Digital Age DLC - Suggestions

[David]

Just wanted to let you guys know that our dev team are now at an early stage of designing a new DLC for Capitalism Lab, titled Digital Age.

I will be posting development news about it in the near future. Stay tuned.

[jiaozi]

顶!

[cumulonimbus]

nice!!

[Infotechcitrixperth]

A good idea is to have dataCenters where people can purchase services from you, you can use your R&D to create new services such as Email and storage and charge people to use them

[WilliamMGary]

A good idea is to have dataCenters where people can purchase services from you, you can use your R&D to create new services such as Email and storage and charge people to use them

+1

[therealevan]

A good idea is to have dataCenters where people can purchase services from you, you can use your R&D to create new services such as Email and storage and charge people to use them

Great idea. Considering that the cloud industry alone is well over $10B in market value as of last year.

[David]

Yes, we intend to incorporate it as part of the new gameplay of this DLC. Any suggestions as to how you would like to see it work with the game's existing mechanics?

[therealevan]

Yes, we intend to incorporate it as part of the new gameplay of this DLC. Any suggestions as to how you would like to see it work with the game's existing mechanics?

If you're referring to data centers / cloud services yes I think it can be!


In it's most easily understandable sense, data centers can provide an increase of efficiency for firms (or known as levels).

Scenario #1 of how it could work:

An individual firm, such as a retail store wants to increase its output but wants to keep employee salary expenses low. The firm can rent data center usage from a provider. See the graph below, but basically imagine this in the usually 3x3 format for firms. Where the data center input is basically increasing productivity or efficiency of the firm. The player can spend more money to increase the efficiency.



Or on a more complex level, here is how scenario #2 can play out:

If data centers were to be a build-able / physical firm, they could operate much like the apartment/commercial building mechanic. Whereas if you start small, say a $2M center that is a 2x2 plot, it can provide a certain amount of 'usage' available for other firms to buy from. In comparison, you could build a $80M data center that would have a much greater usage availability with a 5x5 plot.

Once the data center is built, other companies will be able to buy usage from the center at a fixed or unfixed rate. A perfect mechanic that is already in the game that would allow this work is the ability to offer cash to buy technology. Instead, companies can offer cash for data center usage.



Thoughts?

[eleaza]

So you are essentially saying it's like a "advertising unit", but instead of increasing brand, it affects the linked unit efficiency?

But how about services that required other services to function? how do we link that? And usually these internet services are using a constant subscription type payment. Which isn't very compatible with the "unit of product" goods in current game mechanism.

It will even be more awkward, if an Internet company doesn't get paid directly by their services, but from other revenue source completely. Like Google, their service is entire for the public for free, but paid by advertisement firms so to speak.

[therealevan]

So you are essentially saying it's like a "advertising unit", but instead of increasing brand, it affects the linked unit efficiency?

But how about services that required other services to function? how do we link that? And usually these internet services are using a constant subscription type payment. Which isn't very compatible with the "unit of product" goods in current game mechanism.

It will even be more awkward, if an Internet company doesn't get paid directly by their services, but from other revenue source completely. Like Google, their service is entire for the public for free, but paid by advertisement firms so to speak.

Sort of, but all it's really trying to replicate is the ability for a firm to outsource it's required IT overhead (Basically IaaS). Advertising will still exist obviously, but the data center usage will simply increase various metrics to the firm.