Hey everyone,
We've been going through a load of tester feedback and this update is all about making the late-game feel less like admin and more like running an actual game company.
There's a proper Game Record screen, a Community Dashboard, a bunch of fixes to numbers that weren't adding up, and some performance work on the reports page that was getting rough with 20+ titles.
Let's get into it.
Player Communities
Every game you release now spawns a living player community. These aren't just a number -- they have five tracked metrics: Satisfaction, Trust, Engagement, Loyalty, and Toxicity. Your actions (and inactions) shift these over time.
Happy communities give you a word-of-mouth sales boost of up to 25%. Hostile ones drag sales down by 15%. You'll see sentiment labels like Ecstatic, Happy, Neutral, Frustrated, or Hostile, colour-coded so you can tell at a glance which games need attention.
There's a new staff role: Community Manager. Hire one and assign them to a game to passively boost satisfaction and reduce toxicity. With a CM assigned, you unlock four community actions: Dev Blog, AMA, Patch Notes, and Sneak Peek. Each has different effects on your metrics and a 2-week cooldown.
16 different community events can fire -- things like review bombs, viral fan art, balance demands, content droughts, streamer boosts, toxicity crises, crowdfunding opportunities, pricing backlash, and more. Each event gives you 2-3 branching options with trade-offs. Do you spend cash to fix the problem? Ignore it and take the hit? Double down and risk making it worse?
Loyal communities can even crowdfund your next project. Set a goal and duration, and contributions roll in weekly based on loyalty and trust. Hit stretch goals for bonus effects.
Early Access
You can now release games in Early Access. Tick the option in the project wizard and you can ship at lower quality thresholds (65-75% instead of the usual 82-92%). EA games earn 50% of normal revenue but build up wishlists and an early adopter base.
The core of EA is roadmap management. Promise features, set target delivery weeks, then actually develop and deliver them. On-time delivery builds trust. Late delivery and cutting promised features damages it. Roadmap items take real development time now -- you can't just instantly mark them done.
When you're ready, hit Launch 1.0 for a proper second launch event. It resets the sales curve, converts wishlists into immediate sales, and recalculates your review score with bonuses for a well-run EA period. Launch too early with half the roadmap undelivered and you'll take a reputation hit.
Leave a game in EA for 2+ years and it gets marked as perpetual with trust and sales penalties. Go 6+ months without an update and it gets flagged as abandoned.
There are also 4 EA-specific community events: Feedback Surges, Refund Waves, Roadmap Pressure, and Community Champion.
Project Queue and Cancellation
Pipeline full but you've got ideas? The project wizard now lets you queue up to 5 projects when all your active slots are taken. Queued projects sit on a new panel on the Projects screen showing genre, scope, platform, and type. One click to start one when a slot opens up, or bin it with no penalty since it never started.
You can also cancel in-progress projects now. There's a proper confirmation screen that shows you exactly what you're losing: reputation hit, morale damage (global plus extra for the staff who were working on it), and sunk costs. Penalties scale with phase -- cancelling in pre-production is a minor setback, but killing something in polish is devastating and might trigger a crisis story beat.
Game Record Screen
Click any released game (from Reports, Community Dashboard, or the Charts popup) and you get a full detailed breakdown of that title.
At the top you've got the big numbers: review score, units sold, revenue, profit, community size. Below that is an interactive sales chart with four views: Weekly Units, Weekly Revenue, Total Units, and Total Revenue. The weekly views show bar charts for smaller games and line charts for the big ones. There's an insight bar that tells you the peak sales week, current performance, and how far you've dropped off. If a game is down more than 80% from peak, it'll nudge you to think about retiring it or doing a remaster.
There's also a revenue breakdown line that explains why "price times units" doesn't perfectly match your revenue number. Regional pricing, IP bonuses, franchise effects, and other market modifiers all affect the final figure, and now you can see that split.
The Actions section puts everything in one place: put a game on sale, change the price, do a permanent price drop, push a content update, release a definitive or complete edition, add cosmetic or MTX packs, license the IP, port to another platform, or discontinue it entirely. The port flow works right from this screen, click "Port to..." and you get the full modal without losing your place.
Console games now show the actual console name in the header (like "The Box of Justice") instead of just saying "CONSOLE". Same goes for cross-platform links and franchise listings.
If you open the record for a game that was commissioned for your console by a third-party studio, it'll tell you that clearly and explain why you can't manage the pricing or port it yourself.
Community Dashboard
New tab in the left sidebar that appears once you've released your first game. It's a single screen for managing all your player communities.
Summary cards at the top show total members, average satisfaction, how many EA games you've got, and how many communities need attention. Below that, each game gets a card with its community metrics, CM assignment, and quick action buttons for blogs, AMAs, patch notes, and sneak peeks.
EA games show their roadmap progress and the Launch 1.0 button right there on the dashboard.
You can also retire old communities if you're tired of seeing them. There's a toggle to bring them back if you change your mind.
Status bar and alert cleanup
Community issues used to spam individual alerts for every game. Now it's one consolidated alert with a count, like "Community issues (3)". Click it and you go straight to the Community Dashboard.
Community events were way too frequent. We've doubled the check interval and added a global cooldown plus a cap of 2 pending events. Should feel a lot less micromanage-y.
Weekly random events no longer block the screen with a popup. They go to the news ticker instead.
When an EA roadmap item finishes development, you'll see a notification about it so it doesn't slip while you're busy with other things.
Fixes that matter
Revenue numbers making sense: There was a bug where units sold was being counted before price elasticity was applied, so the displayed units and revenue didn't match up. Fixed going forward -- new weeks will track correctly. Existing saves keep their historical numbers but new data will be right.
Year-over-year revenue chart: The dashboard chart was showing $0 for anything past around 5 years because financial histories were capped at 260 weeks. That cap is removed now and revenue tracks for the entire game. Existing saves will still be missing old data that was already dropped, but going forward everything is kept.
Porting: The port modal used to close the Game Record screen when you clicked a checkbox (click event bubbling). Fixed. Also, port errors now tell you the specific reason -- "not enough cash", "exclusive deal active", "this isn't your game" -- instead of a vague generic message.
IPO button: The "Consider IPO" button on the Company page was opening a simplified popup that skipped the full IPO flow you set up in the Stock Market tab. Now it just takes you there.
Launch 1.0: Was crashing due to a module import issue. Fixed. Also fixed the roadmap delivery checker to use the right fields.
Remaster wizard: The "Next" button was getting stuck when creating a remaster. Sorted.
Community Manager: Wasn't appearing in the hiring pool. Fixed. Also fixed the issue where assigning a CM required a week skip before actions worked.
Roadmap items: You could instantly mark them as done. They now take actual development time, similar to how projects work.
Football Chairman: Paid scouted transfers weren't going through. Fixed. AI managers also weren't making transfers when given authority. Fixed.
Performance
The Reports screen was getting sluggish with a lot of released games. We've removed a cross-screen hover subscription that was forcing full re-renders, replaced a bunch of per-row array scans with pre-built lookup maps, and fixed some memo dependencies that were busting the cache every tick. Should be noticeably smoother.
That's EA15. Lots of quality-of-life, lots of fixes for things that were driving testers mad, and a proper Game Record screen that ties everything together. As always, let us know what's working and what isn't.
Thanks for playing, The ConsoleMe Team