Mad Games Tycoon is a simulation game with a Games Development theme. You start off in a Basement which is small and can only recruit some poorly skilled developers. You make simple games, and take on contract work to raise money to expand.
You can purchase a new office which will have an increased floor space at an extra monthly cost. New rooms are available at certain points, allowing you to expand your focus. There's rooms for Marketing, Training, Research, Support and Production.
When you make a game, you can pick the Genre and Theme, then move a few sliders to set your focus; do you want to choose Graphics over Gameplay? Cater to the Casual or Hardcore demographic? Once you have created your game, you will be given a review score and your experience within that Genre and Theme will increase. The next time you create a game, you will be given hints on which direction to move the sliders. Later on when you have a Quality Assurance room, your staff can create a report which will tell you what you did right or wrong, giving you a better idea of how to make a better game in that genre.
As time progresses, new technologies become available for research, and Platforms are released or removed from market. You can then buy the Development Kit to make games on that Platform. The names of the consoles are unofficial but it's easy to recognise what they are supposed to be. Also, the market changes, and states which Genre and Themes are popular and unpopular.
You can take on simple contract work which gives you small money for a small amount of your time. You can also develop games for Publishers but must create the game at a certain quality in order to receive the full amount. These contracts can pay huge sums.
You can make your own game though, which can vary how much you actually earn. Adding features and using game engines comes at a cost, but the more features usually means a better quality game. It's not clear how random a lot of these elements are though, or if certain tech affects the genres differently.
As time progresses, games take longer to develop, require more staff and cost way more money. This is like real life when early computer games were developed by tiny teams over a few months. Those games may have been text only, or had primitive graphics with colours, but that was what the consoles could handle back then. Today's “AAA” take years to develop but have the cutting edge graphics and sound. So in this game you need to hire more staff, keep training their skills, and make sure you have the staff in the right areas.
For the most part, I had just 1 game in development at any time, but as I expanded and got use to managing my studio, I then created more development rooms, hired more staff and had multiple games on the go.
It was nice to see options to make patches, expansion packs, remasters, re-releases etc., and you can also create MMOs and free-to-play games, which requires a server room. You can even manufacture your own console, but this takes some hefty investment to research.
There's not much of a tutorial in the game, but I found it fairly intuitive or picked things up by experimentation. There were some features that went unnoticed for a long time, like the fact you can purchase shares in other companies, or you can publish games for others developers; paying an upfront fee plus a share of each sale.
I noticed a few spelling mistakes or areas where menus could be improved but there were no crashes or severe bugs; so it's a well-made game.
Just like a lot of simulation games like this, once I loaded the game, I found myself playing for hours and found it hard to put it down. I enjoyed it but I think it didn't have the same impact as classics like Theme Hospital/Park that I associate with this genre.