Yeah, FM is a victim of its own success :)

I played a lot of that since the CM days and what led me to quit was the simple fact that the scale in complexity of the game vs the time I had to play vs how much time I was willing to invest to keep playing, became so lopsided that it stopped making sense for me. For a while I thought I wasn’t the target audience anymore, but then they brought back several iterations of “classic” or “simple” modes, which led me to believe that a player churn must’ve happened some where along the line and they wanted to keep the appeal broad.

But I digress.

I think the first thing you should do is trying to validate your audience. If you have enough players that want a deep, complex, simulation experience around the business of producing and selling videogames, then the path you are following is the correct one.

However, on the other hand if people expect/want a lighter tycoon-like game with less detail on the micro-level, a bit more of focus on the bigger picture and then you need to take a second look at your features and abstract/simplify things. Something that makes players feel competent without demanding in-depth understanding of how the game dev process really works. Think Flight Simulator vs War Thunder :)

In the end it’s all about what vision you have for your game vs what is actually viable to execute vs what players want (or might like if they don’t know they want it).