How to upgrade the office

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)

Well, you basically have two choices - stop them or let them be. This mechanic isn't that deep and from my experience so far you'll only come across this message once during the game regardless of which option you choose.

If you let your fans continue with their development, then they'll love you for it, you'll get a thank you notice and gain more fans.

If you stop them, then your fans will not be happy and you will lose fans.

The outcomes are pretty much the same as the options to deal with piracy but you won't get money out of it either way.