YMMV / Game Dev Tycoon

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Some players have already developed strategies that will ensure quick success and migration to the second building as early as the 2nd year. Most of them involve gaming the system by constantly restarting the game until a set of four topics that are excellent for the PC and G64 is obtained as to reduce unnecessary research, then researching for game engine at earliest possible convenience, the first two parts of the game engine, and building the first custom engine, then using it to build a good game. Done right, said game will have at least one perfect 10 score and you'll be prompted to move to a new building within minutes.
  • Also, the PC as a platform. It's available from the start, and never goes obsolete (while various consoles will demand a license fee to develop on them and go off the market after a couple of years), so it makes sense that you'll make more PC games than any other. It helps that it's also a very versatile platform to develop on.
• Game-Breaker: Doing a casual game for young audiences on the Gameling is very likely to earn you a couple of million dollars. You'll eventually get a critical success on the Gameling regardless, but doing Young + Casual on the TES is the fastest, non-restarting (as detailed in Complacent Gaming Syndrome) way to get to the second office if you know how to pull it off.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Playsystem 5's design ended up looking like a colorswap of the Playstation 5 after Sony announced it.
  • The 2014 April Fool's joke became this when the game was officially released for the iOS platform in late 2017 and for Android devices in early 2018. Thankfully, the game isn't free to play, and is simply a port of the original.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: The excessive piracy that plagues the (allegedly) pirated version of the game was eventually added as an option in the proper version, along with ways to mitigate it.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The opportunity to do a game report being limited in time. You shouldn't do a game report immediately after release, because it gives you less information. But if you wait too long after a game leaves the market (say, it happened just as you were starting to develop a new AAA game), the opportunity expires and you don't get a game report at all! And of course, the game doesn't warn you.
  • The inability to see how long until employees need to go on vacation. It essentially forces you to save right before any huge project just in case your employees start getting exhausted halfway through or very carefully managing the whole team and keeping track when the next vacation cycle will start.
• That One Achievement:
  • "Unobtanium (seriously?)" requires you to sell a gargantuan 100 million copies of a single game without help from a publisher and without making it an MMO. In real life, its a feat accomplished only by Tetris, Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto V, and accomplishing it in-game is going to be just as hard. Hope you're prepared to sink hours upon hours into the game to get this one. It's telling that as of January 2022, a grand total of 8.4% of Steam players have this achievement, making it the rarest non-secret one in the game.
  • Remember the fact that pirating the game made you go inevitably go bankrupt from piracy? The devs eventually implemented that mode for the legitimate game, and there are two achievements for it, Statistical Anomaly (reach level 2 in Pirate Mode) and Against All Odds (beat Pirate Mode). Pirate mode was deliberately designed to be almost impossible to win, and it's telling that more people have managed to get the secret achievements than these two.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: This game is accused by some people of ripping off Game Dev Story despite having different gameplay mechanics.

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