Free Rides
- Thread starter willhen50
- Start date
Yes, you can charge only for admission (and shops) and have the rides free. Many people say this doesn't work, but they're wrong. I know several people who actually make this work. HOWEVER, they offer a few caveats.
1. It's best not to start out this way. You need a few thousand peeps in the park first, to get enough volume of shop sales.
2. Your admission charge has to leave the peeps with enough money left over to buy at least 2 drinks and 1 food, plus maybe a souvenir. If you take all their money at the gate, they won't be able to afford the food and drink they will come to want before they want to leave the park. Remember, very few peeps will ever use an ATM and they don't know the prices of anything until they walk up to it, then immediately forget it again. So broke peeps will wander the park for a while cursing that they can't afford anything and thus generally being unhappy. The object of the game is to make them go broke just when the urge to leave the park hits them.
1. It's best not to start out this way. You need a few thousand peeps in the park first, to get enough volume of shop sales.
2. Your admission charge has to leave the peeps with enough money left over to buy at least 2 drinks and 1 food, plus maybe a souvenir. If you take all their money at the gate, they won't be able to afford the food and drink they will come to want before they want to leave the park. Remember, very few peeps will ever use an ATM and they don't know the prices of anything until they walk up to it, then immediately forget it again. So broke peeps will wander the park for a while cursing that they can't afford anything and thus generally being unhappy. The object of the game is to make them go broke just when the urge to leave the park hits them.
The in-game tutorial video says paid admission will not make enough profits. Its definitely not profitable for smaller parks to have paid admission, but even if you have a really big park with 20+ rides, I still think you would make more profits with guests paying-per-ride. Guests just don't leave often enough
The game should explain to us exactly how long that would be, or give us an indicator in the guests thoughts when they are getting ready to leave so we can know... does it vary from guests to guest? Wouldn't it make sense that its based on energy levels? Guests should want to leave when they are bored, tired, or upset. But instead they stick around when angry and hungry because why?
That is an interesting goal point. So your saying that a guests needs are "usually/approximately" 2 drinks 1 food and maybe a souvenir for them to leave happy? I know each demographic is slightly different but, the point is guests never stay in a park long enough to eat 5 meals, right?? They still seem to stick around for a very long time, especially if you want them to reach the back of large parks
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Where's the fun of that? I much prefer variables that change over a range only approximately known, as a result of the interactions of many variables, the weights and even identities of which are only approximately known. This makes the game a complex puzzle, which is what I like
.It all depends. Like I said, it's a complex puzzle for which only some general observations can be made. And because all parks are different, and the same park varies over time, those observations won't apply the same way at all times and all places. At most, you can just point out some trends that are important to observe, and some of the things to do when such trends happen.
A peep's decision to leave the park works on a mechanism independent of the park's overall pricing strategy. After all, peeps don't know and don't remember prices. According to research by @kickflip, which my own observations seem to confirm, leaving the park is always an option whenever a peep is deciding what to do next. The attractiveness of leaving the park starts out very low but increases over time. Anything that causes unhappiness speeds up the growth of the attractiveness of leaving, anything that causes or maintains high happiness slows it down. But the growth never stops, so nobody stays in the park forever.
So, at any given point in a park's development, peeps of the various demographics will be staying in the park some average amount of time. You can see this on the Guests tab of the park management display. This is just an average, though, the center of a wide distribution. You can also see on average how much each demographic spends on food, drink, and gifts during their average time in the park. If you know the prices of your merchandise, you can thus estimate how many items of each type the peep will probably need to buy to sustain him for that amount of time, but you also have to factor in the frequency of peeps complaining of being hungry or thirsty, or turned away because the shop queue was full, or they couldn't afford to buy anything. Anyway, taking these numbers into account, then giving some wiggle room on top to account for more than half of the population (the average being only the midpoint), should give you some valuable info on how to price your stuff, regardless of which strategy you use.
Just keep in mind, however, that the bigger the park, and the more stuff it has in it that caters to the tastes of each demographic, the longer peeps will tend to stay. They have more park to explore, more rides to go on, etc. The longer they stay, the more food and drink they need, and the more likely they are to want to buy a gift. Thus, you'll have to adjust prices, probably downwards, as the park grows. But OTOH, the bigger the park, the more peeps it attracts, so the more money you make in total.