Prison Architect, a gaming crowdfunding success story | Hacker News Reader

Prison Architect, a gaming crowdfunding success story

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137 pointsVaskivo87 comments

A bit of an off-topic rant, but:

I think the author is wrong to dismiss Ian Bogost's article as "as an opportunity to ignore gameplay in order to pontificate on race and show off the Foucault they read in college". The author is probably unfamiliar with Bogost, and also misunderstands that Bogost's article in The Atlantic about Prison Architect isn't a game review. I found the analysis of the game and how it relates to cultural perceptions of imprisonment in America (and the world, really) very interesting.

It's political and it's about games-as-culture. It's not a shopping recommendation, and I think this is what the author of TFA misunderstood.

Games are sadly just on the cusp of developing a true arts culture - but we have yet to move out of the consumer mentality, where the only value of a game is if you were entertained by it at your most base level. It also doesn't help that a lot of internet commentators can't distinguish between someone criticizing something they like and personal attacks.

> but we have yet to move out of the consumer mentality, where the only value of a game is if you were entertained by it at your most base level.

Neither did Mozart.

It also doesn't help that a lot of internet commentators can't distinguish between someone criticizing something they like and personal attacks.

It also doesn't help that a lot of critics can't make a criticism along the lines of "I don't like this because X" without injecting an overt or covert "People who like this are X". The former is criticism, the latter is always a personal attack.

Games are frequently something that most instances of arts culture struggle with - commercial. This means that trying to treat games as artistic artifacts, made of beauty and aesthetics, free of the drudgery of economics, is a misguided thing at best.

Games are not generally produced as solely artistic works. The economic aspect is significant. Attempting to discuss and critique games as solely artistic artifacts means missing one of largest influences on any such artifact. It's like discussing architecture without admitting that materials and physics and humans impose limits.

I think there is a massive shift in this though. The rise of indie games, niche crowdfunded games, easier tools to create means people are making games for art and not the AAA paycheck.

Indie games and crowdfunded games are still generally done with an eye towards the economics. Even today, with all the tools available, you still don't generally get a team of a dozen people working full-time on a game for three years solely as an art piece.

This isn't it. Mainstream movies are often analyzed and reviewed as art -- whole books written about them! -- even though they are primarily done "with an eye towards the economics".

Modern tools can help make (admittedly small) games even by people who aren't programmers and who don't necessarily want to make money. It's been a while, but I remember the early days of the Adventure Game Studio; there were people trying to make something to sell, but also plenty of people writing pretty decent games solely because they wanted to. Also see the awesome Interactive Fiction community.

And I think that such analysis has similar flaws for similar reasons. You cannot hope to understand a thing meaningfully if you choose to ignore huge influences on its creation and creative choices.

That's a non-standard view of art. I don't know of anyone who uses the term like that; of course an analysis of art must take into consideration its "huge influences".

For example, when people review classic movies, they take into consideration what studios were willing to fund; executive meddling; whether the movie bombed at the box office; the political situation at the time; the moral codes of the time; budget limitations that forced directors to be extremely creative; problems between the lead actors; etc.

I say this because of the people I know who attempt to treat video games as art. They examine social aspects, political aspects, and so on. There's a tendency to either ignore or gloss over economic aspects.

That said, it's probably easier to do that with classic movies about which there is a sizable body of knowledge. You don't have the same production information about a video game released last month.

Art and creative design are not necessarily invalidated due to motivations of economics. Some people might have something to say of their opinions on how financial aspects of creative projects influence the final 'product', but that's all mostly irrelevant to the main experience of the end user. If a single person created Splatoon in their basement and released it for free, it's interesting to think about, but the experience of the creation remains the same as it is that the game was intended to sell for $54.99 a copy.

No, art and creative designs are not invalidated by economic motivations. However, art and creative design cannot always be fully and properly understood without considering economic motivations.

The experience of the creation might be the same, but how the creation came to be and how it is best understood are very different.

Not just the economic aspect, but the game aspect. Board games and role-playing games have been around much longer, and aren't considered art (and there doesn't seem to be any push for them to be considered as such).

This is an excellent point, and one I didn't think of. Do you have any thoughts on why this might be?

I think some of it goes back to the art vs. design conversation and games, in so much as they are games, tend to fall on the design side (there tends to be a clarity regarding the rules, rules are designed to create good gameplay rather than an expression of artistic vision, etc.). A lot of the things that can be considered art can work just as well outside of the game (take a cutscene, for example, which has no gameplay and is basically a movie inserted into a game).

Of course, there are some games that tie the narrative and the gameplay together in such a way that it's hard to separate the two, such as The Colonel's Bequest (1989), The Last Express (1997), and a favorite of Roger Ebert's, Cosmology of Kyoto (1994). There are also "ungames" that eschewed gameplay in order to create more of an art experience, such as Puppet Motel (1995) and The Manhole (1988). But mainstream gaming has largely forgotten these games (as well as many others).

Good examples! I regret that mainstream gaming has forgotten these games. Non-mainstream gaming hasn't, fortunately. There is the Interactive Fiction community, which has produced some of the best games I've ever enjoyed; there are some indie designers doing experimental games about personal issues -- I'll avoid mentioning them, because that's a can of worms I don't want to open here -- there is the "agitprop" of Molleindustria's Paolo Pedercini, etc.

[EDIT] Why is my parent being downvoted? It is a legitimate question, and we should try to answer it.

Yet there are a lot of board and roleplaying games pushing their boundaries regarding theme and mechanics:

You have boardgames exploring difficult themes (Train[0]) and others being defined as they are played (Fluxx[1])

On RPGs, You can have rpgs about simple themes as being a housecat (Cat RPG[2]) or serious one like rape and domestic violence[3]. In terms of mechanics, there is Dread[4], a horror game that uses a Jenga tower instead of dice.

There is no push to be considered art, but there are folks doing some really cool stuff with the medium.

What is happenning with videogames is that there are people who thing "videogames should grow up" and "stop playing around". That, in my opinion, is stupid. You don't tell a 15 years kid to "grow up". It will come out naturally. KLEt games mature on their own.

[0] http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2009/06/24/can-you-make-a-boa...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxx

[2] http://johnwickpresents.com/product/cat-a-little-game-about-...

[3] sorry, the internet failed me :(

[4]https://dreadthegame.wordpress.com/about-dread-the-game/

Actually, Train was the first thing that came to my mind when typing that comment. The fact that we both immediately thought of the same niche game that apparently has only been played twice without it's creator present suggests that these things aren't terribly common (that's not to say that these edge cases aren't interesting). But maybe a die hard board gamer can correct me, since there tends to be a lot of interesting stuff that goes unnoticed (this is definitely true for video games, I'd be surprised if it wasn't true for other games).

The people who seem to be pushing for games to grow up or talking about Citizen Kane moments (and seemingly forgetting about silent films) seem more interested in validation than anything else. There have been interesting games for decades; if they're truly interested in these, all they have to do is play them.

I'll have to think some more about RPGs, but the thing with board games is that the "narrative" aspect is less important than in modern videogames.

I admit is way less common, but even board games have been created and analyzed as art/philosophy/opinion. Some examples:

- Monopoly (possibly the best known example of a game whose original intent went beyond entertainment).

- Train (a game about Auschwitz: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/63933/train)

As for videogames, the language of the creators themselves sometimes seems to acknowledge the relation to narrative and cinema. Some game designers style themselves "directors", and are sometimes more interested in cutscenes and "telling a story" than in actual interactive gameplay. Note I'm not telling whether I think this is a good or a bad thing :)

I could definitely seem board games as art. As for RPGs, the books themselves are art as are the stories produced. A given session of play would also be art; akin to some kind of improv/acting, though not done with any thought given to an outside viewer. As for the system of rules... that one I'm left unsure of but it may be art in a same way some see elegant code as art.

I don't think this addresses the parent post, though. For one, no-one I know of wants to consider games as solely artistic artifacts. What some in the game development community are asking for is the recognition of games as a valid art form; this is orthogonal to their (admittedly dominant) commercial aspects. In my opinion, more misguided is to consider them as simply mindless entertainment whose content and message is too shallow to be discussed.

Criticism and analysis of games as cultural artifacts is both valuable and needed. Games are like mainstream movies in this regard, where we accept that even mainstream Hollywood movies have a message that can be dissected and analyzed.

My problem is that games-as-commercial-artifacts and games-as-art both miss the point. Games are both, as well as entertainment and cultural artifacts. Criticism and analysis needs to consider all these things or miss important aspects required for understanding.

For instance, the question is not just what message a movie conveys. The question also includes why. Similarly, there are entire game mechanisms that exist solely for economic reasons (IAPs, gating, etc.) that cannot be understood through artistic lenses.

> My problem is that games-as-commercial-artifacts and games-as-art both miss the point. Games are both, as well as entertainment and cultural artifacts. Criticism and analysis needs to consider all these things or miss important aspects required for understanding.

That's why reviewers can attempt to do both. Just like they do with movies :)

The problem is that videogames are relatively new and people are not yet convinced they can be reviewed as art. It's safer to stick to them being just entertainment whose content is pointless to analyze.

My issue with Bogost's article was that he missed one of the core mentalities that went into designing the game: that you are only the architect. The prison industrial complex's main causes aren't rooted in the way prisons are designed and built.

> ...but it’s ludicrous to pretend that it makes for a worthwhile study of the 21st-century American prison...

But not quite as ludicrous as writing up a profile based on the assumption that it was supposed to be. It's pretentious post modern critique at its worst. Political and cultural criticism is fine, but demanding that things tangentially related to the game's focus be shoehorned in is absolutely ridiculous. I don't see how this is different than criticizing Super Mario Bros. for failing to properly address the realities of life as an working class Italian American.

Oh, I'm not arguing that Bogost's article is flawless. I'm just saying that it's wrong to dismiss it simply because he is not interested in reviewing Prison Architect's gameplay. He has something interesting and valuable to say about prisons and how they are depicted in fiction, though in some aspects I agree his article goes too far. Yes, I don't think anyone else (but Bogost) pretends this game is a "worthwhile study" of American prisons; on the other hand, I think he has a point about the absence of race and racism as gameplay elements being very conspicuous in a game about prison.

I don't think Super Mario Bros' subject matter is comparable to Prison Architect's, and so I wouldn't expect the same kind of articles written about it.

I think my biggest issue is how clear it was that he had something to say about the state of American prisons in the 21st century and the depiction of sensitive political topics in video games, then just lopped off all the rest of the context and picked a video game that happened to be about prisons.

If you play the game and have listened to what the developers have said, you'd see that these aspects were not a good fit and the developers specifically wanted to distance the player from these realities. The world outside you is a black box from which prisoners flow in and out. How that happens is completely out of your control and knowledge.

Bogost's article would not have been particularly interesting or revelatory without the context of a popular, recently released game. Context which he shimmed in to bring attention he wouldn't normally have gotten.

Well, "distancing" the player from the realities of prison life is an interesting decision worth commenting on. It's a valid game design choice, sure -- but it's something that definitely can be talked about in the context of "games as art/culture". I find it interesting, at least.

Also, I agree, I too get the vibe that Bogost wanted to talk primarily about the state of American prisons, but this didn't bother me because I wasn't expecting a game review with a final score and a "buy/do not buy" recommendation, and I found some of his points had merit.

> I think he has a point about the absence of race and racism as gameplay elements being very conspicuous in a game about prison.

It's a point in the sense of being the dogmas of a pundit who disguises his propaganda using the form of a game criticism.

> I don't think Super Mario Bros' subject matter is comparable to Prison Architect's, and so I wouldn't expect the same kind of articles written about it.

Personally I would be mildly surprised to NOT find a kotaku article that uses a mario game as a flimsy excuse to make some completely irrelevant point or sensational hook that the writer (or editor) wanted to make anyway.

> I think he has a point about the absence of race and racism as gameplay elements being very conspicuous in a game about prison.

According to you. The idea that a game about prison HAS to address race is the dogma. That's the preaching. That not only has nothing to do with making games that are fun and entertaining, but it also has nothing to do with a true artistic culture (rather than a circle-jerking pseudo-intellectual culture of criticism)

PS http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon1022hm.html

> It's a point in the sense of being the dogmas of a pundit who disguises his propaganda using the form of a game criticism.

I'm confused. Are you saying you think that race isn't a crucial part of prison life? Or are you saying it is, but that it's dogmatic propaganda for someone to point out racism is absent in a computer game about prison?

> According to you. The idea that a game about prison HAS to address race is the dogma.

Well, I didn't write the article; I merely said I think the author has a point. No, no game HAS to do anything. But it's conspicuous when it does/doesn't do certain things. This can be discussed because it's an interesting aspect. That's all.

You can tell it's propaganda because of the rampant question-begging. The author isn't "simply pointing out racism is absent in the game." Here is a direct quote from the Kotaku article:

In the same interview he also admits that, in the U.K., incarceration is not a major issue with huge class and racial implications as it is in the U.S.. Thus, as Brits, they may see the world in a different way.

Note the presupposition: Incaceration in the US has class and race implications. That is the dogma. That is the "message." The next several paragraphs discusses the state of prisons in the US, linking to biased sources with sensational language like "out of control."

Now, you could claim that this tangent is needed to establish the relevance of the subject, but the manner it is presented strongly points to the fact that this is simply a propaganda payload. There's this:

The America justice system disproportionately and purposely targets minorities, which make up about 60% of the population behind the bars, according to the Center for American Progress.

Again this is propaganda. Question-begging. This isn't part of some kind of intellectually open enquiry about prisons, video games about prisons, or even prison simulations. This is one-sided preaching about a subject completely unrelated to videogames.

> Well, I didn't write the article; I merely said I think the author has a point

You did phrase a portion of comment in a way that took responsibility for the idea. Obviously incarceration in the US is racist, right? We're talking about how a videogame designer chose not to focus on this obvious truth about how incarceration is racist especially in the US.

PS to whoever is downvoting me: I have made my post less sarcastic. I will endeavor to be more respectful however it is worth anyone's time to study propaganda and how it works, so as not to be so easily fooled. It's important to be able to recognize it and not excuse it with "oh he's just pointing out <etc.>"

Keep in mind that calling an argument "propaganda" inherently attaches a negative value judgment to it. The only difference between "persuasion" and "propaganda" is the reader's attitude towards the message and (unfortunately) the speaker.

Your points are spot-on and they strangely remind me how most journalists make biased articles when they relate information in the medias, sadly.

(I didn't downvote you)

I'm not sure I agree. Not all question-begging is propaganda, nor is all propaganda question-begging. In fact, in this case it's not question begging at all. Question begging refers to the act of assuming the conclusion of what you're trying to prove, which is not the case here. The author is not trying to prove that "incarceration in the US has class and race implications"; this is a given, a premise of his argument. He is instead trying to say something about Prison Architect and how it depicts prison. It's also written as an opinion piece, not a peer-reviewed publication, and as such doesn't source many of its assertions. I've no problem with that, because I don't read this article seeking proof of anything.

By the way, I do believe incarceration has big race and class implications in almost the whole world, not just the US, so I have no problems with that part of the article.

Am I missing something, because if this [1] is the Atlantic article being discussed, it looks like the author is Will Partin, not Ian Bogost.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/des...

Yes! Thanks for the correction! I'm an idiot. I got confused because this is exactly the kind of article Bogost (who is a game designer/researcher and also writes for The Atlantic) would write. Not that this is a valid excuse, but I read this article some time ago, when it was mentioned in Twitter by Bogost, and somehow got confused and didn't read the byline this time :(

19 million? For a game developed by just two guys (iirc) over the span of two years, that's hitting the jackpot. I'm seeing several projects that make a lot of money for a little effort - DayZ comes to mind, an early access game that costs $35 and has sold millions of copies already, but still feels like a rather bad mod, with little development effort going into it (seemingly).

I'm still on the fence about Star Citizen; the demos they've shown so far are promising, but I'm going to wait until there's an actual game.

In contrast, there's Elite: Dangerous, which had a successful kickstarter at about 1.5 million, was built and released, and is still under active development, with few bugs to speak of (atm, experiences from retail version over half a year after first release)

Don't forget minecraft which finally sold to microsoft for 2b. Developed by one guy (then he added employees after the game took off).

These are all exceptions to the brutal world of indie game development.

Mostly, these developers don't make anything. They spend months and years in almost solitude making something no one will play. Games take a huge time investment to make before anyone is at all interested.

It's the starving artist profession of the nerd world.

You can go even further back to the early days of id Software with John Romero and John Carmack making millions on their titles.

>>> Mostly, these developers don't make anything. They spend months and years in almost solitude making something no one will play. Games take a huge time investment to make before anyone is at all interested. It's the starving artist profession of the nerd world.

Yeah, the Indiepocalypse.

The thing is, a lot of indie games... simply are not fun to play. And that's ok, it's hard to make a game which is fun to play. It's fine. [0]

You can treat indie games as a hobby, just have fun, call it 'starving art', whatever, but don't be shocked that people are not paying money.

On other hand, treat it like a business, with a solid product, market research, plenty of feedback from the outside (echo chamber is no good for a product that you are working on for years), marketing plan and some marketing budget. Even then, you have a chance of failure, where failure is that the revenue does not cover the costs. However, the odds are more in your favor.

These two extremely distinct segments (hobby v business) are both under the 'indie' label, however, their chances at succeeding are extremely different.

[0] I won't even talk about the platformers (there are dozens, if not hundreds, of them released every week) and they all are largely the same.

It's true that there are two kinds of game development going on. I wouldn't call the mostly mobile, metrics driven game dev 'indie' but at the same time that kind of game development has a lot to do with the same business model.

These metrics driven developers risk more cash up front and take less creative risks. Like a Hollywood movies, they pick a genre that is already successful and twist it a little. They likely even spend more on marketing than on production.

Still, even those games (like hollywood movies) remain hit driven so you'd better have a big budget backer to smooth out the edges.

True, but there are also a lot of really well made and unique indie games that struggle because of lack of exposure. Things are much better than they used to be (but they used to be terrible), but still a lot rides on whether some popular Youtubers decide to make a video about your game, and there's still a tendency for media outlets to pretend they're evenhanded by trashing games that haven't found an audience yet.

Elite: Dangerous is a gorgeous game... The game's team is something like > 100 people (Frontier Dev is nearly 250 - 300 employees).

They solded more than 850k copies, but the revenue per employee is indeed much less than Prison Architect.

Here's a talk at AWS Invent 2015 about the network architecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvJPyjmfdz0

> 19 million? For a game developed by just two guys (iirc) over the span of two years, that's hitting the jackpot.

It's actually 10 people, if the Wikipedia page is accurate. Prison Architect is developed by Introversion Software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introversion_Software

> I'm seeing several projects that make a lot of money for a little effort - DayZ comes to mind, an early access game that costs $35 and has sold millions of copies already, but still feels like a rather bad mod, with little development effort going into it (seemingly).

I would agree with you. DayZ spawned a lot of survival genre indie/kickstarted games that are all more or less broken. Even DayZ itself has taken years to add features that were present in the free mod. This might be judgmental but I think the kind of people who primarily buy these games just don't care, because I don't think they're naive enough to believe in the "everything will get better once it's out of alpha/beta" thing that gets thrown around a lot (rarely true).

Even Minecraft is pretty poor in terms of development. Performance has gotten better lately but for the longest time it used to run awfully regardless of the hardware you ran it on. Not only that but there wasn't (and I'm not sure there still is) a proper modding framework so most people just use patched jars and hack the game itself. In Minecraft's case it is understandable though, as it was basically a hobby coding project that exploded in popularity. The only thing that would have saved it from that fate is a complete rewrite, which to my understanding is exactly what Microsoft is doing with it right now since they bought it (C++ rewrite).

> I'm still on the fence about Star Citizen; the demos they've shown so far are promising, but I'm going to wait until there's an actual game.

This is just my opinion, but in my eyes it's vaporware. Too much money, too many promises, and not a lot to go by. I'm sure it might come out in some shape or form but it will never justify the hype and many will be left disappointed. /opinion

I love the guys over at Introversion Software, Uplink was one of my favourite games out there for quite a while. Not at all realistic in any shape or form, but the tension/suspense it generated was incredible. Nothing really came close for a good while until FTL came out.

Defcon in multiplayer is pretty darn good as well. Easily one of the best strategy games out there.

Star Citizen.

Really interests me. I believe it is the next version of EvE so been keeping my eye on it for ages. However I do think they are going to have massive issues bring it all together. At present they have lots of modules that are pretty standalone. Yes it is very pretty but I not sure if they can make it work as a single Shard MMO

I am rather behind on news but last I heard someone left and the FPS part was delayed.

There are concerns from ExDevs highlighting the game on kickstarter might never be released http://news.softpedia.com/news/star-citizen-development-supp...

I think they will turn it in to a single player game with some light MMO features, or they will have to mass shard it, at which point i lose interest.

The fact that just last week they release another ship worth $300, and the above news pieces indicates they are down to 8mil out of the 82million pleged might show how they are running out of money.

Note above minecraft: Notch used minecraft to learn. The code in it was never great, and you are completely right that it generally ran like shit but it is getting better, and the development are stream lining the code but they cannot re-write it because some of the things that make minecraft good was the odd behavoir that a recode would most likely lose.

> Note above minecraft: Notch used minecraft to learn. The code in it was never great, and you are completely right that it generally ran like shit but it is getting better, and the development are stream lining the code but they cannot re-write it because some of the things that make minecraft good was the odd behavoir that a recode would most likely lose.

Yeah I actually went back and edited my post to say about the same thing as you did. It used to frustrate me but honestly you can't blame Markus, and Mojang has done an amazing job at making it run pretty well nowadays.

Introversion is a bit bigger than just two people IIRC.

They also predate the post Steam indie boom: they have a longish history of creating interesting, innovative games that weren’t always that commercially successful going back to around the year 2000.

So they may have hit a smallish jackpot, but they’ve worked long & hard for it if so.

Exactly. They got early support because of a strong brand they worked hard to create over the last decade. They backed their idea with market research and created something which could be enjoyed from the very beginning. These are important ingredients in their success.

> while Tim Schafer’s Broken Age ran over budget, needed to be split in half, and delivered a disappointing final product.

Speak for yourself, quite a few adventure game fans don't agree with it delivering a disappointing product. And there are quite a few more success stories... Broken Sword 5, Tesla Effect, Resonance, Shadowrun Dragonfall, ...

It's true that there are conflicts with Kickstarters due to the fact that most backers do not really understand how hard it is to estimate Software Developments (especially in games, refining gameplay and puzzles until it become fun is by definition not something that can be estimated accurately) and game developers that suddenly have to take on the role of PR which the publishers used to do. But overall, there's been more than a few success stories.

It's more than just how you play the kickstarter crowd. Introversion have a knack of writing really playable games. Darwinia was incredible.

Not just playable games, but also games that are different from the usual stuff you see. Was there any hacking type games like Uplink before Introversion released it?

I agree.

Darwinia was a shooter/strategy game set inside virtual world.

Even Defcon is unconventional. A game about nuclear war and mutual assured destruction with a retro asthetic.

>>> Even Defcon is unconventional. A game about nuclear war and mutual assured destruction with a retro asthetic

Don't forget the soundtrack! It added a lot to the game atmosphere :)

Especially the woman in the background who starts to weep as the first missiles hit their targets.

The weeping woman, the cough. Damn I am so tempted to play it again (does it make me a heartless psycho?), but I am at work :(

This is a great example of how some well though out details can play a massive role. Would the game be the same without the soundtrack, with the sounds of crying and coughing? It still would be a good game but not THAT good.

> but I am at work :(

You do realise that you are talking about the game with a work panic button built in, right?

>Damn I am so tempted to play it again (does it make me a heartless psycho?), but I am at work :(

Get your coworkers and boss involved, and then play it in "real-time" mode windowed over the course of a couple days. That'll keep engagement up.

The wikipedia page for it links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_15000, which claims first in breed, in 1984.

OP here.

I feel in the last years we're having a resurgence of management/simulation games.

Just like Will Wright did his own SimCities, SimFarms, SimLifes, etc., new developers are returning to these themes.

We need more of these freeform interactive management sandboxes. We have Prision Architect. Rollercoaster Tycoon is coming back. Bring back Theme hospital and the histrical city-builder! Let's open our arms for new management games in new unconventional contexts. (Boon Hill is a graveyard simulator. How cool is that?)

> We need more of these freeform interactive management sandboxes.

If you haven't checked it out yet: Rimworld. You manage a group of people who crashed their spaceship on a planet, and they found a colony. The game has a storyteller AI that tries to make your struggle for survival interesting and entertaining. I love(d) it.

> Bring back Theme hospital

Well, there's this new Big Pharma simulator on Steam :).

Big pharma is well made, and definitely fun, but it's completely different to Theme Hospital - BP is completely lacking in the humour that made TH what it was.

Thanks for the opinion. It was a bit pricey last time I checked it out, and I wasn't sure if it's good. I'll reconsider buying it :).

Big Pharma is way more of a puzzle game. Very fun, but different mix of genres.

Game Dev Tycoon is one of my favorites (http://www.greenheartgames.com/app/game-dev-tycoon/)

Kerbal Space Program also fits into this trend. It's a little interesting that this is pretty much all indie Steam games - the AAA publishers haven't pivoted to start chasing this demographic again yet.

Except for EA (that bought Maxis) Sim games were never big on AAA market.

For example Roller Coaster Tycoon was created by a single guy, that made the game in Assembly (yes, almost 100% of RCT1 is ASM), he ended getting "publishers" in the sense they sold the game for him, but the game is still his.

Game Corp DX is equally enjoyable (I played both of them), worth checking out http://store.steampowered.com/app/399670/

I maybe like Game Corp DX a bit more as it gives more freedom. Simple things like the office layout etc, but it's a nice addition.