I have seen episode of boom and bust. But nothing that has really affected me.
I'm still 1st in the game, the richest, without taking any loans and just banking months after months.

In the next patch, the impact of boom and bust on consumer demand will be increased. You may evaluate it and let me know if you feel more impact with the boom and bust cycles on your business.

It's ok for the wiki, David. Even if it's quite hard for me to write long text (don't forget english is not my natural language and that i'm quite bad at it).
I understand your position. You want to bring business people to game, and not gamers to business. It's bold.
I'm not sure it works, though ; I hope for you. But at least if you can reach the educational market, you will find plenty of potential "gamers".

I have seen episode of boom and bust. But nothing that has really affected me.
I'm still 1st in the game, the richest, without taking any loans and just banking months after months.

It's easy to make load of money when you know some tricks.

- Thirdly, I think that if you want to sell this game to more people (even people interested in the topic), something HUGE is lacking. We have already discussed about that, but i think you should think about it. Many people today are interested in economy, finance because of the crisis and what happen around. And what are people talking about ? AGENCY RATINGS and BANKS (for the latter, playable or not). However, these two major features doesn't exist in the game, or very simplified.IRL they play a very important role in the capitalistic system. What about central banks lending money to banks, evolution of liquidity ratio (like Bale III), change in the rate of your company which leads to a change of your loan rate (and your stock price).
Everybody talks about subprime crisis. But it doesn't exist in cap2. It's really a shame because this game is very very both interesting and complex, but the lack of these features will limit its development in sales (in my opinion).

You may check out the article about Boom-and-bust Cycle on this page:
http://www.capitalismlab.com/enhanced-m ... ation.html

The asset bubble is said to go burst when the GDP growth plummets to the negative territory and then it affects everything - the stock prices, consumer demand, property asset prices, and interest rate.

When you have got sufficient cash so that burst of asset bubbles (stock prices and property asset prices) did not affect you noticeably and you didn't feel the impact.

On the other hand, if you have taken a huge loan and short on cash, you may feel the crisis.

Stock market crashes, declining consumer demand, falling property prices, and interest rate cuts are something that we have experienced in the past few years, as a result of the crisis.

I would like to invite you guys to post your feedback here for more discussions. Subsequently, you may write an article on Cap Lab Wiki about this topic: http://www.capitalismlab.com/wiki

We believe that this could be a step towards the goal of bringing the game to the mass, especially people interested in business in general. In fact, we think that the goal cannot be achieved alone with new game features only. It has to be presented in a format that help users to understand the new features, in a way that they can digest and learn new things, for which the Wiki guide will be essential.

David wrote:
The asset bubble is said to go burst when the GDP growth plummets to the negative territory and then it affects everything - the stock prices, consumer demand, property asset prices, and interest rate.

Ive had a few bad situations, but not an extreme situation yet.

There was one really bad one in particular when the demand for my goods plummetted quite a bit.
In the wealthier cities, its not so much (Its gone down by about half before), but for the low wage cities, their demand for non-neccesary goods (Eg- cars) had drastically fallen by about 85-90%

I had a huge loan at that time too which impacted on profits, but thankfully the reserve dropped interest rates to 1.5% (From highs of 10.5%) which helped me out.

I haven't seen any negative inflation yet

I have got deflation (negative inflation) in a few games I played. I believe that you will see it in future games.

extreme crisis

You may check out the article about Boom-and-bust Cycle on this page:
http://www.capitalismlab.com/enhanced-m ... ation.html

The asset bubble is said to go burst when the GDP growth plummets to the negative territory and then it affects everything - the stock prices, consumer demand, property asset prices, and interest rate.

I guess that you might have got sufficient cash so that burst of asset bubbles (stock prices and property asset prices) did not affect you noticeably and you didn't feel the impact.

On the other hand, if you have taken a huge loan and short on cash, you may feel the crisis.

If it is not the case described above in the games you played (you didn't see ups and downs of GDP growth and changes of economic state (from boom to recession), you may let me know and we will look into it.

I tend to have the same view as you that in order to make a big splash on the market, we will need to have something big with the potential of bringing the game to a tipping point. Your plan is to take advantage of the experimental nature of the game and continue to shape it until that happens.

Right now, our priority is to fix all the obvious bugs and finish the development of the user registration and auto patch system and open up the beta to more users (the 2nd and 3rd round of beta-testing).

After all that is done, we will evaluate the implementation feasibility of various new features that we have come up internally and those suggested here on the forum, working towards the goal stated above.

On a related note, we believe that having a Wiki accompanying the game is a necessary step towards the goal, especially for bringing the game closer to business minded people who are not traditional gamers. You may check out this topic: http://www.capitalismlab.com/forum/view ... f=10&t=373

I have played now a little, and can give my opinion on it :

I think that I can separate my comment in 3 parts :

- First, you reshaped the game. New graphics, products. The game is not "ugly" anymore (i'm not playing a game because it is beautiful, not AT ALL, I love dwarf fortress :p), and what you added, even if I haven't tested everything, makes it fine. Somebody who would see me playing wouldn't say anymore "wow, what is THIS game ?" This game is fun (it was fun before,too).

- Secondly you added many things. Macro economy is good. Even if it's still very simple and not extreme (I haven't seen any negative inflation yet, or extreme crisis, and the fact that the economy is the same everywhere is pity, because it would be much more interesting). New products are good. R&D disruption is a good idea, even if it needs rework (IMHO, though).
It still lack many "small" things. We should discuss of all of them. Small examples. One ? You should add also training disruption, because nobody is "eternal" level 10. With time, if you don't invest, your level is slowly lowering. Other example ? Inventory management. In Real Life logistics is capital but in this game it nearly doesn't matter (and that's why i nearly never use warehouse whereas IRL they are very important). But some things (and Beta is here for that, i suppose !) needs polishing. Not many. You have done a very good work and the game can nearly be sold as it is. But if you want a real realistic game (even if still as a game), there is much to do, in my opinion.
With this game, i have understood things that I never understood before. I think that this game is a very good way to understand the basis of corporate, finance, marketing, etc. It's the best game of management, and should be used to help students (I had a "corporate game" as end-year exam, and it was much less complex than it)


- Thirdly, I think that if you want to sell this game to more people (even people interested in the topic), something HUGE is lacking. We have already discussed about that, but i think you should think about it. Many people today are interested in economy, finance because of the crisis and what happen around. And what are people talking about ? AGENCY RATINGS and BANKS (for the latter, playable or not). However, these two major features doesn't exist in the game, or very simplified.IRL they play a very important role in the capitalistic system. What about central banks lending money to banks, evolution of liquidity ratio (like Bale III), change in the rate of your company which leads to a change of your loan rate (and your stock price).
Everybody talks about subprime crisis. But it doesn't exist in cap2. It's really a shame because this game is very very both interesting and complex, but the lack of these features will limit its development in sales (in my opinion).


So I can't vote "no", of course. But i can't vote "yes" either.

From a business point of view, we are more interested in making Cap Lab increasing its circle of influence rather than pricing too aggressively.

The book "Black Swam" started out as a book targeting at a specific group of audience in a niche market. Then it reached the tipping point and grew mainstream.

FYI:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Swan-Im ... Black+Swam

Our aim is to innovate Cap Lab via this unique experimental development and testing model and ultimately bring CapLab to the mass.

We are not talking about getting mainstream gamers playing Cap Lab as in general they are not too interested in hard-core business sim.

Instead, we looked at Black Swam as an inspiration for getting business minded people interested in something that is intricate. i.e. Black Swam is an intricate book and could be hard to digest for ordinary people.

But Black Swam managed to get people in business cycles talking about it and it became a trendy topic.

We have been thinking about linking Cap Lab with real business topics or case studies, to increase its appeal to business people.
Here is one experiment:
http://www.capitalismlab.com/the-evolut ... -2042.html

Imagine something like Quora, which allows users to post their ideas of using Cap Lab to observe and test out their strategies of running businesses and taking advantages of the changing macro economy, something that is still an area of exploration in the real world. For instance, most people are not sure where the global economy is heading now and any kind of theories or simulations that might help people figure that out will probably draw great attention and interest.

We are still exploring this plan and any suggestions are welcome.

I did read the thread that you attached, And it's interesting. Although it appears to be a craze for developers and software houses at the moment to have a core game and then add extras to a game and charge. I can see the benefit, don't get me wrong, but It's always nice to buy the next shiny graphicly enhanced edition to a game and have mods rather than the same game with addon's, if that makes sense. Civilization was a classic example, the mods and scenario editor kept me comming back for more rather than the pay for scenarios. I speak to many people about PS3 games and you feel like you paid for a game, which then allows for more addons which you feel it should of had in the game. I don't know if you've played the latest grand turismo but they now have for £2 ( not a lot of money I know) a testing track that was in the previous game. By the time you get to play all of the addons, the next game has come out and all of the addon's are binned and you start again. You look at the cost for example and you realised that you paid as much for the addon's as you did for the game. The worst thing with grand turismo for me was that it was rushed, and then you ended up downloading patches which increased the game size by the same amount as the original game. If anything companies should learn from Microsoft IE complete the software before release rather than fixing it after you've released it. I'm not ranting or anything, these are my observations of the game and software industry over the last 25-30 years. Back then if the game or software wasn't correct, they had no chance. Thus they made sure that it had everything it could and worked as well as it could. Dos and early windows were Micorsofts finest hour. My win 7 wants to update everyday. If it carrys on i'll need a new hard disk

Cool, i'm glad that you have everything to hand. Still dosen't help me answer your poll though