How can I understand when i need more employees for Fan Shop?

[Zibbibbo]

Where i can see the merchandise request? I don't understand if i have to hire more exmployees for Fan Shop or not

Someone can explain me please?

[Kyouko Tsukino]

The more employees you have, the more requests they'll generate.

However, the higher the difficulty, the less profitable the fan shop is in early/mid game, and the more employees you add, the less profit you'll end up getting - because each employee will cost you at least $1000 a month but generate much less than that.

What does affect fan shop profitability is having many IPs at 5.0 rating, but to get there you could be undermining your early game growth, for a room that is - at best - a sidequest.

[Zibbibbo]

Thanks.

[iqoniq]

Originally posted by Kyouko Tsukino:

The more employees you have, the more requests they'll generate.

This isn't true from what I can see. Plitch (cheat mod) has an option for turbo workers, and if this is activated, they'll zip through the orders pretty quickly, and then go into the default wait state. You can see this normally (no cheats) if you create a shop early. They'll sell a few coffee cups, and then just wait.

I can imagine at normal speed it might give the illusion of infinite orders, but there is a cap.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

I don't trust anything that happens when using memory editing or any other "cheat*" but if it happens normally too, that's a different story. I'll have to try slow speed later on, I've gotten used to normal and I've even started going for Very Fast when doing test runs, just to not have to wait for everything to get done.

In Legendary, the employees seem to take forever to go through orders even at Very Fast speed, which may help create the illusion of "infinite orders" too.

I'll admit that, since the "usefulness" of the room is only there if one has many IPs (which I seldom have) and in late game (where "more money" is not a need anymore) I usually don't build any support rooms for fan shops. Getting 2k extra fans per month/week is a much better use of all the extra money.

* The number of times I've had unwanted side-effects from memory editing or "curated"/"pro version" trainers... Yeah, "cheat mode" is not a valid metric for anything.

[iqoniq]

As far as I'm aware it only changes the variables in respect to working speed (a 10 man team can put a 300K playability stat game in 12 months with the sequel buff), and I have nothing running to change any other values. Something I have noticed is that it relies on the peeps being in the play area, and seems to have diminishing returns from the centre of the screen (to having almost no effect to peeps off screen - machines don't seem to be affected by the diminish). The only reason I started using it was because I was having difficulties keeping up with arcade machine orders (there doesn't seem to be a sweet spot and it's either not worth it or you end up swamped).

A good way to test it is by dropping a merch room at the start of the game. You'll see that for the first few weeks you'll sell maybe 10 mugs once the game is released and if you throw all your staff at it the orders will stay the same and slowly increase as sales and the IP grows.

I don't know whether there's a a backlog system for "taking" all the orders, like there is with support requests. If that's the case and you're woefully understaffed, then you'll get the illusion of infinite orders because you wouldn't really be making a dent in the order backlog.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

I've tested it and yes, with enough monkeys and enough typewriters, the fan shop ends up having nothing to do for three weeks out of four. Of course, to get there, the fanshop was operating at a heavy loss, so yeah, still one of the rooms I simply won't bother with.

For arcade machines I ended up going for an "outlived their usefulness" method and just remove games before they run their natural course. Even in Legendary if you make a lot of games and port everything, you end up getting swarmed by arcade orders, so I simply remove an arcade game when the arcade sequel is ready for releasing. Since I time things so releases are yearly ("just add spin-offs!") they still give me quite a lot of money anyways.

[joeball123]

For whatever it's worth, Management (telephone icon) > Fan Shop brings up a menu where you can pick IPs and then see demand bars for each piece of merchandise on offer for that IP, as well as the current and previous month sales numbers. I'm pretty sure that 'demand' bars being anything but zero indicates that you're missing out on potential sales and thus could, theoretically, benefit from additional workers in the Fan Shop, but in all honesty I don't find it particularly useful - there's no overall demand indicator, at least not that I'm aware of, so if you're interested in checking you need to look at each piece of merchandise being sold for each IP, and there's no easy way to translate 'demand' into unrealized sales (the only way I see to do it is to compare sales figures for each product across two or more IPs that have the same IP strength, and even so I don't know how well those numbers really translate from one IP to the next, especially if the IPs don't hit most of the same genres) or additional staffing requirements (either add staff until the demand bars go down or sum up how many sales you think you're missing, compare it to the sales you're actually getting, and increase staff levels proportionately).

Still, it's there if you want to look at it.