Game Dev Tycoon, the Greenheart Games studio-building simulation

Game Dev Tycoon is a business simulation from Greenheart Games Pty. Ltd. The player replays the history of the video game industry by starting a studio in a small garage office in the 1980s. Early releases are simple. With experience the studio can create its own game engine, move into an office, hire and train staff, research new technologies and unlock labs for industry-changing projects.

Greenheart Games was founded in July 2012 by the brothers Patrick and Daniel Klug. They began work on the game in 2011 after enjoying Kairosoft's Game Dev Story on the iPhone and wishing for a version with less randomness, more consequential choices and a more realistic feel. In Game Dev Tycoon those choices matter: a player decides, for example, whether a game needs more gameplay or more quests, and the mix shapes how well it sells. Larger games bring larger problems, and a growing studio has to manage its team well to keep delivering hits.

The launch in late April 2013 came with an unusual piece of design. Greenheart Games released a cracked copy of its own game on torrent sites. In that copy, piracy of the games a player had made inside the simulation eventually bankrupted the virtual company, so people who skipped paying experienced piracy from the developer's side.

The game is on sale. Greenheart Games' official page for Game Dev Tycoon loaded in November 2026 and offers it for Steam on PC, Mac and Linux and for Nintendo Switch, with further links to the App Store and Google Play. A rating line on the page gives 4.8 out of 5, based on player ratings on Steam, App Store and Google Play, dated October 2026.

The page also explains the business model. The developer asks for a small upfront fee and says the game has "no in-app purchases, no ad-breaks, no loot boxes", and no forced wait-times or virtual coins either. Under the heading Gameplay over revenue, the developer says the game was designed to be fun to play and not as a revenue extraction platform.

Game Dev Tycoon sits at the entertainment end of the serious games spectrum. Its subject is the economics of making games, and what a player learns comes from the systems themselves: research, staffing, development focus and release timing.