Game Dev Story

Game Dev Story is Kairosoft's beloved game studio management simulator, originally a mobile title and now available on Steam. Starting from a small office with a few thousand dollars in the wallet, you hire the necessary personnel to develop your first game: programmer, artist, designer, sound engineer. Each candidate has skills suited to different game-creation roles.

The development cycle covers selecting genre and game type combinations (some marry better than others), choosing target platforms (the game traces 20 years of video game industry history with thinly-veiled console parodies: Game Kid, Microx, Virtual Kid, PlayStation analogs), instructing staff to cultivate skills, buying development kits, sending announcements and recruiting talent. Annual awards reward best games of the year by category.

Your staff can change professions as the company grows, and unlocking wider arrays of genres and content comes from accumulated experience. Eventually, you can develop your own console, place it on the market, and potentially compete with the platform holders you previously developed for. Sequels to successful games sell well, building hype increases launch revenue, and the question of whether to invest in ambitious single titles versus rapid small releases is the central strategic question.