![]() ![]() Hire and train staffers to help deal with logistics and keep your agency running smoothly.ĭiscover substories - chains of events and visual novel segments, many of which are triggered by your play style. ![]() Start with simple offices and dance rooms to produce content and train your idols, and end with your own cafe and theater to create a steady stream of revenue. Produce singles, hold concerts, organize huge TV events and overseas tours to capitalize on your group's popularity and bring in revenue.ĭevelop your agency's building. Grow your fanbase by varying your tactics and appealing to a wide variety of demographics. Manage relationships between the different idols in your group, as you deal with cliques, internal feuds, and bullying. Decide how to deal with crises including gossip, vandalism, stalkers, or threats directed at your agency and the pop idols you manage. There's a lot of people who want to tear you down and are willing to play dirty, but try not to let it get to you. The world is full of gossip magazines, super fans, and rival groups, all thirsty for a scoop on the latest scandal. It's not just the idols you have to worry about. Their crowning personal achievements can be your greatest commercial successes, but their emotional meltdowns and PR nightmares can spell financial disaster for your company. The personal lives of these young celebrities are a part of your business, and the life of a pop star isn't always a happy one. As you cultivate and train the newest generation of young pop stars, you'll have to decide who to hire and who to fire, who gets promoted when things go well and who gets reprimanded when things get sour. Part of portraying darker and more sensitive topics includes showing the negative consequences that they carry, and we're aiming to really enmesh the game's themes and story with the gameplay in a way that really allows the player to feel the consequences of their actions, as opposed to having things like characters' mental health just be something that only matters during story segments.You take on the role of manager at a small (but growing!) talent agency. The problem isn't that people disagree that these things are bad it's that they tend to be overlooked and ignored, and in our case I think the point is often better made if we simply to stop ignoring these issues and start portraying them in a way that tries to be more honest and realistic about what happens in the industry. There is some undeniably dark stuff that goes on, but I think there's pretty uniform agreement that things like exploitative work conditions and practices are bad. I think that just portraying some of this stuff in a realistic manner can make for a more effective "criticism," as there's a lot of stuff that is so self-evidently bad that you can make the point just by showing it without going out of your way to say "Guys, this is really really bad" in a ham-handed manner. That being said, we don't want to be too heavy-handed in our presentation. The game is certainly intended as a commentary/criticism of the Japanese idol industry, as one of our goals is to to take things like shady and predatory practices within the industry and not gloss over them (as opposed to a lot of idol games and anime that tend to ignore these aspects). ![]() Scandal is a major theme of the game, but business management is the real substance of it. While some of the events in the game are based on real scandals, the game is more concerned with some of the more "mundane" issues in the industry that aren't really a single event that becomes object of press attention, like mental health issues, demanding or otherwise poor work conditions, bullying and cliques, and so on. It would really easy for us to have some stories that are "pulled from the headlines" and say, "look, we're talking about the scandals that affect the real industry," and we will be doing some of that, but our game is equally concerned with what happens in talent agencies when they're not making the headlines and having to deal with problems like a particular CD release bombing, or trying to make the unit economics on concert tickets make sense. ![]() Even unscrupulous businesses aren't engaged in unscrupulous behavior all (or even most) of the time it's often the case that people are concerned with managing the economy of a growing business empire, and make moral compromises along the way in the pursuit of that goal. Our pitch leads with talking about scandal because we feel it's what separates us from a lot of existing games that deal with the industry, but a lot the game's substance is based on the less sensational aspects of the industry: trying to maintain a profitable agency, figuring out how to appeal to different fan demographics, and so on. Idol Manager is, at its core, a business simulation. ![]()
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