This helps keep the budget on each new title down. SCS also builds its own technology, and continually bumps up its tech and asset library year by year, meaning that it can more easily build on top of its legacy incrementally, rather than starting from scratch each time. 'I don't think any Western publisher would touch a game in a genre where games typically sell on the order of tens of thousands of copies with a 10 foot pole, but as we are self-financing and self-publishing the games, we can control our own destiny and keep considerable chunk of the revenue to keep us in black numbers.' 'That fact that we are an Eastern European company paying Eastern European wages definitely has been a factor in sustainability of SCS Software in the genre,' he notes. developers and publishers jumping at the chance to build simulation games like his. Sebor believes he knows the reason why there aren't exactly an abundance of U.S.

'We started doing these games on a shoestring budget 10 years ago with teams of 3-4 people, and over the years we have managed to build a small but very devoted fan community, people who keep coming back and supporting us over the years,' he explains. Pavel Sebor, the owner of SCS, tells me that his company has been living 'pretty much hand-to-mouth' for quite a while now, and it's simply down to a hardcore community backing that the studio is able to march onwards. Its latest releases include Euro Truck Simulator 2, Scania Truck Driving Simulator, and German Truck Simulator. SCS Software, a development studio from Prague, Czech Republic, is one of the biggest studios making truck simulators right now. The question remains then: Who exactly is buying these games, and is there really so much demand that yearly releases are necessary? In some cases, such as with the Farming Simulator series, there are multiple releases every single year across multiple platforms, with the year usually attached to the end of the name - much in the same way that EA's popular FIFA Soccer franchise goes about its business. gamers.Īnd yet, despite the mockery and oodles of mocking videos you can find on YouTube, these seemingly niche simulation titles keep on coming. These are all names of real simulation video games that you can currently buy for PC, and the sorts of games that receive notable ridicule from many U.S. This article is being highlighted as one of Gamasutra's top stories of 2013.

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