Mad Games Tycoon 2 offers a lot of options and it can be fun to run your own game company but more so here if you are more focused on numbers and imagining what your business is like because the lack of detail and personality can easily lower that enjoyment and really hurts some features.
You will build up your studio over time by hiring employees that focus on fields such as game designer, programmer, graphic artist, sound artist, office worker, technician, tester, and researcher and building up job focused rooms to fill the kind of tasks that you need done. Outside of just making a game there is a wide variety of things to do be they major options like creating your own console or producing your own arcade cabinets, creating production runs of the game's you develop or produce, and making server rooms to support your MMOs, to minor details like setting prices of fan merchandise for the IPs you own, buying a license from some form of media to make a game around, setting amount of or ending crunch time, deciding how much you want to charge for your games and what you want to include with each regular, deluxe, collectible box. From the years 1976-2030 set events will see the release of new consoles, handhelds, computers, phones, technology, and genres for you to work with.
Your game's sales and review scores are determined by a large number of things such as platform market, engine specialty, your skill with genres/topics/platforms/technology, employee numbers working on the game and skills in each area, features your engine allows to be in a game, marketing, genre and possible sub genre combination, topics chosen for the game to be about based on the genre, using support offices that focus on things like graphics design, recording music and sounds, motion capture, bug testing, and managing a variety of sliders that when set to certain levels for a particular genre can lead to better or worse games being made. It sounds like a lot but once you figure out or look up where to set the sliders (game testers can create game reports that tell you if sliders were optimal and you can automatically set them to optimal settings you have identified whenever you make a game of the same genre), you are mostly just clicking on the same kind of things over and over again. Getting extremely high reviews does become more difficult on hard and legendary difficulties as you might need to adjust some developer area focus mid development to fill lacking areas but it's still a similar feeling game. An option can be chosen to randomize those perfect genre options in each game but then you tend to be moving even further away from it feeling in any way like a realistic kind of game as the natural position of the sliders tends to at least make decent sense for a genre (you probably won't have much luck making a children targeted heavy military violence focused puzzle game with a massive focus on story, character design, and game length over the options that would influence level and puzzle design).
Because there is no real personality to employees or other developers and publishers it does tend to make certain options much less interesting than they could be. Unless you are fully committed to the roleplay of your company there is just very little reason money or content wise to getting into publishing games for other people or buying out other companies. Developing retro games for off the market consoles or creating old bundles, abandonware, or re-releases of your old games and filling out your published game boxes with maps, figures, and posters doesn't really have any feeling to it. Even more so because, while you can create a support department to gain new fans and answer fan mail and calls, you don't really have interactions with fans outside of occasional message in a few readable fan mails and reviews that include a small number of generic comments.
There are a lot of useless or almost useless employee perks. There are some that are obviously nice to have like talented to increase skills faster, faster movement, no bathroom breaks, no breaks, completes tasks slightly faster. Then you can have extremely minor situational skills like working on engines faster or doing slighter better when games are sequels that mean very little in the long run. There are a large number of completely worthless perks like not making a mess, not caring about being in a mess, not caring about overcrowded offices, not quitting, half the jobs only focus on one skill so a perk that gives their non specialized areas higher maximums doesn't do anything for them, etc. These perks are worthless because you end up in a situation where lets say you have comfortable room for 30 people and you put 50 in there and the office is a mess, if two people don't care about crowds and two don't care about a mess that only takes care of half their problems and 46 others are still 100% upset. Without your employees even showing any kind of personality many of these traits just feel throw in just to be there even after all this time of development, it would actually be easy to fix the one that doesn't care about crowds by just making them not count to the total office crowd limit (maybe everyone likes them because they are attractive, smell nice, and bring in donuts).
The look of the game is another lacking area. The character models themselves are bland enough but there is a surprising lack of options when it comes to office decorations and options. You have posters, pictures, carpets, and plants to make people enjoy their environment more and more necessary objects like water, trash cans, fridge, seats and benches for breaks (oddly the benches take the space of two chairs and should fit two people but your employees end up taking a break by sitting on the middle of a bench), and things like arcade cabinets, treadmills, and dart boards to increase motivation when they need to unwind but there is such a lack of variety of options in these areas and almost every type of room contains the exact same type of décor that actually growing and designing your building layout and rooms just isn't interesting so you aren't really able to make a visually interesting environment. There are helpful and time saving features such as having your rooms automatically set up after choosing the size of the room, updating all outdated work areas as improved versions are unlocked over the years, and the ability to just pick up and move entire rooms if you end up wanting to quickly change your building layout or the size of certain rooms.
If you're playing to chase those high numbers, watch your office grow over time, and to imagine your long running IP about fire fighters just trying to do their job in a world of dangerous fire breathing dragons you can have a great time. But if you want a more detailed personality driven side where you have employee events or them giving out ideas for a game or suddenly demanding a raise or quitting, having more direct struggles against competitors aside from just not wanting to fill the market with too much of the same genre and topics, you wanted a more varied highly detailed and decorated office, or if you wanted to see some kind of either visual or just descriptive version of the kind of game your employees ended up making then you will likely start to get tired of the game sooner than later.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1674297005559128071
You will build up your studio over time by hiring employees that focus on fields such as game designer, programmer, graphic artist, sound artist, office worker, technician, tester, and researcher and building up job focused rooms to fill the kind of tasks that you need done. Outside of just making a game there is a wide variety of things to do be they major options like creating your own console or producing your own arcade cabinets, creating production runs of the game's you develop or produce, and making server rooms to support your MMOs, to minor details like setting prices of fan merchandise for the IPs you own, buying a license from some form of media to make a game around, setting amount of or ending crunch time, deciding how much you want to charge for your games and what you want to include with each regular, deluxe, collectible box. From the years 1976-2030 set events will see the release of new consoles, handhelds, computers, phones, technology, and genres for you to work with.
Your game's sales and review scores are determined by a large number of things such as platform market, engine specialty, your skill with genres/topics/platforms/technology, employee numbers working on the game and skills in each area, features your engine allows to be in a game, marketing, genre and possible sub genre combination, topics chosen for the game to be about based on the genre, using support offices that focus on things like graphics design, recording music and sounds, motion capture, bug testing, and managing a variety of sliders that when set to certain levels for a particular genre can lead to better or worse games being made. It sounds like a lot but once you figure out or look up where to set the sliders (game testers can create game reports that tell you if sliders were optimal and you can automatically set them to optimal settings you have identified whenever you make a game of the same genre), you are mostly just clicking on the same kind of things over and over again. Getting extremely high reviews does become more difficult on hard and legendary difficulties as you might need to adjust some developer area focus mid development to fill lacking areas but it's still a similar feeling game. An option can be chosen to randomize those perfect genre options in each game but then you tend to be moving even further away from it feeling in any way like a realistic kind of game as the natural position of the sliders tends to at least make decent sense for a genre (you probably won't have much luck making a children targeted heavy military violence focused puzzle game with a massive focus on story, character design, and game length over the options that would influence level and puzzle design).
Because there is no real personality to employees or other developers and publishers it does tend to make certain options much less interesting than they could be. Unless you are fully committed to the roleplay of your company there is just very little reason money or content wise to getting into publishing games for other people or buying out other companies. Developing retro games for off the market consoles or creating old bundles, abandonware, or re-releases of your old games and filling out your published game boxes with maps, figures, and posters doesn't really have any feeling to it. Even more so because, while you can create a support department to gain new fans and answer fan mail and calls, you don't really have interactions with fans outside of occasional message in a few readable fan mails and reviews that include a small number of generic comments.
There are a lot of useless or almost useless employee perks. There are some that are obviously nice to have like talented to increase skills faster, faster movement, no bathroom breaks, no breaks, completes tasks slightly faster. Then you can have extremely minor situational skills like working on engines faster or doing slighter better when games are sequels that mean very little in the long run. There are a large number of completely worthless perks like not making a mess, not caring about being in a mess, not caring about overcrowded offices, not quitting, half the jobs only focus on one skill so a perk that gives their non specialized areas higher maximums doesn't do anything for them, etc. These perks are worthless because you end up in a situation where lets say you have comfortable room for 30 people and you put 50 in there and the office is a mess, if two people don't care about crowds and two don't care about a mess that only takes care of half their problems and 46 others are still 100% upset. Without your employees even showing any kind of personality many of these traits just feel throw in just to be there even after all this time of development, it would actually be easy to fix the one that doesn't care about crowds by just making them not count to the total office crowd limit (maybe everyone likes them because they are attractive, smell nice, and bring in donuts).
The look of the game is another lacking area. The character models themselves are bland enough but there is a surprising lack of options when it comes to office decorations and options. You have posters, pictures, carpets, and plants to make people enjoy their environment more and more necessary objects like water, trash cans, fridge, seats and benches for breaks (oddly the benches take the space of two chairs and should fit two people but your employees end up taking a break by sitting on the middle of a bench), and things like arcade cabinets, treadmills, and dart boards to increase motivation when they need to unwind but there is such a lack of variety of options in these areas and almost every type of room contains the exact same type of décor that actually growing and designing your building layout and rooms just isn't interesting so you aren't really able to make a visually interesting environment. There are helpful and time saving features such as having your rooms automatically set up after choosing the size of the room, updating all outdated work areas as improved versions are unlocked over the years, and the ability to just pick up and move entire rooms if you end up wanting to quickly change your building layout or the size of certain rooms.
If you're playing to chase those high numbers, watch your office grow over time, and to imagine your long running IP about fire fighters just trying to do their job in a world of dangerous fire breathing dragons you can have a great time. But if you want a more detailed personality driven side where you have employee events or them giving out ideas for a game or suddenly demanding a raise or quitting, having more direct struggles against competitors aside from just not wanting to fill the market with too much of the same genre and topics, you wanted a more varied highly detailed and decorated office, or if you wanted to see some kind of either visual or just descriptive version of the kind of game your employees ended up making then you will likely start to get tired of the game sooner than later.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1674297005559128071