Hello and welcome back to my next dev diary, this time focusing on the finances in the game. Be sure to check out the previous diaries, which you can find on the homepage.
I hope you are happy with what you have seen so far. We have touched on: your assistant, the roster, contracts, the academy, signing talent, the boardroom, creating events, booking events, titles, storylines, teams and factions and card roles. Quite a bit to whet your appetite!
When you click on finances on the sidebar, this is what you will see first. The dashboard gives you an overview, which includes your bank balance, monthly income and expenditure, profit/loss and a projection for the year (plus more).
The streams at the bottom (pie charts) enable you to flick the tab between forecast and actual.
You can also apply for a bank loan from this screen if you have fallen on hard times.
Wages
On your wages screen you can view…your wages. You can filter these in different ways, so if you would like to see who’s contract is expiring first, you can view that. At the top, it tells you your wage budget which has been set by the board of directors and also how much wage room you have left. This is also visible when offering a contract and you cannot exceed this limit. If you want more wage budget, you will have to put a request in to the board.
Merchandise
Another cool addition to the game is merchandise. When you complete a show, on the show review screen it will tell you how much money the wrestlers merch sales has made. This feeds into this screen where it is logged. You can view the merch sales for all your roster and see who is doing well with sales and who needs a bit of work. Maybe they aren’t selling merch because they aren’t being booked?
This screen tells you how many units they have sold this month, how much they have made this month and again for the lifetime with the company. Also, you may see merch cut on the end. If you offer a talent a cut of the merch sales when you offer them a contract, this will show here and the company will have to pay the talent their cut.
Sponsorship
The sponsorship screen is a little busy at the moment, so this is a screen that may see an update. As you scroll down, it reveals a list of potential sponsors who are offering you money for a prime spot in your show. To ensure a player could not just accept every sponsorship deal and make a ton of money, I have capped the amount of sponsors you can accept to 7.
Sponsors will offer different things. Some will want to be on the ring mat. Some will want to be on TV prominently and others may want to be featured on the entrance ramp. You decide who you are going to accept into your company. However, you can see some of the sponsors are locked. This is because you need to grow your company to a certain level to unlock different sponsors. You can’t just go straight in and accept hundreds of thousands of dollars without running a show! Come on now!
So I am about to accept an offer from CrownBet, but this is not going to go down well with the fans. But screw the fans, I need the cash. A sponsor will also have some targets that you need to meet (or you will be fined) and a sponsor will also send a message to your inbox to ask to send talent for promotional activities. This is fine but it does add fatigue to the wrestler you send (if you send one).
TV
When you first enter the TV Deals screen, you are met with a lovely map of the world. This shows how much of the globe is covered by your TV deals. As you can see, I already have a TV deal in place with Netflix that covers quite a bit. If you are not ready for the world, you can of course stick to a certain region if you wish.
My current TV deal is shown above. As you can see, I do have requirements I need to meet. They are paying me big bucks so I am going to try and keep them happy!
When you create an event, if you have a TV deal in place then the option is there to link it to your TV deal. For example, I have a Netflix deal, so when I create an event I can select TV, Streaming, PPV, House Show or Netflix Live Show.
All of the finances link together. Merch from shows, this shows on the finances screen and the wrestlers get a cut if it is in their contract. Sponsorships and TV all links back into the finances.
Releasing Soon
So there we are for another dev diary. I am really excited now as the game is releasing in just over 2 weeks (August 18th). I am running solo with this project, with very little experience, however I am a massive wrestling and SIM fan. I hope everyone is enjoying these diaries and I cannot wait to share more with you.
Thank you for all your support!
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