The Executive - A Movie Industry Tycoon Steam Charts & Stats

good game

very good all-around

hours of mind numbing fun

Its basically Game Dev Tycoon, but for movies. Its a decent game, but limited and gets boring fast. No possibility to make TV shows, and you aren't developing stars, you aren't making a name for directors and the biggest task is moving sliders around. Its NOT The Movies, and is not pretending to be. If you're unsure, wait till Summer Sale.

This game is fun. If you enjoyed The Movies back in the day, you'll likely enjoy this one.

Fun Idea and I really gave it my best efforts. It's sometimes fun, but mostly very frustrating In the beginning you have to produce only to pay the loan. Practically all your movies need to be spot on and than you can make it to the 40 million and move to the bigger office. Because you cant keep your employees idle, because of the high costs, as soon as your producer (you) is available, you have to produce. You have to watch the screen like a hawk to find out the icon (make a new film) is not dark grey, but black. Often I watched time pass thinking I didnt have an idle employee, where in fact I spilled costly time... Even when after a few games I know all the optimal settings (writing, costume, set, special effects, sound, editing), It's never a guarantee for a successful film. I found that if I put 2 analysts on trends for theme and genre, and planned ahead, even then the combinations of theme and genre that SHOULD be a succes, can be very, very bad..... Maybe it's more important to find out the best combinations from theme and genre. But this takes many gaming years and makes no sense to me. Switching from revenue share distribution to marketing the film on your own (localy at first) is also frustrating. Even at 100% finding the market, you can almost never make a profit. You spend 2 or 3 campaigns which takes away all the profit. I put in 17 hours so far, and feel frustrated.

A taste of Hollywood, but without all the sex offenders. 10/10

I was looking for something reminiscent of the old "The Movies" game. This isn't an exact replacement, but it definitely scratches the itch. Overall, there is a lot of depth to the game and it isn't too overwhelming to learn. I would recommend it.

I guess it could be a decent little short term time sink for some, but I think it's a bit shallow and the pacing feels off for me. The game advances through the years too quickly for my liking and before you know it, just as you've unlocked most of the techs the game is pretty much done accumulating score. I think the first office should start out with twice the seats so you can work on multiple movies much sooner, and the advancement of time would be better served scaling back from there so you can enjoy making more movies in your play through. There really aren't any legendary or rare employees to hunt for that really make your movies stand out anymore than employees you get at the start and are able to train fully throughout the game. There doesn't seem to be any feeling or reward for trying to find diamond in the rough, unknown directors and actors either. Would be better if you found your own actors and your movie successes propelled their careers and had incentive to work with them more than once which seems to happen in the real industry. Genres get locked out too often and for too long. If I want to make the kinds of movies I enjoy over and over I really should be able to do so for my own enjoyment. The trends of the years from the analytics team can already be a natural hindrance to some of that burnout and provide the needed incentive to make other types of movies occasionally. More genres would also be nice to choose from. Such as Animation, Epic, maybe Operatic, etc. (Western also feels like more of a genre than putting Wild West as a theme. again, just my opinion)

Much less intuitive than comparable games like Game Dev Tycoon. After 40 hours of gameplay, very little in this game works as expected, and it's grindy as hell. --[b]The game grossly under-explains critical mechanics[/b], like how vastly important it is to nail seasonal/holiday releases for ALL movie types and how vastly better it is to do multi-genre movies. Actually figuring out which holidays/seasons are best without looking at a guide or at the backend is pretty much impossible. Figuring out which themes even HAVE a viable multi-genre combination is also pretty much impossible unassisted. Enjoy! --[b]On top of all of the other external factors that can tank a movie, I'll give holidays and seasonality a shoutout as one of the worst game mechanics I can remember in a strategy game[/b]. Trying to remember which of 12 genres does well at... the Super Bowl, the World Cup, summer, Valentine's Day, Memorial Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween... is extremely unfun. ALSO: the difference between a great scheduling match and a neutral scheduling match is 4x your overall product score so you can't actually opt out of doing well on this. Oh, also, until you have a marketing team, you don't have much control over whether there's a release date which works for your movie, anyway. Enjoy! This sucks. --Way too much of which movies succeed or not is based on "not you" factors like genre/theme trends, movie competition, RND, holidays, and if your distributors happened to offer a favorable time of the year. "You" factors like the movie being a 10/10 or winning Best Picture seem to hardly matter at all. The difference between getting a movie that is solidly good (8.0 out of 10) and a 10.0 is maybe 20%. This is underwhelming. --I think the Premium Features might be bugged. I don't think I've ever gotten a movie above "B" in Premium Features even with a list of what Premium Features are supposed to work for each theme/genre. --Mid/late game, you have to check genre and theme trends every time for every movie, which is separate from genre/theme fatigue, by the way. The game could do a vastly better job incorporating this CRITICAL information into the genre/theme selection when you're making a movie rather than fumbling around so much. --A special shoutout to getting penalized when you select a premium feature which doesn't fit the genre. This blows. Out of 71 genres, an upgrade like Jazzy/Blues Music is excellent with 6 of them. You MIGHT be able to guess Prison [spoiler]if you're racist[/spoiler]. Good luck guessing... WITCHES? Sports? Hospitals? Small Towns? Friendship? These feel like they were picked more or less at random. Trying to figure this out unassisted is completely impossible. --It is COMPLETELY normal for a game like this to have some genre/theme combinations that don't quite line up with what a player expects. It's really hard for a game designer to anticipate every billion dollar series that might come to mind for a player. Some of the odder misses here: the Space theme loves sci-fi and adventure but I dunno there's a multibajillion space saga with major Action elements (starfighters/lightsabers) and major Fantasy element and yeah you're completely ****ed on either of these. Relatedly, the "War" theme hates Sci-Fi, which is odd for both Star Wars and Terminator and any number of alien invasion movies, like all of them really. The Monster genre loves Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror, but not Action or anything else which represents the multibillion kaiju subgenre which is bigger than monster-based horror movies. The Military genre loves Action, but not anything which represents anything else you could do with a military story (e.g. it hates Crime and mostly hates Mystery and Drama). Oddly, the theme War DOES love Drama, so good luck remembering that, I guess. Why there are separate themes for War/Military and Doctor/Hospital, who knows.