Cohort: Game Studio Tycoon
You operate one game and see every player in it as a line item. Most are worth nothing. A handful are worth everything. The dashboard asks you, politely and continuously, to design around that handful.
You never see a mascot or a map. You see the interface you already stare at every day: eight monetization levers, a user-acquisition budget, and a monthly release cycle. Nudge a lever, ship the build, and read what moved. Every setting pulls revenue one way and retention, rating, or goodwill the other.
The chart goes up and to the right. Then you tap it, and the aggregate resolves into people. A row like the flagged one below is where the game stops being funny.
| Account | Sessions · 30d | Peak hour | LTV |
|---|---|---|---|
| player_10233 | 42 | 19:00 | $0.00 |
| player_74041 | 219 | 21:00 | $35.01 |
| account_88213 | 0 | 03:00 | $4,180 |
Simulated accounts from inside the game. No real player data is used.
Cohort is not a lecture about whether monetization is evil. It is a working model of the economics, and it lets the economics make the point. Squeeze the levers and the short-term revenue line rises; keep squeezing and retention, store rating, and lifetime value quietly come apart, and the exit valuation puts a number on the damage.
Only 4.6% of newly launched subscription apps reach $10,000 in monthly revenue within two years. The default outcome of a run should feel like that, because it is drawn from the same published figures your real dashboard is measured against.
Read the benchmark writeup, every industry figure in the model with its source, published free.
Cohort runs ads inside its simulated game. Other developers can submit a real app to appear in those slots, in fiction, as one of the products the player's own audience gets sold to. It costs nothing.