News Tycoon Reviews

Drear Oreol Team I love this game but there is a lot to do and alot farther to go. I found this game 4 hours before it came out it looked awsome I loved it. But when I Bought it I was a little disapointed with what I saw the grapics where nice but no tourtorial for a complex game like that angers People you have a nice game with great potenial and I dont want to see this game go to wast and I am a big fan of you reading your reviews and adding what people want to the game fast to if you keep up the great work adding what the fans want and updating it fast this game will make a killing I am far in to and dont have much money so I apreciarte how you uped that. I pearsonly think you should add a way to raise or lower you starting cash and a way where you build your company from a paper vcompany to a paper company and have a web site and have a tv network to boradcast news and a multiplayer that you can work with and agianst each other that would make the game AWSEOME all ready more than it is. Best Regars- Alex

This was last patched March 2017, so no doubt has been long abandoned. I ended up with News Tycoon in a bundle with the other game from this developer, so I figured I ought to give it a shot. Honestly it's not worth wasting the time nor data to download News Tycoon. Subscriber count seems to grow and shrink randomly much of the time, even if you keep your paper running the same style of age/demographic-targeted articles from the beginning - meaning it's not IF you bankrupt, but WHEN. I gave up after attempting four separate newspaper companies. I figured since there are guides so one can 100% the achievements I'd try doing that at least. Still no luck, following them continues to see the weird changing subscriber count and inevitable failure of the paper. The one time I had a successful paper, the game locked up and ate my save file after eventually crashing to desktop. Avoid this one, folks.

Game's been abandonned for a long time. Do not buy it, as it is a waste of money.

Despite the lack of updates, it's still very playable. I only started experiencing issues after I upgraded to the last tier office building. Honestly at that point I've already beaten the game. As long as you don't mind missing 2 achievements I'd still recommend buying it. Still a solid 4 to 5 hours of entertainment.

Dear Devs, dear community, I do whant to state out, that this review shall help to improve the game, as in the moment is is really a very smal starting game, that has a lot of potential, but needs a lot of work to do, to make it a wonderful game... Let us look into it: + a wonderfull Idea, to compete against al the shooting stuff + a nice way of making things better in the world maybe + nicely designed overal + firmly working with good FPS rates BUT now lets look into the gameplay Im putting this out as IDEAS, so do not take it wrong in any case: - no possibility to rewiev the last published articles - no posibility to comment articles or take back articles, as they are random (means to be able to take back an article from the Market, so you do not loose subscribers. - no way to choose a category in articles, to improve your own way of journalism. (means no influence in, what direction your journalisim will go, so no clasdsifications. - no way in choosing, if you whant to be a newspaper, a magazine, even there are no categories, the only way is to choose the release dates.... (means, to be a Sports Magazine, Sience Paper or Beauty Collum, what ever,) - no meetings in the team, no conferences or Press meetings... - no way to choose youre headline article for the next release.... - no influence with your articles on the market or society, as the returns are random... (Las Vegas) - no other companies to work with, or against, so no copmetitors... alone in a big city? - no market, no reviews, no clients, no bad or good, all randome. - no given categories in the articles, if they are political, sozial, sience and so on - no way to choose for categories in the news headlines, when picking an article. - no way to write sidenotes, or have influence of what you are writing ... no way to stop an article, made by an other Journalist in your company, before releasing them to the audience... - There is a ranking in the game, but what for as it only depends on how often you write and release. - Random things happen, taking or giving you money, what make no sence of all... random , Las Vegas - no way to choose what journalists will do for work, lik,e Mary does Sience, Ben does sports, Ann does Beauty - no way to make your own brand name, as there is NOONE in the city... no AI players - The UIs are far to big, and blocking the screen, especially the headline, htat disturbes - What is the FACE for? Sometime green, sometimes RED, ...? - NO TOUTORIAL , and no Notes - Not a lot of animations and stuff to make the game look more filled, looks like a 2D Browsergame. - Do people work 24 h a day, never going home or for lunch, OK breakroom.... - What does DAY 1, WEEK 1, MONTH 1 , YEAR 1 mean? , don´t we have a real date system, what would look far better. - no suroundings, like other places, oh yes 2D Browsergame, so what for... - it should say: Choose youre Theme (or headline), not article, as you are the one who will write one... Please do something in these things, and it will b a great game. I did not take a refund, as I whant it to move on. I´m from Germany, so please do not look to much into my spelling.. smiles Have a great day

I don't buy something in EA section, really - hope, i shouldn't explain, why. For a quite long time i have been waiting someone makes tycoon game about journalist work - and after some search yesterday i was surprised when found this one. And i bought it. So, after some play i want to tell - not bad, i really expected much worse after reading negative reviews of this game. Game mechanics are simple - you choose an event from the list (each one has own theme like politics etc, and relevance) - and your journalist prepares an article for your newspaper. You can set price, paper quality (didn't understand 100% - how it works, needs more tips), choose the look of your front page. After release you see how much new subscribers you have and your rating. Cool thing is - each journalist has many skills like writing, proofreading etc - and if they jounrnalist performs some action - skill grows - like ermmm.. Skyrim. You can also rent new buildings (that require rent each month), and build new offices to hire more stuff. Building system is similar to Fallout Shelter. Sometimes something happens - like sportman won't buy your paper anymore - and you loose subscribers. Bad thing is - it happens too often and needs to be balanced. Final: i'm satisfied with this game and would see, what it will become, when will be finished. PS. Sorry for bad English, i'm from Germany.

After playing this game for about 2 hours i want to say - it's not AWFULL. There is no doubt that it need lots and lots improovement works, but even at current state it's very addictive. The main minus for me - plyer has not so much influence on creation proces - yes, you can change the price, set print setting - but that's it. I WANT TO CHOOSE ARTICLES I WANT TO SEE ON FRONT PAGE, I'M CEO!! Interface is not always intuitive - but key words here "not always". I didn't see any change between articles type, also happiness works in some strange way... And you'll ask me - why positive review, man? I'll try to explain. As i said - the game is not BAD, you can't just say, that something is made half-heartedly - NOT AT ALL - everything works, i didn't mentioned any bugs - the main problem is - monotony at some point. I'm sure it needs balance and more content. I'll check the game in few month, and i really hope that this positive review won't change to negative. For now - 7/10 - not a masterpiece, but can entertain you, before you understand - hey, i've done all that stuff before!

The biggest problem witht the game is that there is no real control. It's a lot like throwing spaghetti against the wall. First, you need somewhere for your staff to rest or your quality goes to crap, but the default office does not come with a rest area. Why is one not included at the start? or have them leave, go home and come back rested or something? Anyway, my biggest complaint is you cannot keep readers. You can lose all your readership with one bad issue. And you cannot really help it because you will automate your staff and if there is no celebrity news available, they just do another genre and boom, your readership dwindles. It's hard to make money, seriously. You need the larger building to hire more than one other person and have a rest area, but then that $5,000 a month rent comes and just eats up anything you have made plus more. You can do these 'quests' to pay the bills, but guess what publishing a couple of notes a bout economics does to your readership levels. Anyone wanna guess? Unbalanced and not really fun. Great concept, but poor execution.

News Tycoon is the wrong execution of the right idea. The news industry is a fascinating concept to explore, given then industry's social-engineering, black-propaganda and other aspects. News Tycoon gently touches on this this, with various entites offering incentives, often large cash payments, to spin articles in their favor. However, the game is very much in an incomplete and partly broken state, and it doesn't appear that the developers are very interested in correcting even the simplest flaws, despite their critical impact. As of the writing of this review, the last response to a bug report was in April of 2017. To make matters worse, they've been advised of and acknowledged easily remedied flaws, such as mispelling "Korea" as "Corea," but they've yet to correct the problem. Major flaws include such things as the player being unable to sort topics by relevance. The option to sort be relevance is available, but not all topics are displayed when doing so. In fact, only a very small percentage is. This means that as your staff grows, you can either micromanage everyone, choosing each topic for them, or you can allow them to choose their own topics, but the relevance will be random. This is comparable to India declaring war on China tomorrow, and newspapers printing articles on increasing electricity prices and the sale of a spoon manufacturer, but never an article on anything relevant to the war, or relevant to the reader at all. The "relevance" of your paper will plummet, as will your revenue and subscribers. The bugged relevance sorting is probably an easy fix, but the developers can't be bothered with correcting that bug, nor any other. While the relevance issue is a glaring flaw which forces the player to tediously micromanage their journalists, or suffer poor ratings and sales, a variety of smaller issues will also be immediately obvious. There's little variety in the subjects available. You'll be writing the same articles over and over again. You might be surprised how often America's president decides to fire the entire government on New Years Day, how often that same president resigns, or how often NASA announces a mission to Mars. There's also very few topics available in general. Whatever subject your journalists specializes in, they'll run out of subjects to report on often. There's an entire world of "economics," "politics" and so forth taking place, but your staff is oblivious, and you'll have to invest massive sums of money, maxing-out your news organization's ability to discover news, just to ensure a single journalist in any subject will be aware of enough events to consistently have something to write about on their assigned subject, and even then he/she will still have to write about some other random topic fairly regularly. Apparently your journalists have never heard of the internet, and apparently the game's developers have never heard of newswires like Reuters or AFP. A game on this topic could be fascinating, and thus this game has potential. The developers are however investing no effort what-so-ever. News Tycoon looks dead. To make matters worse, the developers have disabled Steam Workshop, so even if the community wished to correct the game's problems, it can't be done in any practical fashion. Not that there is a community. Until the developers start developing again, if that day ever comes, and until, at a bare minimum, the developers correct the easy-to-fix autosearch/relevance bug, I don't recommend this game. As of this moment, News Tycoon appears to be abandoned, incomplete and broken. Lastly, even if the developers begin developing again, and even if the relevance/autosearch bug is corrected, I can't recommend this game at any price greater than $4.99, especially considering Steam Workshop has been disabled. That limits the game's potential, and also suggests the developers intend to intentionally leave things out so that they can sell them to you later as DLC.

As far as I can tell, gameplay revolves around assigning a story - selected from a revolving pool of headlines - to one of your journalists. A progress bar will fill up twice, once for "writing" and once for "proofreading." A number next to “ready to publish” increments by one each time. You choose how often your paper is published (weekly, daily, etc), and every time it is published, “ready to publish” resets to 0 and you get some money based on the quality and relevance of your articles. The relevance is determined by a random number next to each headline – and you know it's random, because nothing exists in the game world besides your office building and the menus you use to put out your paper. Headlines with higher numbers are better. If comparing two numbers to see which is higher is too much for you, there is an “autosearch” button you can use to automate the entire process. If there is more to it than that, it is well hidden. There is no tutorial or help menu, and there are no tooltips. You can upgrade your building so it holds more offices, or do research for passive buffs for things like increased speed or decreased rent. Leave the game on autosearch and fast-forward for a while to get enough money to do this. You can also hire more journalists to help you. They have various statistics (celebrities, science, politics, etc). I assume this matters behind the scenes, but the pool of “relevant” articles is so small it hardly seems worth fussing over. I took out a loan to get to the end of the game to try out things like “investigations,” but nothing shakes up the core gameplay of watching progress bars fill up (granted, many games focus on that, but there's usually some window dressing or decision making). While half of the game is patronizingly obvious, another half of the features are just plain baffling. You can choose to have your journalists do “notes,” “articles” or “interviews,” for instance. None of these options are explained, and as someone who works as a newspaper reporter, I can confidently state that this lack of information is not helped with real-world experience. There are also random events. For example, you might lose $42 because people are upset over your paper's article on abortion, even though you didn't write about abortion. Or your article about tennis might cause some scientists to lose a grant. This also subtracts money from your account. The negative events are balanced out by positive events that are just as arbitrary and disconnected, so they don't add a gameplay challenge, they're just odd. And while this won't matter to many, and I don't want to be mean about this because I'm certain the developers are not native English speakers, grammar and spelling are awful throughout. Given that it's a game about journalism (and even features proofreaders), I had higher expectations for the language localization than I would have for, say, a game about spaceships or pirates. In summary, the gameplay is too generic and uninvolving to simulate anything, and attempts at making the game about running a newspaper are poorly executed. The developers say Early Access won't last more than 1-2 months, and while that might be enough time to fix existing issues, it's not enough to add the features that are needed to make this game unique or enjoyable.