Not sure if I really like this game or not lol. I really want to like it, but the demand models for retail are just awful. Same issue other online business games seem to suffer from. They make the prices exploitable to the extreme. Looking at the market data in the game, one quickly notices a pattern - products selling for 100 or more times the cost to make them.
The game creators obviously intended to make a balanced system. Looking at the help files, for instance, they expect you to produce video game systems for a few thousand, wholesale them for 5-10 thousand, and retail them for 15-30 thousand. Instead they are produced for a few thousand, wholesale for a million, and retail for 3.5 million.
It looks like one group of players found out you can drive prices up and up and up without hurting demand and everyone started doing it so that it became the go to way to make money. The game's guides (not official ones, but player ones) all suggest priming the markets like this to make a profit. So now the way to make lots of money is to find a product, produce a bunch of it, sell enough to drive the AI company out of the business, then steadily raise prices over time until you're way up hundreds of times above the products initial value. The only roadblock is new players coming along and trying to follow the tutorial, selling tons of product at cheap prices that drives your average back down. So people push new players into setting prices super high to keep the gravy train going.
Instead of the developers fixing a completely broken demand equation, they added additional checks that make those jacked up prices affect the economy. But that doesn't fix the problem, it just hurts the entire market - even players who are selling products for normal prices. So now the game's cities where people are making lots of money are trending way down in population, but prices are still going up because the demand equation is still broken and people are still raising prices because the game still lets them sell stuff. And with enough stores you can sell half a trillion dollars worth of a single product (like video game systems, or tires, or whatever) a day in a city of a million people, because all it takes to go over 100% demand even when your price is 10,000% of the production cost is more stores. Yeah, that makes sense.
It's still kind of enjoyable setting up production lines for products and selling them and stuff, but the only way to compete on a profit basis is to do the same silliness that others are doing.
If things worked IRL the same as in this game, I could open up 1000 convenience stores in a town of 1000 people and make a fortune selling sodas for $50,000 a pop. Everyone could have a job running their own convenience store, and take turns buying soda from each other.
I'll still be playing this one for now if anyone still wants to join me. But does anyone know of a game similar to this one that has a bit more realistic demand model? I like the style of it, and the community is great and active, but the demand just irks me. I played Economies of Scale before but it has rampant cheaters, don't really know of any others. At least this one doesn't have cheaters, just a broken system lol.
But if anyone does want to play, get look through products and find something ridiculously overpriced. It makes getting started way easier and faster. You can make enough off a retail store in an hour to build another retail store.
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Topic: Simunomics browser business sim - Anyone play this? (Read 7159 times)