Engine issues

Howdy, Long time player, first time poster.

So, after playing for ages, I finally decided to swap my strategy over from the games market to the engines, this seemed a good idea because its cheaper and easier to keep your engine in the top rank, but even when my engine hit 122, I sold it to a 'good game' one that always seems to pop up in the award shows, I got a very good deal for 8% of the sales, I went all out, 104 weeks support, put my 4 best guys on the job, top leadership was 8, top design 8, top gfx 7 and programming was 8 (this was in 1992 and the game was Dragon Lair III on DOS) and yet when I checked after the supposed release date, it was no where in the charts. I checked for 14 weeks, finally it appeared at 98 and dropped out again straight away. This isnt an uncommon issue.

For the past 3 weeks ive been playing around with various engines and when I got 3 engines to 120 (Dos, Amiga, Spectrum ZX) I took the same game on all 3 systems and on 2 i gave a very high level of detail and on the third I hired a nobosy with 1 in all his skills, for 26 weeks, virtually no money and 1% of sales. (incidentally the game was Ste'Sto Slug the 'unloved platform' was the Spectrum) and low and behold, the 2 projects I poured money in did zero sales that I could see and yet, the spectrum version reached a shocking 15 in the Asia charts, 33 in Europe and 37 in America!

My questions are thus:

Does it really matter what level of support you provide for engines? Does pouring a lot of guys in, meaning the support is finished long before the game releases a bad idea or am i just unlucky?

Second: Is there a way to 'track' all the games I have sold engines to, much like you can click on old games to review their history??

Thanks!!

Providing support for a longer time sweetens the deal on your end, allowing you to ask for a higher up-front payment and percentage of sales from the producer. The more people you put on the task after striking the deal, the faster the support time is completed, with no negative effect to the game or your return (Assigning a team leader with higher leadership skills will allow you to assign more people to the project)

So far as I've seen, the skill levels of the people you assign to support a game don't affect the games quality; I'm fairly sure the quality of the game is semi-randomly generated, with a weight for games that were popular (For instance, Pac-man); this doesn't mean that supporting a large budget game will always succeed, though, due to the random generation.

On a whole, I find taking a percentage of the sales for support a too risky strategy; I tend to aim to support large budget games with a 0% stake, and as such raise the one-off payment as high as they'll accept (Often early on, in excess of $300k for the minimum support), this eliminates the risk and guarantees a large payoff, even if the game flops.

Not as I'm aware, though It's nothing I've specifically tried to find before. I *think* Nino plans to incorporate a more detailed breakdown of games' histories in GB3.

Thanks for the reply. over the course of today ive tried several stratgies with varying levels of success. I managed to snag Sabre Vulf and went with a 6 man team of my best guys for a full 10%. It was Best game of the year 2004 and 2nd top selling, i netted a HUGE chunk of cash there!

Usually I play thru the game just making games and trying to win awards, but this time thru I havent released a single game since 1994 when my 'Ranger X' on the Amiga scored a double win with my Apple II version (i chose the wrong platform) coming in second for sales with a platry 10% of the systems still in use! I can only imagine that some nerd bought himself 20000 copies

I must make a diary of this career, its been topsy turvey but not churning out games all the time really does allow you time to perfect your engine and train your guys up. David Bulwa has 9s across the board including Hardware but I havent generated enough capital to plunge into the Platform market and its 2005 now, with one last game on the way, a sequal to my first ever game on the Atari, 'Cat and mouse' being released on windows on an engine hat scores 139. I cannot get it higher so I figure Ill go for one more award