game-dev-tycoon
So I made my first game – it was a Space Adventure game and I called it EVE. When I released it I waited until all of my bugs had been fixed and then released it immediately. However, when the ratings came in from the press the game was universally disliked:
What can I do to improve the ratings for my games?
When you're prompted to deal with your pirates, you're given two options - warn them or sue them.
If you choose to warn your pirates, your fans will respond positively to the fact you didn't launch all out war against gamers pirating your game. You'll be presented with a brief bit of story about how piracy is rife within the games industry and that many developers are taking gamers to court over it, while others are taking a more relaxed approach to the issue. You will get some positive feedback from them and also gain some additional fans.
If you choose to sue your pirates, you'll get a backlash from your fans, who will be unhappy about you being heavy handed over the situation. You will lose a lot of fans as a result of your actions, but gain some money back in legal claims;
If you are not given two options like in the screenshot on the question, but instead receive a screenshot like below, then you're actually a real life pirate who stole the game instead of buying it;
Perhaps you should consider buying the game rather than downloading it illegally!
Whenever a bug crops up post-release, you should be able to find an option named Release a Patch with a price following it in parenthesis. This option shows up whenever you right click on any of your characters. It will patch the game and make your fans happy!
Best Answer
In order to improve the ratings, you can do one of the following:
Selecting a good combo between genre and type, for example fantasy + RPG will get you a bonus in ratings
Set the sliders at the right level and for medium games and larger, you need to assign staff with the right competencies. This is actually quite complicated and would require a section on its own, a very detailed description can be found here
Hire more/Train your developers, this will allow them to be more productive during development phase. This option is unlocked before you make enough money to move to a larger office
Wait for the game to be totally debugged before to click on finish. You just need to wait until the number of bugs goes to 0
Spend money on research and game engines so that you can use better options
Focus on the important parts of the games, for example for RPG, you need better story, dialogues, world and decent graphics. Do not set things like sound to minimum or you risk getting the odd review telling you that you could have spent more time on sound
Later on, starting with medium games, you need to allocate the right person to the right part of the development or you risk not getting enough points in this part
One mistake many people do in their first games is to do too many game engines, the most important factor in getting high reviews is actually to train your staff and specialize them in order to assign them to the correct tasks in medium games and larger. Game engines should be developed only when you have done many research options that you want to incorporate (do not develop 1 game engine to incorporate a single research option)