Prison Architect

The game is a top-down 2D, with a partially 3D mode, highly modifiable construction and management simulation, where the player has been hired by the CEO of a for-profit prison company to take control of building and running a prison. The player's role is of both architect and governor with sandbox micromanagement themes, responsible for managing various aspects of the prison, including building facilities, connecting utilities, and managing staff. The player needs to recruit specific staff to unlock some aspects of the game, e.g., information about the prison's finances is unavailable without an accountant.

The player is responsible for the finances of their prison and for meeting the needs of their prisoners, e.g., sanitation. The player is able to implement various reform and labour programmes that reduce the specific prisoner's recidivism rate. The player tells the prisoners what to do indirectly by setting their schedule. The game takes inspiration from Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper, and Dwarf Fortress.

Prison Architect was developed by British video game studio Introversion Software. The game was announced in October 2011, shortly after Introversion postponed the development of their bank heist simulator game Subversion. It was first made available on September 25, 2012, as an Alpha version. It was then crowdfunded with pre-orders, making over US$270,000 in two weeks with close to 8,000 sales.

Introversion Software co-founder Mark Morris explained that independent crowd-funding has allowed them to have no time limit on the Alpha version, as well as no fees associated with crowd-funding platforms. As of December 2013, the developers had raised over US$9 million.

Upon its full release, Prison Architect received positive reviews, scoring 83 out of 100 on review aggregator site Metacritic. IGN awarded it a score of 8.3 out of 10, saying "Prison Architect is one of the most in-depth, satisfying builder games in ages, if you can get past the initiation." On April 7, 2016, Prison Architect won the 2016 BAFTA award in the Persistent Game category. Prison Architect was also nominated for the 2016 BAFTA award in the British Game category, which was won by Batman: Arkham Knight.

As of September 26, 2015, Prison Architect had grossed over $19 million in sales, and over 1.25 million units of the game had been sold. By the end of August 2016 when the final version '2.0' of Prison Architect was released, the number of individual players was given as two million. In June 2019, it was announced that the game had been downloaded over 4 million times across PC, console and mobile.