Patch Notes Part 1
New stuff
Studio logo upload, re-exposed. If you missed the logo upload during onboarding (or accidentally clicked away from it), you can now upload, replace, or remove your studio logo any time from the Customize banner panel on the Company tab. PNG or JPG, 500 KB max, square images recommended.
Name your own ticker on Spin-Offs and Tracking Stocks. The Empire capital structure panel now has a Ticker field next to the Listing name. Type 2 to 5 letters or digits, validated for uniqueness against every other listing and sector index, or leave it blank to auto-generate as before.
New Studio Upgrade branch: Passion Projects. Two new tier-gated upgrades that discount the entry cost on every Passion Project purchase you make (Racing Team, Football Club, Space Venture, Newspaper, Wrestling Federation, Golf Club, Car Manufacturer, Yacht Collection, Philanthropy):
Tier 1: Owner-operator negotiation, 10% off, $120k, requires Reputation 50.
Tier 2: Mogul-class advisory, additional 10% off (20% total), $240k, requires Reputation 70.
Discount applies to both the Mogul Profile purchase flow and the direct Racing Team founding flow.
13 new tradable companies in the Stock Market. Filling out previously-thin sectors (retail, healthcare, real estate, transport, sports, semis, cloud, diversified). Existing saves pick them up automatically on the next sim tick. New tickers: ATRX, NBNC, MERH, HLXB, KEYP, HRBR, SKYG, OMNH, STRC, VNTA, LMNC, APXS, ORBC.
Bug fixes
Fixed: Best-selling Car milestone showing the raw variable name. The milestone unlock popup was displaying car_mfg_best_selling_model instead of "Auto: Best-selling model moment". Same shape of bug as the Game Awards typo from the last patch. Root cause was the milestone label dictionary being duplicated across five different files and drifting out of sync. Now centralised so this can't happen again, any new milestone we add from here on only needs to be defined in one place to display correctly everywhere.
Fixed missing milestone descriptions for the five short-form Car Manufacturer milestones (first successful launch, best-selling model, award recognition, recall survived, brand reputation 80+). Previously these milestones had no description text in the unlock popup.
Thanks
Massive thanks to ƝƖƓӇƬMƛƦЄ for the detailed forum post and the milestone bug report, every fix and feature in this patch came directly off the back of his feedback.
Patch Notes Part 2:
Patch notes — IP & Franchises page fixes
Fixed: Total cost on the IP page was showing $0 for games. It now correctly shows your actual development spend, so the Profit figure on each franchise is now real.
Each game on the franchise card now shows its individual cost next to revenue, units and score, same way publications, movies and merch already display.
The "By type" summary at the top of the page now shows a Games cost figure too.
Port costs are now tracked. Previously, the upfront fee for porting a game to another platform was being paid but not attributed to the resulting release, so multi-platform franchises were under-reporting cost. Fixed going forward.
Definitive Editions and Complete Editions no longer double-count the original game's dev cost in the franchise rollup.
Heads up for existing saves: ports already in progress before this patch land without a recorded cost (no retroactive backfill). Anything you start after updating tracks properly.
Thanks
Big thanks to JUSTSOMEDUDE199 on the Steam forums for spotting and reporting these. The kind of clean, specific report that makes a fix easy. If you find anything else odd, post it in Discussions, it genuinely helps shape what gets fixed next.