" if you do. patience is important.

the thing is, for a game in this genre, 75% of the mechanics and workings are the opposite of what we're used to. i'm a big fan of grinding game, idle games, management games. and I had to unlearn a lot of stuff before it started to work properly.
Now I have a fanbase of over 10 million. no matter what I do I can't lose money on singles. But I still can't make a practical TV show or make a secondary idol group. Either I lack the stamina or ressource. The cafe is also a big NO for me, it depletes stamina way too fast and the meals are unwanted way too fast. But hey, that's something I'll eventually learn to deal with, just like the rest. and then i'll move on to the theater.

sorry for the long, oversaturated and kinda useless post. It's great that you had few problems making it work. But I also understand how people are having issues with the mechanics. They want idols and they want it now. They'll learn, like I did. just give them time and let them vent their frustration when they need to.

more importantly, have fun.

[mareo2]

For the record I never went bankrupt, but I have some theories.

I think that it is mainly because most players are with the frame of mind that the games start ease and get more difficult over time. But this game is more realistic in that when you start a new business with limited money and unknown idols is when things are really more difficult. This game feels like learning how to ride a bicycle. You fall a lot until you learn the trick, but difficult part is just the start, once you get going the inertia help you to avoid falling.

Also I think most beginners take some time to understand that number of fans means number of customers. The common mistake is to think that idols are the center of the business, make great idols and money just flow. That is wrong, the center is the fan base. No customers, no money. Idols is just a product, as long as the player have enough customers even average products will sell. The start is about making everything for build a customer base while staying out of the red by not overspending. Once the player have a reliable monthly income from singles and concerts it enter the middle game. Then is when the player have leeway for think about higher quality, salaries and office expansion.

Another reason is that there is no good tutorial or guide about how to make profitable singles and concerts. The game rely too much on tooltips. I fumbled around until figuring out how not to waste my money.

[Hobbes]

Yeah. It seems difficult to go properly bankrupt.
Like don't get me wrong, I had money troubles at the start and struggled to stay in the positives. But then you just juggle that with loans and paying those off etc and eventually it works itself out.

[Kiyohime]

Once I learned and invested on Offices and doing business proposals. Never experience the bankrupt. I almost had one but the loan from Fujimoto saved me to do a concert, election, and a smash single to profit well enough and then once my office ladies are almost max in "business deals" those photoshoots can earn me 3 - 5 million per week.

Invest also on Breakrooms and the Doctor office once you're able too.
Early game try to get one Break room and two Offices and make sure they have auto proposals on photoshoots.

[Sai Kyouji]

Very easy to go bankrupt in the early days if you dont take a loan from Fujimoto and concentrate on things that dont matter like Radio/TV shows or Business contracts.

or if you dont research Digital online release.

[Fairwater]

Some people "get" a game instinctively, others don't.

[Deitti]

Even during the first playthrough when i was making mistakes and learning stuff, i was nowhere near getting bankrupt. Was just a matter of calculating how much you are earning and making sure your expenses do not go over that. Probably the biggest thing people need to learn is that what are good sources of money and what are traps.

[Flocci]

A lot of the relevant mechanics are unnecessarily obscure to the point where literally just knowing the basic mechanics is enough to turn even the hard difficulty into a relaxed casual experience. Examples include:

The game tells you that releasing CDs too often will have a weaker effect, so people will tend to spread their release out a bit. This has the bizarre effect that every single one of your releases will carry the maximum penalty for whatever frequency of releases you choose.

Policies are important modifiers for your success. The game for some reason chooses to introduce you to policies in a random "tutorial" conversation that just lists out all the policies and asks you to pick stuff based on their name, without bothering to explain ANY of its effects. It honestly seems like that dialogue is specifically designed to screw over new players because most people will just end up with completely random nonsensical policy setups.

Some people will also start the game with the misguided belief that singing and dancing are important skills for an idol business and waste time, ressources and stamina on improving them instead of spending that effort on other activities.

In general, people will have no idea what the stats do. I think the only point in the game where it's mentioned is if you randomly decide to mouseover the stats during the formation window when planning a new single. So most people will end up with stats that are mostly useless for the demographic they're trying to aim for.

And lastly, there's the mechanic where you have to choose how many CDs to print long before you release the single, and if the number is not in the right ballpark, then you're screwing your profits. And since your sales are dependant on all of the previously mentioned obscure mechanics, it's essentially just trial and error gameplay.

And this has the effect that most people will depend on keeping themselves afloat mostly through the daily performance activity, which is roughly as much income as your weekly expenses, and may even become less once your idols start demanding an actual living wage.

[👻 HauntingTheNet 👻]

A lot of important reasons were already listed so I won't repeat them, but some were either only mentioned briefly or were not covered at all so I will include them.

Avoiding traps. This is crucial. The biggest trap for anyone is liabilities. Those liabilities are the easiest things in the world to cause even the most controlling manager suddenly to get RNGed into bankruptcy.

I decided to do one play with the idols earning income doing nothing but advertisements instead of my normal photos. Even with being absolutely super critical with my policy choices to avoid scandals, and doing everything I could to prevent injuries, my great play through suddenly turned into perpetual hell in an instant and has probably reached the point where I am going to face bankruptcy shortly in that version.

One of the girls who had 100 mental stamina and 59 physical stamina suddenly got injured without reason or warning despite her weekly stamina drain only being 27 and my doing things to increase stamina back as well.

The two contracts she was doing had a combined liability of 6.3 million between them. And seemingly just getting injured is enough for the liability to kick in. So suddenly instead of having enough to release the next single that was going to make me a lot of money, I was instead 5.8 million down and unable to release the single... but I had 30 days so I wasn't too concerned as I knew I could probably make that up in that time if I just pressed the other girls slightly harder. I had a doctor's office, adequate break rooms, and was doing regular spa treatments so I was sure I could handle this disaster and bounce back.

Except at just 2 million left just a few days into that 30 day window I had a second girl get injured and added on top even more liability while also making the number of girls I could depend on to get out of the hole even smaller. The second girl I am willing to take the blame for as her physical stamina had dropped to just 39 and her drain rate with her 3 contracts I had added together to try saving from bankruptcy was a total drain of 42. After that simple bad RNG hit me on causing an injury so quickly rather than letting it drain mental stamina for a while first before happening.

The worst thing is that I had actually the day before looked into that specific idol and questioned to myself whether I should cancel a contract and take an extra 6 million liability or risk continuing and I had decided to just proceed and hold my breath. That decision cost me a total of about 16 million in extra liability on top of the 2 million I had yet to repay for a total of 18.6 million in negatives and with even less time to recover from it.

I have currently paused that play through and trying to decide whether it is worth a loan to try to save it or just give up the attempt as a loss without spending any more effort on something that I already knew was a trap, but one that I thought might have been somewhat overcome just by the proper management. The only way I could have withstood those RNG hits better is if I had done the smart thing and only accepted liabilities that were less than the cash I currently had on hand, but it was too new in the play through for me to gather my usual emergency surplus funding and the entire point was to see if the liabilities were even worth taking on a test run designed specifically to give it the best chance possible.

Another trap is doing something that you know you should not do just to unlock a new level up in performances or promotions. Releasing a new tv series for no reason other than to unlock a new tier is the worst reason to do that. You will definitely not make enough to be profitable, and chances are you will be financially hurt by doing this by that 1 million a week root cost. But even more important than the financials is exactly how fatiguing this show will be on your idols and that it will not let you cancel the series run until the full season has ended even if you know your idols can not handle the drain any longer.

Another source of bankruptcy was added to brand new players in patch 1.0.1 due to the terrible way they implemented the mental changes. 5000 yen default girls will now lose a steady and extremely noticeable mental drain that quickly becomes critical no matter what a new player (or at least one without a doctor and their office set) tries to do. This results in them having mental breakdowns and causing all kinds of problems.

Post 1.0.1 patch, as a result of the mental changes (without untying code that was based off the old 5000 system rather than the new 20000 system) it has become all but impossible to start a new game without a doctor on staff and avoid free fall. You pretty much have to have a doctor now or you fail. Talking to the girls does nothing for their mental stamina. Doing spa treatments does nothing for it either. Having break rooms only barely gives any noticeable gain backs to any of your girls and by default are extremely underused by the idols anyway. But even the girls who do use the break room will lose far more than they gain if you leave them at 5000 which is the default salary the game sets them up at. Most new players don't even have any context to tell them what is going wrong. All they know is that some or all of their idols are just constantly losing mental and with no hints as to how to stop it.

This right there is the reason why post 1.0.1 we are seeing a lot of discussion and bug thread posts about mental stamina issues. Nowhere in the game is there any explanation for why suddenly the 5000 default starter salary is by itself causing problems. Only those who read the patch notes will even be aware that this issue now exists. Old players will already have doctors on staff so likely will never even notice this drain. But new players? They get hit hard by this inexplicable and stupid patch design.

If you decide to fix that headache by just giving all those new girls 20k salaries from the start you better hope that you don't have any other older idols in your staff. They will get angry and demand higher pay just because you are paying the new girls proportionately too much, even if they were 100% happy with their salaries prior to the audition, and the moment that new hire loses her acceptance of just being paid 5000 and being 200% happy is the very moment she will also lose her acceptance of just being paid 20000 as well.

The very instant this happens suddenly all of the older idols will magically become super happy because the new girl is being underpaid compared to them. As you slowly raise (or all at once) the newer girl's salary until she is happy it has the effect of making all the other girls unhappy because of course it is all tied together and all based on the 5000 base which is no longer the true base after 1.0.1 but without any code tweaks to fix things like this.

All of this just because the people in charge of this game decided to make an arbitrary minimum wage change without first checking to see if code was reliant upon a smaller number default.

[nullpo]

Funny story, I went bankrupt after the story just finished. Apparently all those new floors, I use for theaters cost me way too much and I only realize it once it's already -300k Y and 9 days to bankruptcy.

[aliciarune675]

Originally posted by  HauntingTheNet :

A lot of important reasons were already listed so I won't repeat them, but some were either only mentioned briefly or were not covered at all so I will include them.

Avoiding traps. This is crucial. The biggest trap for anyone is liabilities. Those liabilities are the easiest things in the world to cause even the most controlling manager suddenly to get RNGed into bankruptcy.

I decided to do one play with the idols earning income doing nothing but advertisements instead of my normal photos. Even with being absolutely super critical with my policy choices to avoid scandals, and doing everything I could to prevent injuries, my great play through suddenly turned into perpetual hell in an instant and has probably reached the point where I am going to face bankruptcy shortly in that version.

One of the girls who had 100 mental stamina and 59 physical stamina suddenly got injured without reason or warning despite her weekly stamina drain only being 27 and my doing things to increase stamina back as well.

The two contracts she was doing had a combined liability of 6.3 million between them. And seemingly just getting injured is enough for the liability to kick in. So suddenly instead of having enough to release the next single that was going to make me a lot of money, I was instead 5.8 million down and unable to release the single... but I had 30 days so I wasn't too concerned as I knew I could probably make that up in that time if I just pressed the other girls slightly harder. I had a doctor's office, adequate break rooms, and was doing regular spa treatments so I was sure I could handle this disaster and bounce back.

Except at just 2 million left just a few days into that 30 day window I had a second girl get injured and added on top even more liability while also making the number of girls I could depend on to get out of the hole even smaller. The second girl I am willing to take the blame for as her physical stamina had dropped to just 39 and her drain rate with her 3 contracts I had added together to try saving from bankruptcy was a total drain of 42. After that simple bad RNG hit me on causing an injury so quickly rather than letting it drain mental stamina for a while first before happening.

The worst thing is that I had actually the day before looked into that specific idol and questioned to myself whether I should cancel a contract and take an extra 6 million liability or risk continuing and I had decided to just proceed and hold my breath. That decision cost me a total of about 16 million in extra liability on top of the 2 million I had yet to repay for a total of 18.6 million in negatives and with even less time to recover from it.

I have currently paused that play through and trying to decide whether it is worth a loan to try to save it or just give up the attempt as a loss without spending any more effort on something that I already knew was a trap, but one that I thought might have been somewhat overcome just by the proper management. The only way I could have withstood those RNG hits better is if I had done the smart thing and only accepted liabilities that were less than the cash I currently had on hand, but it was too new in the play through for me to gather my usual emergency surplus funding and the entire point was to see if the liabilities were even worth taking on a test run designed specifically to give it the best chance possible.

Another trap is doing something that you know you should not do just to unlock a new level up in performances or promotions. Releasing a new tv series for no reason other than to unlock a new tier is the worst reason to do that. You will definitely not make enough to be profitable, and chances are you will be financially hurt by doing this by that 1 million a week root cost. But even more important than the financials is exactly how fatiguing this show will be on your idols and that it will not let you cancel the series run until the full season has ended even if you know your idols can not handle the drain any longer.

Another source of bankruptcy was added to brand new players in patch 1.0.1 due to the terrible way they implemented the mental changes. 5000 yen default girls will now lose a steady and extremely noticeable mental drain that quickly becomes critical no matter what a new player (or at least one without a doctor and their office set) tries to do. This results in them having mental breakdowns and causing all kinds of problems.

Post 1.0.1 patch, as a result of the mental changes (without untying code that was based off the old 5000 system rather than the new 20000 system) it has become all but impossible to start a new game without a doctor on staff and avoid free fall. You pretty much have to have a doctor now or you fail. Talking to the girls does nothing for their mental stamina. Doing spa treatments does nothing for it either. Having break rooms only barely gives any noticeable gain backs to any of your girls and by default are extremely underused by the idols anyway. But even the girls who do use the break room will lose far more than they gain if you leave them at 5000 which is the default salary the game sets them up at. Most new players don't even have any context to tell them what is going wrong. All they know is that some or all of their idols are just constantly losing mental and with no hints as to how to stop it.

This right there is the reason why post 1.0.1 we are seeing a lot of discussion and bug thread posts about mental stamina issues. Nowhere in the game is there any explanation for why suddenly the 5000 default starter salary is by itself causing problems. Only those who read the patch notes will even be aware that this issue now exists. Old players will already have doctors on staff so likely will never even notice this drain. But new players? They get hit hard by this inexplicable and stupid patch design.

If you decide to fix that headache by just giving all those new girls 20k salaries from the start you better hope that you don't have any other older idols in your staff. They will get angry and demand higher pay just because you are paying the new girls proportionately too much, even if they were 100% happy with their salaries prior to the audition, and the moment that new hire loses her acceptance of just being paid 5000 and being 200% happy is the very moment she will also lose her acceptance of just being paid 20000 as well.

The very instant this happens suddenly all of the older idols will magically become super happy because the new girl is being underpaid compared to them. As you slowly raise (or all at once) the newer girl's salary until she is happy it has the effect of making all the other girls unhappy because of course it is all tied together and all based on the 5000 base which is no longer the true base after 1.0.1 but without any code tweaks to fix things like this.

All of this just because the people in charge of this game decided to make an arbitrary minimum wage change without first checking to see if code was reliant upon a smaller number default.

You can buy a break room. I don't think the new update is really that difficult to work around. I agree it's not the best implemented though and doesn't make sense, but it's still hard to go bankrupt (least when I play). What I do after buying my office, I buy a break room. I then hire three idols and do all the work by myself for about a year. It takes time, but I have never gone bankrupt. But then again, my way may be a bit of a slow start. I don't tend to hire anyone till after the awards. I also try and get as many promotions as possible both with fans and money. Honestly, I've never hired a doctor. I am actually quite bad with these games, so a part of me is wondering if the game is too easy. I admit, at first it was hard but that's not because of gameplay but rather how poorly the tutorial is at explaining things. Now though, I can do all difficulties with decent ease (one time I admit I didn't almost get bankrupt but took out a loan.) I also got the weaker idols and have not even come close to losing. Still, I know this is different for people, so hopefully my advice with breaksrooms help someone.

[Nanaba]

I followed the tutorials.

[LordSith]

When starting a new game, i'm bored because of what i see in the game which could have gone better so i often make mistakes i didn't make in my first playthrough...

in the first playthrough, i went with digital releases for many years, then had a big fanbase which made me successful with high priced concerts (to the point that now 100k ticket price still means 100% attendance...).

I read many good advices here when answering, so i would suggest follow them.