City Game Studio: Your Game Dev Adventure Begins

Every market we collect.

For scale, across Steam · Top Sellers · Brazil over the last 30 days: the 26 chart moves that followed a price cut of more than 20% went a median of 7 places towards #1, and the 2,400 moves with no price cut behind them went 2 away. One store, one chart, one country — it is the only place we have enough observations to say even that.

Prices outside the United States have been collected since 6 August 2026 and chart positions since 19 July 2026, so a cut older than that has no market to compare and a market that joined later has no history yet. Nothing here is converted between currencies.

Hours played at review time, across 98 reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

I recommend trying this game on a discount if you are interested in Tycoon games and a Game Dev theme, but unfortunately it is nearly as good as average rating in steam reviews. For me City Game Studio is a 8/10 title. It's clearly inspired by the old Game Dev Tycoon with focus on expanding the overall replayability making the game progression more player dependent. Unfortunately because of that City Game Studio becomes way more cluttered and a lot of systems aren't really interesting and make the game feel stagnant after a while. There are also a lot of decisions in overall design that I find questionable to say the least. Examples of those would be the lack of game themes (there are hardly any) which is extremely weird because it seems like there are a lot more game genres and combinations between them than game themes. Contracts and ways to gain experience in different game genres aren't well thought out, the company can gain tips on certain game genres while making new games of the same genre (or using marketing to scout the genre which feels clunky to use) but at the same time player unlocks this option only after certain time has passed (or certain requirements are met). There are hardly any reasons to explore game genres outside of the one player chose as his specialty at the beginning of the game, there isn't a mechanic that punishes the player for making similar games in terms of genre ( for example RPG, actionRPG, dungeon crawler, hack and slash RPG etc.), punishment only applies when player tries to make the same exact game (game calls it a asset flip). It almost feels like player is rewarded for making same games/consoles over and over again. There are also a lot of mechanics that SHOULD be possible to setup in a way, that they are done automatically, for example doing contracts in sequence, researching the market or updating the online store. I do like the addition of directors, they somewhat help with the feeling of being overwhelmed if player were to do it all by themselves BUT this brings me to another point, the BLOAT and CLUTTER. Game on normal difficulty is extremely easy to play (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), after releasing my second console I was basically able to buy out half of the other game companies and after my 4th console buy every single company in the game, BUT I didn't want to. Many menus visible on the screen are super small and contain little information, for example the right panel with games/conventions/consoles is extremely hard to navigate, can't arrange the information in any useful way, there is just so much clutter that it becomes an eyesore. Same thing happens with the left panel, which contains information on current projects, meaning produced games, consoles, ports, reports etc. there was a point when I didn't want to build new offices or buy out game companies even If I were to assign new directors to them BECAUSE there was so much stuff on screen I was always confused and thinking if I didn't forget to do something. Navigating through all those menus is mentally draining for me (I don't mind looking at charts/menus but I do mind if it's hard to find meaningful information in them and navigate between them), for example I spent a good amount of time searching where do I need to click to release a game update (for some reason it's on the right panel with release charts instead of development menu on the bottom in game history or somewhere like that). There are always new platforms releasing, new emails with meaningless information and "mark it as spam" option doesn't seem to do anything meaningful, also decorating isn't really that interesting because there is just too much stuff going on at the same time and I don't really feel inclined to micromanage that. I also don't like the fact that most of the game window area is taken up by office building which isn't practical at all. The things I do like about City Game Studio is the replay value, the aesthetics, graphics and soundtrack. I like how dynamic this game feels an how many options there are that are not available in other titles of similar genre, for example Mad Games Tycoon (making FOSS engines that are being developed by free contributors or addition of studio directors). I didn't encounter any major bugs, but I did have a problem when while updating a game I could assign the studio (which was the one updating the game) to other project and then they wouldn't go back to updating the game, meaning I had to cancel the update and start from the beginning while not reassigning them to another task by mistake. Game designing is also very fun but it isn't as robust as in Mad Games Tycoon (no sound studios or graphics designers). I do like the fact that I can port games to other platforms and that not all game genres work well on all platforms (meaning not only is platform popularity important but the specs and the compatibility between platforms/genres) In summary City Game Studio is a fun game and I do recommend it, but I do like Mad Games Tycoon 1 and 2 way more. They both just FEEL satisfying to play and scratch the tycoon itch. For me City Game Studio is just too cluttered and focuses too much on the "studio" aspect rather than the "game", but it works native in Linux and has a wide screen support which for me is very important. Maybe If I didn't play the original Game Dev Tycoon and Mad Games Tycoon my opinion would be different, but from my point of view I have to compare other similar games to City Game Studio. There is also a lot of modding support from what I've seen and the developers keep on updating the game which I do like a lot and I will probably play some more when I'll feel like it (maybe try some mods). I hope that some of my complaints will be changed later down the development, but this game by no means feels unfinished, its just that player isn't really encouraged to do different things but discouraged by sheer amount of options that aren't rewarding. Thanks Developers for making this game.