RISE
Hit up the testing branch for Alpha 8.
A couple questions for long time players:
How do you prop up your own personal store without dropping all other distribution? 10% popularity is not very good.
How do you get an operating system out in less than 3 years even with about 50 designers and 70 coders, all dedicated to their 1 task? I have a night and day team for both Designers and Coders. They're all quite happy in their teams and most are max skilled in every aspect. My first OS in the 90's took forever and had a thousand or so bugs even with an SCM. It cost 5.7 million US to make.
1. You can't really without releasing exclusives, similar to real life. That's why the windows games stores suck and steam is so big, because steam is usually the only place to get a copy of that PC game. around 10% is fine though, it's the same popularity as the other ones usually. What I do is I'll have a small team and just put out a bunch of games on it, maybe lose a bit of money in the process but whatever.
2. I dunno, I get them done quicker with smaller teams. I normally just assign people to any task so they bump up their skills in both categories, so I just have teams of super skilled people on it. Something that does speed up productivity is making sure your employees are happy, making sure they have a competent leader and a meeting room to meet, and making sure they have the best equipment for their tasks (calculators for programmers, sketchbooks for artists, etc.) I haven't played the beta on the testing branch though so YMMV.
It also lacked sufficient room for fuckin' around, which is 100% of the appeal of sims. You create the underlying systems and their interactions and you give me the freedom to do stupid shit with them and see what happens. All you could do in GDT was make silly names, everything else just gave you lower numbers and made you lose.
It's because GDT wasn't a sim, it was just a casual management game, which leaned towards the casual side more than the management side. Might as well have been a flash game for how deep it was. Software Tycoon is a legitimate sim, with some serious simulation going on in the background that GDT doesn't have. Popularity of stuff makes sense in this, and if your software isn't selling well, the reasons behind it usually are clear, and are usually something you can address, whether it be by bumping up marketing, porting it to more popular OS's, or ensuring the followup product is of better quality and receives more marketing in the dev phase.