More Farmville Economics: Treeconomics
Wow. The traffic from the first two blog posts on Farmville has been high. In fact, the Zynga blog even picked up the two articles. Very flattering.
I was all set to write a post tonight on the economics of trees in Farmville… but then I caught Pablo’s post on “Treeconomics”.
Brilliant. Leveraging some of the work I had done, he does a evaluation of a 16-square of trees in terms of “yield” vs. crops. Very interesting, confirming that a 16-square of Date trees can compare very favorably to almost everything.
I’m going to have to think about this a bit more – I want to build a model where I incorporate a few additional factors:
- The “down payment” for trees.
- The freedom to never have to “plow” or “plant” again. (value of time)
- The freedom from working capital for seeds on an ongoing basis.
- The removal of “withering risk”. Crops wither after 20% of their growing time, yielding a complete loss of the capital to plow & plant. Trees never wither.
- The lack of experience points from trees
- Incorporate the data from all the trees, not just the ones you can buy.
I’ll still write a follow up here, but tonight there is no need. Check out this table from Pablo as sample:
| Cost | Revenue/Harvest | Days to Harvest | Daily Revenue | Daily Rev/ Invested $ | Days to Payback | ||
| Date | $800.0 | $69.0 | 3 | $23.00 | 2.88% | 35 | |
| Lime | $750.0 | $75.0 | 5 | $15.00 | 2.00% | 50 | |
| Lemon | $475.0 | $41.0 | 3 | $13.67 | 2.88% | 35 | |
| Peach | $500.0 | $47.0 | 4 | $11.75 | 2.35% | 43 | |
| Fig | $350.0 | $33.0 | 3 | $11.00 | 3.14% | 32 | |
| Plum | $350.0 | $30.0 | 3 | $10.00 | 2.86% | 35 | |
| Orange | $425.0 | $40.0 | 4 | $10.00 | 2.35% | 43 | |
| Apple | $325.0 | $28.0 | 3 | $9.33 | 2.87% | 35 | |
| Cherry | $225.0 | $18.0 | 2 | $9.00 | 4.00% | 25 |
And this one:
| Daily Profit | Total Profit | Initial investment | Residual Value | Profit | |
| Super Berries | $900.0 | $81,000.0 | $81,000.0 | ||
| Date tree square | $368.0 | $33,120.0 | $12,800 | $640.0 | $20,960.0 |
| Tomatoes | $174.0 | $15,660.0 | $15,660.0 | ||
| Raspberries | $132.0 | $11,880.0 | $11,880.0 |
Too cool.
Now go read it.
Updates: I’ve now posted additional articles on Farmville Economics:
