I'm not a gamer. I'm a skier and snowboarder who happens to have a laptop. So when a ski resort management game called Ski-E-O! landed on Steam, I wasn't expecting to lose an afternoon to it - but here we are. Real mountain terrain, a full weather system, storms that roll in and wreck your snow base, avalanche danger, and enough depth to make RollerCoaster Tycoon feel simple by comparison. Early access lands in November. Here's what a few hours in the free demo actually looks like.
I'm not really a gamer - I'm a skier and snowboarder first - but a ski resort management game just showed up on Steam, and after a few hours in its free demo, it's easily the most comprehensive take on running a resort I've come across.
I didn't even have Steam installed. Had to download the platform itself just to get to the demo, which tells you roughly how much of a gamer I am going into this. The last time a management sim held my attention like this, I was a teenager burning hours into RollerCoaster Tycoon on an old Windows desktop. Seeing something with this level of depth, built specifically around skiing, show up in 2026 is a different experience entirely - and I mean that as someone who spends far more time on snow than in front of a screen.
What you're actually doing in it
Ski-E-O! Ski Resort Tycoon puts you in charge of building a resort from nothing. You start small: a couple of single chairs, a handful of beginner runs, and just enough terrain to start bringing in money before you can push further and deeper into the map. It's in development from Falling Damage Games, and the demo is free on Steam right now, covering one mountain and one full season. Early access on the full game is scheduled for November 2026, priced at $19.99.
This is where the game moved from "cute management sim" to something with operational bite. You're not just hiring bodies to fill roles - staff get tired, they need breaks, and if you don't hire enough people to cover the roster properly, you end up running a burnt-out team that starts making mistakes.
There's a promotion system on top of that, so keeping people happy and moving up isn't optional flavour, it's part of how you keep the resort running. It's the first tycoon game I've played where understaffing feels like it has real consequences rather than just a number ticking down in a corner.
Pricing is a lever, not a slider you max out
Lift ticket pricing works the way you'd expect it to in reality rather than in most games: push the price up and you make more per head, but demand drops off as you go, so there's an actual curve to find rather than a "more money = more good" button.
What surprised me was the après side of things. You can set your own beer pricing in the pub once the afternoon crowd rolls in, and in my few hours of play, après sales were outearning lift ticket revenue outright. I did not expect the bar tab to be more important than the lift pass, but that's exactly what happened on my mountain.
The books are real books
Every month you get a full financial breakdown: revenue, operating expenses, profit, broken down across ticket sales, food and beverage, infrastructure costs and staff costs. You can take out a loan to build faster than your cash flow would otherwise allow, but then you're paying it back with interest on top, so overextending early has real downstream consequences rather than being a free lunch.
It's basically a proper P&L statement wrapped inside a ski game, and it's the piece that made the whole thing click for me - you're not just building a mountain, you're running a business that happens to sit on one. At a certain point it stopped feeling like a game and started feeling like a (much more fun) spreadsheet of how Vail Resorts might actually run one of its mountains, if Vail Resorts were a single person doing every job at once.
Sculpting the mountain itself
Each map starts as a base terrain, and you're not stuck with it as-is. There are terrain-altering tools to smooth things out, flatten sections, rough up terrain for more advanced runs, or carve out alpine bowls for the riders who want something steeper and wilder than groomed corduroy. Combined with the real-world elevation data behind each map, it gives you a genuine sense that you're shaping an actual mountain rather than dragging pieces onto a flat grid.
Time, weather, and the day-to-day chaos of running a hill
You can speed up or slow down time as you play, which matters because a lot happens in a single day cycle: skiers wipe out on runs and need ski patrol sent out to help them, storm cycles roll through and bury your lifts in snow that then needs clearing before you can reopen, and on top of all of that there's the avalanche risk and rain events I mentioned earlier. It's close to a full simulation of what a resort actually deals with operationally, day in and day out, rather than a simplified version of it.
What's still ahead of the November release
Based on what I could see in the lift-building menu during the demo, single and double chairs are all that's currently available to build, but the interface has slots that point to express chairs, gondolas and aerial trams arriving by the November launch.
I'd also be surprised if accommodation and hotels don't show up in a future update at some point, given how much of the rest of resort operations is already modelled - running lodging and building out full base villages feels like the natural next step, though again, that's me reading the tea leaves rather than anything the developer has said outright. I wonder if there will also be staff unions so you can get the full Vail Resorts management experience... Park City cough cough!
The story behind it
Ski-E-O! comes from a solo studio, Falling Damage Games, built by Jesse Zigthor, a former Armature Studio and Meta developer with 17 years in the games industry. Zigthor started the studio after Armature was shut down by Meta in January 2026, and has described the game as an ode to skiing itself - he only learned to ski in his late twenties, and the project is built partly around the yard sales and repeated falls that come with learning as an adult rather than a lifetime on snow.
I went in expecting a novelty and came out having lost an afternoon to it, mentally running my own P&L the whole time. If you've got a Steam account and a spare hour, it's worth the download - management-game background not required.
