The Meter is Running news & patch notes

Deadhead

• Renamed from "dead km" and "Empty KM" to Deadhead. That is the actual term for driving without a fare. All screens say it the same way now.

• Deadhead now has colour bands instead of always printing red. Green up to 60%, amber between 60% and 70%, red above 70%.

• Added a tooltip on the label explaining why it never drops below 50%. The car drives out to the fare then drives home, so some empty distance is always there.

Balance

• The reputation bonus moved from Street Smart to Hustler. Same 1.5x bonus, just on a different trait.

• Street Smart keeps the defensive half. It still blocks scammers and still prevents Nuisance reputation loss.

• Trait descriptions updated. Street Smart's scammer protection was always in the game but never written down anywhere.

• Improved runtime performance and reduced memory usage during gameplay.
• Reduced unnecessary background rendering and interface updates.

Hello everyone! This patch focuses on more believable taxi routing, safer save loading, some controller tweaks and several economy balance adjustments.

Fixes

• Taxis now choose routes by estimated travel time instead of raw distance. They may take a slightly longer road when it gets the passenger there faster.

• Fixed old saves sometimes inheriting signatures or daily financial records from the wrong game sessions.

• When multiple controllers are connected, the game now keeps using the controller you are actively playing with instead of switching unexpectedly.

• Dispatch and vehicle-service tutorial instructions now adapt correctly between mouse and controller controls.

• A negative closing cash balance is now shown in red in the day ending notebook.

Balance Changes

• Passive repair and cleaning rate at the home base has been slightly reduced. Repair and cleaning services should now remain meaningful instead of being replaced by short idle periods.

• The Slick trait was a little bit overpowered, it no longer reduces negative rating results. Its mood, tip, service-quality and inspector benefits are unchanged.

• Friday tax choices have been reworked;

  • Pull some strings to get a discount: requires 20 Reputation; pay 85% and lose 20 Reputation.

  • Cook the books to underreport weekly earnings: requires 35 Reputation; pay 70%, lose 35 Reputation and lose 1.5 Rating.

What's New:

• Steam Deck & Linux Support: The game is now playable on Linux and officially optimized for Steam Deck.
• Better Interface for Handhelds: We've overhauled how the game's interface scales. Everything from menus to fare slips will now look better and be much easier to read on the Steam Deck and other displays.
• Gamepad Tutorial: The game now recognizes when you are using a controller and will show you the correct gamepad button prompts during the tutorial.

Visual Polish:

• When you drag a car key over a customer's fare slip, the key now becomes slightly transparent so you can easily read the customer's details without the key getting in the way.
• We've given the opening story letter a fresh new look.
• Customer trait descriptions on the side of the fare slips have been shortened and organized so they are easier to read.

Hi there good folk! This is a medium sized update which includes general stability, performance and balance changes.

Performance

• Fixed the fullscreen FPS drop that occurred when Steam overlay is enabled; fullscreen now runs smoothly.

• Optimized calculations for large fleets and customer pools; hovering over keys, driver cards, and customer notes no longer causes stuttering when the city is busy.

New: Base Popularity

• Serving customers now increases your base's popularity and higher popularity generates more customer demand. Completing a high volume of trips and keeping the base rating high helps your popularity rise rapidly

New: Record Trip

• Beating your previous best daily trip count now earns you Reputation at the end of the day. A minimum of 60 passengers is required to achieve your first record.

Balance Changes

• Maximum driver capacity has been increased from 8 to 9.

• Dispatch radio call limits and zone demand bonuses have been rebalanced; a larger fleet receives more calls.

• Added a 3rd upgrade level to the dispatch radio, allowing it to show even more customers.

• To balance the increased passenger count and new mechanics, the per-kilometer fare and Reputation gained from events have been slightly reduced.

Fairer Ratings

• Rating penalties when your base score is high have been softened; a single bad trip no longer wipes out a whole day's worth of good trips.

• Traffic that forms after drivers are dispatched to a customer no longer causes a bad rating.

e-Taxi Usability

• When an e-Taxi equipped driver exhausts their patience and goes on a break, they now notify you via the radio; the feeling of the automation silently failing is gone.

Time Indicator

• The cigarette pack under the phone has been removed, and a new cigarette pack has been added next to the clock. The pack starts the day full and the cigarettes inside deplete towards the end of the day.

• Resolved performance drops that occurred when there were more than 5 customer notes on the map.
• Fixed a bug that caused taxi icons on the map to disappear on some laptop devices.

• Inspector Risk & Reward: Inspector trait is no longer just a punishment. If you keep your vehicle clean and well-maintained, passing the inspection will now reward you with +3 Reputation.
• Tax Relief: While the tax is supposed to be annoying, it might have been a little too much. We tuned it down to 18% from 20%.
• Cheaper Maintenance: The last big patch introduced the car maintenance fee, but it was a little too much. Repairing and cleaning at the main base and garages is now 50% cheaper.

• Fresh Endless Run: If you've beaten the game in the past but no longer have an active endless save (e.g., you beat the campaign before Endless Mode existed), you are no longer locked out! You can now start a brand-new Endless Shift directly from the main menu. You'll start right on Day 16 with a clean slate, no debt, the default two-driver roster, and a ₺5,000 war chest to get you rolling.
• Discrete GPU Fix: We've pushed a fix for dual-GPU Windows laptops where the game would mistakenly run on the integrated graphics which caused performance drops even in high-end machines. To remedy this, the game now actively forces the high-performance GPU across the board.
• Window Accessibility Scaling Fix: Addressed a issue where UI scaling (125%, 150%, etc.) would cause the game window to spawn larger than the screen and hang off the edges. The game now correctly detects your scaled display bounds and center itself accordingly.

Hi there lovely folk! This update is a big balance and polish pass based on your feedback and the roadmap. It includes a tighter economy, more characterful passengers, a smarter e-Taxi, some cleanup of the cursor behaviour, and a few UI refinements.

New: Controller Input Toggle

Economy & Balance

• More low-income fares. Minimum fare cost is lowered from 50 to 40 and opening fare price lowered from 35 to 30.
• Per-driver costs. Daily shop overhead and meal costs are now per-driver instead of being static. More drivers mean more daily costs.
• No more free maintenance. Main base/garage upkeep is no longer free. Repairs and cleaning done at your bases now cost money (a quarter of the manual service rate) accumulated through the day and deducted at night under Vehicle Maintenance (so it still counts toward your tax write-off).
• Worse debt installments. Debt installment now reduces your debt by ₺2,300 per ₺2,000 payment (was ₺2,400).
• More customers, more often. Customer spawn rates and max number of customers were bumped up across every part of the day. Max customers visible on the map at once is now 5 by default, 8 at Tier 1, and 10 at Tier 2.
• Tax relief. To offset the new economy changes, the default R.I.P Tax percentage has been lowered to 20% from 22%.
• Some morning driver events are now more punishing. The two driver event choices now cost composure for the rest of that same day, no matter which option you pick.
• No more cross-town e-taxi calls. Auto-dispatch now ignores fares more than 5 km from the vehicle, so your drivers stop chasing passengers on the other side of the map.

Passengers & Ratings

• Trait variety up. Passengers now roll positive and negative traits a bit more often (35% each), and each customer type's trait tendencies were re-tuned. For example, unemployed passengers now skew stingy and won't surprise you with a big tip.
• Low composure now costs you. A driver who starts a fare already stressed drags the passenger rating down. You'll see a new "Low Composure" line on the payout slip.
• Dirty-car penalties reworked. A visibly grimy car (below 75% clean) takes a small rating hit; a car below the red line (40%) takes a bigger one. VIP passengers are twice as sensitive to a dirty car and low composure, while CHILL passengers don't care about cleanliness at all. These state penalties can't be wiped away by a good trip anymore.
• Maxed-out rating now pays back. When your rating is already at 5.0, a choice that would have raised it instead converts into a reputation reward, shown as a green **Maximum Rating** chip with a (?) tooltip explaining the conversion.

UI & UX

• The fare slip now sits in a fixed spot. Instead of popping up under your cursor (and covering the very pins and route you're trying to read), the customer fare slip now appears in a consistent lower-centre position whether you're hovering over a customer or dragging a key.
• Trait helper notes on the fare slip. Each customer's traits now show a short plain-language note beside the slip (positive on the right, negative on the left) so you don't have to memorise every icon. (Hidden in Hardcore mode.)
• Route preview draws on top. When you drag a key, the preview route and its destination flag now render cleanly *over* the customer notes instead of being trapped under them, and the line no longer covers the customer it starts from.
• Trip events show the journey stage under the title (Heading to passenger), (Passenger on board), or (Dropping off) so you always know the event type before you answer.
• Phone rating reads true. The big rating number is now floor-truncated so it always matches the star count (no more seeing 5.0 above four stars).
• Day-end notebook polish: The debt installment row now indicates "Installment Paid ✓" and you can't sign off until the end-of-day summary finishes animating.
• Missed-customer marker now reads "late" on the map instead of a generic rating mark.
• e-taxi usability additions. Hovering over the e-taxi switches now also highlights the driver card and taxi sprite so you can easily tell which driver is affected.

Polish & Performance

• Cursor and mouse handling rewritten for smoother, glitch-free movement.
• "New Game" and the Settings "Save" button now feel snappier; heavy work is deferred until after the button visibly responds.
• Tutorial now locks up the game map until the first fare is assigned; also, there are some minor tweaks to tutorial popup visuals.
• Morning events no longer light up the room early. The room now stays dim until the light-flicker that plays after your daily events, removing a jarring early brightening.
• The low-reputation signature wobble was softened and now skips ink naturally, instead of a heavy scribble.

• Optimized calculations for 4+ drivers.
• Fixed an occasional mouse cursor drift when a controller is plugged in.

This small update is mainly for players who were seeing unusually poor performance on otherwise capable PCs.

• Steam Overlay is now disabled by default to reduce Electron/Chromium overlay conflicts on some Windows systems.

• You can turn Steam Overlay back on from Settings -> Behavior. The change applies after closing and reopening the game.

Advanced Launch Options

With this update, we also added a few launch options that can help players who are still having performance issues. To use one, open Steam Library -> right-click the game -> Properties -> General -> Launch Options and paste one of the options below.

--tmir-gpu-mode=compat

Uses a simpler and safer Windows GPU path. Try this if the game is performing much worse than expected for your hardware.

--tmir-gpu-mode=software

Disables Chromium hardware acceleration for troubleshooting. Hardware acceleration should normally improve performance, but on some machines it can cause the opposite, so this is worth testing.

--tmir-safe-mode

Enables both of the options above. This should be the last option to test.

If one of these launch options fixes the problem, please let us know which one worked and what overlay or capture software you had running in the background.

• Zones can now be permanently purchased and come with three parking slots.
• R.I.P. Tax continues to be collected, increasing every week.

• Scammer: 50% chance to ride off without paying. A Coward driver guarantees they'll flee, while a Street Smart driver always makes them pay up.
• Inspector: If the car's condition or cleanliness is below 40% (30% with a Slick driver — the official is more lenient), they'll slap a fine on the shop.

• Zone Cards have been redesigned. Rental options are now shown with their descriptions.
• Hiring Section: Candidate cards now display the driver cut percentage alongside the hiring cost.
• Warning icons have been added for all new trait interactions (scam risk, coward+scammer, street smart+scammer, inspector risk, VIP dirty car rejection, nuisance risk). These icons are not shown in Hardcore Mode.

• Day 15 bailout reputation threshold lowered from 80 to 70. This makes it a bit easier to access the community aid even if you couldn't scrape together enough money to pay off the debt.
• VIP customers now outright cancel the trip if your car's cleanliness is below 40%.
• The bankruptcy threshold has been lowered from -₺3,000 to -₺4,000. We're aiming to reduce game-over losses for new players against the tax pressure.

• Removed unnecessary progress counters from the Achievements Screen.
• Crash markers are now properly cleared when the end-of-day notebook opens.
• We've revisited the in-game cursor and mouse system and squashed as many bugs as we could find. The cursor should feel much smoother now.

• Enabled Steam overlay support.
• Added a control scheme to the main menu.
• Various optimization fixes; this should mostly affect performance with 5+ drivers.
• Small balance tweaks: events generally yield less money and reputation, ratings above 3.0 are harder to gain, and upgrade costs have increased.
• Added a reset button next to the Settings title; this should fix small screens getting stuck on larger resolutions.

Greetings!

We have been reading all the comments and feedback since the game's release. First and foremost, we thank everyone who took the time to share their good wishes and provide ideas for the game's development. We would like to provide a brief update regarding our roadmap.

Active development of the game continues. In order of priority, our current roadmap is:

• Bug fixes and game balance *

• Performance improvements and Steam overlay integration *

• Endless Mode / We are planning a feature that allows you to continue playing even after the debt is paid.

• Extra Scenarios / There are currently around 200 scenarios in the game; new scenarios are being written to increase this number to 250 in the coming months.

• Linux, Steam Deck, and macOS support

Our goal is to complete this entire list within the next 6 months, but since we are a two-person studio, providing an exact date is not possible.

* You can test the bug fixes and performance improvements made so far by selecting the Beta version of the game on Steam. The Beta version may run better, especially for those experiencing performance issues, however beta may not be as stable as realase version. We also look forward to your feedback on the Beta version!

10 Days to Go & Community Content Highlights

Greetings! There are exactly 10 days left until the launch of The Meter is Running! Development is moving forward exactly as planned, and we are now in the final polishing stage. We want to extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who has supported us, both internally and externally. Now, I’m handing things over to our writer, Berker, to introduce some of the amazing content created about our game.

Note on Language: While all videos are in Turkish, YouTube’s auto-translate feature might provide a functional translation for international viewers.

A Short Preview with Enis Kirazoğlu (Minute 6:50)

We are excited to share a brief video by Enis Kirazoğlu explaining the core mechanics and the gameplay loop of The Meter is Running. To call Enis a "big name" in the Turkish gaming industry would be an understatement; he is a true veteran of the scene. Stepping away from professionalism for a bit: we wanted to share how much this means to us. As a two-person development team, we grew up reading Enis’ reviews over a decade ago. I actually still have those physical magazines in my collection. Seeing our own project featured in one of his videos is both surreal and incredibly motivating.

Orhun Kayaalp

We would like to extend a massive thank you to Orhun Kayaalp, one of the most genuine figures in the Turkish gaming community, for the interest he has shown in our game. We were absolutely thrilled that he guided us like a mentor with his valuable feedback. We also want to thank him for giving us the excitement of saying, "Our game is now featured on the very channel we used to watch while eating." We are so glad to have you, Orhun Abi!

Simulaword "Alper"

They say firsts are unforgettable, and in that sense, SimulaWorld holds a very special place for us! Not only was he the first channel to review our game, but we also owe him a sincere thank you for his insightful feedback and the kindness he has shown us since the beginning of our journey. Thank you, Alper!

Hilmi Şahin

Dear Hilmi Şahin, thank you for the interest you've shown in our game! You’ve created some truly educational and informative content. We hope you can manage to raise your station's rating toward the end of the game :)

Samet Arslantaş

One of our favorite things is seeing players internalize the taxi station and the drivers, building a real bond with them. We want to thank Samet Arslantaş for embracing our drivers, taking ownership of the station, and most importantly, for supporting us on this road we’re walking.

RyuKenshi "Berkan"

"Wait, did RyuKenshi actually do a cosplay while playing Taksimetre?" That is exactly the spirit we love to see! You’re not just playing the game; you’re living in it... Thank you so much for the detailed explanations and your wonderful comments!

We want to thank everyone who has supported us, both at home and abroad, especially the Turkish gaming community. We might post one or two more updates like this before the launch. See you soon!

Hi good people! First feedbacks are coming in from beta players and we are so excited! You can watch the gameplay of first day from below. It's in Turkish but there is an auto-dub functionality you can turn on for English. Much thanks to SimulaWorld for taking an interest in our game!