The ongoing series for Flat Turtle Games (the fictional company in my current save) seems to be Butterfly Effect, with at least four titles going strong as hell so far

Butterfly Effect is set in a fractured civilization rebuilding far after a long-ago apocalypse, where small choices build to big chances in the course of history

The series currently includes

Butterfly Effect

Butterfly Effect: Resonance

Butterfly Effect: Ripples

Butterfly Effect: Rebuild

in Game Dev Tycoon I tend to settle on one or two ‘keystone’ game series that I repeat many installments of - the way GDT cycles, you will always make oodles and oodles of games as part of the gameloop, but a few always stick out to me as particularly interesting and those are the ones I tend to make sequels of

and those series that keep going, I headcanon are the ones my fictional company actually focuses on

I've been thinking about Game Dev Tycoon recently. It's a relic from a fundamentally different time and I don't think it gets discussed as much as it perhaps should. First and foremost is the fact that it truncates the history of video games to only the 80's onward. This is perhaps true to a certain perception of gaming - the NES being the console which revitalized the industry in America. GDT was made by Australian developers, and from my Australian friends' testimony their perception of video games is pretty directly tied to the American market, but it could easily also be the fact that the game has a focus on the Home market scene, and the 70's was much more focused on the arcade scene.

All that aside, the perspective that the game ultimately supports is one which pitches every game developer as Valve - a plucky indie studio that becomes a billionaire Publisher, tech developer, and software giant while still being beloved by millions of fans. I'm not about to crucify the game for not showing every aspect of game development, especially the Crunch culture - while the EA Spouse blog post was made in 2004, conversations about Crunch culture were something that gained much more momentum throughout the mid-2010s. I still find it interesting that even at your maximum capacity, your studio only has less than a dozen employees when games had long since become hundred-person projects at the AAA level.

What I find most interesting is how many of the various community-related decisions boil down to "Boss, do you want to be inexplicably mean to the fans for no reason and save $40, or do you want to release the source code to a game you haven't touched for 50 years and make 5 whole new fans?" I'm exaggerating for effect, of course, but it's a perspective on corporation-fan interactions that clearly comes from people who are, themselves, fans first and foremost. It obviously makes sense from a fan perspective to, say, have a fan base who like to mod your games, because that's how they remain socially relevant. DOOM, Skyrim, Fallout, so many Bethesda properties are maintained in the general gamer sphere by their mods and custom content. But there's a failure to understand that businesses only care about these things to the extent that it will affect their bottom line. Bethesda would love to put a wall around the Garden that is DOOM, but they understand that doing so would be extremely unpopular and detrimental to their brand. Their closest attempt to this failed from a fan perspective, and was rife with content theft. Embracer Group, meanwhile, has no qualms squashing companies and hoarding IPs until they might one day be profitable to use. When Volition was shut down, it squashed the chance of a PC patch for Saints Row 2 (still the best Saints Row game, or at least the most well-regarded), which had been worked on by a since-dearly departed developer. Embracer doesn't have a reason to release the patch, because it would not tangibly make them money or value, it would only be a nice gesture (something companies are immune to.) They have no reason to do anything with the Saints Row brand because it recently had a high-profile failure and they can't recoup that loss until it becomes nostalgic. And the Saints Row fan base, however much of it still exists, doesn't have anywhere near the legacy or cultural capital to challenge Embracer, or convince fans of other works not to buy Embracer products.