Today is THE DAY that we add some slimey business practices AND some really cool extra production-line whizz-bang cleverness to Big Pharma, in the shape of this breathtakingly exciting expansion pack:
Big Pharma: Marketing and Malpractice adds a whole bunch of cool stuff. There was a lot of beard-stroking between me and Tim deciding what to put in an expansion (mostly by me, Tim is too young to grow stubble). Some of the ideas in there are cool business-geek stuff like setting individual prices for your drugs (you no longer have to just accept the market price, you can build up stock, or sell at a loss, undercut competitors, sell better drugs at a premium etc…) and some of them are things that just generally expand upon the whole production-line geekery. For example you can now link separate rooms of the factory together. Oh yeah… Plus we have ‘stock gates’…
which sound boring, but in fact I reckon are going to be awesomely popular. Essentially these are systems that let you say ‘halt production if we already have 100 boxes of this’, but the key thing is they can go ANYWHERE, which means a single ingredient can come in, and be delivered to different production lines by a branching conveyor, depending on stock level of certain drugs, effectively letting you automate the process of switching from one drug to another as circumstances and prices change.
Other stuff includes advertising, corporate gifts, sales executives, and cool company-wide ‘perks’ you can unlock such as these…
Big Pharma was as popular as an anti-aging cream that also cures obesity when we released it, so we are naturally concerned that this DLC will bring steams infrastructure to a crawl, so sorry about that. All the more reason to jump in and grab the expansion pronto. You can buy it using the cool humble widget direct from us
Or from GoG.
or the humble store.
Or this new other we are experimenting with (we think it might get popular) called Steam.
We really welcome those all-important steam reviews from happy pharma-tycoons. We also welcome people who spontaneously tweet and facebook share news of the expansion. Obviously if you really cared, you would get home-made T shirts done, and walk up and down your local mall imploring people to buy the game, but those forum posts and social media spreadings are also a good way to show you are a ‘good’ person, so don’t be ashamed if that’s all you do.