I've been putting a good bit of time into this lately, but I can't confidently say it does anything special? The format here is perfect for a mobile game - you spam-produce weapons, armor, and accessories for NPC heroes to come buy from your shop, where the only production cost is the materials used to make them. And that's…. about it? You have a limited number of production slots, a rapidly regenerating supply of materials, and an energy bar that doesn't regenerate, but also can basically be ignored.
It's got other systems tacked on too, and again, you can ignore most of these. There's a system where you hire your own heroes and send them out to collect special, non-regenerating materials. There's a system where you upgrade your townspeople for things like "higher rate of material regeneration" or… "sense of accomplishment", I guess? There's a system where you complete quests for a currency that you can probably spend on some things? I have no idea what that one does. There are still more systems I haven't mentioned, but I can't be bothered to name them, and I'm dead serious when I say you only intermittently have to interact with the first two I listed here.
I keep playing because upgrading the items you can produce hits just right - there are easy, frequent milestones, most of which are throwaways (increased chance of producing rare items, reduced material cost) but it's still relatively easy to hit those thresholds to unlock a new blueprint to produce and start the process all over. Sure, I can "ascend" these blueprints to make them even better, but I'm content to produce like 30 daggers so the big "produce" button turns gold and I can move on with my life. It's easy to hop on for 20 minutes a day, put on a YouTube video, master a blueprint, and hop off.
Shop Titans has earned the most lukewarm, flimsiest praise by being a mobile game that still relies fairly heavily on timers, but still provides enough to do that you can keep playing for as long as you want without being forced out by an energy meter (the energy meter is filled by selling and discounting items, and depleted by raising the price of items) or "watch a video ad to continue playing". There's still all kinds of real-money bullshit baked in - the "king" rolls up once every couple days to tell you that he has deemed you worthy of an Extremely Cool Guy Starter Pack for $15.99, and a couple townspeople will ask you to buy their upgrade pack to make shoulder-mounted fuck guns, but as far as mobile games go this is more of a jaywalking-level crime than a murder.
So how long will it last? I'm looking at around 30 hours in this so far and I'm starting to hit the point where the "best" items I can produce are taking around 5-7 minutes to produce (of which I can produce 5 simultaneously), instead of the 45-second-ish average that you see early on. This is just long enough that, since I'm playing on Steam, I'm probably not going to sit there and wait for those items to finish - I'm much more likely to just close it for the day. If you're playing on your phone this is probably less of an issue, but I find that returning to this game relatively infrequently has limited my attachment to the game and made me far less likely to spend money on the nearly impossible-to-earn gems. I can see the signs of a pending "difficulty" spike in the near future and could probably stall it out long enough to double my playtime in the game, but is it worth doing so? Not really. Might be about time to put this one down.
It's got other systems tacked on too, and again, you can ignore most of these. There's a system where you hire your own heroes and send them out to collect special, non-regenerating materials. There's a system where you upgrade your townspeople for things like "higher rate of material regeneration" or… "sense of accomplishment", I guess? There's a system where you complete quests for a currency that you can probably spend on some things? I have no idea what that one does. There are still more systems I haven't mentioned, but I can't be bothered to name them, and I'm dead serious when I say you only intermittently have to interact with the first two I listed here.
I keep playing because upgrading the items you can produce hits just right - there are easy, frequent milestones, most of which are throwaways (increased chance of producing rare items, reduced material cost) but it's still relatively easy to hit those thresholds to unlock a new blueprint to produce and start the process all over. Sure, I can "ascend" these blueprints to make them even better, but I'm content to produce like 30 daggers so the big "produce" button turns gold and I can move on with my life. It's easy to hop on for 20 minutes a day, put on a YouTube video, master a blueprint, and hop off.
Shop Titans has earned the most lukewarm, flimsiest praise by being a mobile game that still relies fairly heavily on timers, but still provides enough to do that you can keep playing for as long as you want without being forced out by an energy meter (the energy meter is filled by selling and discounting items, and depleted by raising the price of items) or "watch a video ad to continue playing". There's still all kinds of real-money bullshit baked in - the "king" rolls up once every couple days to tell you that he has deemed you worthy of an Extremely Cool Guy Starter Pack for $15.99, and a couple townspeople will ask you to buy their upgrade pack to make shoulder-mounted fuck guns, but as far as mobile games go this is more of a jaywalking-level crime than a murder.
So how long will it last? I'm looking at around 30 hours in this so far and I'm starting to hit the point where the "best" items I can produce are taking around 5-7 minutes to produce (of which I can produce 5 simultaneously), instead of the 45-second-ish average that you see early on. This is just long enough that, since I'm playing on Steam, I'm probably not going to sit there and wait for those items to finish - I'm much more likely to just close it for the day. If you're playing on your phone this is probably less of an issue, but I find that returning to this game relatively infrequently has limited my attachment to the game and made me far less likely to spend money on the nearly impossible-to-earn gems. I can see the signs of a pending "difficulty" spike in the near future and could probably stall it out long enough to double my playtime in the game, but is it worth doing so? Not really. Might be about time to put this one down.