[MODERN USA MOD - V2.6 Update (June 4th. 2022)]

Looks like Film Studio Pro Tycoon is coming out next year on Steam unless you're talking about some tiny game that probably isn't getting finished as the guy just had a baby. The Steam version looks fun though. And that's a nope on MWE. Dealt with the dev way, way, way back when. He is the closest to giving Adam Ryland a run for biggest douchebag that isn't rich I've ever dealt with. Not to mention that I bought his first 2 versions of this game before he ran himself off the board. Plus, that game is super-old. Glad you're having fun with it though.

[MODERN USA MOD - V2.6 Update (June 4th. 2022)]

Dua Lipa and Olivia Rodrigo are way too low. Granted that's off just one album for Olivia, which is why I said pop stars are harder to quantify, but that album was basically a supernova. Dua Lipa has had several albums already all do very well.

It has been awhile since I played the game so I don't remember the bands that didn't have members, but it was several of the more famous ones in there. Also, I didn't mention it, but the Festivals are quite bugged as they're lacking logos so you can't click on them to see the results. I was afraid that that was a game issue with the albums. Honestly, that needs to be fixed as it also creates tours for them too making every game a crapshoot if you don't edit everyone onto your label to start with. Artists that are majorly useless for a year isn't a good game design.

 

But this game right now needs massive improvements to be enjoyable. The UI is too click-heavy, and the AI is still dumber than a box of rocks. Dumping a ton of money at them improved things, but they still don't do promotion well at all which causes them to fall way behind as the months go by. Probably some gain from their singles and albums doing well would be great, but right now, you could do with eliminating anyone with less than 40 rep that the player isn't a fan of because they'll be at whatever they start at plus maybe 5 points after years of playing. I so miss Chart Wars 3 which was the best game of this genre ever. This one could be even better than that given all the extras in the game already, but it'll take a lot of work that I don't know if Mark can do in his free time.

[Album-Produced single's values don't match]

This is a really bad issue as it means you get the worst of both worlds by saving time by recording all your songs at once on an album. If you get exceptional ratings on some of your lower-quality (75-80s) songs getting bumped up to 90s, they don't show up when you go to release a single as they retain whatever rating they had before production, and if your top songs do poorly in the other two stats, those ARE copied to the songs (obviously as they don't have any ratings there) which can torpedo your 95+ songs. I somehow improved every sub-90 song on Gwen Stefani's album up to 88+, and it's all useless. So, according to the album, I have 4 songs that were soldly B-side afterthoughts that should be top 5 mega-hits while 2 of my top 4 songs tanked into the low 80s on their other 2 stats (the song stat dropped a good 5 points as well, but they didn't actually because of the bug).

 

Unless this is purely a display bug where it's incorrectly showing the song's original songwriting rating, but the album's produced rating is what is actually in the data just isn't shown like it should be? I haven't had a single produced change its base rating in this save yet so I'm assuming it's an album-only issue.

[MODERN USA MOD - V2.6 Update (June 4th. 2022)]

Need to edit that your Judgement score has to be 51 to sign anyone. Honestly need to have more points to use if one has to be set to 51 to start.

[MODERN USA MOD - V2.6 Update (June 4th. 2022)]

Tried this today and noticed a couple of things.

1)For some reason, I couldn't pick the option to start with 1 artist. It went to the screen to pick, but the list was blank. There are plenty of artists in the game that are even unsigned, which isn't a requirement.

2)A bunch of the bands don't have their members show up on their artist page. It's just blank next to it.

3)It's weird that you yanked some of the shows but left The Late Late Show as being hosted by Craig Ferguson who hasn't hosted it in years. James Corden is leaving soon. And I'd seriously drop the rating of The Jennifer Hudson show. She's not Ellen, and even that was way too high for her. American daytime TV shouldn't be above the 70s you have for the others. Oh, and remove The Oprah Winfrey show. That hasn't been a thing in 20 years or so.

4)I know you're striving for accuracy, but I'd ask that the last albums being released be set to at least 2021 so you can at least make an album. I bought out Charlie XCX and Meghan Trainor and have no idea when I'll be able to release an album with either.

5)Also, there are a lot of what I'd consider very famous musicians that have very low pop (reputation is the in-game term). I know it's not easy with pop stars because they can come out of nowhere.

 

And this is a game thing, but I'll leave it here just as a tip for new players. Set your Judgement score to 50 if you ever want to sign anyone as everyone rejects you if it's below that. I learned that the first time I played the game but forgot it. 😞

[Real World Mod]

Unfortunately, yes. It's largely the AI is terrible so if you just care about what you're doing, it's not as big of a deal. Others have had game-breaking bugs. The developer has returned to the game so hopefully, a lot of these will get fixed. You can get used to playing it for that future fix as it takes a good amount of time if you have several artists on your roster. The 1.2 version is reportedly very stable, but it's old as far as a real world mod goes.

[Real World Mod]

There are real people in the game if you choose to use the Real World option, no mod required. Some of the ratings and popularity are wildly off for Feb. 2022, but you can improve popularity pretty easy in the game. Some of the moderately-popular non-pop artists aren't in there though. It's a fun game, but it is buggy a lot.

[Why can i download it but when i try to pen it it dissapers]

Anytime you go to run an .exe file and it vanishes, that means you antivirus software is quarantining it for some reason. You'll need to go into whatever antivirus you're running and whitelist it. Also, make sure you set it to run as Administrator. The game is safe btw so your antivirus is flagging it incorrectly.

[Studios generating no revenue]

I noticed in my semi-long-term game (went from July to Dec. or Jan.) that because of how sales work in the game (you have to get the artist's hot as hell with quality mattering not all that much) and the AI being horrible at it, they tended to do a ton of streaming but order almost no CDs. To the point that even the few moderately-successful albums or singles would be 80%+ streaming sales. So that would explain why you're not seeing that much revenue from distribution or manufacturing. You'd almost have to rely on having a big stable of artists to make it work. I hope he can fix the game because this genre has essentially died off in the last several years.

[scouting issue]

Because this is after the scouting finished. Honestly, if you're running the real world database, scouting is pretty useless as far as I could tell. There's that one stat on the person's/band's screen that gets uncovered when you scout them, but all the other important stats matter way more. Unless that helps you when you do auditions, I couldn't figure out what real benefit it gives you, but there's no manual for this game so I can't be sure.

[Numerous bugs and suggestions]

Since maybe Mark is getting back to a place where he wants to work on this game, I figured I'd add a few more bugs that have popped up in my game.

1)This is merely cosmetic, but if you go to make an album (the singles section displays properly) with some songs not recorded yet, when you get to the very last selection of mixer or sound production where there are three values, the last is supposed to say Trend Setting but copies the 2nd column's name for every single song you need to record. As I said, it's purely cosmetic as the stats are the same as for singles.

2)Movie soundtracks are completely bugged. I got an offer for a few of my artists to submit songs and submitted all of them. The day of, they all showed up under the tracklist with no sales data for the album. Simmed a single day, and there is no tracklist plus it looks like it has been out for weeks as there is now a this week and previous week sales. Either the artist should get something out of it (money, reputation, hype), or just remove it because it doesn't look like I got anything from my 3 artists being on that album.

[Game freezes during auto save]

What size databases are you using? I've come to figure out that the largest size just isn't a good idea, but I'm about as far into the game as you are Toby without any of those problems. Also, how good are your computers as that would matter too. Quite possibly, you might want to check your hard drive space on the drive your game is on as I'm sure the database is increasing every week with it decreasing ever so slightly every week too but after it increases. But any specific info will help Mark whenever he dives back in to fixing the game.

[How do you gain popularity for low-pop artists?]

I owned Music Wars. It was pretty good, but the bugs and the dev's harsh tone made me question how good the sequel would be. And then it turned out to be bad. Is 1.2 not buggy? I had never played it much, but I just don't understand how 1.3 could be this buggy. And that artist hype thing looks a little like a display bug as the next day had most of their hype back, but just some artists don't gain much of anything that I'd just love to find out what I'm doing wrong. But the AI is just atrocious. I'm basically playing the game now to make enough money to save some of the artists I enjoy irl because the AI is just bad.

[How do you gain popularity for low-pop artists?]

Honestly, I think it is simply down to a bug. I had been trying that suggestion of just send your artist out to do media before ever hyping a single, and it had built a little bit over 2 weeks. Loaded the game up and right back down to 0. The other one that had been building a little with her single that alarmed me dropped a bunch of her hype too. This game has so much potential, but it is a massively buggy mess. I hadn't even advanced a day just stopped because I needed to go to bed and it takes me an hour to go through the charts every Monday. I hope the dev can come back and fix all the bugs or sell it to someone else to do it and give it the huge graphical and ease-of-use additions it badly needs as there isn't another game like this on the market. Of course the only other series on this genre died a horrible death because that guy couldn't squash all his bugs either. Wonder how Chart Wars managed to be so great for so long without being a buggy mess.

[How do you gain popularity for low-pop artists?]

Nothing has fallen and I've had no negative incidents to my artists, just others periodically. The label rep gains have basically tailed off since I started having to spam that option in the media visits for some of my less popular artists. Yeah, the singles bar sometimes only hits halfway for a lot of them, but that wasn't what I was talking about as that doesn't seem to have much impact on sales. The ARTIST'S hype bar does by a metric ton, and I was just wondering why the gains vary so wildly between artists when I'm doing the exact same stuff. And that's part of the game's major problem as practically no AI-controlled artist has any hype because they do no media appearances or just 1 show for a week or so (which is bugged as they'll do a weekday show each day for 7 days, including the weekend), and combine that with awful songs, produce no sales no matter how much reputation the artist has around the world. No artist hype=really lousy sales no matter their reputation.

 

It really came to a head with one of the AI-generated artists I signed that is over 80 in the US and either Asia or Europe along with Australia (which doesn't matter at all), and she didn't even peg 200k in sales in her debut week because her artist hype meter (the one on the artist's main page with their social stats) was barely anything. But I've got a few other less popular artists that their hype meters maxed out sell infinitely better the same week even if it wasn't their debut week.

[How do you gain popularity for low-pop artists?]

Okay, it's a little weird that selling things doesn't gain you any pop, and I will add that doing the "My rep is high enough so reconsider that no" does in fact hurt your label's rep as I've just about stopped gaining label rep week over week despite practically owning the top 10 singles charts everywhere for 2.5 months now.

What is causing some of my artists to struggle gaining artist hype? I've got some that will nearly max that out right before their first single is released, and I've got others that are barely halfway there or worse with their 2nd single coming out (I space them out every 35-56 days). And that's with full weekdays of 2 shows each plus every weekend show I can get them on. The singles are pretty much the same quality. No one has lower than a 70 live rating or poor charisma, but since you can't see their show scores, you don't know if they're just randomly bombing (that report never showed my artists at all so I turned it off as I couldn't care less what anyone else was doing). But it is killing a few of my artist's sales since that is a massive part of how sales are calculated in the game. Do you just have to throw the kitchen sink at the single advertising campaign? That wouldn't explain all of it as some of my most popular artists are the ones struggling. Or is it strictly tied to their social medium subs as that would explain it as they don't have a massive following yet though it's growing. Makes zero sense that the game would auto-generate a ton of very popular artists with poor social medium subs if that's going to kill your sales.

[Numerous bugs and suggestions]

I'll tack on one more glaring bug. I've checked the enable auto-stock option on every single album and single I've released until I tested to see if the toggle was set backwards (so checking it turned it off instead of enabling it), and every single one shows me the option in the single/album stock to click to enable it, which doesn't work. That means you have to micromanage yet another thing every week.

[Raising Label Skills]

You have to start the game either with an artist (an option in the game setup) or just set your character to start with 50 to avoid that problem. If you start with a good artist, your judgement stat will skyrocket super-fast just because you'll be playing the game, so to speak which is how that skill improves (just sending them on media stops, picking good singles to produce, etc). But the best way is to just setup your character with 50 judgement, which is the min. required to get any artist, anyway. I wasted my first game too not knowing that and doing an audition to get a single act/singer takes way too long for my taste.

 

PS--the super-top-tier free agents won't sign with you until your label reputation is high enough, but 99% of the other artists will sign with you at 50 judgement.

[Artist disappeared after loading a save]

I've been paranoid about this happening in my game to me, but it just happened to another label. It's possible that it is just a further problem with the label screen, but when I go in to view one label's artists, it's a blank list. The label screen shows 8 artists, and since there's no other way to find them, I can't prove which is wrong. Other label's artists display just fine though. Really don't want my game to quit working as I'm barely 5 months into it which takes forever to play that far when you have a decent-sized roster of talent.

[My suggestion list to make 1.3 playable]

I knew I'd forget something.

8. Australasia either needs to have its sales increased, or have the sales staff figure out that it is a tiny sales total because the suggested CDs amounts think it is on par with Asia wanting you to have 50k or more for that region if they have any popularity. For reference, Ariana's 3 CDs, the first 2 are at almost 7 million sold each (all together not just CD sales as this isn't 1992). Total CD's sold in Australasia? 12,700 for one and about that for the other with it going up maybe 100-200 per week. The rest of the regions are fairly accurate so something is amiss somewhere, likely on what the expected sales should be. It told her to have 300k per single so I have a metric ton that will never be sold. Wish you could ship them between regions.

[My suggestion list to make 1.3 playable]

Not sure if this is the right place to put this as a lot of these are bugs, but I figured a checklist would help Mark out a bunch.

 

1. Fix the numerous database linkage and corruption problems. That's what is causing people to lose artists randomly. In my game, Ariana Grande's tour is literally printing money, but because there is a linkage failure, she's getting nothing but the sponsorship money and the small merch sales total (only selling $563k through 15 shows?). Not sure if that's a cap limit issue to prevent popular artists from becoming super-rich as she's likely going to make over $100 million from her 50 show tour. The label screen no longer works for displaying region certification stats and doesn't work for any other label as they just show diamond.

2. The AI needs a massive overhaul. The main thing is that they're barely putting their artists on shows, which means they're not getting any more reputation/pop or their albums and singles aren't getting any hype, which means their sales blow. It also means that the player can just spam shows with little difficulty because they're all available, except for the one-day-per-week shows. They also need to get out of the 1)Make an album 2)Release an album 3)Release a couple of singles. Albums take a long time to hype up, which they aren't doing, and they're rushing to put it out there so there's no song quality control which tanks the album when the absolute crap songs get put on there. But I'm talking super-popular artists selling less than 300k albums or less than what 2 of my low-popular artists did with EPs. And 3 singles don't total 1 million in sales.

3. Related to #2, artists' value should be tied more towards their reputation than their social media subs unless their sales are tied more towards them. The game's generated artists are super-popular with low social media subs, and the few that have released singles for me haven't had that much of a difference with Ariana Grande. But this is tying the top unsigned artists to being unemployed forever as the AI that has the label reputation high enough to sign them won't, and I'm not even to 50 in the US yet (granted in only 4 months but starting with Ariana should have boosted it better than that after 3 massive singles and having a total of over 1k gold certifications amongst everyone on the roster) so they won't sign with me. Plus, they'll be horribly used by the AI.

4. The price to buy-out contracts needs to be looked at. I stole Camilla Cabello who was on a 360 deal with several more albums to go for $10 million. That's inexplicable since she has an 8% rate instead of the usual 16-21% royalty rate and much lower tour rate. Granted, she's one of the ones that has barely sold anything because her singles were all 30s and AI tours are broken so maybe the AI just gave up on her despite being one of the most popular signed artists in the default real-world mod.

5. Speaking of which, the AI tours are completely broken. Only one tour in the game has made any money other than my own. Most don't even have a major sponsor, just the 2 minor ones which shouldn't be possible. Then they all look like they've been canceled as everything is zeroed out which means tours, which print money in general, lose money. The AI when it works properly does produce good competition. Also, it looks like they're doing a single day of tour practice, which oddly got displayed twice in a few that I checked on which might be the bug causing the problems. Good singles that get some media hype beforehand perform exactly how they should. Good albums sell well too. They're just the exception that highlights the massive problems with the AI. Note: I am getting the proper money from the tour. Just not her.

6. Please, please, please, please if it is even possible given the language you're using, merge the calendar and the media screens. If you can't make it drag-and-drop, at least let us see our calendars so we don't waste a slot that is already full. Also, focus on eliminating clicking. This game takes way too many clicks to do stuff. Plus, if you improve the AI media booking, that would let the player rely on that being handled instead of painstakingly having to spend 1 day every 2 game weeks booking shows for everyone on your roster. That takes forever once you have over 10 artists/bands all with singles, EPs, or albums, and is the single most time-consuming thing about the game.

7. Also, please put the help file in the installation files so we can figure out what we're doing. None of the little question mark things that say they take you to the help file but don't even if I'm signed into the game. A manual would be tremendous. Plus, it would stop players from wasting time creating their user character with less than 50 judgement because you can't sign anyone.

[Numerous bugs and suggestions]

I thought about making a new thread titled "Was 1.2 this bad?" because I'd only played it a little bit of it, but this game has some just baffling bugs for it being in a 1.3 state. The AI is just bad as noted in my last post, but now, they can't even get tours to have artists make money or gain pop because it bugs and cancels the event as that's all I can think of when it is 0 attendance and 0 performance when the artists have over 60 rep in several regions. But the biggest scary thing is that the database is easily corrupted as per the post where artists just vanish, and now, the label screen is refusing to do the region breakdowns of the gold/platinum/diamond with any of them having diamond releases have 0 in gold and platinum. If you go into the artists, their individual certifications work properly, but clearly, the database is being corrupted as you play which is the first thing that should be prevented in a game using a database to store everything.

 

I really hope Mark can come back at some point soon and fix the game because it has major problems. Is 1.2 stable without these issues? I'd be willing to try it instead and suggest anyone else do it too.

[Tours with no attendance]

Pretty much every single tour done by the AI in my game that I've looked at have had 0 attendance and 0 performance like the show is being canceled because it's not just a glitch in the display but the tour is losing money too which should be impossible with most of the artists being high-rep people. My single tour so far is selling out with 97-100/100 performance after not quite a full month of tour prep, which never showed up in her artist stats.

[My artist disappeared]

Just out of curiousity in case this ever happens to me, does immediately loading the backup file restore the artists? Something is clearly corrupting the database to have artists vanish like that so it'd be interesting to know if it is in the saving mechanism or if it is happening before then and the save hard-codes it in. But my backups are usually hours older than my save so it's possible the corruption hasn't hit that. Hopefully, I'll dodge that issue altogether though as that's awful given how long it takes me to play a week or two.

[Problems with albums charts]

When you go to your artist's single or album page, are you getting sales? What does the chart tab show (you have to switch to different continents and hit select for it to switch)? Again, I had that problem with the EPs upon release (never singles though), and doing that eventually fixed the charts. You say that your artists aren't that high. Do you mean they're all at 0-2 reputation (basically popularity) across the globe? Are other artists with other labels releasing singles and albums? It does take a few weeks for new stuff to start up just because writing the songs, then recording the songs, and releasing the singles takes roughly 3-4 weeks with albums taking 6-8 weeks. But if this is 2 months in, you should have stuff showing up. Screenshots will definitely help.