Genre: Business Simulation
Publisher: DataSteam
Overview
Are your friends cheap? No, I don’t mean “thrifty.” I mean if they were auctioned off by space aliens, how much would you pay for them? Friends for Sale is a social game that asks essentially that same question.
(And what would you do if you could make your friends your pets? This only further compounds the question of “Who is man’s best friend?” – but I digress.)
Friends For Sale’s friendly interface asks you to buy your friends to make them your pets. All of your friends (and some people you don’t know) are in the marketplace. Friends who have this game and have been bought and sold cost a great deal, and friends who are less popular or don’t use Facebook applications often will be pretty cheap. I invested heavily in the latter type of friends to test this application out.
Gameplay
You earn money when other people buy your pets, whenever someone buys you, and every time you visit (a very good idea). After you’ve bought your friends, you can give them nicknames, gifts, or sell them. There are always new gifts to buy your friends and it’s fun to make your friends, as pets, do your bidding.
The profit on a sale is split 50/50 between the pet and the owner. There are also plenty of partner offers to get you more cash.
Friends For Sale is an addictive social game for people with lots of friends, and it’s easy to become thoroughly “invested” in the application. In this way, the game is pretty deep.
But while it can be addictive, the developers need to build more features around the owner/pet relationship. You can buy gifts and poke people in Facebook – if the game only offers the same types of features, it could fall flat pretty quickly.
Analysis
As a business simulation game certain elements that exist in real world business are apparent in FFS-ng. For instances, monopolies, in the sense that a few, well connected players can influence massive sums of in-game cash to make themselves richer. But unlike the real world, money in FFS-ng is easy to come by in the sense that every citizen is capable of monetative easing (printing money). It just takes an understanding of the game system mechanics to become vastly wealthy, and the social aspect of the game will help as well, because with more trading partners comes more business opportunity.
It is quite interesting to observe the game mechanics, understanding how players interact with each other. It is true that the well established players do not in fact play with anyone they know in real life, but make friends in the game and develop and maintain friendships in game.
FFS-ng is a unique game. It is simple to understand and play, while the complexity of the game are vast and ever changing. While there are countless variations of how to play there is only one unifying method of determining an given players success, how much money they have, in the form of cash and pet investments.
It takes a pinch of luck, trust, networking and a whole lot of strategics to become the riches pet owner in the world of Friends for Sale: Next Generation.
Strategy
It would be pointless to believe there is one all powerful strategy to win in FFS'ng. There is an ever expanding arsenal of strategies to be applied and it takes determination, ingenuity and insight to apply them in the most profitable way.
For Beginners
If you are new to FFS-ng, for accuracy sake lets say playing less than 2 weeks or own less than 2 Billion in assets. You need to ally yourself with an experienced player, someone who can take you under their wing, give you tips, that sort of thing. Someone who will help raise your value by buying and selling you with other players. You need to be active so other players are willing to invest their time and money in you.
Once you have learned the ropes and established trading partners and steady income you will have cash to invest in pets and other ventures that can generate you more revenue.
For Established Players
You would be wise to invest in up and coming players, people who haven't been in the game long but are active and seem eager to learn. You want to help them make money because in return they will help you make more. Creating loyal players in a great way to play.
Tips & Tricks
One of the best ways to make money is "Bouncing". Bouncing is when you and another player buy a single pet back and forth in order to raise it's value. This can be done one of three ways:
First: Two owners buy a pet back and forth, raising the pets value and ultimately increasing each participants capital assets. This one can be done as often as possible, all you need is people who wish to keep the pet at the inflated value once the bouncing is completed, this is an example of an opportunity that arises when you have up and coming allies in the game.
Second: Three players with low values buy each other back and forth like a triangle. Since the money being spent by the buyer on each buy, the inflation value is distributed to the ex-owner and the pet. If done properly, all three players will end up with an increased value and no decrease in cash. So essentially making good money with no risk.
This is a more rewarding method, but is less likely to occur because it requires your own accounts value being inflated and that only happens when you first start and whenever you're reset.
Third: Probably the most profitable method to date. In a case where two players want to own each other but at the same time need to inflate their own values, you acting as the middle-man assist by buying the two players from each other and they by themselves back. You will earn half of the total inflation value and walk away with zero money tied up in investment.
History
FFS was a massively multiplayer online business simulation game originally developed by Serious Business, available as an application on the social networking website Facebook. The game allowed players to buy and sell virtual pets representing other players. Since its launching by November 2007, Friends for Sale soared into popularity by June 2008, becoming one of the top ten Facebook applications with around 700,000 daily users and activity peaked at around 6.5 million monthly users in 2 November 2009 until Zynga acquired Serious Business in 11 February 2010.
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