How to Make Easy Money in Mad Games Tycoon

Freshly out of Steam Early Access, Mad Games Tycoon has already carved out a solid niche in the simulation market, offering a surprisingly deep and challenging gameplay experience for gamers that want to try their hand at making their own games.

In the vein of most games in the tycoon style, you’ll be juggling projects and staff while managing your space and expectations. Oh, and at some point you’re going to want to make some money too. Luckily, there are a few easy ways to keep money rolling in even if you’re a newcomer to this kind of simulation game. Read on to find out the easiest ways to make money in Mad Games Tycoon!

Starting out small

In order to make money in Mad Games Tycoon, you’re going to have to take a somewhat unexpected first step. After making your setting selections and starting your game in the year 1980, hire some staff, and publish a really bad game. Don’t put any money into it — it doesn’t matter if it even sells. We simply want to open up the key component to this strategy, which is a research room. Once development on this game is complete, push it out to market ASAP and create 2 research rooms, if you can. Use the space wisely and fit in as many desks as you can. This will be key for the next step.

Research and development

Now that you have both a research lab and a development area, we can start the Mad Games Tycoon money making strategy proper. The development team should only be taking on contract work to make quick cash, while the research team needs to be researching new genres and features as soon as they become available. If you’re ever short on money, feel free to take out a loan, but be aware that this will be costly in the long run, as each loan increases your monthly interest payment.

Start your engines

The next step in this strategy is doing some market research. What engines are already on the market? What genres do they specialize in? Where is there room for you to step in?

Once you find a genre that doesn’t have an engine that specializes in it already, start developing one yourself. You’re going to want to put a decent amount of money into this — enable all the features you have researched so far. Set the cost somewhere around $150,000, and then set your royalty rate around 15%. Wait for the engine to be developed, and then rinse and repeat the process, picking up contract work, training your staff, and researching topics and game improvements in the process for later.

Upgrading your office

At this point, you might want to, you know, actually develop a game in this game development simulator. Don’t. Be patient, and keep making money by creating and updating engines as new genres and features unlock. Start to pay off your bank loan, and think about upgrading your office. 

Once you do, it would be helpful to have at least 2 rooms for development and research so that you can multitask. A staff room and training room help as well, and you’re obviously going to want to react to any tooltips that come up asking you to, like, buy some plants or trash cans or something. You should have more than enough money to continue to upgrade and buy things as they become necessary if you continue to develop new engines and keep your older ones up to date with all of the features you have researched. As you expand further, start to research more game-development-related topics as well to set yourself up for success later on.

Becoming self-sufficient

Once you have a few engines with 256 colors, feel free to start producing your own games using your own engines, assuming you’ve done enough research into game development (and your staff is good enough). Even if they fail, your royalties from the game engines should ensure that you continue to make good money.

Keep improving and publishing games, get your marketing team working, and then once it becomes available, go for self-publishing. Be aware that you’ll need a pretty huge office space for this, and you’ll also need a lot of money in the bank since you’ll be footing the bill for the actual production of the game. That said, highly rated games produced in this way should net you millions upon millions of dollars. Simply rinse and repeat, and you’ll be able to coast your way through the whole game.

If your games start to fail, be sure that you’re constantly updating your engines (and making new ones for other developers to buy) since not only are they the tools that you use to make your own games, but they’re also providing a steady stream of income across your entire Mad Games Tycoon experience. Stick to that strategy and you’ll find yourself on top of the video game development world in no time!

Have you been enjoying Mad Games Tycoon so far? Let us know what you think in the comments, and if you’re hungry for more tycoon-style management games, check out our preview of Project Automata!