Playing the game 2005+

I have been playing GB3 from time to time ever since it was released and I've always had a really great experience up until around 2005 and forward.

I recently started a new save and I got the exact same experience as I have had before. A really fun ride with my company up until around 2005-2006 something when the current generation of consoles are released.

Every single save I have ever played on GB3 the old generation has outsold the new generation by miles. On my latest save the Xbox sold around 4,9 million units with the Xbox 360 selling around 600k units. The Playstation went from around 1,2 million to 370k units. To go even further back Nintendo 64 sold 6,3 million units compared to Gamecube that sold 3,1 million to Wii that sold 710k units.

That's a clear decreasing trend. I've also noticed that the weekly sales of the consoles have gone from around 40-50k every week on the top rated console in the 80s to 13,360 on the top rated platform in my current year - That is when the Hardware demand looks to be pretty high too.

While the consoles always are huge flops Windows is always continuing to sell really well and is my current week leading the sales list once more with the Public Opinion "Hot". It has now sold 13,3 million units.

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The problem that these numbers set up is that for every new year that goes by every game I make sell worse and worse.

The reasons are quite simple. Despite Windows being the platform selling best every year the game looks more at it's age, which now is 11 years and 19 weeks, and sets it's usage after that. 10%. That makes it impossible to sell more than 1,3 million on every new game that I make for Windows despite it being the most popular platform.

And since the newer platforms, with a usage of 90%+, doesn't succeed at all I can't sell much games on those platforms either.

The only platform on my current save which is selling okay is the PSP which in 4 years have sold about 3 million units but with me controlling the company I want it to be - creating games for the new top-rated consoles and not a handheld one - it isn't fun to be forced to create PSP games to afford the salaries I have reached now.

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What I would have loved for a kind of game-mode or mod is one that ensures that the platforms always sell pretty much the same way that they did, or do, in real life. And/Or with a function that when a "Xbox 720" or "Zeebo" - a console with the highest, second or third rating so far - is released that they have a minimum sales number coded (pre-order or something) that is the best selling console of the last generation x 1.1 (if third highest), 1.2 (if second highest) or 1.3 or 1.4 (if the highest)

I would also have liked to see the "Public Usage" percentage being calculated on Sales. And not age.

And if a platform dies, like the PS3 or the X360 always does for me - Why is the other gaming companies always releasing lots of games for those...? Of course I know that they are real games that were released IRL like that. But they were released on those platforms since they were most popular.

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Apart from this I really do love GB3 - Which always makes it really frustrating to progress this far!

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Hope my point is making it's way forward and that everything is not in a blur. I am really tired and was playing some GB before sleep when I ran across this problem again and I felt like posting it ^^

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Looking forward to any new games that will come from you, Nino!

Well you still can get your own platforms out which should sell good again

True, but that's not how I want to play the game

I want to be a game developer only

I competely agree. The economic system should be flexible enough to allow to be a game developer only.

As I understand the game mechanics, it's down to highly randomised variables. It seems to me like the global late-game economy in your particular game dived.

Persoanlly, I've had a number of weird variables occur to entirely the other effect. I had one game where hardware sales were constantly decent, but platforms from the early 90s continued in popularity well into the early 2000s, killing Windows within months of launch and forcing it to retire early. After that, the entire gaming market was left on sixth generation consoles.

I like this highly randomising factor. You rarely get two games that play exactly alike. It keeps the player on their toes, and provides a window into an interesting alternate reality. I'd rather have a randomised game than fidelity with reality over and over again; that would just kill the great replay value of GB3.

I do get why it is in but to me it doesn't work very well. The mechanics work in a way that the randomizing is there but at the same time, the mechanics also presume that the newest consoles are always the ones most people want.

For example. Windows that still is selling quite well on my save and is the most sold platform of all time. Why is its usage down to only 10% then? Why can't the game figure out that, ah, it is still selling really well - perhaps the usage should be around 80% or so?

I'm kinda guessing it's the same with the 90s platforms that continue to sell well. That the usage drops down really low despite them being really popular.

And that is my main problem. That since the usage drops lower and lower for every year on the most popular platforms the game sales also drops lower and lower.

A game that normally would have sold 5 million copies drops down to only 500,000 copies. I understand that the usage should drop down. But if a platform is still selling really well it should only drop down to 70-80% otherwise it would be pretty odd that new people are buying the 13 year old platform so much if there is barely any usage on it. At least that is my opinion.

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It's the same thing with the hardcoded games that are always released on set consoles. An example: Despite Xbox360 and Playstation 3 flopped big time; all the major titles continue to be released there. Despite that, for example, Windows, Xbox and PSP are the ones selling best right now and should be more interesting for game developers to release their games on as it would bring more money.

Of course I do understand that making a database that figures all that stuff out itself could a bit... tricky ... it does make the randomising seem pretty awkward to me - again, my opinion only, of course.

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That is also why I would want a mode where the big new consoles always succeed. Because it would be an easy solution to my problem and also introduce new challenges. Because... if Windows still is going strong - or, let's say, the Nintendo 64 - how come my 10-rated knowledge from 9 years ago is still enough to make 9/10 or 10/10 rated games. Shouldn't that rating change over the year, if people are still working on the console, to reflect that it is still being modified and improved.

If the bigger newer consoles always succeed then that problem would be gone in an instant and they would prove to be successes.

I would still love a randomised "match" between the PS2, Xbox, Gamecube and Windows though that when the next generation the same between PS3, Xbox360, Wii and Windows too. A mode where one of them could be really much more successful than the others, but still the ones not being as big as the others selling well enough to make it possible to still earn money on them.

To me that is more realistic than a 11 year old platform outselling a newer, "overhyped" platform with much more capability than the older one(s).

Yeah. Its always a big challange to do a game which is both controlled and randomized enough to sometimes give players a new challange and still keep it kind of realistic.

The plan I have for GB4, will proberly make it more "controlled" but who knows, i might succeed in making differents modes this time, if only I have tiome enough, its possible thats for sure :-)

True that!

Just figured I would give some feedback on my experience after having played the game on and off for about a year and a half now

Still find the Gamebiz series the best game series I've ever played, when the game(s) are being created by just one person. I could probably include teams on 5-10 people there as well

I wish you the best of luck with your future releases!

for GB4 you could try checking if a platform is retired or not, and if not follow the historical release platform for each game, but if its historical platform was retired early, have it release the game on one of the top 5 selling platforms, by selecting it randomly. IMO this would increase the replay value of the game as you could, for example, have the Commodore 64 flop and get retired within less then a year of release and end up with most of the historic C64 games released on the ZX Spectrum and end up with the ZXS be this game's C64.

I also agree with hw that the % in use drops of way too much for an older platform that's still a hot seller. If it's still selling lots then there should still be lots in use. If a 10 year old platform's selling 20,000 units a week then there should be 20,000 new units in use, not 2,000, because 10% of the total units sold are in use and 10% of 20,000 is 2,000 -- where do the other 18,000 newly sold units go? maybe change the % of units still in use to the total number still in use, so that way the number of units still in use could reflect recent sales, with the number of units still in use drop by a percentage each week, based on both the age of the platform and the amount and quality of games being developed for it, and how popular it is.

That sums up how I feel in a lot better than how I wrote it

Adding these kinds of features would definitly make the game improve by 300%, especially the replayability

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Meanwhile I am cheating to get around it by changing the total sales of a platform, using ArtMoney, to better show how I want it to be, making it possible for me to release games without dropping sales for every year

Yes, The "still in use" could diffinitly be changed, but i fear that the game will be fare to easy mayby ? The games getting released on an other platform is not quite so easy to do in the current version though.

But, Mayby I put to much weight on the game not being to easy as i tend to loose interrest in games which is to easy to "beat" but this might not be how the majority of players of my games llok at it.

Mayby i should put in more options for the players so they can select more into how hard it is, i will have to take that into consideration for GB4 and my other games in the future.

Yes Arndt you sometimes tend to do that in my book, which on the other hand is understandable.
In general you should balance the game on the medium difficulty and scale up and down from there without just slapping modifieres on it.

Altho it shouldnt be too easy like Game Dev Story is where mid of your very first game you are practically unbeatable godlike hit producing machine deluxe.

A good idea might be to keep the difficulty for the player at somewhere near medium level of gamebiz 3 but make what the computer companys do harder or less hard depending on the difficulty level.

Like on easy they barley do games/platforms that are a concern for you and on hard they do that all the time to keep you on your toes.

Still i think its good that you take feedback of us seriously thumbs up.

Edit: The Idea how to keep still in use with using absolute numbers is a pretty neat idea. Maybe you can think out a formula that calculates how many people drop a console which takes into account how old a system is , if there is a better system is available already, how many high rated games are there for a system and so on. If you do that right it would balance things way better and keep the randomness a bit in check while still maintaining the complexity we all love and care for! Then you havea a few value modifiers which you then can easily balance the whole thing with, which also should make it easier for you in the long run.

Edit2: A suggestion from me is unifiying difficulty on the building costs/side effects like skill loss on new generation of hardware and stuff but shift more towards how other companys act. So you have a more narrow field to balance while having more options to do so, depending on how you want to make the AI work in Gamebiz 4.

I think it is important to make sure a game is not too easy. then again, it's also important to make sure a game isn't too hard. Too far in one direction and the game quickly gets boring, too far the other way and it just gets frustrating. The trick is that what is too hard for one person is too easy for another. One solution to this balancing issue would be to make more user settable parameters so the user has more control of how difficult a game is, and can fine-tune the game balance to suit his/her personal taste and skill level.

As for the old, but still successful platform that's selling 20,000 units per week but still has only 10% in use despite all these sales, and it's success keeps killing newer, better platforms, that is imho a form of logic error, not a difficulty level issue. If an older system is so successful it's killing the newer ones, it should have a large amount of units still in use, otherwise there are no good platforms to develop games for as soon as this situation develops.

I have a game that's into the mid-90's and already I'm starting to get this problem. Amiga, Genesis and SNES are all so successful that they've already killed Playstation, and are in the process of killing platforms like windows, N64, etc. Yet the older platforms are all getting down to 10 to 40% still in use. If this continues I'll be left with no platforms with enough units in use to produce a successful game for.

Another issue that's been brought up in this thread is historical accurateness. IMO the best way to handle this is to make 2 options, historic, which attempts to as closely as possible, follow the gaming history, thus all successful platforms, games, etc will be successful in this game as well. The other option could be random, where the success or failure of platforms is largely random and varies from game to game, although an historically successful game or platform could still be more likely to be successful then the ones that flopped. This would keep the re-playability and add a historic re-enactment for those who are interested in that.