Horribly buggy, almost unplayable – Game Studio Tycoon 2 Review

This game is fun but numerous bugs make it unplayable after getting far enough along in the game. * Games released for your own consoles sell ridiculously abysmally. I released a console which sold about half as well as the "MES" and released a game-of-the-year, perfect 10.0 game that sold so poorly I lost over a million dollars on it. Similar games released on the "MES" or fake Sega consistently made 1-2 million in profit. * Games developed for your own consoles are listed as being developed for the PC or Atari 2600 in the Game Info screen. Is that why they sell so poorly, because a glitch in the game makes it think they are for a system no longer on the market? * Games for your own consoles cost way too much to make compared to other consoles: 4-5x as much. Why? * Using more than one team is next to impossible. To release a game for the second team while the first is developing one, for example, you have to wait for the status bar to manually cycle through options until it shows the second team's game. This can only happen when the game is unpaused, so this means your second team will be sitting idle for 1 month+ waiting for the option to release their game. * You can spend research points while the game is paused, but the research point meter doesn't update until the game is unpaused, which gets frustrating. * Doing contract work always defaults to the second team, even if it is empty, meaning I'm constantly having to move people over to the second team to work on a contract I mean to assign to the first * Hype disappears stupidly fast, which means if your second team is working on a game it will be all gone by the time the status bar finally cycles to the team so you can release the game. * Maintenance costs for MMO keep going up exponentially, which is not realistic. Did Blizzard have to double what it paid to host its WoW servers each year? It makes MMO games next-to-impossible to make money on. * longer development cycles seem to have no meaningful effect on game scores. * In-house games don't affect custom console sales very much. It seems like a game-of-the-year might increase sales of your console by a few thousand at best. Combined with the guaranteed horrible sales mentioned above, there is literally no reason to develop games for your own console, and no reason to develop your own console unless you like throwing away $20 million dollars you spent hours working for.
Review by rockincameron on Game Studio Tycoon 2.