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A Weekend with Social City

By Pete

If you’re on Facebook, you’ve seen this game (or games like it). After watching a really interesting talk on the future of video games, I finally gave in and decided to see what these Facebook games were really about. There are a lot of Facebook games out there, Farmville and Mafia Wars likely being the most popular, with about any theme imaginable. The one I decided to try out, Social City, appealed to me because I really enjoy the SimCity series of games.

Here’s the basic idea:

You’re given an 9×9 grid, some cash, and some starting buildings, and you can build a city however you choose.

The mechanics are very simple. There are three basic kinds of buildings: factories, residential, amenities. Factories produce coins, residential buildings produce population, and amenities produce an unnamed resource which I will call Happy Points.

Factories

Factories work by producing goods which then get sold at a price. As you gain experience levels, different products will be available to you. The goods cost different amounts and take different amounts of time to make. Once they are made, you have to click on the factory to sell the goods. If you don’t sell them, they “expire” after a certain period of time¹. The coins you get for selling these goods are what allows you to build other buildings.

The expiration of products underscores a key part of the game: you have to keep up with it. If you have products which are going to complete in 10 minutes, you need to be there to sell them and start something else. There is no “set it and forget it” mode of play. When you’re looking at the kind of goods you can produce, there are three factors: cost to start, payoff, and duration. If you figure out the profit and divide it by the amount of time it takes to produce, you can get a good number to compare the products against.

You are able to produce your most lucrative good as soon as you start. It will net you a lot of coins as long as you are able to babysit it. To give you an idea of how much better this product (”Puffies Treats”) is than the others, this product will net 3780 coins per hour². The next closest product you will ever get are Slinkies, they only produce 3720 per hour³, you don’t get them until level 14, and you have to attend to them every 15 minutes. The best you can do with a timer of an hour or more comes in at 2,430 per hour⁴ and doesn’t show up until level 22. As a general rule, the longer something takes, the lower its profit-per-hour number is. Take a look:

The obvious goal here is to get you playing the game and keep you doing things so you feel a little invested.

Update 3/9: I just realized that the numbers and graph originally posted were not quite correct. There is a $20 fee when you “clean” the factory after you produce something, which obviously impacts fast items far more than slow items. The graph and numbers have been updated.

Population

Residential buildings work in a very similar fashion to factories. Each of them takes a certain amount of time to generate a population increase. The most efficient of them will produce 25 population every 15 minutes. The same trick applies to population that applied to factories, though: the population doesn’t get added (and the new counter doesn’t start ticking down) until you click on the building. When its timer runs out, you’ll get a little notification and then the building will sit there doing nothing until you click on it. Having houses that generate 100 population per hour is worthless if you’re not there to click on them.

Your population is also limited by the number of “Happy Points” you have. Amenities (like burger joints and parks) increase your number of Happy Points. These happy points put a limit on the population you can attain. The exact formula isn’t obvious, but as your population increases, you have to put more amenities up, and as you increase in level you will gain access to buildings which are worth a greater number of Happy Points.

The Business Model

So, what’s keeping this game running? There’s another form of currency in the game called “City Bucks”. You use these City Bucks to increase the size of your grid and to buy more effective amenities or residential buildings. You start with a handful of them and then receive one per level. There are two other ways to earn City Bucks. The first is by straight-up paying for them. The other is by completing “offers”. All of the current offers require purchase, but the interface hints that it is possible that “free” offers (like signing up for a credit card) might exist.

Conclusion

It’s a good little time-waster. It’s cute. The building selection isn’t terrible. The nagging thing, though, is that the mechanics are so simple that it really seems like psychological trick wrapped around a freemium business model. There’s a lot of potential for this sort of game, I think, but a lot more work needs to be put into the design and mechanics. Right now, it seems like companies are putting as little effort as they can into the games in order to turn out a lot of them to scoop up users and, hopefully, dollars.

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1. I think the time you have varies by the amount of time the good took to produce, but I’m not 100% sure about that.

2. Puffies Treats: Cost 15, Reward 350, 5 minutes

3. Slinkies: Cost 1,800, Reward 2,750, 15 minutes

4. Whiser Sailboats: Cost 2,850, Reward 5,300, 1 hour

Full post as published by PeteHoliday.com on March 07, 2010 (boomark / email).