Shopkeeping Sims (Shop-Retail Simulations) General Discussion

[Zed Clampet]

This thread serves two purposes. One, it prevents people in the general game discussion thread from happening upon my really boring shop posts. Two, these are somewhat popular these days, so maybe someone new will find this thread and join in.

So if you have anything at all shop sim related to discuss, go right ahead! We are almost always very friendly here, so no need for the normal reticence one might normally feel when posting on a new forum! If there is one poster here to fear, that would be me, and I'm making the solemn promise to be on my best behavior 🙂

 

[Zed Clampet]

So I love these games, but one thing that kind of annoys me that I'm finding applies to just about all of the shop games is that you get penalized when adding low profit margin items to sell. A couple of examples (out of many I could provide):

Bookshop Simulator: Now, it's been awhile since I played this, so it might have changed, but originally, selling used books just absolutely killed your profits. They were easily the most popular item in the store, and you actually lost money on them. Once you have found the proper bonus books to use, getting rid of the used books was the right move.

Bookshop Simulator on Steam

Open your own bookshop! Order books, stock your shelves, and earn revenue. Use your profits to decorate, expand, and hire staff. Collect rare books that give powerful abilities. Adopt a cat to keep you and your customers company along the way!

store.steampowered.com

Megastore Simulator: This is what I'm currently playing. I was making about $4200 a day, decided to unlock groceries (which are very cheap) and that dropped to $3500 a day.

Megastore Simulator on Steam

Megastore Simulator is a first-person management & tycoon game. Start small and grow into a massive two-floor megastore with forklifts, pallet jacks, and staff. Unlock and manage departments like Bakery, Clothing, Electronics, Sports, Music, Toys, Grocery, Seafood, and Vending Machines

store.steampowered.com

Despite both of those games are very good for anyone looking for a new shop sim.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I don't think I completely explained this right. It would make sense that adding low margin items that are similar to what you already sell would cut into your profits in a strict retail sim, but there are no strict retail sims, and in a gamified world, you shouldn't do worse for adding new things. In the bookshop example, you might, in the real world, lose some profits if customers come in and either find what they were looking for in the used book section or decide to see if they can save some money and find something they'll be happy with that is used, so that's probably not the best example, but If I'm running a pharmacy, and all we sell are prescriptions, and then I add greeting cards, we should still get the same amount of pharmacy business, plus now we might get some greeting card business on top, and that's the way it should work in games even if you are adding a similar item to what you already have. Now if someone makes a real retail simulation, that might be different depending on your product offering.

 

[Pifanjr]

I don't think I completely explained this right. It would make sense that adding low margin items that are similar to what you already sell would cut into your profits in a strict retail sim, but there are no strict retail sims, and in a gamified world, you shouldn't do worse for adding new things. In the bookshop example, you might, in the real world, lose some profits if customers come in and either find what they were looking for in the used book section or decide to see if they can save some money and find something they'll be happy with that is used, so that's probably not the best example, but If I'm running a pharmacy, and all we sell are prescriptions, and then I add greeting cards, we should still get the same amount of pharmacy business, plus now we might get some greeting card business on top, and that's the way it should work in games even if you are adding a similar item to what you already have. Now if someone makes a real retail simulation, that might be different depending on your product offering.

I suspect a lot of shop sims have the customers just pick a couple of random products from the store to buy. So if you add a bunch of low margin items your high margin items get picked less often.

To have a proper shop sim I would suspect you'd need to have other shops around as well, with customers choosing which shop(s) to go to based on their various needs, the distance to a shop and the price of the items at each shop, plus stuff like how nice a shop looks and how long the lines are. You should be able to draw in customers by having a loss leader that convinces some customers to come to your store and buy other things there as well.

As far as I know however more store sims don't bother with simulating an entire market, your store typically exists in a void.