Product Features & Response times

[Tanzier]

Alright I've worked my way up to a skyscraper using contracts. I have a team running those like clockwork as long as keep clicking my way to new contracts :)

My problem is I have never found a way to make products profitable, and kept feeling I must be missing something. Now I think I found out why, but I can't find the solution.

So the features have response times which translate into CPU cycles, which drives hardware requirements. So far it seems like no matter what I do my product is losing money. Just when I get close to break even I have to start adding hardware. I've got a product with 200K subscribers and bouncing off 2k online, and I'm losing money on it.

So far I've found two ways to improve this. 1) Update the engine to increase the ratio of ms to cpu. I'm almost at the most efficient engine. 2) Improve efficiency using lead developers,

I'm fairly sure once I get the last framework I will be profitable, but still not really enough to be generating a material amount of money. I've tried desperately to improve efficiency but it is very slow. I can't figure out a way to pump out the dependant bits for the improvements fast enough!

Then I was watching a guide video posted on here and I noticed he had a Landing Page with a 2 ms response time very early in the game. I looked at mine - 35ms!! That would certainly solve the problem. Am I doing something horribly wrong?

[Tanzier]

I figured it out. So the TLDR for products is:

Effeciency decreases response time, which decreases CPU, which reduces servers required which essentially reduces costs.

Improving quality increases the subscriber cap that a feature adds, allowing you to add more subscribers without adding additional features.

I would say Quality > Efficiency at this point. I added about 300 points of quality just on my landing page and my subscriber cap went from 200k to 9 million.

[jhovgaard]

Hi there,

Happy you figured it out! Product functionality is very rough around the edges and quite hard to figure out in the beginning. I hope that I'll soon be able to put some time into improving the usability.

Regarding the massive amount of users from usability: This will be nerfed a lot in the future. Other features will be buffed instead.

Best,
Jonas

[Tanzier]

Yeah this is VERY grindy right now. You could build a billion dollar app with just a high quality landing page and CMS.. which is a good thing because it would probably take 2 in-game years to do that. So right now I have 2 apps going - and for each I've basically built 3 landing pages and 3 CMS's, and I just leapfrog while building up the quality of each. IE I take the landing page to 500 and turn it on, then build a second to 500 and turn it on the second app. Then I build a third up to 1000, swap it out, and start working the next up the ladder.

I'd rather see much more flexibility and a little easier grind up for quality & efficiency. Additional components have less of an impact on both performance and max user count, but make it easier to actually build robust components to add. That would be much more interesting.

It's a bit frustrating that money is basically no longer an issue, but I've maxed out my employee count and still make only very slow progress towards improving one single feature.

Thanks for your work - I think this is shaping up to be a great game!