Super Tycoons Facebook Update: From $100 Million to $14 Billion

On May 9th, I gave an update on the Super Tycoons game I’ve been playing every day on Facebook in which you have to build an empire and compete against other players. I’ve even convinced my grandma to start playing it as a steel tycoon.

When I wrote about the game back in May, my in-game businesses generated $11 million per day and my game net worth stood at below $100 million.  As of a few seconds ago, I’ve gotten my in-game profits to just under $500 million per day and my game net worth $14 billion.  Mwa ha ha ha… A lot of this came after I used my flour mills to build a flour empire that was vertically integrated and gave me a stream of earnings to buy, improve, and hold beach resorts.

I used those profits to buy a diversified portfolio of businesses in the game, which now stands at 167 individual companies that include:

• 4 aluminum factories
• 21 bakeries
• 20 beach resorts
• 1 brewery
• 1 buffet
• 5 car assembly plants
• 1 cattle ranch
• 4 chemical plants
• 1 chicken farm
• 1 coal mines
• 1 coal power plant
• 1 coffee field
• 2 coffee shops
• 1 concert hall
• 2 corn fields
• 1 cotton field
• 1 cotton mill
• 1 five star hotel
• 19 fusion power plants
• 2 glass manufacturers
• 3 gold mines
• 15 grain mills
• 4 high rise condos
• 2 jewelry stores
• 1 mutual fund
• 1 national bank
• 1 oil rig
• 1 pancake breakfast house
• 1 pig farm
• 6 plastic manufacturers
• 1 potato field
• 2 rubber plantations
• 1 sandwich shop
• 1 sports stadium
• 3 steel companies
• 1 sugar cane field
• 1 synthetic textile mill
• 4 uranium mines
• 4 water companies
• 3 water treatment plants
• 17 wheat fields

Plus, I have a population of over 7.6 million in the game, which generates $647,495 every 5 minutes.

Commodity Price Inflation Is Rampant Because the Game Has No Built-In Gold Sink

Many video game economies have what is known as a gold sink.  A gold sink is a process or system whereby in-game currency or valuable items are removed to avoid inflation.  This process is also commonly called a gold drain or just drains.

The top players, many of whom started the game when it was first released more than a year before I began playing, have a net worth of several hundred billion.  They keep almost all of their money invested in commodities and NOT in game cash.  The result is that they can use the taxes from their population to constantly buy limited supply commodities, inflating the price.  By investing a few billion per day in acquiring commodities, they can elevate their own reported net worth figures by far more than that.

Think of it like this: If you had 100 million barrels of corn and you could get the quoted value of corn to rise by $10, your net worth is going to go up by $1 billion.  Is that a true economic representation of your net worth?  No because you couldn’t sell it for that.  You have created a sort of self-perpetuating circular ponzi scheme for lack of a better term (not possible, I know, but you get the idea).

To illustrate my point, look at where game commodity prices were a few months ago:

And now compare it to today:

Power has gone up by 600%, water by 700%, cars by 331%, flour by 518%, potatoes by 792%, and uranium by 839%.

This is caused by market manipulation on behalf of the richest players.  For example, consider a player named simply “David”, the current leader in the game, who has a net worth of more than $1 trillion.  Of that, only $6.3 billion is parked in game cash.  Given the “rules” of the game economy, he is acting intelligently.

That means everything else – almost his entire net worth – is parked in commodities, which he has been buying insanely for several months, in effect self-inflating the price because there is a limitation to the total commodities that can be purchased at one time (no more than 400,000 units, or 20 orders of 20,000 units each).  By driving the price of a handful of items up each day, he can add hundreds of billions to his net worth in quoted market value.

If the video game developer introduces a gold sink, he could find himself quickly screwed but I’m not sure that will happen.  If we could short commodities in-game, a handful of us could crash the prices and take the top players out because they hold almost no cash reserves.  Sadly, the game is limited in scope.  Still, it’s a blast to play!  Especially when you consider it is possible to build an empire like this in real life.

In my own case, I can’t stop behaving like I do in real life.  I quickly harvest my properties and convert to cash because I think it is an asset bubble.  I realize the real-world economic forces that would cause asset bubbles to crash do not apply in the closed game economy, but … I just can’t help myself.  My first goal is always never lose money.

Related posts:

1. My Super Tycoons Facebook Game Net Worth Just Hit $60 Billion
2. My Super Tycoons Game Hit $135 Billion in Net Worth
3. I Broke Into the Top 60 Richest Super Tycoons Players on Facebook!
4. Building a Flour Empire on Super Tycoons
5. Tycoons Game on Facebook
6. Ruby Is Now a Steel Baroness on the Tycoons Facebook Game
7. My Theory: It Takes $4.5 Million to Feel “Really Well Off” and $10 Million to Feel “Rich” for the Average American
8. My Pure Mage Strategy Worked: Level 100 Conjuration, Level 100 Destruction, and Level 100 Enchantment
9. How to Marry a Millionaire – An Economic Update on the 1953 Film
10. The Plaza Hotel In New York City Underwent a $400 Million to $500 Million Renovation