Software Inc.

Work on the overhaul is moving forward at a steady pace. Here are some of the things that have changed since last.

Servers

You can now develop your own server products and use them for hosting your software, or use servers already on the market.

A server's bandwidth, durability, power usage and security will depend on which features you select during development. The security attribute will lower the impact of DDoS attacks.

DDoS attacks will happen more frequently the bigger your company gets, but can also be carried out by other players in multiplayer. Your IT staff will work to mitigate any attacks.

Pre-marketing

Target audiences

3 audiences have been added to the game, each of which interact with your products in different ways. Some will be more or less likely to refund, more or less sensitive to pricing, or increase or reduce support tickets, etc.

Each type of software will affect the target audience, based on how you balance the market targeting. At a base level each audience is targeted equally and will not affect your product, outside of how it already works now.

Hype

You can now hype products during development. Hype will increase total audience reach, but also audience expectations, so you better not make too many promises!

Process simplification

Hype, press releases and press builds are out and have been replaced with:
Pre-marketing: Basically like the old hype task, but it doesn't just stop you from losing followers, it will be your only way to gain followers and hype during development.
Messaging: You will be able to update your messaging about 4-8 times during development, which will hone in on your target audience and increase your reach, but also allow you to hype your product and nudge your target audience.

Other miscellaneous changes:

• Entire IPs can now gain their own following, separate from the companies' fans
  

• You can now gain business reputation from licenses, patents, frameworks, publishers and awards, and business reputation has been added back to impossible difficulty
  

• Support ticket simulation now happens separately from support task
  

• You can now place trash cans below tables and desks
  

• We've started adding ads for products in-world to make it very apparent what is happening in the market and how well you are doing

The background

If you've followed development closely, you might know that we've been working on a campaign mode to help ease in new players and introduce the game's mechanics at a reasonable pace. My hope was that this would tie the game together for the 1.0 release. This work has been slow going, as I'm not an author, so writing good dialog has been pretty difficult, even though most of the campaign is playable at this point. We've spent downtime polishing the game and adding a couple of small auxiliary mechanics, as seen in the recent trash update.

I've paid particular attention to the fact that some of you are disappointed none of the recent patches have touched the software development/management part of the game. I had written this part of the game off as complete, while the campaign was being developed. I decided to look over our list of "wishes" for this aspect of the game and made a tentative plan to improve it. My conclusion is that it would take at least 6 months and be completely game breaking.

Based on the fact that I wrote "I have a great opportunity to make this game as good as I possibly can" on the Steam store page 10 years ago, and this is our last chance to introduce game breaking changes (so I don't mess up the campaign mode and final 1.0 release), we've decided to move forward with it.

The plan

The overhaul will touch marketing, servers, product "identity", subsidiaries and some smaller game breaking stuff that I've always wanted to add, but I didn't want to break saves.

Everything is subject to change of course and will probably not live up to your expectations, but the rough plan is:

• Completely overhaul pre-marketing and introduce a couple of new mechanics
  

• Add an extra mechanic to post-marketing, but keep the overall post-marketing process pretty much the same
  

• Integrate servers better with the core gameplay loop
  

• Add some very high-level customization to subsidiaries
  

• Add a couple of things to make software products feel more personal

As always, I will try to make sure the additions don't complicate the game too much. Most of the things we add can be completely ignored, without making the game tougher on easier difficulties.

The TL;DR

We're going on a financially dubious probably 6 month long hiatus to overhaul some core mechanics (marketing, servers and subsidiaries), because it seems like the right thing to do and I enjoy working on this game.

I will keep you updated as progress moves along and we have some actual stuff to show. The new server system is pretty close to done already and the pre-marketing overhaul is well underway.

Finally, I just wanted to give a quick happy 12th year anniversary to development of Software Inc!

Changes

• Cooks can now use trays outside of their assigned rooms
  

• Sort icon on columns is now separate from header, to avoid it being cut off
  

• "Night owl", "super focus", "born leader" and "just the flu" above employees heads will now change color depending on whether the effect is currently negative or positive
  

• Changed the wording of the team compatibility filter error when looking for new employees

Fixes

• Changed room aura calculation to avoid inconsistencies based on furniture placement order
  

• Fixed bug when new product is released using framework with no owner, mostly occuring in multiplayer
  

• Fixed leader multitasking specialization not applying to accounting work and incorrectly requiring 3 stars for support work