Game Dev Dynasty

At a Glance

• A full career from 1995 to 2019, across four hardware generations

• 27 genres, 42 topics, and 23 platforms that rise and fall

• Three audiences and four world regions that buy differently

• 100 rival studios with their own release histories

• Your own game engine, built tech by tech

• Genre Awards, Game of the Year, and a world ranking to top

Make Games Your Way

Start in 1995 with one developer and a small office. Develop your first game by choosing its genre, topic, platform, and features, and design its cover.

There's no recipe that always makes a hit. Follow your own idea, aim for a big crowd, or turn a surprise success into a series.

Compete With Rival Studios

Other studios are making games at the same time. They have their own games and audience: casual, mainstream or hardcore. Watch them climb the world ranking and try to pass them.

Keep an eye on what rival studios are making. Launch at the right time, beat the game at the top of the charts, or take back a genre from the studio that passed you.

Build Your Studio

Hire a team, upgrade their computers, and solve problems during development. Move into bigger offices and build your own game engine as the studio grows.

• Real people. Every developer has their own skills, traits, and stress. Overwork leads to burnout.

• Keep your best people. Rival studios make poach offers, and unhappy staff threaten to quit.

• Stories with choices. Events during and between projects ask you to decide what the studio does.

• Your own engine. Research tech on the engine map and manage technical debt. Each new generation, choose whether to upgrade the engine or build a new one, or license an engine instead.

• Prestige. Climb from Unknown to Icon. Higher prestige brings publisher offers, review copies, and questions about what kind of studio you want to be.

By 2020, look back at a catalog full of flops, hits, long-running series, and games that became the top sellers in their genres. Can you make the year's best game and reach world rank #1?