If you haven’t seen Game Dev Tycoon on the App Store, you can check it out here or simply click on the image below.
It took me nearly a whole day to compile the first report so for the second report we already have data for the next two days after release. We also have some reactions to our first report and some clues of what the next days might hold but first let’s take a look at the data.
Sales
Sales (Units)
Est. Proceeds (USD)
Day 1
1,463
5,325.84
Day 2
1,568 (+7%)
5,692.57 (+6.8%)
Day 3
1,742 (+11%)
6,321.4 (+11%)
Day 2 and 3 showed a steady increase in numbers. Day 2 unit-sales grew 7% to 1.5K and day 3 saw another 11% increase to 1.7K units.
Piracy rates
Because we did not repeat our piracy experiment (see part 1 for reasons why), we cannot easily observe piracy rates. What we can do is compare our Unity analytics (essentially anonymous statistical data) with our purchase numbers.
Ordinarily I would caution that this is inherently imprecise and becomes more useless with each day as one legal purchase could be (legally) used on multiple devices and even by multiple people (we support family sharing both on Steam and on iOS) but looking at the data I should not have worried.
According to Unity analytics we had 3,572 new players across all three days. This stands against 4,773 sold units during the same period. This suggest a piracy rate of 0% and indicates that 25% of people who purchased the game haven’t had a chance to play it yet.
This is in stark contrast to our experience on PC – Part of the reason we never published Day 2 stats for our piracy experiment was because by the time we looked at the data, there were so many players and so many pirates playing the real game (rather than our joke one) that it was impossible for us to make an insightful call to what the actual piracy rate was – well, other than saying still pretty high. It will be very interesting to see how this will play out in the next weeks and even more insightful to see how the Android release in January will compare.
More analytics
Sadly, our statistics for games created and bankruptcies inside the game have malfunctioned but here are some other fun stats we can share:
5,685 companies were created 3,328 bailouts were taken 1,511 companies reached the last office 1,169 staff were fired
Particularly noteworthy is that 26.5% of players reached the last office. This number is surprisingly high 3 days after release, especially since it takes around 7 to 12 hours to complete the game if you don’t go bankrupt (and most players go bankrupt at least once).
The last analytics number we proudly want to share is the number of in-app purchases sold so far 😁
(spoiler: it will remain at 0!)
Reception
After day 3, 250 players rated the game with an average of 4.8 stars which means our rating is keeping very steady.
4.8 stars
iOS Release Report: Day 2 and 3 – Steady Improvements4.8
Most lower ratings are, as before, due to a problem where the game can stall on iPhone X (not everyone is affected but if you are, please try to logout from Game Center and then in again). – We are deploying a fix for this right now but it still has to pass review.
On the press side, Pocket Gamer gave us a glowing review:
A stunning simulator that’s perfect for mobile – 9/10
Interestingly, this volatility is not reflected in our proceeds which is visible if we overlap the charts data with the proceeds from the US market.
Given the relatively small sample size here (we are still just talking about 1-2K units) this might just be natural fluctuation on the App Store but it’ll be interesting to see how closely our proceeds will match our chart position.
Day 1 Report Reactions
I’d like to summarize and respond to some of the reactions we got to our Day 1 Report. First, the reaction from readers was very positive. Twitter in particular showed many tweets where people appreciated us for being so candid. Thanks to everyone who shared the story on Twitter or elsewhere! 💚
Newsletter
We sent out another newsletter last night and I’m happy to say that the open rate was better compared to our announcement post.
The click-rate in particular was more than double. As people pointed out yesterday, our announcement title was self-explanatory and didn’t mention new features so many readers simply marked the email as read once they read the subject.
We also received multiple emails that reported our newsletter landing in Google’s ‘Promotions’ tab which, I suspect, very few people actually read and has been dubbed ‘The Death of Email Marketing’. Yes, our announcement was a promotion and is marketing but it’s a pity that Google would lump our once-a-year important email announcement into the same category as daily sales emails.
Others also reported seeing the newsletter in Spam which also surprised me because our Spam-report rate is very low (0.003% vs. industry standard 0.02%).
In the end I think we just have to accept that an open-rate of 40%+ of yesteryear is no longer feasible and also admit that there is room for improvement. I know our subject lines could be better, it’s a topic I struggle with because I really dislike click-bait subjects myself but there must be a better way to be both informative and interesting.
Budget
In our Day 1 Report we stated that Game Dev Tycoon iOS cost us 190K and a few people reacted to that saying that the budget is way over the top. I should start with saying that we budgeted for 120K, the rest was, well, unexpected but both we and the developers of the port Rarebyte believed that a good performing port needs to be of high quality. The game experience needs to feel right and not just be a function-by-function copy of the PC version.
I think it’s also an easy mistake for developers or designers to severely underestimate the complexities of a different game. Game Dev Tycoon isn’t as small as it may seem. The original PC game has over 30K lines of handwritten code, was developed over 1.5 years and has nearly 20K words which appear in the game. The port by Rarebyte (from HTML5/JS to Unity/C#) took over 3,000 hours over nearly a year to develop. The budget isn’t just development either, it includes marketing and other expenses.
The bottom line is that if you run a game development studio as a business where you pay everyone on the team a fair wage and where your own time isn’t worthless either, then game development is really really expensive and risky. That’s especially true if you then factor in the real amount of cash you need to earn to even get that budget together in the first place but that’s a topic we will explore in a proper post-mortem.
Why not make a new game instead?
The other sentiment that came up was why we even spend effort to port an old game instead of making a new one.
Well, to those who haven’t heard it before, let me introduce Game #2: Tavern Keeper 😉
We are investing heavily into a fantasy tavern simulation game for the PC, you can find out more on our website: https://tavernkeeper.com
The main reason it took us so long to get Game Dev Tycoon for Mobile off the ground was because we didn’t have the human resources to develop both a new game and a port and strategically and creatively a new game seemed more important. We still wanted to do a port simply because so many people asked for it but finding a development partner you can trust takes time, hence the delay in Game Dev Tycoon appearing on mobile.
Are you only marketing to people who own Game Dev Tycoon?
In the first report it seemed like we only used our current fans and reach to market the new release. I didn’t mention it before but we contacted nearly 300 journalists and several influencers during the lead-up of the launch and most of the review coverage is a direct result from that. We also set a review embargo for release day to try to get as many clicks on the App Store page as possible on day one. I think this would have worked fine if not for the link not working. As I also said in the previous report, we would consider a soft launch next time we launch something on the App Store.
To wrap this up, thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion, be it on the forum, on social media and via email! Besides the points I mentioned above, there were many suggestions that made us think and we appreciate all of your input and time. Also thanks to everyone who gave our game a review and who considered other options. This is all really helpful, so thank you! 💚
Outlook
To close off this report, I wanted to give you some insight into live data that we are seeing on Unity analytics today (this data is a bit more up-to-date than our other sources). Unity analytics show that 1.7K units were installed in the last 14 hours, which suggests that day 4 will be our strongest day yet. In addition, App Annie shows us that we are featured in 15 countries on both the iPhone and iPad home page today (yay!) so we can expect an upwards trend. We will report on the results of the next days early next week.
To be notified of further reports, consider signing up to our newsletter (you will be in good company) and perhaps take the time to white-list ‘system@greenheartgames.com’:
– Patrick
Greenheart Games 💚
You can comment on this post here.
Continue following our story in part 3.
We decided before the release that we would try to share sales data with the public after checking that this is allowed with our contact at Apple. This is in part so that other developers have more data to make decisions on, and also gives us a chance to talk more about the release, instead of only re-sharing positive coverage.
Here’s the data from our release day (one day delayed because of how the data is collected).
(For Android players: Release on Android is scheduled for January!)
(Release time 28th Nov, 6AM PST.) Data after 24 hours
Piracy
We did not repeat our piracy experiment because I don’t think we are legally allowed to publish an iOS game outside of the App Store, even if it were a joke version. Looking at our data however, and seeing that the actual users are in fact lower than the purchases, suggests that there is a piracy rate of 0%, which would be incredible.
Reception
4.8 stars
iOS Release – Day 1 Analysis: A Rough Start4.8
Players had a great time playing the game. On release day we got 86 ratings with a total rating of 4.8 stars, or as Game Dev Tycoon would say 10, 10, 10, 9 (thanks, All Games 😉). Seriously though, the only visible low rating was due to an issue where the game can crash on iPhone X – fair enough and sorry, we are investigating (if you have that issue, please try to logout of Game Center and then back in again or get in touch with us via email).
The press also gave us great reviews, here is the 5-star review from Toucharcade:
It’s the perfect sort of game for mobile devices and there’s so much to do here […] all players owe it to themselves to check out this great port.
We couldn’t have hoped for a better reception. Thanks players and press! You are amazing 💚
Sale Numbers
1,463 copies in 24 hours is pretty good for a first game on a platform but if you take into account our audience and if we compare this data to other platforms and to the amount of copies we have to sell to break even on the mobile version, it becomes more sobering.
Even on the Windows 8 Store, back in 2011 when we had an audience reach of zero and very few people had Windows 8 (and even fewer wanted to have anything to do with the Store app on it), we sold around 450 copies on day one. Given the massive reach of iOS, the much lower price ($4.99) and given that we (tried) to reach our audience we certainly hoped for a better launch day.
To give another comparison, when the game launched on Steam we sold substantially more on day one.
Visibility
The reason Steam was such a strong release for us was primarily because Steam had us featured on the front page. After the piracy story went viral in early 2012 and we had all the attention of the world (it felt like it anyway) we didn’t actually do the smart business thing and rush the game on Steam but instead disappeared for over three months to polish the game based on feedback we’d received from our players. Quality-wise this was an important decision. Our initial release has a Metacritic rating of 68%, but after the changes we made for the Steam release, we got a 95% user approval rating from Steam players. If Steam hadn’t featured us at launch though, I don’t think we would have reached the critical mass that makes word-of-mouth effective… bringing me to the next point: marketing.
Marketing (or how we failed to reach most of our audience)
We suspected that Apple would not feature us on day one, so we set our goal to try to rally our audience behind the release on launch day to get the first important positive boost. Part of the reason we were confident to invest into a good Game Dev Tycoon port (Rarebyte, our development partner, spent over a year creating the port), was that we have a larger audience than the usual indie game studio.
What’s more is that the vast majority of these recipients bought Game Dev Tycoon in the past and are simulation game fans. We treat our newsletter with a lot of respect and only use it when we have big news, sometimes going nearly 600 days without sending something as we really don’t want to inconvenience people. This has worked really well for us in the past as the few times we do actually send a newsletter, we reach a open rate of nearly 40% (industry standard: 20.82%).
Our thinking thus was simple: Make a good port that also offers something new and write a straightforward and nicely formatted email bringing people directly to the iOS store.
We sent the newsletter out in time for the US mainland to see. Sadly though, the result over the next 24 hours was underwhelming: an open rate of 13% and a click rate (on the image or link to the App Store) of 2.41% which is both well below the industry standard. This means that on launch day from our 145K-strong newsletter readership, only 3,509 people clicked on the link. I’m not sure what the cause of this low rating was but people live busy lives and we are not entitled to their time! We will simply try to reach our audience again in the next few days.
Unfortunately, for many of those people who did click the link, the link didn’t seem to work and they couldn’t find the game in the App Store.
App Store patience
Apple says that it can take up to 24 hours for the Store to be updated and show new releases. They are not kidding. We sent our newsletter out six hours after the game release (after we had tested the game link extensively among the team and our friends) but even 18 hours after release people were still saying that the link resolved to nothing. Game Dev Tycoon was also not showing up in search results and we were simply not visible in the Store for the clear majority of the day. This was rather stressful and unexpected. We certainly would consider a soft launch next time we release something on the App Store.
Social media
To try to increase our initial reach we ran a thunderclap campaign (thanks for everyone who signed up) and we were happy with the result but should probably have pushed this more and earlier.
Our announcements (Twitter, Facebook) did reasonably well too but the sad fact of the matter is that the followers you have on social media are largely unreachable unless you spend heavily on advertising.
Reluctantly, spending a bit on advertising is what we tried next, just to give us a first boost and reach our existing followers but both Facebook and Twitter refused to take our money. Facebook apparently doesn’t allow boosting of posts that link to the App Store:
Twitter only allowed me to boost the post in Austria
and then, when I found a specific App Store promotion option, simply refused to accept the link as valid (just as many other users had reported, the link didn’t work for them):
Regardless, we couldn’t afford to invest much in social media boosts anyway. The game is only $4.99 and has no further monetization (no ads, no in-app purchases) and given that Apple still takes a cut, I suspect there is not much point in paying $2+ to get someone to install the game. (We are running a trial on Facebook though, so we’ll see what those results will be next week).
Charts
During the end of the first day, we did show up in Top Paid games’ charts across the world which, given the sales numbers, was surprising. In the US we made spot 42 under Top Paid and in many ‘Strategy’ lists we were in the Top 20.
If you are wondering what Rank 42 in Top Paid relates to in Top Grossing category, the answer is apparently Rank 1,560+ which, together with our earnings from our first day, just highlights how steep the Top charts on the App Store fall. I suspect for premium games, if you are not in the Top 30, you are not very profitable (though this is all based on App Annie rather than data from Apple so take it with a grain of salt).
Outlook and Conclusion
Release day is always stressful and exciting at the same time. On one hand you are faced with unexpected technical issues and simply a lot of unknowns, all of which is emotionally draining. On the other hand, you get to see first reactions and wonderful people share their experiences and enjoy the launch with you. As developers, we spend years behind the screen working quietly on our games with almost no input from anyone so it’s really fantastic to then see so much joy from players.
On the business side, we will have to wait and see. The mobile game cost us around 190K USD because, well, the game is much larger than you might think and we really wanted to make a good port. Naturally, we need to sell a lot more copies before this becomes profitable but we are not entitled to profitability, nor success. It’s only the first day and hopefully now that the link works and our game is visible, things will pick up a bit. Meanwhile we are addressing all known issues and hope for a potential feature from Apple (which we are also not entitled to, of course). Our biggest chance to success is, quite simply, you. If you think you could like our game, please check it out:
And if you enjoy the game, leave a positive rating or consider helping in other simple ways 💚.
PS: To read future analysis and a planned post-mortem, consider signing up to our newsletter:
Game Dev Tycoon is available on iPhone and iPad RIGHT NOW. Go and get it!
Launch trailer
New Features
The mobile port of Game Dev Tycoon was rewritten for mobile from scratch by our development partners Rarebyte. Work started more than a year ago and all in all it took more than three thousand hours to bring Game Dev Tycoon to mobile. This isn’t just a straight port. A lot of love and care went into this and once we saw the quality of the port we took some time out from our second game to develop new content for the mobile release.
Updated Storyline
Gaming history doesn’t stand still and so we’ve updated the game’s story line to match. Who knew Ninvento would deliver another innovative console to the market?
More Topics
We added a bunch of new topics to the game, from Farming and Mad Science to Dystopian and Abstract, to name a few. Now you have even more freedom to make the games you want to make. As part of the extensive user interface redesign, we’ve also given all topics shiny new icons.
New Pirate Mode
The mobile release introduces a new (and optional) super challenging pirate mode. Can you survive as a game developer when faced with game piracy? Will you take investor money to stay afloat? Can you keep up with the DRM curve to protect your income or will you go bankrupt like the majority of startups?
Inspired by true events, this game-mode provides a tough challenge to seasoned game dev tycoons.
Streaming support
Game Dev Tycoon for iPhone and iPad has built-in support for video recording and streaming so if you are a influencer and entertainer, go ahead and broadcast your path to your success (or failure)!
What are you waiting for?
FAQ
Price?
Game Dev Tycoon on iOS costs $4.99 (USD) or your local App Store equivalent which, depending on your currency and taxation system, varies (we don’t have control over region-specific pricing). That’s about half of what it costs on PC. The game has no ads, no in-app purchases and (ahem), no loot boxes.
Android release
The Android release is scheduled for January 2018. If you don’t want to miss it, please subscribe to our newsletter:
PC Update
Originally, we planned to update the Steam/Desktop version a few weeks after the Android release in January but since receiving so much interest from PC players, we plan to put a beta version on Steam once the iOS release has calmed down a little. This will also give modders a chance to make use of our new topic icon features, though adjusting mods is entirely optional as existing mods should continue to work without issues.
If you want to be notified when the PC update goes out, just sign up to our newsletter:
You like the game and want to help spread the word? That’s so nice of you!
Head over here and thank you so much! 🤝🏼
To discuss our announcement, please head to our forum.
Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone, and iPad are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.
The mobile release of Game Dev Tycoon contains no in-app purchases and no ads. We did, however, take the opportunity to add a few new things to the game for this release.
You can look forward to:
– an updated story line (something about bitter tasting cartridges).
– new topics to enable even more game types.
– a new super-difficult game mode, inspired by true events.
– built-in video recording and streaming support because Game Dev Tycoon provedtobepopularwithstreamersaroundtheworld.
– a re-designed user interface, tuned to mobile devices.
PC players won’t miss out on these, as new content such as topics (including these gorgeous icons), the new game mode, and updated story line will be delivered as a free update to our current Game Dev Tycoon players soon after the mobile release.
Anticipated Questions
Why did it take you so long?
We knew a good port would probably take more than a year to do right. We also knew that we lacked the experience with mobile game development to do an efficient job and since we wanted to start our second game too, we had to look for a development partner. Someone with the right experience, someone who gets what makes Game Dev Tycoon fun and, most importantly, someone we can trust to deliver a quality port.
Who developed the port?
We partnered up with Rarebyte, a premium developer with a long history of mobile development experience based in Austria. They have been great!
In what languages will you release Game Dev Tycoon?
The game will be available in 17 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Arabic, Czech, Dutch, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese-Brazil, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Korean.
In what countries will the game be available?
We aim for a global launch but due to release complexities introduced by China it is unlikely that we will be including China at launch.
Are you looking for testers?
Yes, we’d like to test the game with a small number of players. If you are interested in testing the game, please voice your interest here.
I'm a journalist/influencer, can I get a copy to review?
After two years of working on our next game in secret we are finally ready to tell you what Game #2 will be. Find out more at our freshly baked website at www.tavernkeeper.com
First things first: we are not ready to announce more details about Game #2 but in case you haven’t seen our non-revealing teaser page, you can find it here (make sure you sign up to our newsletter while you are at it!).
That out of the way, I’m happy to report that since we changed the project over to Unity some 10 months ago we have made a ton of progress. It was a bold step and a difficult decision to scratch all our previous prototypes and restart from zero but switching the engine and rebooting the project was absolutely the right call. The game will be much better for it.
The entire team is focused on this reboot and we are getting closer to an internal alpha version of the first level (we currently plan for three large progression steps, similar to how GDT has offices). Most of the core systems like AI, game-mechanics, UX, prop/animation systems are in place for the alpha and our newest team members, Seth and Mike, have employed their art wizardry and art necromancy skills to raise the game from ugly prototype to something that looks very much like an ambitious indie game in the making.
On a personal note, I will remember 2015 as the year I did not sleep. It was also one of the most joyous, emotional and challenging years of my life. Around this time last year my wife and I found out that we are expecting our first children… Surprise: twins!! This year in May we welcomed our twin boys into the world and life has not been the same since. Needless to say, I took some time off in the middle of the year but I had no idea just how challenging it would be to run a business and work from home while having twin-newborns in the house. Looking back, the only reason I was able to get anything done at all was because of the generous help from family and friends. Anyway, it has certainly become easier since then and thankfully, when it comes to Greenheart Games, there is a whole team of people involved.
Looking forward to 2016, I’m very excited about the road ahead and I’m looking forward to being able to start talking more about Game #2 (probably once we are closer to a beta). I’m also aware that our complete focus on this reboot (combined with my temporary break) has meant that we retreated from the Game Dev Tycoon community a bit too much and that’s something I’d like to change.
The last few days I’ve added some better error reporting to GDT, fixed a long-standing issue that would affect new users and Daniel updated the translations again (we now have a Korean beta). I’ve also started working on some small UX improvements and we will discuss other options for GDT in the new year. We feel very fortunate to have so many players still enjoying or just starting to enjoy Game Dev Tycoon and, while we still need to focus on Game #2, we want to do something for the GDT community as well.
Happy holidays and wishing everyone a fantastic 2016.
Last month, we hosted our first charity sale under the label “Gamers, Assemble!”
I’m happy to report that thanks to the generous gamers who participated, we donated 3,500 AUD to the Caritas, Middle East Crisis Appeal.
Here is our donation receipt:
As you can see on the sales page, 143 people contributed 1606.14 USD in the sale.
As a special thanks to people who participated and as a counterpoint to some of the nastier messages we have received about this, we ended up donating much more than what our initially stated rules would have prescribed.
Thanks again to everyone who helped! This will hopefully not be the last time we host a charity sale.
We have been very quiet. Last year was an intense year for us. We hired a larger team and we started a bunch of really interesting projects. Things became hectic quickly. There’s probably a good reason we only allow one project at a time in Game Dev Tycoon :D.
Anyway, as the year progressed, some projects went well, others not so much and not everything has gone to plan. Halfway through the year a new idea for a game came up that quickly became one of the favorites among the team. We realized that this new idea required a much bigger focus and shelved some of the projects that weren’t progressing as much as we’d hoped. This also gave us the opportunity to take the best elements from these shelved projects and integrate them into this new idea.
After prototyping this new project in HTML5, we also realized that this game will really work better with a full 3D engine, and, after spending months working with three.js, we decided to restart the game from scratch in Unity. More on that decision here.
Sadly, all this means that it will be a little while longer before we can show something but we are all really excited about the project. Here are some pointers on what we currently focus on:
Game #2
Our main focus is Game #2. Game #2 is a humorous and sophisticated business simulation game in the spirit of classics like Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper and Star Topia. It’s a new exciting concept and we are focusing on a great single player experience, full with interesting game mechanics and interactive story-telling. It’s our first 3D game and has simulation as well as base building elements. We are super excited about this but unfortunately it’s too early to show more (especially since we are switching engine).
Game Dev Tycoon 2
Game Dev Tycoon 2 is a long term goal for us. Last year we spent a considerable amount of time working on concepts for it (including a early gameplay prototype, more than just talk!). We wanted to prove that we have the necessary vision to make a sequel worthwhile. I think we do. We are innovating on the core gameplay, adding more and more features and aim to deliver a much more mature simulation game (while keeping it fun). We feel though that we can learn a lot from focusing on Game #2 first, and then coming back to the game dev genre. We are not leaving Game Dev Tycoon on the wayside though. More on this soon!
Today, we are happy to announce that Game Dev Tycoon now ships with Steam Workshop support and, even better, there are already a dozen great mods available for you to enjoy. From simple mods that add topics and platforms, to more advanced mods adding competitors or allowing you to build custom PCs. Head over to our Workshop page to check out what’s on offer.
To celebrate the launch we are running a week-long 50% discount. Enjoy 🙂
Create your own mod!
Whether you are an expert modder or a complete beginner, you can create a mod for Game Dev Tycoon.
For beginners, our community has created a wizard-style mod creation tool that requires no programming knowledge. With its simple UI, the Ultimate Mod Editor allows you to create your own mod in no time.
Game Dev Tycoon is written in HTML5 and if you do have some programming knowledge, the open nature of this technology doesn’t put a limit on what you can achieve. To start with, you can use our modding API but skilled modders are *not limited* by what the API provides. We have an enthusiastic and friendly modding community and we’d love to see you become a part of it. Head over to our forums and say hello 🙂
To developers
Is your game created in HTML5? Want to add Workshop support to your own Steam game?
Good news! We have just updated our open-source Steamworks integration library, Greenworks, to include Workshop support and you can use this to integrate Steam Workshop for your game for free. Check it out here.
Since we announced modding support for Game Dev Tycoon late last year we have seen a great deal of interest in modding and in a short time the community has created some impressive mods. To check out some of the best mods have a read through our first Game Dev Tycoon Modding Spotlight.
Here’s a summary of these mods:
The EPM mod adds many more topics, platforms, events and even some advanced features like the ability to create your own PC’s or to set your own sales price.
The Cheat Mod finally allows you to cheat to your hearts content without endangering your save files by manually editing them.
The Tweak Mod supercharges the settings menu, allowing you to speed up the game and gives you even the power to turn some of the notifications into less invasive text popups.
The Camelot Expansion pack adds a whole lot of additional game options and UI tweaks (check out the feature list through the link).
There are also a few experimental mods with a promising future:
The Platform Randomiser turns your real world market knowledge useless and offers a greater (albeit currently some times extremely unfair) challenge.
The Competitor Mod adds virtual competitors to the game.
The Multiplayer Mod allows you to compete with other real players.
If this list doesn’t impress you then check out our full mod list. To learn about how to install mods check out the modding FAQ. Please be aware that mods can turn your current save files inoperable so be careful when you install mods.
Introducing The Ultimate Suite
Today, we are not just celebrating a whole lot of awesome mods but it is also my pleasure to introduce the Ultimate Suite, a mod editor and mod library created by our veteran modders Francesco Abbattista (aka @alphabit) and Chad Keating (aka @SirEverard).
Ultimate Mod Editor
The Ultimate Suite includes the Ultimate Mod Editor or UME for short. With the UME anyone can produce Game Dev Tycoon mods by using a simple wizard mod creation tool. No coding experience or JavaScript knowledge required!
UME not only allows you to add custom topics, platforms, engine items and events but also allows you to add your own achievements and lab researches.
How cool is that? Answer: Substantially!
Ultimate Lib
While the Ultimate Mod Editor is a great tool for novice modders, the Ultimate Suite also gives more power to advanced modders through the release of the Ultimate Lib. The UltimateLib essentially expands on the features offered through our official modding API and provides many more additional features.
Supporting our Modders
Clearly our community has embraced modding in a big way and we can’t wait to see what’s next. Given the interest our fans have shown we think we have also a responsibility to further support modding. Last month we already published changes in our Modding Agreement that allow modders to accept donations. For good measure, and as a small thank you, we have made some donations to prolific modders ourselves and have other surprises planned. We have also dished out some ‘Advanced Modder’ titles on the forum and are working on a badge system for our forum to further give modders the recognition they deserve.
Finally, we have started working on Steam Workshop support. At the moment this is in early stages but we are looking forward to giving our modders more exposure through the Steam community.