Game Dev Story is a game development studio simulator where you as a player have to deal with problems and obstacles that may occur when dealing with a real life studio.
But the question is, Is it really that realistic?

Positive/Realistic:

It has a surprisingly nice balance when it comes to the economic part, which could give a proper reflection of a real life scenario.
There is always something you can purchase or upgrade but there is also something you need to prioritize in order to accomplish your goal. The great thing about this, is that it feels like a realistic event when it comes to the planning part. Yet another great thing is that there is parallel options for you to do if you don't want to stick to one strategy.


The workers you can hire has just like in real life, different abilities such as strong/weak sides.
They do also learn along the way when producing the product.
Which means they get more productive the longer they have worked in the company.

Negative/Unrealistic:

One minus side is that when you get a new project to let your team work on, you don't have the choice to apply the right worker for the right task, you will basically get one random from your company to work for this task or hire a new worker outside the company.
Instead of having the choice to choose a much more convenient person from your company.
We both found this part to be unrealistic.

Another similar element is when you look for people to hire, you spend about 50.000 dollars to look up people, then you find about 2 potential workers, but you don't want to hire them yet, but in a month or so, then we never really found a way to hire these applicants afterwards.
We had to spend another 50.000 dollars to search for new applicants instead.

There was also no choice to search for a specific work group, such as sound designers only. Or only programmers.

When Purchasing a license for a specific gaming console, the button said: “Negotiate price/license” but when the button was clicked you actually bought it for the full prize, where we as players thought we would have the option to haggle the price.


First impression:

The strategy we used when creating our company was to focus on quality games and still hold a defensive economic strategy.
But when we soon realized that most real-life game companies that focus on quality game titles also have a very offensive economic strategy to improve their break through.
Then we slowly focused to create more defensive game strategies from the economic left overs we still had left and build our empire the slow way, without focusing on break through’s.

The game simulator held all the basic requirements to be playable. But from a realistic perspective.
Then its not very easy to understand as a game. The control over the workers could have been much more open to give the simulator a more realistic management.

Made by: Emil Wikström and Fredrik Henriksson (My friend Emil wrote most of this but we did the analysis and testing together)