Your device’s review rating decides almost everything about how it sells. It sets how many people will buy it, how long it stays popular, whether it wins or loses fans, and how much your marketing is worth. Get the rating up first, then price the device just under 135% of its cost, and you’ve covered most of what moves your income.
How a Device Gets Its Rating
When a device launches, four reviewers each give it a score from 1 to 10. Each review comments on one aspect of the device, such as a component, the price, a design choice or the warranty. Every aspect earns a bad (1–3), average (4–7) or good (8–10) comment depending on how well you handled it.
The game gathers a comment for every aspect your device has, shuffles them, and draws four at random. Your rating is the average of those four scores, rounded to the nearest whole number. A smartphone can have more than sixty aspects in that pile, so a single weak spot rarely decides the rating on its own. Every weak spot does raise the odds that a reviewer picks on one, though. The way to push your expected rating up is to clear out as many bad and average comments as you can.
Price is the exception. If you charge 135% of the device’s cost or more, a complaint about the price always takes one of the four review slots, however good the rest of the device is. The Pricing section below explains how to avoid it.
The biggest source of bad comments is falling behind on technology. Each component is judged by how far it trails the newest option on the market, so an old screen or chip turns a good comment into a bad one. The research priorities guide covers which technologies to keep up with.
Save Before the Reviews Come In
The four reviews are drawn fresh every time the Reviews screen opens, so a disappointing rating isn’t final until you click past the last review. Before a new device reaches its reviews, open the pause menu and choose Save game. If the rating comes in low, close the game without saving and load that save, and the reviewers draw again.
Decide on the Reviews screen. The game also saves on its own every 90 in-game days while you’re in the office, so if you play on after a bad result, an automatic save can lock it in.
How much this helps depends on the device. A device with almost nothing to criticize, priced under 135% of its cost, scores 9 or 10 a little over half the time, so a reload or two usually gets you there. A rating of 9 sells about 40% more than an 8 and guarantees an award at the next ceremony (see the awards guide). Reloading won’t save a weak device, though: one with plenty of average comments mostly lands on 6 to 8 however often you try.
What the Rating Does to Sales
Read the table as sales potential compared with a device rated 5, at the same price. The first year column applies during your company’s first year, when every device gets a sales boost that’s biggest for low ratings. That boost fades away over your second year. Selling period is roughly how long the device keeps selling before its popularity runs out, without any hype.
| Rating | Sales potential | First year | Selling period |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.02× | 0.02× | about 73 days |
| 2 | 0.06× | 0.06× | about 73 days |
| 3 | 0.15× | 0.15× | about 73 days |
| 4 | 0.33× | 0.33× | about 73 days |
| 5 | 1× | 1× | about 73 days |
| 6 | 1.7× | 1.5× | about 81 days |
| 7 | 2.6× | 2.0× | about 92 days |
| 8 | 3.8× | 2.7× | about 106 days |
| 9 | 5.5× | 3.6× | about 124 days |
| 10 | 7.5× | 4.8× | about 152 days |
Below 5, sales collapse: a rating of 4 sells a third as much as a 5, and a 3 sells about a seventh as much. Above 5, every extra point adds roughly 35–70% more sales, and the device also stays on shelves longer, because popularity drops more slowly for well-reviewed devices. A rating-10 device keeps selling about twice as long as a rating-5 one.
The first-year boost softens a weak start. In your first year, a rating-5 device sells 80% more than usual, while a rating-10 device gets only 16% more. Don’t count on that cushion lasting; by your third year it’s gone.
Pricing
The price slider runs from 105% to 160% of the device’s cost and starts at 145%. Move it down to just under 135% before every launch. The default price is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make in the game.
At 135% of cost or more, one of your four reviews is always a complaint about the price, whatever the other reviewers think:
| Price (% of cost) | Price review |
|---|---|
| 140% and up | always one review scoring 1–2 (“overpriced”) |
| 135–139% | always one review scoring 3–4 (“high cost”) |
| 130–134% | a 5–6 comment that can turn up among the other aspects |
| 120–129% | a 7–8 comment that can turn up among the other aspects |
| under 120% | a 9–10 comment that can turn up among the other aspects |
A guaranteed 1–2 among four scores pulls the average down hard. At the default 145%, a device that would otherwise average about 7.7 drops to about 6.2. Below 135% the price comment is just one of dozens of aspects and rarely appears.
Price also changes how many units sell. Each device has a “fair price” that rises with its rating: about 142% of cost at rating 5, 156% at rating 8 and 165% at rating 10. Charging less than fair sells more units, and charging more sells fewer. Put both effects together and just under 135% comes out on top. This table is for a well-built smartphone; other devices follow the same pattern.
| Price (% of cost) | Profit compared with 134% | Average rating |
|---|---|---|
| 115% | about 72% | 7.7 |
| 125% | about 92% | 7.7 |
| 134% | 100% | 7.7 |
| 135–139% | about 63% | 6.7 |
| 145% (default) | about 49% | 6.2 |
| 160% | about 49% | 6.2 |
Leaving the slider at its default roughly halves your profit, and the lower rating also wins you fewer fans and makes your marketing weaker. Going much cheaper than 130% sells more units but earns less overall.
Fans
Fans make your audience bigger, so every future device sells more. On about a third of days, a sales event moves your fan count for each device you have on sale. A strong marketing campaign raises that to up to two-thirds of days. How many fans you gain or lose depends on the device’s rating:
| Rating | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fans per event | −120 | −70 | −35 | −12 | +35 | +60 | +90 | +130 | +165 | +200 |
These are base amounts. They grow with the device’s popularity and with marketing, and they’re multiplied by the size of your company: the more fans you already have, the bigger every swing, up to 40 times larger. A device rated 4 or lower loses you fans for as long as it’s on sale. Fix a device’s weak spots before launch so it doesn’t drag your fan base down for months.
Fans add to the pool of potential buyers for every device:
| Fans | Audience compared with no fans |
|---|---|
| 50,000 | 1.4× |
| 125,000 | 2× |
| 250,000 | 3× |
| 1,000,000 | 4.7× |
You also gain fans slowly over time from the devices you’ve already sold. The higher your average rating, the more fans that adds up to.
Marketing
A campaign does two things: it widens the device’s audience, and it turns your spending into extra sales. Both depend heavily on the device’s rating.
Campaign strength grows with the device’s rating, your daily budget, the campaign’s length, the skill of your marketing staff and the device’s hype. The rating counts on its own, so a well-reviewed device starts a campaign much stronger than a poor one with the same budget.
Only part of the money you spend counts toward extra sales, and that part depends on the rating:
| Rating | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spend that counts | 0% | 10% | 25% | 45% | 70% | 90% | 100% | 110% | 120% | 130% |
Running more campaigns for the same device pays less each time:
| Campaign on the same device | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 6th and later |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Value | 100% | 80% | 50% | 25% | 10% | 5% |
At best, each dollar that counts brings back about $1.80 in profit, and the return shrinks the more you pour into one device. Save your marketing budget for devices rated 7 or higher, and stop after one or two campaigns per device.
Device Types and Market Size
Each device type has its own market size. Smartphones have by far the biggest market, so the same rating sells several times more phones than TVs or VR headsets.
| Device | Market size compared with smartphones |
|---|---|
| Smartphones | 100% |
| Headphones | 75% |
| Smartwatches | 50% |
| Tablets | 42% |
| Consoles | 38% |
| Laptops | 33% |
| Keyboards | 29% |
| TVs | 25% |
| E-scooters | 21% |
| VR headsets | 17% |
Gamepads come bundled with consoles and don’t sell on their own. Every market also grows by 3% each year from 2008, so the same device sells better later in the game.
Selling several devices of one type at the same time splits the buyers between them. One other model of the same type on sale cuts a device’s sales potential by about 22%, and two others by about 36%. Versions of the same model compete harder: one other version (Budget, Standard or Flagship) cuts it by about 31%. A phone sold in all three versions at once has each version reaching only about half the buyers it would reach alone.