I'd make it as a parody of the Tycoon games, Factorio, and SimTower, except instead of rollercoasters or machinery, you're filling out an office with cubicles, sound studios, mocap studios, testing workshops, q&a phone banks, etc, and then finding people to fill them.
You have to balance happiness with getting an acceptable rate of workflow. Ranging from an office that's a moneybleeding paradise that accomplishes nothing, a profitable gulag, or an outright reign of terror where dissenters are fired.
The easiest business model to pick would be to focus on mobile games, letting you get away with no testing, no support, but a lottery-like return; low chances of success but massive profits if you get lucky. But the longer you keep making mobile games the less likely you are to get a hit. So you have to transition to other products which means expanding your office and getting more capabilities.
But the more you expand the more testing you potentially need and the more support teams you need to placate customers so testing flaws don't hurt your reputation.
A staffer with many disciplines and successful titles becomes a "rockstar", a special employee type that's a brand unto themselves; you can put in charge of projects based on their strengths and weaknesses to boost results but they also have quixotic demands and a growing risk of leaving (sorta like going rebel in Tropico, or nobles in Dwarf Fortress).
You could even have linked projects. So you have a development project for one game going on, but then you can put another development team on an engine special project. On its own, an engine project is almost guaranteed to fail. An engine project paired with a successful game project becomes a revenue source that requires almost no support as long as you keep pairing it with games (at the cost of limiting the upside of games as the engine gets older).
Rather than expanding your offices as a mobile developer, just reincorporate under a new name, fire all your employees, pay some Indian sweat shops to reskin all your old games, and re-release them with new branding. Sleep with a few journos to get some good press for your shitty reskins, and slip the app store owners a few kickbacks to artificially inflate your game's popularity.
Nah, that's not how I'd do it at all.
I'd make it as a parody of the Tycoon games, Factorio, and SimTower, except instead of rollercoasters or machinery, you're filling out an office with cubicles, sound studios, mocap studios, testing workshops, q&a phone banks, etc, and then finding people to fill them.
You have to balance happiness with getting an acceptable rate of workflow. Ranging from an office that's a moneybleeding paradise that accomplishes nothing, a profitable gulag, or an outright reign of terror where dissenters are fired.
The easiest business model to pick would be to focus on mobile games, letting you get away with no testing, no support, but a lottery-like return; low chances of success but massive profits if you get lucky. But the longer you keep making mobile games the less likely you are to get a hit. So you have to transition to other products which means expanding your office and getting more capabilities.
But the more you expand the more testing you potentially need and the more support teams you need to placate customers so testing flaws don't hurt your reputation.
A staffer with many disciplines and successful titles becomes a "rockstar", a special employee type that's a brand unto themselves; you can put in charge of projects based on their strengths and weaknesses to boost results but they also have quixotic demands and a growing risk of leaving (sorta like going rebel in Tropico, or nobles in Dwarf Fortress).
You could even have linked projects. So you have a development project for one game going on, but then you can put another development team on an engine special project. On its own, an engine project is almost guaranteed to fail. An engine project paired with a successful game project becomes a revenue source that requires almost no support as long as you keep pairing it with games (at the cost of limiting the upside of games as the engine gets older).
Rather than expanding your offices as a mobile developer, just reincorporate under a new name, fire all your employees, pay some Indian sweat shops to reskin all your old games, and re-release them with new branding. Sleep with a few journos to get some good press for your shitty reskins, and slip the app store owners a few kickbacks to artificially inflate your game's popularity.