{tl;dr} Improve your on-boarding experience (interactive tutorial game) and improve your help tools (in-game community support/commentary, discussion area, etc)

{tl;dr} Improve your on-boarding experience (interactive tutorial game) and improve your help tools (in-game community support/commentary, discussion area, etc). Study what companies like Zynga are doing in the online game space and figure out how one of any of their more complicated games get so addicting. {/tl;dr} I started looking at the Developer Channel videos about the sim and I gotta say you weren't lying about the steep learning curve! sigh If I were in your shoes, I'd be out looking for money to secure a badass UX designer. A site like this REALLY needs an experience that immerses the player into the game and GRADUALLY shows them the ropes. This sort of thing is very difficult to get right because there are so many moving parts. The "progressive reveal" is a great tool a designer will use to help the user jump on easily without getting "fatigued". I really think this is the sort of product which could do well with the very hardcore sports fans, but you'd have to create some support to get them over that initial hurdle. An ideal solution would be a tutorial game which walks the user through the features and common strategies. I'd try to develop a community around it and let users collaborate on their experiences and strategies. Promote improving your game with things like contests or tasks (max number of completions in a game, lowest salaried super bowl winning team, etc) and generate content that gets players thinking about how to win these challenges. If you have the budget, attempt to do some real-world tie-ins. Ex: Winner of this season's superbowl gets tickets to the real deal. The driving factor of each promotion should ultimately get players "better" at the game. And providing tools to help each other improve the on-boarding experience (and bring their friends) will help your user base grow more easily. As much as I loathe Facebook platform games, many of the games that Zynga publishes there are very complicated and require some user training to get them up to speed. I'd study those games VERY CAREFULLY. Look for patterns and how they provide incentive to continue playing.