Game Dev Story Review (Wildy)
The game that started it all
I used to play this game on my iPhone in 2010 and seeing it on PC, it brought back a lot of memories and I only bought it out of nostalgia.
DO NOT EXPECT an incredible level of simulation, with deep meaningful choices that brings world-shattering results.
It's a mobile game and the delivered package in 2022/2023 is the same game from 2010. There are no improvements.
Why do I recommend it? It was one of the best games in the App Store at a time where there were only very simple games (Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja, etc...), you could spend hours with it and it was worth every cents of your local currency (I also loved the mall game).
It didn't age well and playing on the PC was more of a chore than a pleasure, but I still grin at the silly names and interesting word plays that the devs came up with. It oozes that "play one more turn" sense of comfort with that repeating simple music.
The concept of the game is very easy, keep making games until you get better devs, fire the bad ones, train the best ones aka develop the developers (sic), keep churning out games, select the platforms (consoles), rinse and repeat.
As time goes by, your people will be inevitably better and bring more revenue which will be used to keep hiring better developers to make better game that brings even more revenue and it goes on for a long time.
New consoles are also presented so that you can switch and develop on a more costly one but with more units sold which means more potential customers.
Some gimmick can be used as one-off boosts or advertisements but they aren't very impressive unless you go for a speed run, I guess.
There is no difficulty unless you just go crazy, it's a game where going slowly and steady, you will get there and "win" it.
In conclusion, I recommend this game on sale (otherwise I do feel it's a bit expensive) and with the dangerous caution sign that it might entice you or bore you in less than 1 hour (but it can also get boring after 5 hours when you dominate the gaming world and can't fail anymore).