Morally bankrupt tycoon game Hollywood Animal hits Early Access in January

Weappy Studio has announced that their twisted tycoon game, Hollywood Animal, is set to launch into Early Access on January 16, 2025. If that’s too far away, the studio is also releasing a new demo in December to keep you satiated.

Hollywood Animal is a tycoon game about running a film studio. Where it differentiates itself from the usual crowd is in its meticulous depth and shocking lack of morals. To succeed in the film business, you may need to resort to cutthroat tactics like bribery and actual cut throats. You keep your staff in line using anything from threats to blackmail and, if you can believe it, much worse. You do have the option to stick to your conscience and do things more nobly, but your competition almost assuredly doesn’t have the same principles. I hope that moral high ground can keep you insulated from the hellstorm that’s coming your way. It’s all outlined in this new trailer.

I played the first demo of Hollywood Animal back in June. When I first learned of the game, I had concerns that it was too ambitious. The intricate systems at play introduce so many variables into play that it would be easy to create bugs, exploits, and weak aspects. The demo was enough to give me the impression that Weappy has got some suspicious voodoo going on, since the execution is looking spot on. If the added features shown off in the trailer are any indication, the team doesn’t sleep, and I fully expect that they have a wall set up like an evidence wall where they feverishly keep track of the game’s mechanics. It’s ridiculous.

I also suspected that this would lead to it, at the very least, missing its intended 2024 launch window. It happens. But Early Access makes a lot of sense for a game of this scale. As I said, there is a lot of potential for problems to lurk in its spaghetti nest of mechanics. It would take a lot of playtesters to try everything, so why not just unleash a flood of players on it? This is almost certainly a game that would only benefit from feedback.

Hollywood Animal releases into Early Access on PC on January 16, 2025. A new demo is set to arrive sometime in December.