We may earn a commission when you buy through links in our articles. Learn more.

Democracy 4 is happening, as “quite a lot has happened in global politics” since 2013

Positech Games has announced Democracy 4, covering our modern-day political issues from social media to Fake News

"Playing Democracy 3 with Donald Trump's manifesto"

Brexit, Trump, Russian Collusion, Ed Miliband’s bacon sandwich – it’s been a busy few years in the world of politics. Which is quite literally why Positech Games, the developer of the Democracy series, is returning with the announcement of their new game, Democracy 4.

In a press release, Positech straight up says “Democracy 3 was released in 2013 and…quite a lot has happened in global politics since then, which we hope to reflect in the new version.” To give that some context, in 2013 neither ‘Brexit’ nor ‘Alt-Right’ were terms that had any worldwide relevance (according to Google). Obama was just starting his second term as president. Elsewhere in the world, China’s leader, now able to stand as president indefinitely, had just been elected, while Pope Benedict XI announced his surprising decision to step down from his role.

To reflect the way the world has changed since the release of the last game, Democracy 4 will be “completely updated to reflect modern issues.” That means some older features will be stripped out, but there’ll be plenty of new problems to worry about.

Most notably, those include “fake-news, social media, and other social phenomena.” There’ll also be features carrying over from the series’ most recent release, Democracy 3: Africa. That introduced corruption, as well as the ongoing issues surrounding freedom of the press.

Positech says the game is still “very early in development,” so there’s nothing to show off just yet. They do, however, have a release date of “some time in 2019,” and expect to offer some form of early access or alpha version to players ahead of the game’s full release.

While there might be a new game on the horizon, I’ve got to say that Democracy 3 is suddenly sounding very appealing. It might be worth picking it up cheap somewhere while you wait for the new game, and rewinding to a time when politics was less ridiculous and depressing than it is today.