Devices Tycoon Guide: Hardware, OS, Staff & Revenue

Devices Tycoon puts you in charge of designing tech products, hiring specialists, building custom operating systems, and expanding your global hardware brand. Developed by Roastery Games, the game is available on PC (Steam) and mobile platforms, letting you engineer everything from smartphones and laptops to custom processors and graphics cards.

Understanding how to balance employee fatigue, manage software licensing revenue, and configure hardware architectures is critical for maintaining profitable cash flow.

Getting Started: Company Setup and Staffing

When creating a new company, you select your company name, founding country, starting budget tier (such as medium), and brand logo. The game supports custom logo uploads, requiring a 100-pixel PNG format.

Before developing any hardware or software, you must recruit specialized employees across three core disciplines:

• Designers: Required for device styling, casing aesthetics, and user interface layouts.
• Programmers: Necessary for developing operating systems, optimizing system speed, and engineering software ecosystems.
• Engineers: Essential for designing internal components, processors, and graphics hardware.

Staff can be found through the recruitment agency interface. During active production, your staff automatically earns research points, which you spend in the research lab to unlock advanced components, features, and higher-tier technologies. As your firm grows, you can buy and upgrade more than 16 different office spaces to house your workforce.

Managing Employee Morale and Fatigue

Employees accumulate burnout and experience mood drops as projects conclude. Neglecting fatigue reduces productivity and disrupts ongoing development cycles. Following post-launch patches, the developer added a quick-response option: when an employee fatigue notification appears, you can distribute team bonuses with a single click rather than navigating individual worker profiles.

Generating Early Revenue: Software and Operating Systems

Designing dedicated operating systems is one of the fastest paths to steady cash flow in both the mobile and PC versions. The software editor allows you to target multiple form factors:

• Mobile devices (Smartphones and Tablets)
• Computers (PCs and Laptops)
• Smartwatches
• TVs

Licensing Models

When completing an operating system—such as an initial SmartOS 1.0—you select your distribution model:

1. One-Time License Fee: Generates immediate income per unit or sale.
2. Monthly Subscription: Charges a recurring monthly fee (for example, $25 to $30 per user). This provides predictable monthly income that can easily outpace baseline office salaries and corporate tax liabilities once your user base expands.

Iterative OS Updates

Releasing continuous minor updates (e.g., version 1.0.1) raises your operating system's rating and expands market adoption. In the OS upgrade menu, allocating your budget improves specific attributes:

• Safety and Autonomy
• Voice Assistant and Optimization
• App Store integration
• Animations and Multi-language support
• Operation Speed, Usability, Functionality, and Interface Design

Monitoring your software ratings in the home menu's ranking tab ensures your OS stays competitive against rival market offerings.

Hardware Development: Processors and Graphics Cards

Beyond complete consumer devices, Devices Tycoon features standalone component editors for central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs).

The CPU Editor

Processors can be tailored for mobile devices, laptops, gaming consoles, or VR headsets. Configuring a processor involves several stages:

• Series Setup: Assign a processor series name, custom badge, and color scheme.
• Styling: Choose from over 100 base casing styles, surface patterns, chip text, and optional laptop stickers.
• Core Specifications: Balance clock speed, active core count, architectural structure, and the fabrication node (manufacturing process). Increasing performance metrics increases power draw and thermal output.
• Integrated Graphics: Choose between a pre-licensed mobile/desktop GPU (such as Intel, AMD, Adreno, or Mali) or request a custom GPU build.
• Memory Bus: Adjust cache allocation, interconnect speeds between the CPU, GPU, and RAM, and overall memory bandwidth.
• Thermal Regulation: Check the real-time thermal heat map. Excessive heat output causes thermal throttling, requiring you to refine cooling solutions or pare back clock speeds.
• Licensing Type: Choose a Private License to keep the silicon exclusive to your proprietary devices (similar to Apple), or a Business License to sell the chips to competitor manufacturers for wholesale profit (similar to Intel).

GPU Synergy with Processors

While you cannot drop an entirely finished standalone graphics card directly into a CPU socket, your GPU lab research directly impacts custom processor development. When selecting the custom GPU option inside the CPU editor, your maximum allowable clock speeds, compute power, texture units, and fillrates are capped by your unlocked GPU research tree. For laptop products, research tiers into PCIe versions, texture fillrates, and compute power directly benefit both your discrete graphics cards and laptop integrated chips.

Retail Stores, Marketing, and Device Ratings

Scaling hardware sales requires maintaining high review scores and global distribution channels:

You can track your aggregate catalog size at any time by checking the total device count displayed in the upper-right corner of your interface.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Fullscreen Black Screen on PC

A known interaction between Windows refresh rates and NVIDIA G-Sync can cause a black screen when launching the game in fullscreen mode. Use the following workarounds confirmed by players and the developer:

1. Alt+Tab Workaround: Press Alt + Tab twice consecutively after the game enters fullscreen mode to force the display renderer to reset.
2. NVIDIA Control Panel: Navigate to Manage 3D Settings → Program Settings, select the Devices Tycoon executable, find Monitor Technology, and set it to Fixed Refresh.
3. Command Flag: In Steam, open the local game directory (Manage → Browse local files). Make a backup of package.json, open the original file in a text editor, find the "chromium-args" entry, and add --disable-direct-composition within the quotes before saving.
4. Display Mode: Switch the display setting to Windowed mode via Settings → Video if hardware sync issues persist.

Missing Research Categories

If device category tabs or left-hand section buttons disappear when browsing the research laboratory, verify whether the "Hide unavailable features" checkbox is enabled. Toggling this checkbox off typically restores hidden development branches without requiring a client restart.

Net Profit Balance Thresholds

Certain milestones (such as the 100M milestone) track your overall company net profit rather than your gross cash balance. If your top-line treasury displays over 100M but the corresponding achievement or status does not trigger, your cumulative net lifetime earnings have not yet crossed the net profit requirement.