Work-in-progress screenshots of Internet Companies

[David]

Sneak peek of the work-in-progress screenshots of Internet Companies: see attached screenshots.

We are still trying to figure out a way to make the gameplay fun for Internet Companies.

Any comments and suggestions are welcome.

[therealevan]

Looking great David. Like apartments and commercial buildings, will internet firms have a similar setup? Or will there just be one building fits all sort of a mechanic..

[kg79]

The idea to handle internet firms a bit in the way media firms are implemented is good. I think there also should be some dependencies between the internet market and other markets. For example: if the internet market booms then internet devices like modems, smartphones sell better and vice versa.

Perhaps another product category should be implemended: software. It could include products like operating systems, office software, games. In the early years you would ship them on floppy discs, later on cd roms and in the final game via the internet. Good software would push the PC / notebook market (and vice versa), later the mobile devices.

With this perhaps the product types system should be reformed so you could define several dependencies besides the one that a new product makes an old outdatet. Now you just can make a product outdated, but this is not in every case a good sollution. When you think of smartphones or tabletts: there were several smartphones and tabletts, but it was only a niche market for years. The boom came with the Iphone and Ipad. These were not really new products, but the software was good in quality and quantity, and they became along with good brand strategy lifestyle products.

[Arcnor]

Looks good. I definitely believe that layout will work if the company is a search engine or social network.

I notice however that online retailer is an option. What is the plan for how that business will operate? The Amazons of the world are not concerned with advertising. My suggestion would be that if online retailer (or business like those) are selected that the Internet company firm work similar to a retail firm however that a new function is built where the user selects a product to sell based on the products available in their warehouses and then this function would basically control the sell of that product. There would be no purchasing but instead it would be shipped to the consumer directly from the warehouse. In this way the user can just go to his internet company firm to see how sales are and set prices.

[kg79]

You should distunguish between digital products and normal products. For digital products you need servers where you store them, for normal products of course warehouses. Amazon has huge warehouses all over the world.

[anjali]

well even amazon has an advertising budget, they wouldnt be where they are without advertising

[therealevan]

well even amazon has an advertising budget, they wouldnt be where they are without advertising

Amazon's advertising/marketing strategies are interesting because it's not like they really need to advertise about amazon, everyone in America and most other parts of the world they do business in knows about them. For them, it's really more about advertising specific services they can provide to customers such as Amazon Prime, or if you live in the Seattle area - one hour same day delivery for prime members.

[David]

Each type of Internet company is supposed to be dependent on a few technologies.

Any suggestions for the technologies for powering the following types of Internet companies?

Social Network - currently we just define a generic "Social Network Engine" tech for it. I think it will be more interesting to define more technologies that power a social network. Any suggestions?

Search Engine - similar to above, any suggestions for the list of technologies that affect a search engine's performance and quality?

Photo-sharing web site - similar to above, any suggestions for list of the technologies that affect a photo-sharing web site's performance and quality?

[azxcvbnm321]

The internet companies should be limited to non-physical goods and services only. Physical goods are already handled in the game with factories and stores and are the main base of the game. Basically Amazon has warehouses too, a lot of them, and they are just like stores, except that they ship to you instead of you going to them. There isn't much of a need to add an Amazon kind of business to the game and it would be complicated to balance out the gameplay and make it fit within the overall Capitalism Labs game.

Yes different technologies will determine the "quality rating" (content quality) of these new internet media companies. This is a good system. Now all you have to do is make up a bunch of new technologies that can be researched.

[Spac3y]

I like the look on the online share trading company. You could have a couple of approaches for this.

It could be charge say $15 a trade for a customer to buy shares in the stock exchange of the game (thus also increasing ownership of companies through share trading companies) (Customers would fluctuate depending on market cycle (boom/recession etc) and population

You could also add a fund manager section on this which charged a % fee tup to say 5% on increase in value of the fund each year (this fund would also be paid dividends from your company / AI companies adding to the fund value)

If a company wanted to IPO for example, whether your company/subsiduary , or AI, it could offer a chunk to the online share trading companies, they could take up the offer or not (the risk would be if the company went bust the share trading co would loose the value of its investment).