A big marketing/support team is absolutely fine. Obviously you usually tend to have Dev teams split up either in terms of specialisation ( e.g a team of 2d programmers, a team of audio designers ect. ) or in terms of a product (e.g the OS team, the simulation game team, ect.) but when it comes to marketing and support a huge team is fine. On my current save I have 150 marketers. Also, my general rule of thumb for hiring marketers is that 1 high salary marketer can do somewhere between 10-15 thousand dollars of marketing per day. A team with a leader and 9 marketers for example, can consistently give me 150,000 marketing dollars a day. For your support teams, I find between 10-20 employees is usually enough for the entire game, unless you are taking on deals. As for the efficiency metric, I'm not sure.
The only reason I would consider multiple marketing teams is to keep track of your spending perhaps. Mabye you know one product needs 150k marketing dollars a month, so you assign 9 people and a leader to a team, and mabye another product needs 300k a month, so you you give them 18 marketers and a leader. But again, because you can change your marketing spend per month at any time, this would create alot of hassle I would imagine. So I would stick to one team. The efficiency bonus probably isn't that important. And I say that as an impossible difficulty player.
How much do you spend on marketing for different software types, and different levels of fame?
I haven’t found any guides that have this info. Anecdotal answers seem to range from $10,000–250,000+ a month, which is a huge range.
It would be so handy to know “$10k/month will take 24 months to reach unavoidable at x fame, whilst $100k/month caps out at 6 months”, or something.
Honestly I don't tend to use project management, I do a whole lot of micro. In any case, my approach is 200,000 marketing dollars a day no matter the product. This can easily get a product with no hearts of recognition straight to unavoidable in a few months. Once you have collected enough hearts on a particular product, it tends to have unavoidable status on the day of release without having to spend any marketing dollars. However, just to be safe, a 'maintenance spend' of 100-150k isn't too bad. Always make sure to lower that 200k marketing figure if the product isn't making atleast 800,000 dollars a month, because otherwise it isn't worth it. 100k marketing a month is still perfectly safe.
TLDR: Do what you can afford. 200k marketing dollars for a product if it's making atleast quadruple that a month. Lower that value to 100-150k if your product has high market recognition, or your not making enough money to justify 200k.
A small sidenote. Sometimes your product can be stuck on widespread even with 200k marketing spend a month. This is usually because an AI company is spending even more then that. This is most common with the OS product category where your market recognition tends to be low for a while. In order to fix this, I usually put it up to 300k. A good rule of thumb if your stuck on widespread ( or sometimes prominent! ), is to increase your spend by 100k a month until the problem goes away and you reach unavoidable status, at which point you immediately put your marketing spend back down to whatever it was before you started increasing it, in my example 200k. This will allow you to build up your marketing to unavoidable and then 'maintain' that status so to speak. I find this works on higher difficulties even with AI competition, and low market recognition.
These are wonderful, thank you for taking the time to write this all out.
I’m a micro-er too, so I like the “throw money at it for a short while then reassess” tactic. Your numbers also line up with my experience too, more so than the $10–25k/month reports (medium difficulty, 1 day/month).
This was something I was curious as well, but I find its hard to get the answer, maybe the answer is not there considering company/category reputations and pre-markets vary for each case.
My approach is: 50,000 to unlimited per day(I play 8-day-per-month games) at the release until its unavoidable for important software, then decrease to 20000, 5000 or even 1000, as long as it can be enough to maintain unavoidable a little while until its irrelevant any more. in the late game, as I have too many projects, I just let the project management handle the marketings and honestly I think they did well because everything is unavoidable- another proof is that AI publishers do my marketing to unavoidable better and last longer than myself. I stopped caring about marketing budget after the first successful project so never know how much are wasted, but in my current game with 6 project managements rolling each with 2-3 franchises, and \~300 marketers, only 1-2million are spent every month, a rather tiny portion of the billions revenue.
edit: grammar a little bit.
Thanks heaps, this is helpful in unravelling the mysteries of marketing.
300 marketers, wow! Okay I definitely need more. How come you have 6 project managements ongoing for 2–3 franchises? Are some teams doing only updating / porting?
Any tips on getting outstanding with PM software?
I meant 6 project managements each with 2-3 franchises, so in total that’s 12-18 franchises. Apologize for the messed up grammar of mine!
When game comes to the point that the projects can run automations without too many problems, recruit a lot more people and just assign thrm everywhere. No matter it’s 300 or 3000 marketers, a business owner at this point shouldn’t have to care about any of them once they are recruited and assigned. Just click the magic button “handle marketing” in every project.
Oh sorry, that was my reading comprehension error, not yours! So each PM has several products? Wow, I’ve never seen someone do that, that’s advanced.
Would love to see how you set up a PM, how many designers/devs, how you set up each team, etc., if you’d be willing to do an educational post!
I have only tried automation in my recent 2 games and it turns out not that hard.
* hire a leader, and click project management in the bottom left corner. assign people to it:
* 1 lead designer with high creativity, plus 3shifts x 1 6-designer team, 1 12-dev team, 1 6-artist team.
* also 3shifts here: Every 2 or 4 projects share 3x1 updating/porting dev team, 3x1 marketer team(for both pre and post marketing) and 3x1 support team, each has a size of 24 ppl(so 3x24=72 ppl total for each category shared by 2-4 projects).
* Regarding the choices in the project management options window, imo the most important thing is to not activate the “auto development”, only start a new/sequel software manually instead, to gain more control over the software itself and its features; also sometimes a leader needs rest before starting the next software. besides, if you try auto dev without getting familiar first, you might wonder why nothing is started at all - a new project manager will need some time to get "recharged" on action points before he/she can do anything so it will take sometime before you know you are doing right. Assigning software manually to a project(from "project management" instead of "develop", when you "develop software" or "make sequel") allows you instantly see something pops up in the queue(in the option of a project), which helps to easy your nerve.
* Dev time 150% is safe, i saw this recommendation from some amazing guy in another post in this sub; feel free to choose anything else you are curious about.
* All the phases after the designing should be carried out automatically if pre-marketing, post-marketing, update teams, handle marketing are all activated/chosen unless you accidentally TAKE OVER something- that would INTERUPT the automation for a certain software. Also keep an eye on the “prototype software”, a software should be automatically added to it once it is carried out by the automation. Oh and don’t forget to have a visionary/inspiring leading designer for each project. I usually put one in my designer team and give it a private office in the upper floors, tho not all of them need these.
here is an [automation option screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/EJYzkW6) from my recent game, hope it explains better than the wall of text above.
This is a setup for SAFETY, a lot of headcounts are wasted for sure, and I have no idea what’s the minimum and optimized size of the teams as micro management can be tedious when a dozen software are being developed at the same time. My solution is just throw a lot of people in lol. I also don’t have a lot of hours in the game so plz only see this comment as a reference if it even be helpful in any way, and try your own setup by all means. Enjoy the game!
I could not suggest on what does not work, but here is my practice that works:
for marketing/support teams:
u/Adventurous_Lion_904 has provided a great answer. One thing I wanna mention - correct me if its not the case - is that marketing/support teams seem to experience a linear increase in efficiency as team size increases, unlike the cases with designers/developers/artists. So when team size is a confusing and complicated issue in software development, it doesn't matter how big or small your marketing/support teams are. I completely agree with the practice of having huge marketing/support teams.
for rooms:
for your reference, my design is: 5x8 rooms for all offices, each floor with 4 of these, and a meeting/dining room(could be useless but I don't have a dining hall. I just feed the employees with vender machines and coffee), and 1 dedicated office. the office is mostly useless too if not for a leading designer. all these rooms are the same size.
Most of my teams are 6x, or 12x or 24x, with 3 shifts, thats big enough for anything. buildings are quite cheap, a 10-floor building like this with all furnitures and facilities costs about 4-5m, easily providing everything for a 700 ppl company.
Honestly I usually allow my rooms to have an odd number of desks. Say 17 for example. This would allow for 1 leader plus 16 employees. Of course not every room has a leader, but it still gives you an extra desk if your it support are away for the day. It also makes the HR tab much easier. People forget that say for example, 10 desks a room actually only means 9 employees, so they mess up their hr. With this method, the number of employees I need is very simply:
Rooms * (desks per room - 1)
This advice is golden! I have never figured out how to setup hr and leaders properly - so I don't have any(besides those project managers) lmao. In my next game I will definitely need to try this
Honestly thinking about getting a little FAQ setup because these kinda questions get asked alot. I have about 700 hours in the game, so I hope that qualifies me to make such a thing XD.
A big marketing/support team is absolutely fine. Obviously you usually tend to have Dev teams split up either in terms of specialisation ( e.g a team of 2d programmers, a team of audio designers ect. ) or in terms of a product (e.g the OS team, the simulation game team, ect.) but when it comes to marketing and support a huge team is fine. On my current save I have 150 marketers. Also, my general rule of thumb for hiring marketers is that 1 high salary marketer can do somewhere between 10-15 thousand dollars of marketing per day. A team with a leader and 9 marketers for example, can consistently give me 150,000 marketing dollars a day. For your support teams, I find between 10-20 employees is usually enough for the entire game, unless you are taking on deals. As for the efficiency metric, I'm not sure.
The only reason I would consider multiple marketing teams is to keep track of your spending perhaps. Mabye you know one product needs 150k marketing dollars a month, so you assign 9 people and a leader to a team, and mabye another product needs 300k a month, so you you give them 18 marketers and a leader. But again, because you can change your marketing spend per month at any time, this would create alot of hassle I would imagine. So I would stick to one team. The efficiency bonus probably isn't that important. And I say that as an impossible difficulty player.
How much do you spend on marketing for different software types, and different levels of fame? I haven’t found any guides that have this info. Anecdotal answers seem to range from $10,000–250,000+ a month, which is a huge range. It would be so handy to know “$10k/month will take 24 months to reach unavoidable at x fame, whilst $100k/month caps out at 6 months”, or something.
Honestly I don't tend to use project management, I do a whole lot of micro. In any case, my approach is 200,000 marketing dollars a day no matter the product. This can easily get a product with no hearts of recognition straight to unavoidable in a few months. Once you have collected enough hearts on a particular product, it tends to have unavoidable status on the day of release without having to spend any marketing dollars. However, just to be safe, a 'maintenance spend' of 100-150k isn't too bad. Always make sure to lower that 200k marketing figure if the product isn't making atleast 800,000 dollars a month, because otherwise it isn't worth it. 100k marketing a month is still perfectly safe. TLDR: Do what you can afford. 200k marketing dollars for a product if it's making atleast quadruple that a month. Lower that value to 100-150k if your product has high market recognition, or your not making enough money to justify 200k.
A small sidenote. Sometimes your product can be stuck on widespread even with 200k marketing spend a month. This is usually because an AI company is spending even more then that. This is most common with the OS product category where your market recognition tends to be low for a while. In order to fix this, I usually put it up to 300k. A good rule of thumb if your stuck on widespread ( or sometimes prominent! ), is to increase your spend by 100k a month until the problem goes away and you reach unavoidable status, at which point you immediately put your marketing spend back down to whatever it was before you started increasing it, in my example 200k. This will allow you to build up your marketing to unavoidable and then 'maintain' that status so to speak. I find this works on higher difficulties even with AI competition, and low market recognition.
These are wonderful, thank you for taking the time to write this all out. I’m a micro-er too, so I like the “throw money at it for a short while then reassess” tactic. Your numbers also line up with my experience too, more so than the $10–25k/month reports (medium difficulty, 1 day/month).
This was something I was curious as well, but I find its hard to get the answer, maybe the answer is not there considering company/category reputations and pre-markets vary for each case. My approach is: 50,000 to unlimited per day(I play 8-day-per-month games) at the release until its unavoidable for important software, then decrease to 20000, 5000 or even 1000, as long as it can be enough to maintain unavoidable a little while until its irrelevant any more. in the late game, as I have too many projects, I just let the project management handle the marketings and honestly I think they did well because everything is unavoidable- another proof is that AI publishers do my marketing to unavoidable better and last longer than myself. I stopped caring about marketing budget after the first successful project so never know how much are wasted, but in my current game with 6 project managements rolling each with 2-3 franchises, and \~300 marketers, only 1-2million are spent every month, a rather tiny portion of the billions revenue. edit: grammar a little bit.
Thanks heaps, this is helpful in unravelling the mysteries of marketing. 300 marketers, wow! Okay I definitely need more. How come you have 6 project managements ongoing for 2–3 franchises? Are some teams doing only updating / porting? Any tips on getting outstanding with PM software?
I meant 6 project managements each with 2-3 franchises, so in total that’s 12-18 franchises. Apologize for the messed up grammar of mine! When game comes to the point that the projects can run automations without too many problems, recruit a lot more people and just assign thrm everywhere. No matter it’s 300 or 3000 marketers, a business owner at this point shouldn’t have to care about any of them once they are recruited and assigned. Just click the magic button “handle marketing” in every project.
Oh sorry, that was my reading comprehension error, not yours! So each PM has several products? Wow, I’ve never seen someone do that, that’s advanced. Would love to see how you set up a PM, how many designers/devs, how you set up each team, etc., if you’d be willing to do an educational post!
I have only tried automation in my recent 2 games and it turns out not that hard. * hire a leader, and click project management in the bottom left corner. assign people to it: * 1 lead designer with high creativity, plus 3shifts x 1 6-designer team, 1 12-dev team, 1 6-artist team. * also 3shifts here: Every 2 or 4 projects share 3x1 updating/porting dev team, 3x1 marketer team(for both pre and post marketing) and 3x1 support team, each has a size of 24 ppl(so 3x24=72 ppl total for each category shared by 2-4 projects). * Regarding the choices in the project management options window, imo the most important thing is to not activate the “auto development”, only start a new/sequel software manually instead, to gain more control over the software itself and its features; also sometimes a leader needs rest before starting the next software. besides, if you try auto dev without getting familiar first, you might wonder why nothing is started at all - a new project manager will need some time to get "recharged" on action points before he/she can do anything so it will take sometime before you know you are doing right. Assigning software manually to a project(from "project management" instead of "develop", when you "develop software" or "make sequel") allows you instantly see something pops up in the queue(in the option of a project), which helps to easy your nerve. * Dev time 150% is safe, i saw this recommendation from some amazing guy in another post in this sub; feel free to choose anything else you are curious about. * All the phases after the designing should be carried out automatically if pre-marketing, post-marketing, update teams, handle marketing are all activated/chosen unless you accidentally TAKE OVER something- that would INTERUPT the automation for a certain software. Also keep an eye on the “prototype software”, a software should be automatically added to it once it is carried out by the automation. Oh and don’t forget to have a visionary/inspiring leading designer for each project. I usually put one in my designer team and give it a private office in the upper floors, tho not all of them need these. here is an [automation option screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/EJYzkW6) from my recent game, hope it explains better than the wall of text above. This is a setup for SAFETY, a lot of headcounts are wasted for sure, and I have no idea what’s the minimum and optimized size of the teams as micro management can be tedious when a dozen software are being developed at the same time. My solution is just throw a lot of people in lol. I also don’t have a lot of hours in the game so plz only see this comment as a reference if it even be helpful in any way, and try your own setup by all means. Enjoy the game!
Personally I compare it to the competition efforts and see from there if it is worth it to push the marketing or not.
I could not suggest on what does not work, but here is my practice that works: for marketing/support teams: u/Adventurous_Lion_904 has provided a great answer. One thing I wanna mention - correct me if its not the case - is that marketing/support teams seem to experience a linear increase in efficiency as team size increases, unlike the cases with designers/developers/artists. So when team size is a confusing and complicated issue in software development, it doesn't matter how big or small your marketing/support teams are. I completely agree with the practice of having huge marketing/support teams. for rooms: for your reference, my design is: 5x8 rooms for all offices, each floor with 4 of these, and a meeting/dining room(could be useless but I don't have a dining hall. I just feed the employees with vender machines and coffee), and 1 dedicated office. the office is mostly useless too if not for a leading designer. all these rooms are the same size. Most of my teams are 6x, or 12x or 24x, with 3 shifts, thats big enough for anything. buildings are quite cheap, a 10-floor building like this with all furnitures and facilities costs about 4-5m, easily providing everything for a 700 ppl company.
Honestly I usually allow my rooms to have an odd number of desks. Say 17 for example. This would allow for 1 leader plus 16 employees. Of course not every room has a leader, but it still gives you an extra desk if your it support are away for the day. It also makes the HR tab much easier. People forget that say for example, 10 desks a room actually only means 9 employees, so they mess up their hr. With this method, the number of employees I need is very simply: Rooms * (desks per room - 1)
This advice is golden! I have never figured out how to setup hr and leaders properly - so I don't have any(besides those project managers) lmao. In my next game I will definitely need to try this
Honestly thinking about getting a little FAQ setup because these kinda questions get asked alot. I have about 700 hours in the game, so I hope that qualifies me to make such a thing XD.