🔮 Streamogul 🎞A Slop-It-Up Sim

You run a streaming service. Every turn is one month. You decide what to make, what to licence, what to charge and how to market it — then you press Advance Round and find out what the market thought.

The goal is to grow subscribers and market share against five entrenched rivals who react to what you do. A full run is 120 months — ten years, after which you get an anniversary finale and the option to keep playing.

The monthly loop

1. Read the news feed for events affecting the market
2. Commission or licence content (maximum two items per month)
3. Optionally run marketing, a promotion, or adjust your price
4. Press Advance Round
5. Subscribers, revenue, costs, content ageing and competitor moves all resolve

The reminder before you advance

If anything is worth a second look, one dialog appears when you press Advance. It can mention two things:

• Unused content slots. Slots do not carry over, so advancing with one spare loses it permanently.
• Titles without a generated poster. Cosmetic only, and easy to leave for later.

Both appear in the same dialog rather than one after another. Stay returns you to the month; Advance anyway moves on. The Stop asking for buttons silence whichever concerns raised that dialog — for 3, 6 or 12 months, or for good — and the choice is saved with your game.

Setting up

Everything on the welcome screen happens before you press Let's Begin.

• Type a name, or press 🎲 for a suggestion
• Pick a logo from the grid of 53 — it appears after your name everywhere in the game. Tapping another swaps it; the 🎲 in the grid picks one at random.
• The preview line shows exactly what your service will be called. Leave the name blank and you get the suggestion in the placeholder.
• Press Enter in the name field to start

Loading an actor list

The 🎭 Load actor list button pulls in a smactors.txt file of real performer names, replacing the small built-in list. It looks for the file beside the game and falls back to a file picker if it can't fetch one — which is what happens if you opened the game straight from your filesystem.

It is worth doing before your first commission. Cast names drive the posters, and a name the image model recognises produces a far better result than a generated one. The counter beside the button shows how many names are loaded.

Format: one name per line, or comma-separated. The list is saved in your browser, so you only load it once.

Your starting position

Reading the screen

• Bottom bar — Advance, Actions, Library, Analytics. This is your main control. Tapping Advance while a transition is playing skips it, so you never have to wait.
• Your service — the five numbers that matter. The four metric cells are tappable: each opens a popup with that metric's detail, without leaving the dashboard.
• Market overview — five charts. Swipe between them, use the ‹ › arrows, tap a dot, or use the arrow keys.
• Industry news — events affecting the market, plus stories about your own content and cast.
• Competitors — every service including your own, each in its brand colour, sorted by subscribers so you can see exactly where you stand.
• Content limit — the counter at the top right shows how many of your two monthly content slots you have used.

The seven charts

The simulation is transparent enough to plan around. These are the actual values it uses.

Content types

Talent levels

Genre popularity

Base popularity feeds 30% of a title's opening popularity score. News events shift these during play.

How quality is decided

Quality lands between 40 and 95:

(50 + (budget ÷ $50M) × 30 + talent bonus) × random 0.8–1.2

Two consequences worth noting. First, budget has hard diminishing returns — the term is a fraction of $50M, so going from $5M to $10M helps far more than $40M to $45M. Second, the ±20% random factor is large: an identical commission can land 15 points apart. Talent is the most reliable lever, since its bonus is flat and unaffected by the multiplier.

Popularity and ageing

• Opening popularity = quality × 0.7 + genre popularity × 0.3
• From month 4 onward, popularity decays 2–5% per month, floored at 20
• Subscriber pull from a title falls with age, bottoming at 20% after a year

Churn

Other constants

• Operating costs: the greater of $500,000 or 10% of monthly revenue
• Content limit: 2 new titles per month, commissioned or licensed
• Licence offers: 5–10 available at a time, 6–36 month terms, costing 30–70% of the title's production budget
• Awards: every 12 months, among titles at quality 85+ released in the last year
• Run length: 120 months, with a milestone finale every 5 years from year 10

Everything lives behind ⚡ Take Actions on the bottom bar.

🎬 Commission new content

Original content. Yours permanently — it never expires.

1. Enter a title, or press 🎲 Roll Title for a generated one
2. Choose type, genre, budget and talent level
3. Press Create Content

You'll see the result immediately: quality score, a review, the cast, and a generated poster.

🪪 Licence existing content

Cheaper and instant, but it leaves your library when the term ends. Each offer shows quality, talent, term length, cost and the full cast up front. Names from your loaded actor list are highlighted — those are the ones the poster generator can render a likeness for. A news event can also pull licensed content early: the rights holder reclaims it.

🎬 Create a sequel

Available for any original at quality 70+ that is at least six months old. Sequels inherit an audience and get a quality bonus scaled to the original's success, which makes them the most reliable way to produce a hit. They cost budget like any other commission.

🤵 Marketing campaigns

A campaign is a gamble, not a purchase. The figures below are the typical band; every campaign also draws an outcome on top of it, so the same spend can disappoint or overshoot badly.

The average across many campaigns still lands where the band implies, so this adds risk without making marketing worse. Promotional events carry the same spread. Content quality and any active marketing conditions scale the band underneath, so timing and a strong catalogue still matter more than luck.

👩‍🎤 Promotional events

Two are offered at random each time you open the panel, drawn from Free Trial Weekend, Bundle Deal, Student Discount and Premium Content Early Access. Early Access additionally reduces churn for two months, which makes it the best value of the four.

🧠 Ask the VP of Strategy

Reads your current position and names two things to do about it, ranked, each with its reasoning and a button that opens the relevant action.

The advice comes from the game's real numbers rather than general tips, so it is checkable: it will tell you that campaigns multiply by quality ÷ 70 and yours is below the line, or that a named title is now old enough to follow up. Ten rules run in priority order, and the two shown always lead to different actions.

🫰 Adjust subscription price

Between $4.99 and $19.99. The effect is immediate and proportional:

• Raising the price loses subscribers at twice the percentage of the increase
• Lowering it gains subscribers at one times the percentage of the decrease

Analytics

Financial Performance now carries the same three lines as the dashboard chart — revenue, spend and running costs — read from the same history, so the two screens cannot disagree. The dashboard is a set of collapsible sections — Subscriber Stats, Financial Performance, Content Library, Genre Distribution, Content Type Distribution, Competitor Comparison and Market Performance. The first is open by default; Expand all and Collapse all are at the top.

For a quick look you often do not need it at all: tapping Subscribers, Revenue, Budget or Library in the Your Service panel opens just that metric's figures in a popup, with a link through to the full dashboard if you want the charts.

The library

Open it from the bottom bar. It's laid out like a streaming service: a featured hero title, rows by category, and filters for type, genre and sort order. Click any poster for full details — synopsis, cast with character names, review, awards, and estimated monthly subscriber contribution.

What each title carries

Posters

Posters are generated per title from its genre, cast, budget and synopsis. The first one of a session can take 30–60 seconds while the image model wakes up; after that they are quicker. Until an image arrives you'll see a coloured placeholder card with the title on it — that is expected, not an error.

If the generator can't be reached, the game draws a placeholder instead and keeps going. A placeholder is not the same as a generated poster, and the game tracks the difference:

• A 🖼 badge appears on the title in the library. Tap it to retry that one poster.
• The badge only clears once a real poster actually arrives. If the generator still can't be reached you'll be told so rather than left guessing.
• Titles still on placeholder art are mentioned in the reminder before you advance the month (below).

Nothing here blocks play. A placeholder poster costs you nothing mechanically — it is purely cosmetic.

What actually drives performance

• Quality — direct multiplier on subscribers attracted
• Recency — full strength when new, falling to 20% after twelve months
• Episode count — a 10-episode series pulls roughly ten times a movie of equal quality
• Awards — a large, lasting popularity boost
• Season — horror and thriller rise at Halloween, action in summer, comedy in winter

Who you're up against

Rivals grow 1–3% monthly scaled by their quality, lose subscribers to their own churn, occasionally adjust price, and improve their content over time. They are not static targets.

Competitive pressure

Every rival that beats you on quality or undercuts you on price applies pressure, which is subtracted directly from the subscribers your content would otherwise attract. It is capped at 70%, so you can lose most of your potential intake but never all of it.

The practical reading: quality gaps and price gaps compound across five rivals. Being slightly behind on both against everyone is far worse than being clearly ahead on one.

Market share

your subscribers ÷ total market subscribers × 100. The status ladder:

Industry news

Most months bring one or more headlines. They are not flavour text — each one applies its stated effect: market size shifts, churn spikes, acquisition costs, genre popularity swings, and occasional loss of licensed content. Read the effect line.

Stories about you

The feed also generates news from your own game state — subscriber milestones, rivals overtaking you, budget warnings — and from your cast: interviews, reviews, award buzz, on-set stories, viral moments. These reflect your actual library and roster.

Awards season

Every 12 months. The ceremony runs as a show: an opening, then a sequence of categories, each with nominees, a reveal, and presenter banter in between. It lasts about a minute and can be skipped at any point — skipping still awards everything.

You can lose. Rival services are nominated in every category, drawn from your actual competitors. Quality decides the odds, so a strong title usually wins but never certainly.

What gets nominated

• Title categories — Best Picture (always last), Best Writing, Best Director, Critics' Choice, Audience Favourite, Best Original Series, and one for each genre.
• Acting categories — Best Lead Performance, Best Supporting Performance, Breakthrough Performance and Best Ensemble Cast. These nominate a person from your cast, credited to the title they appeared in.

Four categories run each year, chosen from those you are actually in contention for, so a comedy-heavy library gets different nights than a horror one. A title is eligible at quality 78+ released within the last twelve months; winning generally needs 85+.

Each win grants the title an award, a 1.5× popularity boost and 50,000–80,000 subscribers. A title can hold one award at a time. The annual industry report follows once the ceremony ends, with a performance score out of 100 and a cash bonus scaled to it.

Acting categories are performance-based rather than gendered: cast names come from your loaded actor list, and the game has no way to know who belongs in which.

Seasons

• Winter (months 11, 12, 1) — family and comedy gain 30%
• Summer (months 5–7) — action and adventure gain 30%; a content preview arrives once a year
• Halloween (month 9) — horror and thriller gain 50%, the largest seasonal swing in the game; celebrity gossip about your cast appears and boosts a title

Special events

Roughly a 30% chance per month. Among them: viral hits that double a title's popularity, price wars, platform outages, talent bidding wars, production strikes, rival shutdowns that send you their subscribers, and international expansion offers — a one-off chance to buy into a new region for a large subscriber gain. Expansion offers appear as a card above the news feed and expire after three months.

Actor pitches

Occasionally an actor from your library will pitch you a project directly. Accepting commissions it immediately at the stated cost, with that actor attached. Declining costs nothing but they take it elsewhere.

Achievements

The ⚙️ Settings button sits beside the music toggle. Everything here is saved between visits.

Themes

Ten colour palettes — Purple Night, Ocean Depth, Emerald Empire, Crimson Noir, Golden Age, Cyberpunk, Synthwave, Sunset Boulevard, Arctic Light and Monochrome — plus five styled after the rivals themselves: Netstream, PrimeFlix, BO+Max, MouseTV and EmpirePlus. Arctic Light is the one light theme.

Display

• UI scale — 70% to 130%
• Font — default, mono, serif, futuristic or rounded
• Corner style — sharp through to pill
• Poster style — the art direction used when generating posters: photorealistic, painted, minimalist, retro, noir, neon, comic, watercolour, gothic, sci-fi, luxury, gritty or storybook. Mixed varies by genre.

Actor list

The same loader as the welcome screen, so you can swap the list mid-game. New cast members are drawn from it immediately; titles already made keep the cast they were made with.

Sound

• Music and effects have independent volume sliders
• A single mute toggle covers both
• Effects cover navigation, month advance, money spent, subscriber gains, headlines, awards and the ceremony

Months 1–6

• Content mix: two or three originals including at least one series, plus two or three licences to fill the library quickly.
• Budget split: roughly 60% content, 30% marketing, 10% reserve.
• Price: hold at $9.99 or drop to $8.99. Growth matters more than margin now.
• Marketing: wait until you have content worth advertising, then run Influencer or Television.
• Genres: pick two or three high-base genres — Action, Horror, Thriller — rather than spreading thin.
• Talent: Rising Stars and Established. Save A-List for when the budget can absorb the 1.5× multiplier.

Months 7–12

• Release something every two to three months to hold churn down.
• Reinvest 70–80% of revenue.
• Start watching rival pricing and quality for gaps.
• Test a ±$0.50 price move around month 10 and revert quickly if churn spikes.
• Target 50,000 subscribers by month 12.
• Time a quality-85+ drama or documentary just before the month-12 awards.

Year 2

• Build toward 15–20 titles with five or six original series.
• Begin genre diversification based on news trends and rival gaps.
• Commit to at least one A-List production a year for award potential.
• Track licence expiries and plan replacements before they lapse.
• Target 2–3% market share.

Mid game (years 3–5)

• Shift the library toward 60% original.
• Start producing sequels to your strongest originals — the inherited quality bonus makes them your most reliable hits.
• Push price only when average quality is above 80.
• Run two or three award contenders a year across different categories.

Late game (years 6+)

• 75% original. Licences become gap-fillers only.
• Build franchises: sequels and spin-offs of proven properties.
• Counter-programme against rival release patterns.
• Maintain a refresh rate — a large old library decays quietly.

Balance targets

• Genre: no more than 25–30% in any one genre, unless you are deliberately specialising.
• Type: series 40–50%, movies 30–40%, documentaries 10–15%, reality 5–10%.
• Age: aim for 20–25% under six months old; no more than 40% over eighteen months.
• Original vs licensed: 40/60 early, 60/40 mid, 75/25 late.

Quality tiers

Strategic roles

• Flagship — high budget, defines your brand. One to three at a time.
• Award contender — quality 85+, drama or documentary, A-List. One or two a year.
• Subscriber driver — broad appeal, high episode count.
• Retention — long series that hold attention between releases.
• Niche — serves a specific segment; useful for differentiation.
• Filler — cheap licences to round out the catalogue.
• Seasonal — timed for Halloween, summer or winter multipliers.

Responding to trends

When the news feed reports a genre gaining popularity:

• Immediate — licence something in that genre this month
• Medium — commission a mid-budget original
• Long — if the trend holds, build a flagship there

Consider the inverse too: investing in a temporarily unpopular genre buys you a position nobody is contesting.

When to stop investing in a title

• Popularity below 30 for three consecutive months
• Quality below 60 and not filling a genre gap
• No longer attracting subscribers despite marketing support

Budget allocation

Watch operating costs against revenue. They should sit near 10%; if the ratio climbs past 15%, something is wrong with your revenue rather than your costs.

Price against quality

Above $12.99 the churn penalty starts; above $14.99 it compounds. Treat $14.99 as a ceiling regardless of quality.

When to move price

• Time increases just after a major release or an award win
• Avoid raising during a rival's promotional period
• Step in $0.50–$1.00 increments; never more than about $2.00 in a year

If the budget runs short

1. Freeze non-essential spending immediately
2. Keep exactly one quality release per quarter — do not go dark
3. Shift from commissioning to licensing temporarily
4. Point marketing at retention rather than acquisition
5. Consider a small price rise only if quality genuinely supports it

Recovering: rebuild with one flagship series first, then targeted marketing, then the wider pipeline.

Acquisition

• Sequence campaigns: social to build awareness, then television or influencer for reach, then a promotion to convert.
• Match channel to content: television for prestige drama, influencer for comedy and reality, podcast for documentary and niche.
• Market after you ship. Campaign strength scales with your current average quality, so advertising before your good content lands wastes the multiplier.
• Avoid head-to-head with a larger rival's flagship; target their quiet months instead.

Retention

• Stagger releases so there is never a long gap with nothing new
• Plan a replacement before a popular licence expires
• Use Premium Content Early Access ahead of expected high-churn periods
• Keep genre variety — a household is not one viewer

Growth expectations

Viable positions

• Genre specialist — the most achievable early. Dominate two genres nobody is defending.
• Format specialist — become the documentary or limited-series service.
• Value — comparable quality below rival pricing. Hard to sustain, since price cuts hit revenue directly.
• Quality leader — beat BO+Max's 90. Expensive and slow, but it removes competitive pressure from every rival at once.
• Refresh leader — win on cadence rather than peaks.

Reading the rivals

Use the Analytics comparison chart. What matters is not their absolute numbers but the gaps: every rival above you on quality and below you on price is actively suppressing your subscriber intake. Closing the largest single gap is usually worth more than small gains against everyone.

Exploiting weakness

• MouseTV and PrimeFlix price low but sit at quality 75–80 — beat them on quality rather than price
• BO+Max leads on quality but charges $14.99 — undercut on price
• Netstream's advantage is volume, which is the slowest thing for you to match and the least worth chasing

Budget efficiency

Because the budget term is budget ÷ $50M × 30, every $1M adds a flat 0.6 quality points before the random factor — but the multiplier and talent bonus interact, so the practical return falls away as budgets grow.

Matching talent to budget

• Unknown — viable under $8M, where the 0.6× cost saving outweighs the missing bonus
• Rising Stars — best value at $8–15M
• Established — most efficient at $15–25M
• A-List — worth the 1.5× multiplier above $25M, and required for reliable award contention

Consistency

• Set a quality floor and refuse to ship below it — average quality drives both churn and marketing effectiveness
• Keep the spread within a genre under about 15 points
• Remember the ±20% roll: for anything that matters, budget as though you will get the bad roll

Eligibility

• Quality 85 or higher
• Released within the previous 12 months
• Judged at every 12-month boundary

Building a contender

• A-List talent for the flat +30
• Budget above $25M so the random floor still clears 85
• Drama or documentary — thematically the strongest fit, and documentary costs 0.7×
• Release in months 10–12 so the win lands while the title is still fresh

Why it's worth it

• Popularity multiplied by 1.5
• 50,000–80,000 subscribers immediately
• +3 to your annual performance score per win, up to 15
• The Award Winner achievement pays $15,000,000 the first time
• Award-winning titles keep pulling subscribers well past their normal decay

Early

• Sinking most of the opening budget into one or two titles
• Raising price before quality supports it
• Marketing an empty or weak library — the quality multiplier makes this literally wasteful
• Narrowing to a single genre before you know what's working
• Expecting to trouble Netstream in year one

Mid

• Spreading budget thinly across too many productions instead of concentrating it
• Wide quality variance — the average is what drives churn and marketing
• Copying rivals rather than finding an uncontested position
• Letting licences lapse without planning replacements
• Never producing an award contender

Late

• Coasting after reaching leadership — decay is continuous
• Aggressive pricing that triggers compounding churn above $14.99
• Trading quality for volume
• Relying on old franchises without fresh properties

Financial

• Holding no reserve, so opportunities and expansion offers pass you by
• Letting operating costs exceed 15% of revenue
• Ignoring rising churn until it compounds
• Overreacting to a bad month with cuts that stall the pipeline

Years 1–2

• Month-over-month growth consistently above 10%
• Average quality reaching 70+ and rising
• Churn below 6% and falling
• 15+ titles within the first year
• 2%+ market share by the end of year 2

Years 3–5

• At least one award win by year 3
• Small price rises absorbed without a churn spike
• Best titles consistently at 85+
• 5–15% market share
• Revenue growing faster than operating costs

Years 6+

• 20%+ market share
• Average quality above every rival
• Regular award recognition
• Continued growth despite market maturity
• Reserves large enough to act on any opportunity that appears

Auto-save

The game saves your run to your browser automatically — after every month you advance, every commission or licence, every campaign, promotion and price change. If you close the tab or refresh, the welcome screen offers a Continue this game card showing your service, month, subscriber count and library size.

• Start over on that card discards the save and begins fresh.
• Restarting from the game-over screen or the anniversary finale also clears it.
• Only one save is kept — starting a new game replaces it.
• Saves live in this browser on this device. They do not follow you to another machine, and clearing site data removes them.
• Private or incognito windows usually block storage, so runs there will not persist. The game still plays normally.

Posters are not stored — they are regenerated as you browse the library, which keeps the save small (a few kilobytes rather than megabytes).

Posters aren't appearing

The first poster of a session can take 30–60 seconds while the image service starts up. A coloured card with the title on it is the placeholder, not a failure. If posters still don't arrive, open the browser console and run fixPosters() to clear and regenerate them, or posterTest() to check whether the image service is reachable at all.

Charts look wrong or empty

Switch to another carousel slide and back, or advance a month to force a recalculation. Charts populate from historical data, so a brand-new game has little to draw.

Transitions and skipping

Each month advance plays a short transition, and occasionally a spotlight card afterwards. Pressing Advance during either dismisses it and moves straight on — you never have to wait for an animation to finish. Tapping the transition itself also skips it.

Console commands

These are available in the browser console for anyone who wants them:

Keyboard

• ← → — move between the market overview charts
• Enter or Space — open a focused metric cell in the Your Service panel
• Esc — close a metric popup or strategy card
• Enter in the name field on the welcome screen — start the game

There are no single-letter shortcuts. An earlier version of this manual listed M, L, C and A as working; they never were.

Performance

• News history is capped, so a long game does not accumulate indefinitely
• Landscape orientation suits the charts better on a phone
• Reduce the UI scale in Settings if the layout feels cramped