The Executive – Movie Industry Tycoon Review

It’s an enjoyable tycoon game like Game Dev Tycoon or City Game Tycoon. Completion takes around 10 hours or less, but a few achievements seem to be bugged at the moment.

It’s an enjoyable tycoon game like Game Dev Tycoon or City Game Tycoon. Completion takes around 10 hours or less, but a few achievements seem to be bugged at the moment.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 10 hours or less
Estimated achievement difficulty: 5/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: Not yet, but this spreadsheet helps a lot.
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Yes, for each era (aka 70’s, 80’s, 90’s etc), there is an achievement to score a hit with a specific theme, so keep an eye out for those achievements and maybe make a separate save at the beginning of each era which you can lot back into if you failed to get high enough ratings during those 10 years.
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: Yes, it feels like scoring a hit movie and finding an actor/supporting actor with a high enough rating seems luck-based as well.
Does difficulty affect achievements: No, you can play on the easiest difficulty
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: Yes, at this moment, at least 1 achievement is bugged, but I think 3 of them are bugged.

I enjoy management tycoons like this a lot. Increasing your money and growing your studio… is addictive, and that is also the case in The Executive – Movie Industry Tycoon. However, after 8 hours, I still feel like some things aren’t as clear. I still have no idea how to really make a hit movie that will make me money while it is showing in theatres. I understand parts of it, like the sliders that will manage how important the script is versus the looks of the set, for example, and that you get more info about those for each genre the more movies you make, and I understand how extra features can help. But even with all that info and playing 80 in-game years.. I still don’t make any money on the movies while they are shown in theatre and only with the streaming services I only made up for that and stay afloat. And I’m totally fine with that… however, there are achievements for making 300 and 400 million in the Box Office… While I do not even know how to make 0 after the 80’s.

You get a lot of info thrown at you, and I can see how that may overwhelm me and that I’m clueless about which stats are the most important (how comfortable directors and actors are with the script or how popular they are with the audience or the critics?). At this moment, I feel quite dumb for not being able to figure it out, but I see others on the Steam forum struggling with those things as well. I can totally see how this gets better the more people understand it and make videos or guides on how to make proper movies in this game.

What I can say is that the developers read the Steam forums and reviews and make changes based on them. At first, it wasn’t so clear that you can make multiple movies at once if you have more directors, but now the menu says that when you hover your mouse over that button. And people asked for autosaves, which just got implemented. So I can only see this game getting better and better.

Achievement-wise, the most important ones to keep an eye out for from the beginning are the hidden ones that tell you in which genre you need to make a movie hit. I highly recommend making a separate save at the beginning of each era, and if you failed to make a movie hit with that specific genre, load back that save and try again. The other achievements will come over time, and you’ll unlock more and more and just do each action more and more, which increases the chances that, at one point, you’ll do the specific thing the achievement asks for.

I give The Executive – Movie Industry Tycoon 3.5 out of 5 stars. I can see this rating going up the more things will be clearer on how they work or which stat is important for a specific achievement or goal. In short, I think this rating goes up the less I feel so stupid for not understanding everything :P.

This review for The Executive – Movie Industry Tycoon was written on 19 february 2025, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 39 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.