The first of two articles on the products of Tycoon Systems: IndustryPlayer and IndustryMasters. Both are online business games which join together light entertainment of multiplayer gaming with educational purposes.
Industry Masters.
IndustryMasters is an online, multiplayer, business strategy game, brought to you by Tycoon Masters, a Brazilian business education software firm and is intended to replicate real world economy. This business game first saw light in 2007, subsequent to Tycoon Masters’ additional simulation game IndustryPlayer which was launched in August 2006. In IndustryMasters, players assume the role of a company’s CEO and battle one another in real time for profit and in order to rule the market and have the highest share price. Generally, the concept behind the game is allowing the players to experience the results of their actions in this real-like situation of ongoing financial strive.
The novice CEOs (and maybe next-generation executives) who consist of business and engineering students, corporates’ trainees and amateur users; engage at running their company and must deal with all the aspects of their corporations’ business including planning strategy, financial investments, product branding, pricing, quality assurance, research and development, HR and even ecology. The game contains approximately 250 industries which are divided into 16 categories. The goal is to constantly increase the share price by making smart investments. Each week a new tournament begins, where you start out as a low level manager and get promoted with time. With each promotion the challenge and rewards gradually increase as well. The tournament consists of 100 participants hourly rounds, which represent sixty business months. Therefore, each month is one minute of game time, which in the end of – scores and market data are automatically updated. The players can play individually or group up and in the end can get analysis on their performance.
The game is available in few editions customized for different usages:
- Single User Simulations – Self paced study while competing with specific business scenarios.
- Real Time Simulations – The public RTS where you compete with players worldwide.
- Simulation Workshops – Single seminary class, lasting 1 – 2 hours, for 10-50 players.
- Simulation Seminars – A longer comprehensive 2 days simulation.
- Competitions Events -The game also provides a solution for extensive business competitions and events.
Since the game was first released in 2007, it continually grows and has expanded to Facebook, the widely renowned social network, where it has nearly 3500 active monthly users. Here in the CEO Game we tackle relatively similar issues to the ones IndustryMasters deals with, with micro and macroeconomics concepts such as product life cycle, economies of scope and scale, benchmarking and much more. Moreover, we strongly believe in creating and providing a real world business environment, influenced by day-by-day events and trends, thus creating a new, addictive, easy to learn, fun to master challenging simulation which will help predict and maneuver the global economic markets.
The CEO Game.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:41 am
I’m not necessarily convinced IndustryPlayer is something you should be shooting for with The CEO Game. I’ve played IndustryPlayer in two stints now, once near when it first came out, and again very recently. Despite the complex tracking of your financial statements, and product by product marketing budgets and so on, the crux of the game comes down to constantly expanding the size of one’s presence within an industry (1x, 2x, 4x, etc.). Almost everybody makes money in the industry, and there’s really not a lot of skill involved in the end, and the game quickly becomes monotonous.
Something like Capitalism II, where bankruptcy is always a distinct possibility, would be a much more interesting imitation. That game also introduces the nuance of different branding strategies (product specific, industry specific or firmwide). Another interesting simulator is SABRE (http://www.iibd.com/sabre/), a somewhat simplistic marketing simulation which is predicated on constantly shifting (though somewhat predetermined) markets influenced by both endogenous and exogenous factors, and a constant need to stay ahead by R&D new products and adjusting marketing budgets while trying to work off incomplete information (in the form of commissioning market studies). At any rate, very interested to see the results!
October 13th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Dear Jeff,
Thank you for your opinion and for your comments about our game. The CEO Game is scheduled to launch on January 2010. In the process of designing and developing the game, we are looking into and learning from other business games out there in order to improve our simulation’s gaming and educational experience. The game will include a simulation of the business world and all of its aspects and will be based on real life data and events, therefore the competition will be a challenging one, between you and thousands of other competitors. The name of the game will be planning ahead and making good decisions: smart play, will bear revenue and vice versa. Sure, the goal of the simulation will be to lead the company to profits, but it definitely won’t be easy. The user will have to achieve that by using management tools which replicate the CEO’s arsenal of decision power, taking on all factors: Marketing, HR, R&D, logistic, finance and many more. It is important to point out that relevant information will be presented to the user with each subject that he deals with, shedding light and creating a bigger understanding of the issue.
We welcome you to sign up for our beta which will launch soon on January as mentioned above. We would like to hear more suggestions and comments from you on how to improve the game, since we strongly believe in the wisdom of the crowds.