izigame.me

I played 27 hours in the first 3 days, 2 of which were working day evenings. That should say enough about how compelling this game is.
This game simulates a LOT more than most games, and keeps adding interesting layers and mechanics to play with as you advance through in-game time. As a consultant/programmer who enjoys simulations and economy games, it ticks a LOT of boxes for me.
There are ways to do things manually, and to automate them once you scale up or just don't want to bother with them anymore. It's like real life in this way.
There are so many different ways to earn money in-game that I think it allows for multiple very different playthrough focuses:
- Typical garage startup with one product snowballing into a conglomerate that owns the market for various related tools
- How far can you get with just your founder(s) living the solo indie dream?
- How long can you sustain one hyper-polished product? How "Wube" can you be?
- How much cheap garbage can you churn out for close to zero cost? Think cheap outsourcing.
- Play as an agency: only do contracting work, and never develop your own products
- How far can you go via buying shares instead of developing software? Can you live off dividends until one of your investments collapses and you take over their business? Or start with a big bag of money and buy an existing company to bootstrap your software?
- Focus on publishing, marketing and support for others
- Focus on hardware (it's _very_ capital intensive, but viable with loans and knowledge from previous games)
- Focus on software that earns its money via licenses vs units sold directly: play the long game with eternal support and ports
- Run a digital distribution platform, and try to grow it via exclusive deals
- Challenge: is it viable to run a dedicated R&D lab from the start?
- Challenge: can you fulfill all available deals? (I'm cornering the market on hosting/support/marketing in my current playthrough, but dev/design would require a LOT more staff to handle)
Gameplay has a bunch of ways in which you can control trade-offs. For example, these are choices you _can_ make (but don't have to) when designing new software:
- How many features do you put into new software? Complexity and domains determine skill of designers/programmers needed to design/develop/support it later on, and how expensive your people will be.
- Do you create or (re)use a framework?
- Is this a sequel to earlier software, or something new?
- Do you have access to research, patents or other advantages? Do you use the latest tech levels, or settle for older things that are easier to build but also less appealing in the market?
- Do you target one OS, multiple, or all of them? Do you want OS-exclusive deals? More OSes take more time, but increase market reach at launch. Porting them in later expands reach, but you'll be low on hype.
- How do you position this in the feature pyramid, and how much demand/excess saturation do you want? This impacts marketing reach/effort down the line.
- Who is your lead designer, how creative are they and how experienced are they in this software type? (Do you warm them up first with some contracts or tester projects?)
- Do you use a publisher for funding/marketing/distribution or do you choose to do it all yourself?
- How many design iterations do you take the software through? More improves quality and lowers bugs, but each takes increasingly more time than the previous one.
- How often do you review + iterate on the alpha version of your software?
- How long do you fix bugs in beta?
- Pre-launch marketing: how many press releases, when, and with how much detail? Do you send demos to the press, and do hyping?
- Post-launch marketing: how much money do you spend to blast it everywhere? (I wonder if future updates could do segmentation and different media types to make it more than "spend money")
- Distribution: physical vs digital (when do you stop physical?), how many copies do you print yourself or order from a supplier?
- Do you make the software exclusive to a particular distribution platform, such as your own?
- Support: do you have enough people turning complaints into verified bugs?
- How often do you patch bugs?
- How often do you apply technology updates to existing titles to keep them relevant vs new competitors?
- Do you want to developer add-on content packs, or just focus on main titles?
- At what point do you stop supporting/selling/marketing/updating/porting of existing titles?
- How many teams work on each of these aspects, and are these primary or secondary tasks? How do you balance tasks relative to each other?
Edit: initially I hadn't touched much of the following game aspects, but after nearly 150h I've tried them all:
- Hardware design, production lines. It's _very_ capital intensive to get started, but the profits are silly good once you get going.
- Physical printing of software vs just ordering copies. Ordering is MUCH cheaper than a publisher, but printing is again MUCH cheaper than ordering copies ($2/copy down to around $0.30/copy). Printing contracts are also nicely synergistic with building hardware because it'll keep your boxes flowing and getting shipped, so you get paid faster. It's not fun having millions tied up in a pallet of hardware that's waiting for transport.
- Project management and HR automation. It automates some of the tedium away, but for software development it also automates some of the fun away for me. I was happy to learn you can let managers pick up maintenance for old projects!
- Building an office. It's very fun and Sims-like to build your own office. Once you're earning decent money this is a great way to get an office layout that you enjoy.
Nothing is perfect, so these are things that could do with improvement / expansion:
- Picking what to educate an employee on next often depends on which skills are least trained in their team, but you need to manually open the teams window to get the comparison. Automated HR may help a bit, but the control is not very precise.
- If your publisher bails on you, you can't find a new one to do it for you
- You can pick up deals to perform any aspect of the software life cycle for others, but you can't create deals or contracts to ask others to do the same
- A distribution platform behaves a lot like software, but lacks some of the feature comparison and growth metrics that you can get for regular software
- Marketing is pretty simple right now: just throw money at the problem. I wonder if this could be expanded with market research, to increase conversion by optimizing targeting, or to have different channels to reach different market segments.
- Product feature matrix: a few features seem to have actual impact, the rest is just there to move the numbers in a customer demand bar graph. There's no (in-game) incentive to ship software with all the features because most don't do much. This means when making a game there's no benefit in picking one 2D editor over another except to satisfy the tech level requirement and then to pick the cheapest option available. More depth and utility derived from features may be fun. Have some features boost quality or reduce time needed to work on certain features.
I bought the game after seeing Quill18 play it. I played 25h after his first 3 episodes. There's aspects of the game he completely overlooks or neglects, which I micro-manage myself, and things still work fine for him. Typical big picture vs detail focus things. It's a testament to the range of viable options and play styles you have while playing and can still succeed with. I love his idea of running 3 teams in the same office in a day/evening/night shift schedule, it keeps the need for space much lower than if you only use a daytime shift. Starting work on marketing at midnight, when the budget resets, also means you have the rest of the day to focus on it, or have other teams work on it as a secondary task.