Devices Tycoon Awards Guide: How to Win Annual Awards

Release at least one device rated 9 or 10 every calendar year. That guarantees your company an award at the next ceremony, and every award you win pays $5 million and 250 research points. Until your company is big enough to top the company ratings, your best-reviewed device of the year decides almost all of your other chances too.

When the Ceremony Happens

On 12 December your assistant tells you the awards ceremony is coming. On 1 January the ceremony itself arrives, and TAKE PART takes you straight there. The calendar stays paused until you leave.

Each ceremony judges the year that just ended. The one held on 1 January 2009 hands out the awards “of 2008”, so your first ceremony comes on the first 1 January after your start date.

There are 21 awards, presented one at a time with third place, second place and the winner. The speed button plays the ceremony three times faster. Skip decides every remaining award at once and shows a results table with the top three for each award, how many you won and the money and research points you earned. Skipping changes nothing about who wins or what you’re paid, so use it whenever you don’t want to watch.

What Winning Gets You

Only first place pays. Second and third place get your name on the screen and nothing else. Each award you win gives you:

• $5 million and 250 research points, or $7.5 million and 375 points with the Star Effect perk;
• 5 points of Influence and Dominance, the company skill that opens perks in that line (a new tier opens at levels 41, 81, 121 and so on);
• a one-day lift to your share price of 3.5% for one award, or 7% for two or more on the same day;
• a new post about the award for your company’s social media page;
• a place in the awards room and on your company stats page.

Two Steam achievements are tied to awards: one for your first award, and one for winning five awards at a single ceremony.

How Winners Are Chosen

Every rival company that’s active that year competes, and so do you, whether or not you’ve released anything yet. The 21 awards pick their winners in three different ways.

Ranking Awards

Eight awards go to whichever company scores highest on a measure from the company ratings screen. Your device ratings play no part in them, except for a bonus in Breakthrough.

The ratings screen shows the same numbers the ceremony uses. Income is your yearly revenue rate from device sales and software, based on the last six months. Income growth compares those six months with the six months ending three months earlier. Overall rating combines Income (35%), Company value (25%), Fans (20%), Market share (10%) and Income growth (10%). Income, Company value and Fans are scored on a log scale against the leader, so going from $1 billion to $10 billion a year moves your score about as much as going from $10 billion to $100 billion.

Jury Awards

Ten awards are drawn by lottery among the 20 companies with the highest Overall rating. Bestseller draws from the 10 companies with the highest Income instead. A company’s chance grows with the square of its Overall rating, so a company rated 70 counts four times as much as one rated 35.

Despite their names, these awards don’t measure anything specific. Pre-order Record never looks at pre-orders and Hype never looks at hype. What gets you a real chance is your best device of the year. If it’s rated 7 or higher, you’re entered even when you’re nowhere near the top 20, with a bonus that can make you the favorite (see the next section).

Craft Awards

Best Design Work, Best Programming Work and Best Engineering Work are near-even draws among the 30 highest-rated companies, plus you. Every rival gets one entry. Your device bonus multiplies your entries, up to about eight at the top.

One rule covers both kinds of draw: a company that has already won at this ceremony enters each later draw with about a third of its usual weight. That applies to you too, so your second and third awards of the night are harder to get than the first.

How Your Devices Help

The ceremony looks at the devices you launched during the year being judged and takes the highest review rating among them. A device counts for the calendar year its reviews came out, so one released on 28 December counts at the ceremony four days later.

Read the table by your best rating that year. Jury bonus is extra weight added to your entry, measured against the strongest rival in the draw: at 2×, you count twice as much as the industry leader. Half-bonus awards give you half of it. Craft entries is how many entries you get against each rival’s one. Breakthrough is the boost to your Breakthrough score.

Each extra device rated 9 or 10 in the same year adds a small step toward the next row, up to three devices.

The Guaranteed Award

If your best device of the year is rated 9 or 10, one jury award is yours no matter how the draw goes. Which award it is depends on the year being judged and repeats every five years:

What to Expect While You’re Small

This table shows roughly how many awards a young company near the bottom of the ratings wins per ceremony, depending on its best device that year. The figures hold across 2008, 2014 and 2026 starts.

The jump from 8 to 9 is the big one: it roughly doubles your haul, because it adds the guaranteed award. Going from 9 to 10 adds much less. If your devices stall at 7 or 8, the sales guide explains how reviews set your rating and the research priorities guide covers the technology that keeps reviews high.

Ranking Awards You Can Plan For

Rivals are huge from day one. The leaders earn about $75–135 billion a year and have 55–75 million fans, so Best Company, Top-Selling Brand and Fan-Voted Best Company are late-game goals. Four ranking awards open up much earlier.

Breakthrough

Only companies in their first five calendar years can win it. For you, that’s your start year and the four after it. Your score is your Overall rating × (0.4 + 0.6 × growth credit), where the growth credit is (Income growth + 20) ÷ 80, capped at 1, plus your device bonus from the table above. For example, an Overall rating of 25 with 40% growth scores 25 × 0.85 = 21.25, or about 32 with a 10-rated device.

Your start year decides how hard this is, because every rival’s founding year is fixed:

• 2008 or 2010 start: every rival counts as young until 2010, and the best of them scores around 47–50. After that the best young rival still scores around 43–46, so this one is hard to win early.
• 2014 start: the best young rival scores about 46 in your first year, then only 24–29 after that.
• 2020 start: the best young rival scores about 27–32 each year.
• 2026 start: only 13 young rivals in 2026, 5 in 2027 and 1 in 2028, scoring at most about 27, 27 and 11. In 2029 and 2030 there are none, so Breakthrough of 2029 and Breakthrough of 2030 are yours automatically.

Fastest Growing Brand

You need at least $500 million a year in Income, then the highest Income growth. By the ceremony, the fastest-growing rival is usually somewhere between 14% and 39%, depending on the year. Your growth is (recent six months − earlier six months) ÷ the larger of the two, so if your last six months earned 1.5 times the earlier window, your growth is 33%.

On 1 January the recent window is roughly July to December and the earlier one roughly April to September. A strong autumn launch lifts the first without touching most of the second.

Best Growth Strategy

Half of this score is Income growth, and you get full marks at 60% or more. The other half is your Company value on a log scale against the most valuable company. With 60% growth, a Company value of roughly $6–10 billion is enough to beat the best rival, which makes this the easiest ranking award for a fast-growing mid-sized company.

Financial Breakthrough and Most Loyal Fan Community

Financial Breakthrough multiplies Income in billions by Income growth in percent. The leading rival usually scores 450–850, so you need something like $10 billion a year growing at 60% (a score of 600).

Most Loyal Fan Community rewards fans relative to Income. With $1 billion a year in Income you’d need roughly 8–14 million fans to beat the leader, and every extra billion of Income raises that bar.

Perks for Awards

Two perks boost awards. They sit in the same slot of the Market and Audience line, so you can take only one. That slot is the fourth tier, which opens at Market and Audience level 161. The line grows as you gain fans and social media followers, release well-reviewed devices and run marketing campaigns.

Take Star Effect. At two awards a year it’s worth an extra $5 million and 250 research points. Award Hunt adds well under a tenth of an award per ceremony while you’re small. It only earns its slot when you’re within 10% of a rival on a ranking award you want.