Early Access is actively updated. The game is expanding from a studio sim into a full empire experience, with the new Empire Command Centre (a weekly mogul dashboard showing risks, actions, and “why it matters”) and an expanding Empire portfolio of ventures and businesses. Alongside this, the game includes the full Empire stack (IPO, board, acquisitions, ethics), a holding-group view for your studio and subsidiaries, and major optional systems: Racing Team, Football Chairman, Football Annual, Story Universes, Engine Lab, MMORPG and MOBA builders, Wrestling Federation, The Daily (newspaper), and more. The Player Guide is now searchable and surfaces context-relevant pages from where you’re playing. Recent Early Access pushes also deepen the Empire stock side: trade a roster of listed names from your holdings view, with clearer risk and regulatory pressure when you lean aggressive. Other updates also promote the Movie Studio into a full passion-project-tier division: rival studios, recurring talent careers with portraits, festivals and an annual awards season, watch-the-premiere recaps, era-gated home video releases (VHS/DVD/Blu-ray/Digital), TV and streaming series, plus its own row on the Finance screen. ConsoleMe is a deep, unforgiving game studio (and business generally) management simulator where success isn't just about making great games, it's about surviving the business behind them. Start in 1984 and build your studio from a scrappy startup into a legendary name, or run it straight into the ground trying. You'll hire staff, manage payroll, design your own console hardware, negotiate launch-day exclusives, chase trends and innovations, survive market crashes, deal with policy regimes, investors, publishers, and competitors... and try not to miss payroll while doing it. As your company grows, the Empire layer opens up: go public, answer to a board, trade your stock, acquire rivals, and build a portfolio of ventures beyond your studio. Your business evolves from a single team into a broader empire with multiple moving parts. Over time, your run can evolve from building games to managing a multi-layered empire of interconnected systems. There are no perfect runs. Only lessons. BUILD GAMES ACROSS DECADES Create games across multiple eras of the industry, from the early console years to modern platforms. Choose genres, scopes, engines, platforms, and business models through a cinematic guided wizard with genre-specific video and sound. Design your own box art in a full drag-and-drop design studio before you ship. Plan your launch, schedule release dates, run marketing campaigns, send press previews, negotiate platform deals, and build hype before pulling the trigger. Or just ship it and hope for the best. Support games after launch with DLC, live services, ports, remasters, remakes, content updates, price drops, and complete editions. Build franchises, manage sequel fatigue, and track brand value across your entire catalogue. Engine Lab: Found and grow your own engine as a long-term product. Shape its philosophy, manage development and R&D programs, and evolve it from an internal tool into a full platform with adoption, licensing, and market positioning. Games built on your engine inherit real development and review effects tied to its health. Your games don't exist in a vacuum, the market changes, competitors react, and timing matters. Launch an MMORPG and manage it as a live service through a dedicated builder. Lay out zones on a hex world map, develop raids, PvP arenas, classes, crafting, and housing systems, each with real development time. Plan your content roadmap on a visual calendar with drag-and-drop scheduling. Run community polls, publish dev blogs on autopilot, launch expansions with their own review scores, and eventually port to console. Your subscriber count lives or dies by what you ship and when. MOBA Builder; run a live MOBA as its own product—champions, maps, balance, esports, economy, community, infrastructure, team, and calendar—same “years of live ops” idea as the MMORPG side, tuned for arena competition. Story universes; attach normal games to named worlds, pick how strict canon is, and read a release timeline (sequel, spin-off, reboot, etc.) with fan and critic pressure. Football Annual; run a yearly soccer series—brand health, edition focus (major / polish / experimental), pillar R&D, deadlines, and a Release Planner that warns if you’re shipping too early or too late for the annual beat. Unlocks mid-campaign when your calendar year and cash meet the in-game gate (shown on the hub). DESIGN AND LAUNCH YOUR OWN CONSOLE Research technology through a full R&D tech tree, dozens of nodes across CPUs, GPUs, RAM, storage, media, controllers, chassis, and special features. Design every detail of your hardware in a multi-step wizard: form factor, internal components, external shell, controller layout, pricing strategy, and launch plan. Announce your console and enter a pre-launch phase where you negotiate exclusive launch titles with AI developers, build your own first-party games, manufacture stock, and build buzz before launch day. Compete in the Console Wars : every active console gets a dynamic war score based on sales, game library, and services. Track head-to-head comparisons, respond to competitive events (price wars, patent disputes, franchise defections), sign first-party studios, launch online service tiers, and release mid-gen variants to stay ahead. Read detailed launch reports after consoles hit the market, yours or a competitor's, with grades, sales breakdowns, lineup analysis, and analyst verdicts. Track console performance over time with periodic intelligence reports covering market position, sales trends, top games, and growth forecasts. EMPIRE, MOGUL, HOLDINGS & PASSION PROJECTS Grow personal net worth and mogul rank as you scale, from scrappy operator to industry titan. Take the company public through a multi-phase IPO: preparation, roadshow, and listing. Pick underwriter posture, watch investor buzz, and live with the share price once you're trading. Run the stock market like an owner: buybacks, dividends, secondary offerings, quarterly earnings vs expectations, and board meetings with votes that actually resolve to outcomes you can read. Listed names (portfolio trading): Beyond managing your own listing, you can trade a growing set of fictional public equities from the Empire Stock Market; open positions, take profits, and (if you play on Advanced market complexity) unlock shorter, riskier strategies. The UI spells out cash, prices, and position context so you’re not guessing what a trade will do. The roster spans rival game studios, public companies, index funds, your own empire spin-offs and tracking stocks, and now rival movie studios that price off prestige and recent box-office momentum, with bull/bear analyst commentary tailored to each one. Compliance matters: aggressive or suspicious activity feeds regulatory heat and scrutiny so empire trading isn’t a free money button; it’s another lever that can burn you if you ignore the business behind the ticker. Acquire competitors for cash, stock, or mixed deals, full integration, IP-only, or talent-only, and fold them into your group. Face activists, hostile pressure, and takeover defenses when the market turns on you, or when you turn on someone else. Ethics and corporate dark side aren't cosmetic: studio choices and empire-level behaviour feed regulatory heat, legal exposure, and long-term consequences. Holding company model: your group can include the game studio plus subsidiaries. The stock view rolls up group performance; modals are tagged so you always know which part of the empire you're looking at. Empire Command Centre: A weekly command post for your business. Get a clear, plain-English view of your empire with recap, risks, priority actions, and “why this matters” breakdowns across all major systems. Designed to reduce tab-hunting and help you think like a mogul. A Stock Market line on the dashboard calls out compliance and portfolio risk and can hand you off straight into the Market view when equity needs attention. Core loop is still games and hardware. Empire is power fantasy for when you've earned the chaos. PASSION PROJECTS Sink your mogul wealth into side ventures that run as their own management games inside ConsoleMe. Football Chairman (new): Buy a football club and take the reins. Build out a 2D stadium with per-stand upgrades, facilities, seat colours, and pitch quality. Design kits each season through a guided wizard with five fictional manufacturers, seven patterns, collar styles, and your club badge on the shirt. Compete in a three-tier league system with full stats, fixtures, results, championship history, and promotion/relegation. Manage a full squad with sortable tables, detailed player profiles, nationality flags, shirt numbers, and biographies. Scout players, browse free agents, set transfer policy, review your manager, and listen to fan sentiment. Your manager now handles contract renewals and emergency signings automatically, so your squad won't collapse to one player if you step away for a few seasons. It's deep, and it's entirely optional. Movie Studio: Run a Hollywood-tier studio alongside your game company. Greenlight original films or adapt your own games into movies through a multi-step wizard with title, genre, strategy, budget tier, and a full cast and crew picker. Pick a director, writer, lead, and supporting talent from a recurring pool of directors, writers, leads, supporting actors, showrunners, and TV leads with fame, age, salaries, archetype portraits, and a clickable filmography. People debut, age, retire, occasionally mount comebacks, and sometimes get caught in scandals. New names show up at the start of every year and a smaller mid-year wave keeps the pool fresh. Racing Team : Found a motorsport team with drivers, engineers, principal, pit crew, and sponsors. Allocate R&D across aero, powertrain, reliability, and strategy. Race through full seasons with qualifying, weather, strategy choices, and championship standings. Climb through four tiers from karting to the pinnacle of open-wheel racing. Space Venture : Build a space programme from sounding rockets to interplanetary missions. Research technology, assemble modular vehicles, schedule launches across multiple sites, and manage weather windows. Wrestling Federation: Roster, weekly show booking, TV, titles and belts, storylines, backstage calls, and owner/GM tools (delegation, auto-book, card polish). The Daily (newspaper): newsroom beats, staff, ads, and politics-lite choices that sit beside your studio loop. Golf Club : Build and run your own golf club as part of your empire. Acquire land, design courses using a hex-based builder, upgrade facilities (clubhouse, spa, bar, pro shop), grow membership, manage upkeep, and work toward hosting larger events. Your club develops over time and contributes to your wider empire strategy. Car Manufacturer: Found and grow a vehicle brand as part of your empire. Brand identity, an active model line-up with flagship picks, weekly unit sales by model, and a manufacturing / R&D / dealer overhead loop that books to its own Automotive Division row in your finances. Sits alongside the other passion projects as a serious diversification play. More passion verticals are planned. The mogul profile shows what's live vs coming soon. RUN A REAL BUSINESS (NOT JUST A DEV TEAM) Manage cash flow, payroll, rent, taxes, loans, grants, and investors. Choose where your company is based and expand offices across countries. Deal with shifting policy regimes, tax changes, and economic cycles. Use analytics to track genre trends, profitability by platform, and market share over time. The status bar shows your cumulative week count alongside the calendar date so you always know exactly where you stand for unlocking mechanics. Balance growth against risk, scale too fast and you'll trigger coordination stress, pipeline overload, burnout cascades, and collapse. If the culture goes toxic, you're in trouble, but if the treasury is still deep, you may get a shot at rebuilding instead of an instant wipe. Money runs out faster than you think. Per-division P&L on the Bank screen: Core games and consoles, Movie Studio (films and TV), Wrestling Federation, Football Club, Golf Club, Racing Team, Automotive Division, and Newspaper / live services each get their own row with revenue, cost, profit, week-over-week, 4-week, and 52-week trend chips so you can see exactly which division is helping or hurting the bottom line. Player Guide: open from the status bar (book icon)—search every help page, browse by Core systems / Game modes / Passion projects, and get context-relevant suggestions based on the screen you’re on (you can still read everything). MANAGE PEOPLE, NOT JUST NUMBERS Hire staff with traits, skills, morale, fatigue, and ambitions. Staff have career goals: ship a hit, get promoted, mentor juniors, work on their favourite genre. Meet their goals and earn loyalty. Ignore them and they'll leave. Deal with personal events, family emergencies, creative breakthroughs, burnout recovery, conflicts with colleagues, industry award nominations. Promote leaders and deal with internal politics and alignment. A great team can save a bad plan. A bad culture can sink a great studio. COMPETE IN A LIVING INDUSTRY Compete against procedurally generated AI studios with unique personalities, genre preferences, and growth strategies. Studios enter the market, grow, decline, get acquired, and shut down, every playthrough is different. Your closest competitor becomes your rival. Track head-to-head wins, watch them poach your staff, and race to release in the same genre. Navigate a dynamic market where genres move through boom-and-bust cycles: emerging, growing, saturated, declining, niche. Time your releases or get burned. Attend annual industry events: Hardware Showcases, Developer Conferences, Game Jams, each with real gameplay consequences. Compete for Game of the Year at the annual Awards Ceremony across many categories. Your trophies live in a permanent awards wall. Read rich, context-aware news that references your studio, your rivals, and the consoles you're all fighting over. LEAVE A LEGACY Every run tells a story. Chase prestige goals and milestones, from genre dominance to industry legend. Display your Game of the Year wins, nominations, and lifetime stats in the trophy room. Past runs are tracked so you can see what you built, and how it ended. Carry over bonuses into New Game+ for your next attempt. Bankruptcy is a failure... but also a lesson. Learn, adapt, and try again with better decisions next time. Make hits. Miss payroll. Try again.
