Magazine Mogul

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Without a doubt the most prolific developer and publisher of Management Simulation games on Nintendo Switch is Kairosoft, who specializes in games with a retro-style isometric pixel art style, often with the word “Story” in the title. As of this writing, Kairosoft has released 60 games on Nintendo Switch, most of them Management Simulations.

After their earlier games, Kairosoft had established a few templates for their Simulation games that later games would largely follow. Game Dev Story established a Simulation-style game more focused on managing employee time and focus, Hot Springs Story established a Simulation style in line with Theme Park Simulators where you try to cater to guests’ tastes to maximize attendance and income, and Epic Astro Story established a Simulation style akin to games like Sim City, where you’re building out a town or settlement.

Magazine Mogul originally released on mobile devices in 2014, then saw a port to Nintendo Switch in 2020, then to PC and PlayStation 4 in 2022, and Xbox One in 2024. And of the above templates, this game adheres pretty closely to the first of those templates, and instead of selecting a game genre and topic matter that you suspect will sell well, you’re pairing a target audience, topic matter, and location for your news magazine articles that you hope will pair well. There are a few other changes here and there, but for the most part the core of this formula hasn’t changed.

Despite this, I still prefer Game Dev Story to this game, and not just because I personally find the topic matter more interesting. Rather, I enjoy the idea of having multiple products in rotation at a time and having one dwindle as a new one is introduced while you’re on the edge of your seat waiting to see if it will fill the gap your older product is gradually leaving, whether it’ll be a flop, or potentially even a greater hit – here you’ll generally only publish a new issue of a magazine only after the last one has left publication, making everything feel less fluid.

To its credit, Magazine Mogul does add other elements, mainly with players investing in the town their magazine is covering with the goal of attracting a greater population to the town to increase your target audience, something that strikes me as a backwards approach to growing your target audience in real life, but that works well enough in the logic of the game’s world. However, I don’t think this fundamentally changes the core gameplay.

As I mentioned above, this game makes use of Kairosoft’s signature presentation style using simple retro-styled pixel art visuals, paired with repetitive chiptune music and sound effects. Apart from the forgettable synthesized music, everything about this presentation is really endearing, though by this point we’ve seen more or less the same thing in numerous other Kairosoft games.

Overall, I think Magazine Mogul is a decent follow-up to Game Dev Story, but it doesn’t hit quite the same success as the previous game, either due to the structure or topic matter. And while it does do some things differently, and fans of Management Simulation games may still find it to their liking, I still don’t think it escapes the shadow of Game Dev Story.

tl;dr – Magazine Mogul is a Management Simulation where players try to pair subject matter, target audience, and location for articles in a news magazine in the hopes of increasing sales. It’s a decent Management Simulation that reuses the formula of Game Dev Story, but doesn’t do enough to truly differentiate itself. Still, if you’re a fan of the genre you may find this worth a look.

Grade: C+

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