Feedback: venture capital

[midnight]

Starting a new product by using venture capital is supposed to be easy. That is true and false at the same time. It's true because you can get money (by reaching milestones) to keep you in the game until you can make profit on your own. But it's also false because once you you earn your own money it is really really hard to buyout your product. I accepted several investments so now 83% of my product is owned by investors. With 60m users and a valuation of ~$616m, I need more than $500m to buyout my product. Right now I get a profit of ~$500k per day. That means I need 1000 ingame days to get that money. I don't see a way to earn money faster and I don't want to farm contracts. I still don't know if spending money for marketing and growing bigger will help or make things worse.

→ Buyout a product feels like pain.

The Milestone 16 doesn't help. In my case I needed $10m to achieve that milestone. That means I sold another ~25% of my product, just to get the $1m reward. Right now I need ~$150m to buy that 25% back. That is a bad deal.

Milestone 17 is still unbalanced. My product ist now #5. To get top #3 I need a product valuation of ~$4b. That means I need to grow 6 to 7 times larger. That also means that the required amount of money to buyout my product will be 6 to 7 times higher than it is right now. And I will get a $2m reward. I already need just 4 days to get that. Simply put: I don't give a f*** about $2m when my product is top #3.

→ Milestones 16 cost me a lot of money
→ Milestones 17 is basically useless

[jhovgaard]

Hi there,

This is a complicated matter, but I'll try to answer as simple as I can.

The whole "buying out" your investor is hard to balance. It's completely natural that you as a player want to buy out your investors. Mostly because you have the button available, so it naturally becomes a goal.

At the same time, I want the game to be at least slightly realistic. This means buying out an investor of a successful company is always going to be insanely expensive and close to impossible. You'll see the exact same thing in the real world.

I'm working on some new mechanics that hopefully will remove some of the desire to buyout investors. I really want you guys to gain that knowledge on how startups are working. At the same time, it should still be fun and exciting of course.

I haven't talked about this before, but future betas will introduce "The Exit". It's basically what all succesful entrepreneurs are striving after: selling your company and gain the highest possible revenue. At the same time, this will be the end of the game and the price of your exit is your "highscore".

Regarding milestone 16 and 17: You're completely right. These haven't been balanced out yet. I'm still gathering feedback from people like you. I'm planning on adding 3 more milestones, making the "curve" less steep and objectives easier to complete.

Damn, too much text already. Anyways, I hope you can see what direction I'm trying to go towards.

Thanks for asking questions, it really helps a lot!

Best,
Jonas

[GarfiidooDK]

I agree to OP

but I also agree with jhovgaard, since it isn't realistic of buying out a investor completely. I would however if you had the option to slowly buy out a investor at slow intervals, and give me the option to buy the company slowly back ( 5% at the time or something like that ), so I have more to sell to other investors.

Does it make sense ?

also, the investor spam is too much at full speed ;)

/!\ Offtopic:

How about having a option to sell server power from the datacenter until you need it ?

I did also write on Discord about, having a option to assign a rack(s) to a project. I do like the percent, but it can be "hard" to assign power to more projects when they are all big.

[nucky_bad]

Instead of buying out an investor a VC could leave the company if he isn't anymore interested in the company due to stagnation, losses which aren't coming from rapid growth or something like this.

[midnight]

Please also consider this: The desire to buyout my product doesn't come from the fact that I can do this. I want to do this because it is the only way to add an additional product.

The funny thing is: I want to add an additional product to increase my profit and to be able to get more money to buyout my first product (It doesn't matter if that takes some time as long as I have something elso to do). But I need the money first to buyout my first product to start another one. So all I can do is waiting. And marketing is still to slow, so I need to wait longer...

For some reason the valuation of my product is increasing automatically even if I don't want that, but my daily profil is sill the same every day. As a result I need more and more money buyout my product while my daily profit isn't chaning. So just waiting is not an option. I need to increase my daily profit ASAP. So thats just it. Waiting for money. Lets say I get there some day and I can buyout my product completely, at that point it is likely that I will have lost the interest into starting another product, because I already have enough money. So right now statring another product would give me something to do instead of just waiting.

[Skipper]

My feedback is the same as the ops; that I want another product but can't because of the unrealistic milestones or cost to buyout. We've touched that buyouts are unrealistic, and while yes that is reasonable, milestones need to be more accomplish, or another method to create another product should be available.

Maybe there needs to be an option to sell the entire product to investors and you can begin a new one?

And why does the "Exit" have to be a true Exit? A prime example of carryover is Prison Architect allows you to sell your prison (in this case company/product) and use the revenue towards a new company or product...there should be more continuation available in Startup Company...not start here, end here, create a new gameplay.

Brandin.

[jhovgaard]

Hi everyone,

Thank you for all your feedback, much appreciated!

I've decided to make a hotfix based on your comments: Starting from Beta 16.3 (shipped today or tomorrow) you'll only be required to complete at least 15 milestones in order to create a new product.

[midnight]

Originally posted by jhovgaard:

Hi everyone,

Thank you for all your feedback, much appreciated!

I've decided to make a hotfix based on your comments: Starting from Beta 16.3 (shipped today or tomorrow) you'll only be required to complete at least 15 milestones in order to create a new product.

I will look into that as soon as it is available.

Beside that: it's always easy to criticize. So I want to give you some positive feedback as well. I like the way the venture capital feature is going. It will need some fine tuning, but you did a great job with beta 16 and beta 15! You've created a good plattform to implement additional difficulty levels with different milestones to start new products. I guess that is the way you intend to go. So, keep going... ;)

Great update!

[jhovgaard]

Originally posted by gamer:

I will look into that as soon as it is available.

Beside that: it's always easy to criticize. So I want to give you some positive feedback as well. I like the way the venture capital feature is going. It will need some fine tuning, but you did a great job with beta 16 and beta 15! You've created a good plattform to implement additional difficulty levels with different milestones to start new products. I guess that is the way you intend to go. So, keep going... ;)

Great update!

Thank you :-) It is indeed the way I want to go. To be honest, I always release a bit "too early" to get some feedback from you guys. It always make design decisions much clearer.

Thanks again!
Jonas

[midnight]

Originally posted by jhovgaard:

Hi everyone,

Thank you for all your feedback, much appreciated!

I've decided to make a hotfix based on your comments: Starting from Beta 16.3 (shipped today or tomorrow) you'll only be required to complete at least 15 milestones in order to create a new product.

Something is not right in 16.3. I reached milestone 14, still working on 15, but I already can create a new product. If I got you right I need at least 15. This is low priority, I guess, but if you have a minute, you might want to add this to your backlog.

[jhovgaard]

Originally posted by gamer:

Something is not right in 16.3. I reached milestone 14, still working on 15, but I already can create a new product. If I got you right I need at least 15. This is low priority, I guess, but if you have a minute, you might want to add this to your backlog.

Damn you're right. Will be fixed in next hotfix. Thanks for reporting!