Sporting Goods Shop is a first-person business simulation game where you run a small (but growing) store that sells various sporting goods. You manage the ordering of new stock, keeping your shelves filled, online orders, and your customers by taking them through a smooth checkout process. The gameplay loop is simple, yet incredibly engaging and anyone that enjoys business simulations will certainly love the game.
Disclaimer: We were provided two Steam keys for our review of Sporting Goods Shop directly from the developer, Business Tycoon. The developer has not read our review prior to publication and as an independent website, we do not allow external parties to influence our content.
Let’s dive into what makes Sporting Goods Shop good. To kick things off, I had the pleasure of playing this game in multiplayer with fellow staff member Taryn, and at the time of this initial review we both had 4 hours into the game which was at v0.05 launching just a few days prior.
Sporting Goods Shop is available on Steam in Early Access and you can join their official Discord server. The developers state that they wish to improve the project and work with the community to design future features and they state the core game is fully playable, which I strongly agree with this statement.
Getting Started in Sporting Goods Shop
You get your start with a couple of retail displays and your choice of a couple of colors of basketballs unlocked.
You head on over to your computer which sports some awesome RGB fans, and you are met with a desktop that has a ton of icons. Luckily, the shop is closed and when the shop is closed you aren’t making progress on time, so you can get your feet grounded as you explore everything the PC has to offer.
Time in Sporting Goods Shop is interesting. When the shop is closed, time doesn’t move. As long as it hasn’t hit 10 PM at night, you can still order new goods which you can then put onto your shelves and get things ready for the next wave of customers. You can take advantage of this by, and the end of day, move to the next day and immediately make all your purchases and get your store ready for the incoming onslaught.
One other fun thing that I noticed, and if you really want to min-max your earnings, customers will walk towards your store at all times, even when you are closed. Your best bet is to open your store as soon as someone is about to walk right up to it, because they will then enter as soon as the store opens and you aren’t waiting around for 10-15 minutes in-game for your first customer to start browsing the store.
Customers enter, they seem to know exactly what they are looking for; Their hands move to the shelves and they start picking out their products. They walk around and see that display of protein powder as they gather up a whopping four jars of it - weren’t you in here yesterday buying protein powder too? - and when they are ready to checkout, they walk up to your cash register.
Everything in Sporting Goods Shop can be moved around. Initially, your first two displays are right at the front of the store, and customers have to walk to the back to checkout. Moving items around did not seem to have much of an effect on what customers were purchasing, they’d run from one corner of the store to another corner and back again to get exactly what they came for, but the aesthetics definitely mattered to myself when building the empire.
The Point of Sale System - POS
If you’ve ever had to manage a cash register, Sporting Goods Shop does a great job at giving you a fairly realistic scenario that has a great physicality to it. Physicality is one of my favourite things about the simulation genre of games. Some do a poor job at it, but Sporting Goods Shop makes good use of interactables and small details that put you to work.
First, you scan all the items that are being presented to you by the customer. After they are scanned they will present you with their choice of cash or credit, and then you get to make the actual sale.
If a cash sale, there is a chance they have provided exact change. A swift tap of your spacebar checks them out and the next customer can be handled. But, if they give you too much cash, you get the pleasure of counting the change.
Admittedly, when we were making change ourselves, we rounded all our prices up or down to keep things more sane. Although it wasn’t as realistic to not have the odd number of pennies, nickels, and dimes to give out, it did speed up the checkout process and it wasn’t until we received our first paid cashier that we started going with pricing that was using the current recommended retail price. It can be fun to give out the change and to input the exact numbers of the terminal when we go to swipe their credit card (no physical swiping motion, sorry), but we’re also in this to be as efficient as possible so round easy numbers prevail!
Business Simulation
Sporting Goods Shop is all about the core of retail. Your customers want goods, you have goods. You take on a contract with a supplier of a certain set of goods, you buy those goods in boxes, you place them on shelves, the customers get ringed up at your POS and move on with their, hopefully, five-star experience.
With how physical everything is in Sporting Goods Shop, you need to manage your inventory well. Your initial stock room quickly can become overwhelmed and so it will take time to sort things out if you aren’t staying on top of it. Your ordered stock arrives instantly in a loading bay-type area at the rear of your store, and then you can choose how you want to organize it in your room.
Stacking boxes is fairly easily, though the keybindings at times don’t feel very intuitive. Everything can be rebound though in the options menu which is a huge positive, but I am curious as to the reasoning behind why certain keybinds were chosen. C makes some sense to close a box and it is easily accessible with your left hand, but why is G the key that drops boxes? Q is the most common key in games to drop something, and right beside W and A which makes pressing it quickly trivial. G definitely does see use to drop in Warzone, or PUBG, but that’s not as common. E also is a very common key for interacting with objects, but instead we left-click instead. Again, not a big deal, we have a keybinding menu that will allow us to customize our controls.
I found it quite fun to be bouncing between all the different retail duties as I panic to order the next set of boxing gloves because that lady just bought four of them; This whole town seems to have some underground fight club going on because I cannot seem to keep them on the shelves.
How do you get more products and expansions though to build the simulation? We certainly can't just be known for selling basketballs and fighting gloves. You need to level up.
Leveling Up
Positive actions in the game like making sales or starting new contracts gives you experience. From the very, it feels like you have to work quite a bit to get those precious levels which makes the game quite grindy, though it’s not a bad thing. The pacing, although grindy, still feels good and every couple of in-game days we seemed to be able to do something new. Every time something new was available to us, we typically had the cash on hand to make use of it, though that was something that we were constantly aware of as well so if you aren’t looking at what’s unlocking next, you may have to wait a bit more after unlocking something to make use of it.
If you watch the progress bar though for experience, it does get a tiny bit slower as time goes on for each additional level but with each level also comes more complexity in running the store efficiently so you may not be worried to rush through everything. This sounds like a good moment to remind everyone that not everything has to be a race and taking your time can be enjoyable. Play around with the color customizations and reorganizing the store to change up the flow.
The Art Style
Sporting Goods Shop has a very basic art style. It doesn’t try to take itself too seriously and everything feels like it belongs. The products, which are core to the retail experience, all look fantastic and they are all inspired by real world brands, with interesting off-brand names, which adds to the realism aspect of the game. Even lower-end machines should have no problems running the game, which is great to see.
There is nothing more satisfying than displays filled with beautiful items, and in some cases color matching the displays to the items to make them really pop.
Sound Design
There isn’t a whole lot going on with sounds in Sporting Goods Shop, though honestly, it doesn’t really need it.
You can purchase a speaker that allows you to play some music for your customers, though I don’t recommend placing it near the cash register because you will be hearing it non-stop and it can get a bit repetitive and thats with turning the music down in-game.
I did come across one odd “bug” with the audio levels of a piece of ambiance near the outside area in the square having an increased level of volume, but that should be an easy issue to resolve as it just seems as if it isn’t respecting your overall audio volume.
The Roadmap
Currently, Sporting Goods Shop has a roadmap published within the game client right on the start screen. Getting immediate insight into what they are working on is a fantastic way to communicate with your players who may not be reading all your updates on Steam or be present on your Discord server. I’m always a big fan of giving people information in multiple places so you can engage with the audience.
But, the current roadmap doesn’t show anything outside of primarily cosmetic additions and some extra NPC helpers. This isn’t a bad thing, more ways to customize the store can make it more of a dream come true and it would be a blessing to have someone to handle online orders. Customization is a good thing and with the game being early access, it makes sense that they wouldn’t have all their customization plans realized. But, we don’t get any insight into potential improvements to the main game loop, which makes me wonder if they are planning any outside of a basic "we're letting the community tell us what they want".
The Bad
Not every great game is going to only be good, there are things that I didn’t enjoy about it and although they aren’t major, they are all worth mentioning. I’m not nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking either.
Creating the Game
I was very slightly annoyed yet amused at the poor choice of interface for creating your game. This is the first point of contact with players that have loaded the game up and you are given the option for a Name, is this my character name? No, that’s actually under the Profile section on the main menu, you are instead naming your save file. The Left and Right arrow buttons are for changing your gender which could be labeled better.
The "Profile" screen from the main menu.
A minor gripe certainly, but when paired with two checkboxes that don’t explain their functionality very well, titled “Thief” and “Cleaning”, I was a bit worried about jumping into the game.
For the sake of explaining it, if you tick the checkboxes it enables thieves and enables cleaning respectively, cleaning meaning you will need to mop up footprints every day from your patrons. I was leaning towards this being the case, but it would be a better overall user experience for players for this to state it would enable thieves and cleaning. They are off by default though, which is probably for the best because they do make the game have more things to worry about and not everyone will like that. A good user experience on user interfaces always means being direct about the intention.
Online Orders
Online orders aren’t very well thought out. That feels a bit of an extreme take but I do genuinely feel that they are more of an afterthought and I hope that the system gets more depth to it in the future.
Each day, you will always receive two online orders on your computer. They will require around 30 total products, spread between three different products to complete and are a major source of that day’s revenue. I’m not sure who needs 11 footballs (soccer for the Americans), 12 yoga mats, and 11 boxing gloves, but I’m sure they’re creating some very interesting custom sporting games. These products are then taken over the Post Office which is across the town square and deposited into a box.
The guarantee of online orders doesn’t make sense from a realism perspective which, I somewhat expect out of a business simulation. I just opened my store, why do I immediately have an online order?
This could be improved by allowing you to research into an online shop and perhaps more effective marketing tactics. It would also be wise to have variability in that some days you may just have zero orders and other days you simply don’t have the stock to take care of all the orders that are present. It would make managing the overall stock of your store more varied and especially for multiplayer it would make sure there is that little bit of extra chaos around. Management of the online sales would be good.
The Bank System - Loans
Business simulation games love to give you loans, and that’s a very real reality in the world. As someone who has run an ecommerce business and has a deep understanding of cashflow management, having access to loans can make or break your business at times.
Sporting Goods Shop implements the most basic level of loans, and I didn’t find them very useful either. To start, your loans come in the form of a small $500 loan initially, and your payment terms are to pay it back $50 at a time over 10 days. No interest. Not having interest makes taking a loan have zero risk. I’m not entirely sure that Sporting Goods Shop has much risk at all when it comes to finances because there is always a steady stream of customers and paying that $50 back at the end of the day is going to be easy. However, we never felt like we were in a spot where we needed to take out a loan because we had so much money coming in. If we wanted an extra shelf and just refilled our warehouse, we’d just wait for a few customers to come in and buy several pairs of swimming goggles.
But, Sporting Goods Shop is Fun
Don’t let the bad take away from the good; Much of the bad that I have with the game are all very minor issues that may not even be issues for some and are definitely able to be fixed. Sporting Goods Shop hits some elements of realism, but then it also just has a very solid core gameplay loop that keeps you engaged. The entire time I was playing, I had a good time and playing with a partner made it even better. We gave those customers a great experience, we managed to expand our little empire slowly, and our stock room is an absolute disaster but we try our best.
As far as bugs go, I didn't notice any aside from the one minor sound issue. Especially considering we were playing multiplayer, where plenty of simulation games get wrong and introduce multiplayer-specific bugs, I was blown away by a bug-free experience. Everyone loves to trash talk modern game development and how so many teams have so many bugs with their game so I'll do the opposite, great job everyone on releasing a seemingly bug-free game!
Also, hitting the thieves with a mop is a fantastic additional use of our favourite cleaning device. There's an entire category of fun items you can use to smack thieves with which adds an element of charm.
The Recommendation, Final Words
I’m giving this the Must Play recommendation for anyone who enjoys business simulation games or is just looking for something that will keep them constantly engaged through multiple play sessions. It may be a bit chaotic but it also felt very chill to play.
Buy the game, find a friend or two to play it with, laugh, cry when someone accidentally spends all the money on the wrong goods, and hopefully your friendship will be stronger through your new retail bonds. There is always something to do, even with multiple people playing, so don’t be afraid to get the whole crew together. The amount of customers you have to deal with increases with more players, so go wild.
Will We Still Play Sporting Goods Shop?
Yup! Another play session is already in the works and we’re excited to keep growing our sporting empire and seeing the rest of what the game has to offer. There is easily dozens of hours of content to play through and to build your ultimate sporting goods store, and we’re ready to make that goal a reality.
So, are you going to give Sporting Goods Shop a try or have you already? Let us know what you think about the game in the comments below and let us know if you want to see a follow-up when the game has been out longer.
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