To whom it may concern,
I have a production facility and a sales shop. However, I can’t find out how to transfer the cars from the production to the selling store. I attempted purchasing my own products via direct sales and open market only to find out the game won’t permit to do so. I’ve attempted to find a solution through the “Help” pages and the tutorial itself, but I can’t manage to achieve this.
Thank you very much.
Vehicles must be purchased from other players. To shorten shipping times, use the map to find manufacturers near you and try to negotiate sales with them or purchase from the on open market.
Shipping times are based on location of vendor and seller. Minimum shipping time is 5 game days. If you look at you reports (accessible from the phone) you will find the Vendors Report, this report will show the shipping date as well as the average number of game days shipping will take.
The reason we do not allow players to sell products to themselves is because we want you to do business with other players as this enhances the gameplay.
Hi
I understand the goal, you want to create a real business environment, in a real business environment people need to collaborate and talk to each other. I think that is brilliant and something to really strive for.
However, an artificial rule like not being able to supply your own company doesn’t seem right - you preclude a major business strategy i.e. vertical integration.
How is it going to work when there are more products and people are producing raw materials etc. (I’m guessing that is the aim eventually), would somebody producing and selling cars have to do something like - have a raw material business but no steel making business, have a car manufacturer but no car retailer.
Thinking about real corporations, the reason why most tend to stick to a connected series of businesses is complexity and expertise, it seems that big corporations firstly expand into lots of areas, fail and then “return to core business”, it has happened twice to companies that I have worked for in my career. Also, the complexity of running completely different businesses adds overhead etc. costs, additional management layers etc. inefficiencies, supply chains get doubled up etc.
GE for example, have many different divisions, but even they don’t operate in many many markets.
Perhaps you could penalize multiple business stream through admin cost or similar.
Another way would be introduce a tech level through a research tree, and set up the tech tree and costs in such a way as to make it uneconomic for for players to become experts in many different markets/businesses.
IMO somehow tring to mimic the real economic drivers in business rather than force behaviour through arbitrary rules would be a better way to go,
Cheers
P
Thanks for your thoughtful feedback. I agree!
Early on (internally) we did allow players to sell to themselves, but because we think the social interaction is so important to the early success of the game, we decided to not allow that … for now. It’s definitely not a firm design principle for us.
As we build out the game, we will likely allow more vertical integration as you note. Maybe eventually we will open it up completely, but we are not sure right now. Authenticity is our driving principle for sure, but we will adjust the gameplay based on the feedback we receive from our players (like you!) and how we observe people playing the game.
We appreciate thoughtful discussion like this, thank you.