Annual Reports, Smarter Contracts, and Much More

Hey everyone!!

So where are we at with City Game Studio? The last major update rebalanced the game, improved performance across the board, and honestly left things in a pretty great spot. So what's even left to add in v1.27? I mean, v1.26 already felt close to perfect. What could possibly make you want to fire up a new playthrough?

Turns out, quite a lot.

The Annual Financial Report

Brand new, fresh out of the oven. At the start of every new year, the game now generates a financial report summing up the year that just passed. The whole point is to know whether you're raking in the cash or burning through your budget chasing that next AAA release that's going to finally take your company to the next level.

Inside you'll find a quick overview of the year, broken down by sector. Did your games actually make money? Are you overspending on game engine development? You'll also get a few handy stats in there, like your current headcount.

The Interface

I don't think there's been a single major update without some interface improvements, and v1.27 is no exception. The changes are pretty significant if you're used to how things worked before, but don't worry, you won't feel lost. If anything, things should feel more natural.

The bottom menu got a small cleanup. I removed a button that used to let you repair coffee machines, but since coffee machines can no longer break down, that button had been sitting there doing absolutely nothing. I also reorganized the remaining buttons to make the whole bar feel more intuitive. While I was in there, I added tooltips to your money display and fan count. Hover over either one and you'll see the exact figures.

Quality of Life

A handful of small but welcome additions throughout the game. For example, when you're attending conventions, there's now a button that lets you assign the same game to every booth in one click. A small thing that saves a surprising amount of clicking.

I also added the ability to change which studio is assigned to a game update. And since DLCs are a thing too, that same option is now available for DLCs as well. That side of things should feel a lot more manageable now.

You may also notice the calendar looks a bit different. Instead of displaying month names in English, they now show up in whatever language you're playing in. Only the first three letters are shown, but that should be more than enough.

On the comfort side of things, the hacking mini-game that pops up when you publish a game can now be skipped for $1,000,000. Not a huge amount at that stage of the game, and it gives people who just don't enjoy that mini-game a way out.

The Studio Director

A few tweaks here too. First up, when it comes to game ports, you can now filter consoles by market share, which makes the whole decision a lot easier.

And the big one: the Studio Director can now work on game sequels. You stay in full control though. If you'd rather keep things to original titles only, you can tell them to stick to that.

Balancing

Contracts have been significantly reworked. On easy mode, you probably won't notice much difference. But crank up the difficulty and contracts will become noticeably scarcer. There's also no longer an infinite supply of them. Once you've cleared the available contracts, you'll need to wait a few months for new ones to come in.

On the server side, a new server tier unlocks from 2020 onwards, capable of handling twice the player load of the previous generation. To reflect that, the servers that were available from 2007 are now retired by 2020.

Competitors will now generate game offers that actually make sense. No more unreasonable demands with impossible genre and platform combinations. Offers are now logical and well constructed. While I was in there, I also cleaned up the interface for that panel to bring it in line with the rest of the game.

Minor Changes and Bug Fixes

The game name generator has been reworked to produce more varied names, sometimes quite long ones.

There's also a brand new company name generator. When you start a new game, you'll get some fun and sometimes ridiculous suggestions to play around with.

A few bugs got squashed too. There was an issue preventing manual upgrades of individual employee computers and servers. The global button worked fine, but doing it one by one was broken. That's fixed now.

The sixth difficulty level wasn't always showing up in the difficulty selection screen. If you didn't know there was a sixth one, well, now you know why you never saw it.

Number formatting now adapts to your region.

Firing a Studio Director no longer leaves their active projects hanging.

The company logo editor was slow to update while drawing. That's been smoothed out.

Studios are now sorted alphabetically.

The Studio Director could sometimes generate games with a missing or malformed name. Fixed.

If you were loading a save from version 0.29.0 or older, the migration to v1.27.0 wasn't completing correctly. This bug dates back to around 2020, but some players come back to the game after years away, and it would be a shame for them to lose their progress. That's now properly handled.

A New DLC on the Way

I think that covers most of the big changes. There are plenty more in the build itself, so the best way to discover them is to start a new game.

As some of you know, I've been working on a DLC: the Supporter Pack. The idea is to add extra cosmetic content that doesn't affect gameplay at all. Think new company logos, small loading screen animations, slightly different magazine layouts for game reviews, and additional furniture for your studios. That's about it. If that sounds like your kind of thing, here's the link:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2893100/City_Game_Studio_Supporter_pack/?utm_source=2026Q2

What's Next

Outside of this update, v1.28 is already in progress. The focus will be a redesign of the digital store along with expanded specialist powers. Marketing managers will be able to run proper marketing campaigns, and HR will get better tools for managing staff.

I think that covers everything I wanted to share. Thank you to each and every one of you for playing City Game Studio. Hitting 70,000 sales is something that genuinely means a lot to me.

As usual, see you next week for the first v1.28.0 devlog.

Take care of yourselves.
Xavier aka Binogure