Festival Tycoon Early Access - No Wellies Necessary!
If you live in England, you only get 3.7 days to experience a Summer festival until it rains, so it’s time to make your own fun in Festival Tycoon Early Access, from Dreihaus and Future Friends Games.
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I don’t care what your stance is with vaccines, your music tastes or your business credentials – we all love festivals, and this is your chance to make the best one on the planet in a 100% safe environment.
Now, let’s see if Oasis will reform, and you can book them…
Festival Tycoon Early Access
If Michael Eavis can make Glastonbury from two blades of grass, a piece of string and a sausage roll, then Johannes Gäbler can make the best festival game on his own. That first comment is not remotely accurate, and equally, Johannes has gone from solo developer to now having additional helping hands and an awesome co-publisher.
As it stands, you have a sandbox mode, a ‘new’ event, the latest news and content if y’all plugged into the internet and ready to go, and some info on your chosen festival and partners.
Under the ‘new’ tab, you can choose from selected events of X number of days and sizes – the latter impacting your projected audience and how much space you can work with. Your job is to set everything up, have a fully functioning event that people want to come to, but fundamentally, earn some money doing it.
If You Book Them…
Getting started in Festival Tycoon Early Access wasn’t complicated, but there was a lot to go through to grasp all the varying factors that impact the event. I’m from a generation where we never read the manuals, now in our old age retro collecting days complain games don’t have them anymore; I felt I’d learn more by diving deep and referring back to the help files, but I stuck with the tutorial, and glad I did as there’s a bit of a linear checklist approach; you have to do X and Y before moving onto Z.
The concept is straightforward enough: you start small then grow into a marketer’s wet dream. There are two key areas to the game: build mode and live mode. The former is all about the management side of layout, sponsorships and booking the right artists, whereas live mode is where you get to watch whether it succeeds or not, but you will have a hands-on approach with staff. You can’t reposition structures, add or remove them in the wild.
That success is measured on three factors: Festival – whether it’s any good; facilities, price and what-not, Music – the popularity of the band (let’s face it, booking System of a Down or Rage Against The Machine would guarantee the ratings, but can you spell h-i-a-t-u-s? The final rating is based on Genre – in this case, as a rock fan, I might have a bias towards the aforementioned bands, which would be suitable for metal and rock crowds, but the hip hop crowd might want some of The Pharcyde, Tribe or maybe even a bit of Wu?
Remove All The Blue M&Ms
Once you’ve booked the bands, you’ll have to serve their needs. Fortunately, the Mariah Carey type won’t be on the roster, so there is no need for puppies, but you have to keep the artists happy, ensuring they’re not playing for free either. This can mean anything from having an RV available for them to hang out in before the gig or not booking a particular genre – EDM, for example. Additionally, they’ll have other requirements like your festival being rated high enough or selling sufficient tickets.
I noticed that once you hire a band, you can’t fire them – even at a loss. This might have been a feature I missed, but I booked a metal band only to find that their festival rating requirement was too high. The only way that could be countered was by hiring additional bands to play. This duly raised the level, but unfortunately, for the $40k profits I made, most went to the bands and maintenance.
Once the festival has met all the requirements of the bands and sponsors, that the buildings are presentable enough with easy access, you switch to that live mode and watch the chaos kick in. Typically this means sending out your cleaners to patrol for any trash or having medics on hand. If you’re unable to juggle staff placement, you can always do a quick fix (such as repairs and healing people) by clicking a button, though it will cost a bit of cash.
The Clock Is Ticking
To say that Festival Tycoon Early Access runs like clockwork is optimistic. Well, it does to some degree as you’ll see the busload of people show up ready to entertain themselves with your archery stands and similar or to pitch up their tent, plus the bands will show up accordingly – primadonnas or not. That element is smooth. In fact, the whole process is a well-oiled machine once you learn all the mechanics.
The key thing is naturally the management side of things, and the more competent you get, the more rewarding it becomes. The fastest way to measure your success is to monitor your festival’s reputation, the money you earn and your relationship with the bands and sponsors. Perhaps an even more interesting parameter is how your fellow festival organiser is doing as Festival Tycoon has a built-in online leaderboard.
I wasn’t retired to the bottom of the list for once, but my first scores weren’t good either. Johannes isn’t an uncommon name, but I’d put my money on that person ranked at 6th globally as the developer. Despite shying away from online gaming, I sometimes get competitive when I see other’s scores, thinking, ” I can do that”. I can’t. Still, that won’t stop me from my next festival and the one after that – I love this game.
Festival Tycoon Early Access is bloody brilliant. It combines my favourite things into one space: music, gaming, an abundance of alcohol and multiple toilets. This IS the next best thing to going to a live event, so click on the link to the Steam page and add it to your basket. Put it on your wishlist, at the least.
