Run a game studio from the garage up
Mad Games Tycoon 2 puts you in charge of a game development company starting in any year between 1976 and 2020. You build the offices, production facilities and server rooms yourself, place the desks, lounges and bathrooms, and hire the staff who fill them. Early on you are a small outfit with a handful of employees; later you can grow to hundreds of people and take on three roles at once: developer, publisher and console manufacturer. Each passing year brings new technologies and features to research, engines to develop or license from competitors, and market shifts you have to read before you commit to a project.
The games you make are not one thing. You can produce MMOs, free to play titles, mobile games, arcade games, add-ons, spin-offs, GOTY editions, bundles, budget games, retro games, sequels, remasters and ports. Every release feeds into a growing IP, and you build those IPs into franchises, merchandise them for extra income, sell off the ones that go dormant, or buy popular ones from other companies. Licenses from books, toys, movies and sports give a game a built-in audience. Engines matter too: keep your own up to date and take a cut of the profits from every game made with it, or license a competitor's and let them do the maintenance.
Playing together with up to four
Multiplayer runs for up to 4 players, and you decide whether the group cooperates or competes. You can trade technologies with each other and send funds across to friends who are short on cash, or you can sabotage them while everyone chases the top spots on the charts. The charts are a big part of the game: historical records, current market analysis and market research are all tracked, so you can look up who won game of the year in 1986 while you are playing in 2044. A session can run for a century and beyond, which gives a group plenty of room to settle old scores.
Before you start
Decide as a group how you want the session to feel. Difficulty options run from very easy up to a challenging legendary setting, and those can be tweaked further with additional settings. If that is still not enough control, the full sandbox mode carries dozens of options to shape the challenge exactly the way you want it. Pick your starting year carefully, since 1976 and 2020 offer very different technology, consoles and markets to work with. Expect a long game: research, hiring, console production with era-appropriate parts and warranty decisions, marketing campaigns, and buying out up to 100 competing companies all take time to pay off.