Idle capitalism

A look at AdVenture Capitalist

I haven’t really played AdVenture Capitalist since I bought a new phone, and I was desperately looking for a distraction from life this weekend, hence I installed it again.

And since I barely log in to games, I was greeted by the prospect of lost progression and having to start all over again. Which got me thinking about how long it would take to get back to where I was, and why are idle games designed this way?

The horror.

The Core Loop

The building block of AdVenture Capitalist is a business. Just as in the real world, you do the following:

1. Start a business (buy a lemonade stand)
2. Earn an income from it (when people buy said lemonade)
3. Reinvest in the business (buy another lemonade stand)
4. Earn more income as a result of the reinvestment (now people can buy 2X lemonade!)
5. Reinvest again when you have enough money to do so (buy a third lemonade stand)
6. and so on and so forth

Game design wise, each business is defined by the following parameters:

1. Number of production units
2. Total output
3. Time taken to produce output

All the cool game blogs have diagrams so I must have one too.

The Meta Loop

At some point your business is too low-brow for the wealth you’ve amassed, and also for the wealth you want to amass. So you invest in another business, and repeat the flow for business #2. That’s what the Tatas and Birlas must have done, obviously.

At some point, you’ve started every business you could have, and have gone through the reinvestment loop for each one of them ad nauseum, and you are now an ultra mega tycoon. The world is not enough, so you go forth and try to run businesses on the moon and mars. You hire managers to run the businesses for you, because some poor minions have to man your lemonade stand empire.

Forest Trump would be a fantastic crossover. I hope Stefani Speilburger makes that movie soon.

That is the long term goal of the game, for me at least. Having a multiplanetary business empire that constantly churn many quintillions of dollars. The numbers make me feel good, and make me forget that I am a 31 year old doing a 25 year old’s job.

There’s no time, and there’s no money!

The fine folks at the AdVenture Capitalist wiki did a great job at compiling the various numbers in the game. The wiki introduces us to the concept of productivity, basically the revenue generated per unit time.

If a player owns n businesses, the productivity calculation looks like this:

I shall now take the liberty of using this to define the aim of this game:

The aim of AdVenture Capitalist is to maximize productivity by optimal and timely investing.

I might be wrong, but hey, cut me some slack. I’d be in better places if I were smarter. Anyway:

Using the formula that I so painstakingly wrote in PowerPoint, these are the following approaches to maximizing your productivity:

1. increase quantity → i.e. own as many units of each unique business as possible
2. decrease production time → i.e. reduce the production time of each business as much as possible
3. increase n → i.e. own as many unique businesses as possible

Unit revenue is fixed in this game. Each additional unit produces the same as the previous one.

Increasing quantity

All you have to do is purchase an additional unit, but the game makes this difficult by making the cost increase via geometric progression, with each business having a different coefficient for the said GP.

What this means : Your first lemonade stand has an effectively costs you $3.7. Lemonade stand number 200 costs you $2.6 million.

But given that revenue scales linearly and costs scale geometrically, how does it work out? Why would anyone fork out $2.6million for a lemonade stand that generates a revenue of $1 per production cycle? This leads us to -

Decreasing Production Time

The more units of a business that you own, the lesser the production time. The game follows a step function for production time decrease:

Once you get to your 25th unit, production is twice as fast. On the 50th unit, production is 4 times as fast, and so on. This plateaus after unit number 400.

But why should you buy multiple unique businesses instead of scaling one of them?

Increasing n

The game gives you serious incentive to purchase multiple units of each available business. To quote the wiki:

[time] Gets halved at 25, 50, 100, 200, 300, and 400 of each business’ investments and is further halved at the same milestones when all businesses reach them. Total amount of production cycle halving happens for 12 times maximum (so the production cycle time can get to be a 1/4096th of the initial one).

The value of this can be understood by looking at the earth business with the highest production time- the Oil Company. The first oil company you buy has a production time of 36,864 seconds, or nearly 10.5 hours. If you own 400 units of all businesses, this time reduces to 9 seconds! The Bank reduces from 1.7 hours to 1.5 seconds! (yes, the wiki used the same example to sell the point)

Hoarding is a very human trait, and so is investing. We derive great satisfaction from watching our savings and collections grow, but we derive greater satisfaction from watching our investments and sacrifices give returns. This is because some effort went into deciding what the sacrifice or investment should be, and any positive returns tells us we’re smart. Hence, when the above machinations churn out $1.7 trillion per second, it feels very good indeed.

How to monetize off of capitalists

I’ll bring this back, because it was a piece of work on a mac:

From Kongregate’s point of view, there are three things that are valuable to the player:

1. A way to increase the number of units
2. A way to increase the unit revenue
3. A way to reduce production time

While nothing in the game directly impacts time or the number of units per se, almost all of the monetization is geared toward helping players increase unit revenue.

The simplest of these is the rewarded video ad implementation:

While the rest is an elaborate system involving gold bars, a premium currency used to purchase time warps and outfits that give certain profit boosts.

Buy gold, spend on time warps, flux capacitors (!) and fancy suits

While not going into the intricacies of how these outfits work, one thing to note is that the messaging to the user is very consistent — everything in the game is about increasing your profit. There are no confusing tangents and complicated upgrades. Yes, there can be an upgrade or a boost selling a time reduction or the store selling cash outright, but no. The player is told repeatedly that the path to glory is through increased profits.

I’m sure that this somehow leads to better engagement and monetization, but am too lazy to think why.

Battling Boredom

Once you’ve hired managers to run your businesses for you, your massive conglomerate continues to churn out trillions per second, you’ve unlocked various perks to enhance that further, the main game doesn’t really have much for you to do, and it can get quite boring.

The game tries to alleviate that by allowing you to start over and relive the thrill of a new business. It does that in three ways:

1. Unlock the Moon or Mars and start anew over there
2. Run limited time themed events so you start anew there
3. Reset and restart your existing businesses

#1 & #2 are pretty self explanatory, so I won’t elaborate. $100 trillion will buy you the moon (!!) and 100 Mega Bucks will buy you Mars. This is vaguely similar to what I think a Civilization VI sequel would be after a science victory.

While others reach for the heavens, you claw at the dirt.

That said, #3 is probably the most unique of the lot.

The designers have probably identified trillionaires as the wealth threshold for boredom, because this is when angels unlock. Angels can either be sacrificed for getting upgrades, or used to reset your investments. In exchange for resetting, each angel on hand gives you a profit bonus.

excuse the shoddy use of GIMP

That said, I think that is the game’s key drawback, and the reason I lapsed in the first place. Progression really slows down as you go ahead (that is expected and happens in most games) — but fatigue and boredom does get to you.

What can be done to improve it? I’m not entirely sure, as this boredom is common for me across the genre, from this game to Egg Inc to Fallout Shelter. What might work is to maximise the MTTB metric — Mean Time to Boredom. Yes, I invented that KPI.

Players lapse for various reasons, one of the most irreversible of which is that they got bored of the game and have no interest in playing it again, no matter what notifications / remarketing ads / rejoin bonuses that you might throw at them. What you do have in your control, however, is the ability to maximize the time taken by these players before they decide to give up on the game.

This, I believe, is primarily done by increasing variety, both in terms of content and newer game modes.

AdVenture Capitalist does not really lack in the content variety department — they have fresh themed events that regularly show up as per their Live Ops cadence.

What they can bring in is new modes, and increase the depth of the meta.

Unlike the current moon base, where you go do the exact same thing but with a different currency, a new mode with a different idle mechanic would be great.

The “sister game”, AdVenture Communist seems to be something different though, and I think I’ll give it a serious try now!

Hi All,

This post came about due to extreme boredom and ennui on a rather sultry Sunday afternoon. I’d appreciate your feedback on it. Do you like this style, or would you like it to be more hardcore with numbers as is my usual wont? Do let me know.

Cheers,
V