Thx for the News

This is great! Had a blast with the first game.

Small question: All those additional things that take time away from just selling things: Are they optional? Is there an options menu where you can toggle on or off all those things like mood / health / aging / life events, so that those who wish to immerse themselves in that can do so at copium while we who just wish to have a light and fun game about designing a store and selling stuff can toggle it all off?
Because if not, King of Retail 2 will run the risk of feeling like a job which for me personally would be a no-buy.
EDIT:
To elaborate:
Take the idea of the sandbox mode where you have 2 options to either play the game with everything on or everything off and toss it. :-)
Please make a deep and powerful options menu instead, where we can toggle on or off all the elements and adapt the game experience exactly to our desires. Even further thinking, make it dynamic where we for example can start with full simulation but after an hour can go lighter if we wish to do that.
Or even further, make sliders, such as:
0% / 25% / 50% / 75% / 100% / 125% / 150% reputation needed for cooler product lines
Then maybe make 3 or 4 difficulty presets for those who don't want to tinker in depth plus a custom difficulty.
That way KoR2 will be a game that will be played and replayed near-infinitely instead of being played once for an hour and then closed for something more fun.

I like all of this but this all seems a bit confusing to me.

Is the Merch from Paluten and GLP in The sequel ?

WTF?
The current game is in pieces, you can barely fix the bugs and are you going to create 2?

Originally posted by CoW:

WTF?
The current game is in pieces, you can barely fix the bugs and are you going to create 2?

it's entirely the reason of this whole post. After time software can grow and decisions made 2 years ago hinder progress for the next 2 years. So they decided it was best to start fresh than continue piling on code to the existing code base of the first game.

Although I enjoyed a lot about the first game, it always felt quite janky and unfinished to me, so it's a bit of a concern that you're going for a sequel now, which may just be left in the same state as the first game.

I'll leave my opinion here in case it matters to you. I've read your apology in the other news article as well and I understand your reasoning to go on to make King of Retail 2 instead of improving the older version.

However, I think your perfectionism, which probably lead to your burnout earlier, is shooting your in the leg. There will always be a new game engine version with fancier graphics and new features. Will you keep leaving your game unfinished and creating a new iteration from scratch over and over?

Regarding the state of King of Retail 1, some people seem happy with it, some want new features added. Personally I don't think the foundational logic of the game works as advertised. The more I played and tried to cater to the preferences of the different demographics in the area, the less it seemed that it mattered. NPCs will buy wares which don't fit their demographic and vice versa to the point where the best strategy is just to stock your store with everything and forget the demographics mechanic even (supposedly) exists. Personally this makes the game in its current state not worth playing to me. And since you're moving on to King of Retail 2, it will never get looked at or get fixed.

congrats dude regardless of you being gone. This Game found a lot of us at different times and im sure a lot of us are some tycoon/economy sluts when it comes to these management games. Happy that your first was a success keep it up brother!

Da ich auch aktuell viel in King of Retail drin bin, werde ich auch Teil 2 kaufen-ungesehen

never even came close to finish the first one. Never buying this or encouraging anyone to seek it out.

Funny how many devs these days give up their games and disappear for a long time and have no need to communicate.
Then suddenly they believe that they have to apologize and there are always deep personal reasons.
But that's not all. A new game is also currently in development.
Coincidence or intention? I have my own views on that.

For what it's worth:

I quite enjoyed King of Retail. It's a game concept I've been hoping would be explored for years if not decades. I've had many hours of enjoyment playing it, though I suspect I could have had 2 or 3 or more times as many had its development been followed through on.

Further, as someone who suffers from anxiety and depression (and a fair dose of perfectionism), I can sympathize with your personal struggles during development, and as someone who has been in the IT field for over a decade, I fully understand the dangers of sunk cost fallacy and recognize that starting from scratch is often the most efficient use of your time. And there's a reason I'm in IT support and not software development - I know programming is often an exercise in delayed gratification, with significant time and effort yielding precious few immediately appreciable results, something I personally can't cope with.

With all that said, the state KoR1 was left in is unacceptable. I think many would agree, perhaps even you, that it was rushed to launch, and the post-launch support it received was woefully abysmal. Setting feature/content updates aside, even performance, balance, and bugfixing updates were abandoned after precisely 1 hotfix and 1 patch. I understand the burnout, but no amount of justification changes reality.

I would hope (and suggest you seriously consider) owners of KoR1 are offered a not insignificant discount on KoR2 as a show of good faith. I, for one, have no intention of purchasing KoR2 at full retail price. While I'd love to be excited about the upcoming title, I would be foolish to place any trust in it being brought to its full potential after the abandonment of KoR1.

In the immortal words of George W Bush, "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again."

pls no life simulator. big ambitions is such a crappy game