Game Summary
SimVillage immerses the player into the real world of developing nations. As a super entrepreneur start up any business designed for the third world village. Fly over the village, look into what problems it has, assess what resources it has and choose the best businesses to start and how to manage them. Pick the right ones and the village's economy takes off, pick the wrong ones and watch the village waste away.
Initial Game Play
Imagine you are flying over top a village in Kenya watching people, cattle, pigs, chicken walking about, farmers tending to their crops, people buying and selling goods in the town markets. Imagine you can click on anybody in the village and see what income they have, what access they have to jobs, healthcare, education, etc. Click on the storefronts in the town center to find out what is selling well, and what's missing entirely. After perusing the village and assessing the needs of the villagers and what you think you can sell, you set up your own store fronts to provide microcredit, kickstart pumps, solar cell rentals, waste/recycling all the self-sustaining businesses that will have the biggest impact on the villagers lives. Your only constraint is what products and services villagers will actually buy and what you can afford with a third world business budget of $10000.
The Final Game Experience
Now imagine you've been playing this game for several months now, you're logged into the online game and growing healthy beautiful villages with teams of virtual entrepreneurs from around the world. You all have spent weeks perfecting the design of one particular village in Kenya. One day the pastor from your church calls you up to tell you that he's really enjoyed watching the village grow from the game website. Your church has decided to build your village for real as their next summer missions trip. Fundraising is a breeze because your friends and family have already been watching your creation come to life through the online game. Now, you're headed to Kenya to build it for real!
Competitive Advantage and Strategic Timing
The greatest competitive advantage of this game is it's tie to reality. Because our game is dealing with real problems and real solutions there are literally thousands of NGO's, and governments, and for-profit companies that stand to benefit from the game and therefore make them candidates for strategic alliances in marketing the game. Thousands of international organizations involved in community development, economic development, and public health such as Ashoka, Skoll Foundation, Technoserve, Acumen Fund, Habitat for Humanity, World Hope have a vested interest in seeing this game reach a wide audience. Every government of a developing nation: Brasil, India, Mexico, South Africa stands to benefit from promoting this game to encourage their wealthier, educated citizens to become entrepreneurs to the poor. For-profit companies selling technology to the poor will want to advertise their technology in this game so that when church groups and aid organizations start building these villages for real their products and services will be the ones they choose.
Right now the biggest trend in movies and television is Reality. The hottest trend in TV right now is reality TV and transformational TV: Pimp my Ride, Extreme Makeover. The hottest trend in movies is geo-political: Syriana, Crash, An Inconvenient Truth. America and the rest of the world love watching real people live their lives and watching real people transform their lives. The time is now for the video gaming industry to catch this wave and create reality/transformational gaming.
Who Will Play
The early adopters will be social entrepreneurs themselves. Their feedback in the development and improvement of the game will be invaluable and prepare the game for the full market push onto the PCs of college students and hich schoolers across the globe. Aside from students the next best segment to target are those who played SimCity, which has a lot of gameplay overlap.
Revenue Streams
Even without movie or reality tv spinoffs SimVillage stands to be a very strong revenue maker through:
Game sales.
Online subscriptions to the massively multiplayer version of the game.
Advertising on website.
Advertising within the game.
SimVillage offers a powerful, meaningful, and lucrative bridge between gaming and reality. Given all the possible strategic alliances with governments, NGO's, and for-profit companies and the trends in film, and TV, and given the all the potential revenue streams SimVillage is poised for gaming history.
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