Big Pharma is a business tycoon sim and Factory-Building Game developed by Twice Circled and published by Positech Games that released to Steam on August 27, 2015.
In the game you take on the role of the CEO of a Pharmaceutical Conglomerate and you have the power to do anything from ridding the world of serious diseases to running an evil corporation that puts profits above people. Like any other business sim, the player must do everything from managing the company's stream of revenue, to running advertising for your products and getting them delivered out in time, to making sure you stay ahead of rival companies. The player starts with making simple medications for common ailments like colds but soon grows the potential to create miraculous new drugs to treat new diseases.
Big Pharma contains examples of:
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Sometimes it's not the most cost-effective decision to run your company with 100% ethical practices. This is a Truth in Television for many pharmaceutical companies worldwide.
- An Entrepreneur Is You: You are the CEO of a pharmaceutical company and you must manage the entire company from making new products to marketing them as well as making sure the company maintains a revenue stream.
- Harmful Healing: As a general rule, every substance you can turn into a pharmaceutical has some kind of drawback, from the relatively minor (headaches for example) to the extreme (racing heart beat, night terrors, incontinence, and so on). Processing the substance to remove the negatives can make the benefits less powerful or be prohibitively expensive, so you have to decide if you're okay with some drawbacks to make a more profitable drug, or if you want to reduce your profit margins to make a safer one.
- Sadistic Choice: Though you never see the effects of your drugs on people, you may occasionally come across a horrible choice, where the maximum efficacy of a drug benefit also corresponds with the maximum power of a drawback. This could be resolved with some changes to the production line to remove the drawback, but it will likely be expensive.
- Video Game Caring Potential: You could make sure your company is creating products that work well and are ethically viable, like cures with no drawbacks.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: You could make sure that your products are the cheapest things ever produced, with loads of drawbacks, but low production costs that ensure you still make a profit.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: If your products are bad, you'll get a negative reputation, and people won't exactly be racing for a treatment that causes horrible nightmares or "slight" anal bleeding, which makes it more difficult to maintain your profit margin.
- Withholding the Cure: This is an important late-game game mechanic. If you make a cure too good, its rating will skyrocket, followed by its price... for a little bit, until it stops treating suffers and starts curing them, permanently reducing demand (and thus price) for the cure. One of the reasons why "Female Contraceptive" is such a good cure to focus on is it's guaranteed never to be, uh, cured.