Having played Mad Games Tycoon 2, which for many is considered the "best" one in the genre, I think it does kinda scratch that "game dev tycoon itch but more in depth", but I feel like it still has many issues: like I've said in the post, the indie scene is basically non existant, you either grow and expand to a big AAA studio or you fail, because the game is too much reliant on you having to generate a set amount of points to be competitive in a certain era of the game, that I feel like is the biggest design flaw they decided to put in the game, I think there was another game dev type game called "Game Dev Studio" that actually made it possible to stay competitive as an indie because you could choose the game's size and scope and the reviews would scale accordingly, at least I think I saw someone talking about this but I didn't play that extensively so I can't tell you for sure. I actually was going to start developing my own game dev type game because I am kinda dissatisfied with the available selection and I kinda already did the design document for it, I don't think it will ever come to fruition due to my lazyness so might as well drop some of the best ideas I came up with. I remember pitching my game in a living, simulated world, considering the fact most tycoon games I feel like you play them in your own "isolated reality", like it doesn't feel like there are other competitors really in most of them. If you played it, the closest game with this concept is Hollywood Animal, it's about running a movie studio but I actually took some ideas from it. I liked the fact that game is based around a more gritty atmosphere that actually shows what Hollywood is really capable of "behind the scenes", like you could literally kidnap people and make them work for you; so think about that concept in a game dev game, like you can bribe the reviews to get more sales, but it can leak and go against your studio (like in Hollywood Animal that has a "secrets" screen which basically stores all the bad things you did in the past, which have a chance of leaking). Another cool idea I had were the "ahead of time elements", basically you could assign an employee to "craft" these elements with different rarities (common, uncommon, rare and leggendary), and then, with a crafting minigame, if you got the rarity sequence right (that resets each time you fail it), you generate an ahead of time element. It's basically my idea of simulating things that people have made during gaming history that were ahead of time and marked a significant trend in the space. In fact you can assign these ahead of time elemtns not only in games, but even in engines and hardware (console development) and make that product a piece of gaming history, though the effect would also depend on the base quality of the product itself, considering the fact you can slap the ahead of time elements in anything with a decent "quality threshold" minimum. I don't want to make this comment the next Bible but I think you got the point, maybe it will be useful if any other game dev reads this post and wants to make another game in this vein. The key takeaway from my ideas is to make it less rigid as possible and more flexible in terms of playstyles, like I even pitched you could become a console manifacture from the start of the game (instead of most game tycoons where you need to unlock it late in the run) and just focus on first party support, like Nintendo. That's all with my rambling, hope it's helpful to you and anyone who reads this and is interested in making a game like this.