City Game Studio: Your Game Dev Adventure Begins

It looks too simple, but this is an amazing game. I had a lot of fun!
My company Rat Star Studios got huge so fast.
I've developed some insane games like Blue Dead Redemption, Tim Clansy's, The GenZ Scrolls: arena, daggerfall, morrowind, oblivion, skyrim, skyrim plus, skyrim special edition, skyrim GOTY, skyrim extra, skyrim pro, skyrim remastered, skyrim platinum, skyrim 2... but at that point I had unlimited money and ran out of content.

Fun game and great and very active devs

I really can't recommend this game enough to everyone interested. This was my first game of this type. Since then I've tried a few others and legit none of them even hold a candle to City Game Studio. If you like other games like this, this will be your favorite. 9/10 for the genre

One of the best game dev simulations.
Some gameplay features are rather basic, but that doesn't destroy the gameplay at all.

Would like to see some move towards releasing a game for a lower price or in a bundle.
I've seen and played that in Mad Games Tycoon 2 and it's a feature I really love.

If you like Game Dev Tycoon, this is better. I also like the fact that it's made using Godot Engine.

I’m loving this game. I’m about 5 hours in. I played the hell out of Game Dev Story on my phone and PC, and was hoping someone would make a more feature-full, updated type of game like this.

It’s a little rough around the edges in the UI, but I’m really enjoying this game. Such a fun time!

A good spiritual successor to Game Dev Tycoon, with its own twist.
Compared to well known Tycoon, City Game Studio has much more tools for Player's disposal - the city itself and option to build multiple studios, working cross-project or independently, get publisher deals or be a publisher - there is a lot to get into.
This itself makes it a very interesting approach, as it's easy to get in this way and high level control of production known from Game Dev Tycoon is there, making it not overwhelming - with more detail of control.

Worth trying out, especially as developer is very active and builds up this title, so more good to come.

Just Played It!

Game Dev Studio on steroids, fun, addicting and with a lot of upgrades, City Game Studio is the go to for this type of game

Binogure made me a hacker. He MADE me. My cat refuses to let me pet him anymore.
The game is great! Buy it- have fun!

Easily one of the best game dev games

One of my favorites in this genre. Binogure is incredibly and diligently working on this game still. There are consistent updates and it has been through many updates that have increased enjoyment of the game and made me comeback at least once a year for a few hours to play again.

Extremely fun. It's Game Dev Tycoon on steroids, it has so much more to it. I love both games to death, but this one definitely went above and beyond.

Great and updated alternative to Game Dev Tycoon. My only problem with this game is how outdated the UI looks and feels.

i made a studio called fuckkill studios
i won
i made a game called fuckkill
i won

If you liked Mad Games Tycoon Youll love this. More in depth but not confusing. Very fun very addicting. Still being updated years later.

It s very good game. I personally spend a loot of time in there and it s still fun after more than 100h....

The closest thing we'll get to a Game Dev Tycoon 2.

Game is fun for a few hours but it has no depth

Pretty fun and entertaining game. if you are looking for a management game where you can laid back and not feel overwhelmed by it than this might be your game.

Game Dev Tycoon And Software Inc Had A Baby with some unique additions to the play

Nice game. I think i sniped it for 10€ but once you played it through it feels really one colored. It has no real replay factor maybe the devs will read it and build in something like crisis or buyouts from enemy firms.

I've played Game Dev Tycoon back in the day and it was plenty of fun, but I always thought it lacked a lot of features and replayability. After a while, it feel like I'm doing the same few things over and over and it lost it charm after several runs. This game is not like that. City Game Studio is a shining example of a spiritual successor done right with enough features and mechanics to run laps around the OG. Right now, in my current save, I have more money, employees, progression, and technology options that the endgame of GDT even offers. This is still the early game and that blows my mind. There is so much CGS has to offer as a video game development tycoon title and I can't wait to see what comes next.

Game dev tycoon, but better and it is still updated with more content

Game Dev Tycoon but you have no idea what you're doing

Recommended 9/10

The game is fun, many of the tasks can be automated before they get overwhelming. And most of all, the game gets active attention and consistent updates from the Dev!

i took over the entire game and console industry, ez

Fun game. Pretty easy to get a hang of. A lot of combos, and it might be difficult to get a good game at first, but it's very fun.

Honestly, its a fun game.

Plenty of content to be found related to this type of game.

Had some game breaking issues with the game (crashing) asked for help on the discussion page and within a day the developer not only contacted me but solved the problem, really appreciate that considering he could have easely ignored it spending most of his time on creating the sequel instead.

*THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN MADE BY AN ACHIEVEMENT COMPLETIONEST, MAY BE BIASED DUE TO ACHIEVEMENTRY*

This game is actually pretty fun, i made it to 2024 and am still going!
I made a game called Dawgstorm which became a HIT with MILLIONS of units.
However they should add making PCS because they are availible platforms.

J'aime beaucoup les possibilitées pour personnaliser et sortir des jeux ! Très bon jeux dans l'ensemble :)

this is a really well made and fun game, and you'll love it especially if you came from Game Dev Tycoon first

Chill game

fun game and enjoyable

After completing the game it doesnt really make you wanna come back for more, but for a good price on sale its a pretty fun game to pickup. Who wouldnt want to manage their own game studio and release games? There are plenty of cool features in this game and its definitely a fun little laptop game.

Developer is amazing, very responsive to community feedback and updates often with qol, use or cool new features/mechanics.

Fun game and polished, especially in this genre.

This is how modern game development should go!

i9-13900K, 32GB of ram, 4070ti and the game crashes so much that the 2-min autosave feature is useless. I have to manually save every single time that i make a decision. I really loved the game that i put up with it for two days but jesus its unplayable for me :(

An odd little game. Objective isn't clear beyond not going bankrupt, you can make as much money as you'd like and it puts you on a leader board but otherwise lacking in direction. Game lags out when you really have a lot of game studios. There's no real punishment for expansion. Overall game lacks direction and feedback and has performance issues.


Edit to add my response to dev's reply:

A scenario sounds like a great idea, but that's not what I meant. There is a win condition already built into the game complete with a "you won" screen, but the win condition and the progress towards it is not presented to the player (or if it was I TOTALLY missed it). There are no objectives to reach for or to measure your progress against (E.G. Keep 10 employees on payroll for one year, launch your first AAA game, Make 1G on a single game launch etc.). I don't even know what I did to trigger the win condition!! There are some achievements, but it's not something you're told to work towards.

Yes, the game has five difficulties and I played on the in-game recommended "2" difficulty, and while it may have had an impact on some of the following issues, I don't think that's the source the above mentioned issues and I can't imagine them being remedied by a higher difficulty as they seem like design oversights/choices. It seems like you put effort into trying to make hiring, decorating and expansion choices impactful and important, but at some point they just don't matter (decoration choices NEVER mattered at any point on "2" difficulty) and you're buying up every person and building that you can with absolutely zero consideration as there's no downside to doing so. Also, once you start releasing multiple games at a rapid clip, your game will bog down performance and fill the screen with popups detailing how well they did and make you unable to play further.

There are many things to like in the game; among them I especially like how the making your game engine free and open source unlocks free updates to your engine from the "community". The cat videos when you're hacking are cute too. It's not that I didn't like the game, I do, it's just that it's far too flawed and incomplete feeling to recommend it as it is. Just giving my honest feedback, good luck dev.

Addicting, like any game with numbers which go up can be. Lots of features, not as many as Software Inc, but enough to keep a "bloat lover" like me busy long enough. It also drops all the sandbox aspects and frames the player into a strict, immutable storyline, with up and downsides. As an Amiga user of course I'll focus all my efforts on it, but why only the A500? That's it, only the 500 is available, and even the allegedly most complete mod won't add any other model. Having this preset story means that I can fully predict where not to waste money and every game is going to be the same.
UI is decent, a couple screens might had been tied together but this is nitpicking, it does its job. OST and sounds are quite repetitive but not intrusive. Graphics are barely serviceable, but everything is clear, no noise, no excessive colors.

In the end the game is leagues behind Software Inc, but it offers a different enough experience, borrowing much from Game Dev Tycoon except its barebone structure. Not a masterpiece, still entertaining.

TLDR: Promising game with some annoying issues

At first glance, CGS seems like an updated and more in depth Game Dev Tycoon. You start your game company in your room and after publishing a few succesful games, you rent a bigger studio. At that point, the differences between these two games become evident.

For one, there's a city map. I still don't know what the point of it is, but it's there. You select which studio you want to rent, (which largely consists of filtering on the maximum amount of rent you want to pay, sorting the list with largest area surface at the top, and clicking that studio) and then you're given the option to automatically furnish it with furniture. You could do it manually, but that's exceptionally tedious, so I never bothered. This means that your studio will look like an absolute pig's breakfast. Since the studio floor is what the screen will be centered on most of the time, it's quite problematic from an aesthetic point of view.

This entire aspect of the game (building and furnishing) feels rather useless at the moment. It also leads to some awkward situations. When servers become a thing, you need to place them down physically. The AI will not place them down when you automatically furnish an office, presumably because you don't want servers to clog up your office space. That's fine, just rent a whole new building and use it as a server park. Only, there is no option to automatically furnish it as such. Which means, you need to manually plop down each individual server. Since it's really tedious to do this neatly, I just spam click random locations, which doesn't really matter, because I'll never have to look at this location again.

Talking about building, the only way for you to train your staff (apart from them leveling up by working on projects), is to send them to university. Sounds logical, no? Well, as far as I can tell, you have to build a university yourself before you can do this. Since this is something you can only do when you've amassed quite a bit of money, it means that you can only start to purposely train your staff when you don't really need to worry about income anymore. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of the systems in place here, since it really gives you a way to spend the massive amount of money you should be making by the 90s. However, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired for now.

Actually developing games is the same as with other games in this genre, so I won't bother explaining it. You can release your game pretty much right after development is finished though, without a lenghty bug-fixing phase, which for some reason feels a bit off. As far as I can tell, succesful games won't increase third-party console sales. So no, you can't keep developing brilliant and succesful releases for the Virtual Boy and make it a succes. That's fine of course, since no other game dev games that I know of feature a fully dynamic economy, although it is something I would love to see.

If you decide to develop and sell your own console though (and you really should), you can of course influence its sales. The amount of games (on release and afterwards), the quality of components, the marketing budget, etc... Developing the perfect console is what will really get you swimming in fat stacks of cash. It is here, however, that my willing suspension of disbelief was pushed beyond its limits. You see, I had developed the perfect console. Reviews were a whopping 100%. Sales were massive. By its second year on the market, it had sold 130+ million units. To boost sales, all games that I developed were exclusively for the HyperSystem (I suck at coming up with names, sue me).

Imagine my surprise when my first 100% game for this system sold 430 million times. Again, this was developed exclusively for a console which had shipped around 130 million units. In other words, the amount of units a game can ship don't seem to be influence by platform market share. To me, this shows that there is no economic simulation to speak of. This game went from "roleplay as succesful CEO and watch numbers go up" to "idle on my phone while numbers go up". I haven't actually tested if this is a bug that's only relevant on your own in-house console design, or if it goes for all third-party platforms as well. Either way, before this revelation, I had in-game plans: I was planning to branch out into more genres, develop a handheld console, buy up a competitor. When I saw the man behind the curtain, however, I didn't want to do any of these things anymore.

Overall, on the surface there are plenty of things to like here. It's only after a few hours of play that you'll see them for what they are: window dressing. This game does receive quite regular updates. If these systems actually do get integrated into a well-oiled simulation, you can bet dollars to donuts that I'll be back to playing this until the sun comes up. Until that happens however, I'll just let it sit idly in my library, hoping for the update that will actually turn this game into one that I want to play.

EDIT: The developer quickly responded to my review and set me straight. You can definitely furnish a studio with servers, I simply missed the option. The games selling more copies than consoles on the market is apparently a UI issue that lists subscribed online users as new buyers and will get fixed soon. In all, that's enough for me to give this game a tentative "recommend" label, if you don't mind dealing with some rough edges when it comes to renting/building/furnishing office space and training the workforce.

An enjoyable game with a solid amount of depth. Originally found out about it when the dev posted it on Reddit and chatted with them briefly about it, and I've been enjoying myself so far.

Great game, regular massive updates, lots of developer communication.

Pretty good, up until this one there wasn't really anything that came close to game dev tycoon imo.

This feels just as satisfying to play to me and is definitely something i will consider going back to time and time again.

The best game dev management game I've played, with incredible support from the single developer who's been working on this game for years. Cozy with a reasonable amount of depth and a plethora of difficulty options that'll please noobs and pros alike. If I had to leverage any critiques, there are two that come to mind. The first is that the rival companies feel rather soulless and I'd like them to interact with the player more, such as proactively offering contracts or poaching employees or creating games that "copy" your successful titles. The second is that your studio tends to fail hard or snowball before the last ~10 years of the game which can make it kinda tedious to play until the very end. But these complaints are minor in the grand scheme of things, and I give it my whole-hearted recommendation for anyone even tangentially interested in the genre.

Could have more diversity in the things you can do such as make arcades systems, run arcades, mobile games, and other small things like that which add immersion. There also needs to be a way to make consoles and games that don't max out stats/specs since in real life games or consoles that have the best specs don't necessarily always became the fan favorites. That could also add to the immersion since it is kind of annoying to make a super console that gets a 100% score and sells well but the better console is still the shitty Grantendos. There could also be a retro game feature since sometimes people like games that look simpler on purpose such as Undertale.

Other than that! I think it's a great game and I wish it just had a bit more on the immersion side for those sorts of scenarios but my favorite thing about it is that does create a sort of realistic or fun simulation of game development which is the core of the game.

Well I've played it for almost 3 real life days.. If that isn't enough proof for you go back to Call of Duty and bum around on your zombies camos you bum

This game is better than game dev tycoon and very addictive.RECOMENDED!

play it

very good

Nice relaxing game.