Your magazine. Your readers.
You take over a small editorial office in an office building: a few editors, your first test devices, an empty magazine. Which games make the cover? Who reviews what? Is there enough money for the printers? And how long will your readers stay when the competition at the newsstand has the better covers or content?
Games Mag Tycoon is a playable memory of the age of games magazines from 1986 to 2010, from the 8-bit home computers to the HD consoles. The deadline creeps closer while you walk through the building and try to turn every issue into a real magazine - into YOUR magazine.
What you do
Plan the issue. Fill your magazine with games, previews, hardware, tips and news. Every editor has strengths, favourites and a mood.
Design the cover. The cover sells this issue, the content sells the next one.
Review and score. What does your team give the classic? And what do the publishers think of that? And what score do YOU give?
Make money. Ads, print run and price: those are your business levers.
Grow with the times. Hire editors, add new platforms, expand your offices, publish special issues and cover discs, up to your own video show - whether as multimedia readers' letters or as the Games-Mag spaceship.
Listen to your readers. You will only succeed if you read your readers' feedback and draw the right conclusions. But there is no manual for the perfect magazine.
An industry as it was
25 years of games from 1986 to 2010, with platforms, games and publishers as they shaped the era.
Thousands of games with release date, genre and platform, modelled on gaming history - with Steam Workshop support
Games magazines modelled on the era as your competition at the newsstand
Mods and Workshop
The content lies in open files in the game folder: games, magazines, editors, publishers, images and texts. Share and subscribe to mods through the Steam Workshop, for example more games for a favourite platform or your own covers. Use the existing, curated data - or change everything.
About me
I read games magazines in their "golden age", above all in the early days of PC gaming in the early nineties, with ASM, PC Player and later GameStar. To this day I follow many of the editors of that time in what they have done since. Games Mag Tycoon is the game I always wanted back then - MAD TV and MAD News were my favourites in my personal "business sim phase".
I have worked as a software developer since 2003. I generated the graphics with code, no AI image generation was used; the style took many rounds of work. The music consists of original songs by my band and me, only restyled with AI for the game. Apart from that, AI was only used for bulk texts in the game data (for example game descriptions) and for the English translation.
Note
Games Mag Tycoon is a fictional business simulation. All games, magazines, companies, devices and people in the game are invented. Any resemblance to real games, magazines, brands or names is purely coincidental and does not mean that their owners are in any way connected to Games Mag Tycoon or oLabAndI; they have neither supported nor endorsed the game.