Battle Royale Tycoon Helps Us Reach Peak Battle Royale

Are you one of those rare souls who wishes there were more battle royale games? Would you be tickled absolutely pink if you could not just play another battle royale game, but instead, make one yourself? If so, you're the target audience for a game called Battle Royale Tycoon.

If you know how "Tycoon"-type games work, you'll get the premise of Battle Royale Tycoon pretty quickly. Much like all those other games, you're tasked with building and maintaining a product. You oversee the day-to-day operations. You make financial decisions. And you try to understand what people enjoy about your thing so you can make it even better. But you aren't building a railroad here. There are no roller coasters in sight.

In Battle Royale Tycoon, you're the brains behind constructing battle royale arenas, where combatants then gather to murder each other for sport. Yay!

Battle Royale Tycoon, which has been in Steam Early Access for several months, seems to blur the line between real-life and video games in the way it approaches the sim management genre. You're setting prices. People are seemingly showing up to watch battle royale matches take place. You even have to clean up the field of battle once someone's emerged victorious. But you're also tasked with fixing some very video-gamey things — for instance, spawn points that people don't like.

Perhaps that's just enough wackiness to distract from what otherwise seems like a pretty disturbing premise. Most "Tycoon" games don't encourage us to exploit homicide to further our capitalistic goals. Then again, we're already participating in the cycle by playing games like Fortnite: Battle Royale and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. So why not try our hand at profiting ourselves, eh?

Battle Royale Tycoon is getting a full Steam release next month on Dec. 10, 2018. You can visit the game's Steam page to follow it and be notified when it goes live.