SELF MADE: Investment Life Sim · published
Hello, investors!
This update round is driven almost entirely by your posts on the discussion boards — special thanks to Doomi, whose detailed feedback and hedge fund threads shaped most of this update, and to everyone else who took the time to write up what they hit. On top of that, an internal audit pass closed out every remaining high-severity finding from our full-game review.
Not running a fund yet? The beta is opt-in: right-click the game in your library → Properties → Betas, enter the code EnableHedgeFund, and select the hedgefund branch.
New Fund Reports screen. Browsable month-by-month and yearly reports, from both the Full Desk and the Compact view. No more relying on the recap popup as your only history — page through past months, or flip the yearly toggle for January-to-December changes.
Fees now land where you can see them. Management and performance fees settle in December and appear on December's statement. This also kills the doubled December recap some of you saw in January.
Manager Credential screen. Open Manager Credential / Desk Mastery from the Full Desk (Capital + Progression group). It shows your rolling 36-month annualized personal return beside the solo and partner requirements for every larger fund — so you can see exactly what an institutional launch takes before your current fund closes. Until 36 months of data exist, it shows months collected instead of a misleading 0%.
Contribute Capital, where you expected it. The button now lives in the Full Desk. The cash shortcuts are 50% and 95% — the 95% option deliberately leaves a reserve for taxes and ordinary bills, exactly as suggested on the boards.
Leverage expectations are fair now. An institutional LP that joins while your fund is visibly running a higher leverage stance records that stance as its baseline. Investors no longer complain about risk they knowingly signed up for — though raising leverage further can still breach them.
Your fund survives you. Fund and GP units pass intact to your heir. If the estate can't cover estate tax from cash, it can queue an orderly wind-down under the same market-liquidity rules as any large sale — and the estate-tax deadline now waits for that payout instead of forcing bankruptcy or an arbitrary haircut. The estate screen no longer traps you either: close it and keep advancing months while the fund raises the cash. Heirs can also sell the management company's fee rights as an estate line.
Smaller fixes: a queued wind-down disarms the button with a WINDING DOWN label; fund decision popups now block the month from advancing underneath them; margin-call notices no longer duplicate.
The "pass the torch" button on the Family screen (On cell phone) if the following conditions are met:
Player alive, not incarcerated
Heir is 18+
player is 60+
No active legal matter — SEC investigation, court case, municipal case, or injury lawsuit
No active family matter — a pregnancy in progress or a newborn still waiting to be named
No outstanding divorce settlement
Estate is solvent (gross estate above zero)
No estate tax already due, and no income tax outstanding (including taxes deferred to April)
Summer break works like summer break. Classes suspend for the summer, your term schedule (study load and job hours) is remembered, you can go full-time at your job over the break, and September restores the term schedule automatically. No more losing the first class month or hand-rebuilding your hours.
Injury paid leave now pays the wage frozen at injury time, and only while the injured job is still yours. The pension pauses while you're employed — no more stacking a pension on top of a full salary.
Divorce settlements are funded the way a court would order: cash first, then forced stock sales, then bonds — capped at what actually exists. Your cash can no longer go arbitrarily negative in a divorce.
The theme here: what a screen tells you now reconciles with what actually happens.
Takeovers no longer hide leverage. Acquired public companies keep a conserved sector ledger, so a business showing a fat operating surplus can't quietly deteriorate the moment you buy it.
Index funds no longer bleed on splits. Stock splits now carry continuity divisors, removing a price drag that compounded badly on passive index positions over long saves.
Legal costs and settlements flow through NET CASH FLOW like every other dollar.
December taxes refresh after year-end asset sales, so a December sale shows up in that year's bill.
Options expiry now runs on the same 252-trading-day clock the market uses. This removes a structural edge on long options that was, frankly, free money.
Personal short selling is capped by the borrowable float, matching the fund side.
Estate-planning loopholes closed: charitable deductions cap at 50% of the year's income, foundation moves are refused while estate tax is due, and SEC self-dealing probes now disgorge 1.5× everything routed through since the last probe. A private company's sale quote also can't drop below the cash it actually holds.
The asteroid-mining reward: some of you reported the $500B "not paying out." It pays out as company valuation, not cash — the rocket dashboard now labels it that way.
Foundations from older saves no longer display "null" for their name and specialization.
Whale-scale sales of your own self-created company now execute their premium correctly.
Closing the window saves first. The game now catches the window close, autosaves, and then quits. No more losing everything since the last month-end — and no, killing the process no longer reverts Ironman casino losses. Ironman means Ironman.
Steam Cloud: fixed a false conflict dialog after a backup retry; deleting a save slot can no longer resurrect an unresolvable conflict on restart; older saves no longer conflict with their own Cloud history.
The Foundation dashboard no longer breaks after you start a mega-project.
Every slider in the game has a visible track again — blackjack bets, financing down payments, UI scale, all of them. A theme bug had collapsed every track to zero height, leaving lone knobs floating in space.
The company-creation clipboard is readable and fully localized — real translated labels in all seven languages instead of English baked into the artwork.
Paper surfaces got real ink: the financing page, every button state on the property contract (including a readable disabled state), the newspaper's close button, and outlines on roulette's black number pockets.
Share counts on the trading screen group by locale (1,200,000, not 1200000). Street addresses use real ordinals (31st, not 31th). The resolution dropdown names non-standard window sizes instead of rendering blank.
Company dashboard: the close button no longer stretches into a gold bar across the header, and a company with no products shows guidance instead of an empty void.
Insider tip cards name the company instead of printing a raw placeholder.
A refreshed main-menu backdrop.
Controller focus now covers the surfaces that were missing it: options trading, real estate, sector reports, spreadsheets, stock details, the news app, the entire casino floor (blackjack, roulette, slots, the ATM), art auctions, the garage/dock/hangar collection rooms, and business contacts.
The game now ships an official Steam Input action manifest.
The visual sweep also runs at the Deck's native 1280×800 to keep every screen contained and legible.
We've come a long way since April and plan to keep updating this game well into the future. Thanks for making it so much fun
— Dev Brothers