I also noticed it came in handy when I talked to some of my Farmville buddies:

“My artichokes are choking my profits ” – Farmville buddy

“Yeah, I know. That’s the third worse ROI crop!” – Me

I’m only on level 11 right now so wanted to develop the spreadsheet a little more before putting it out for my friends to use it. But, I promised that I’d get it out, so here it is (Farmville ROI Analysis — Google Spreadsheet)! (It’s in its very rough stages as you can see, but it gets the job done for me.) Some more analysis that I have not done, but would like to add to the spreadsheet are:

• Trees & Animals have one fixed cost whereas plots of land is linear.
• Trees take up less space than plots of land.
• Space taken up by animals vary. Must be factored in to value the true ROI.

Hopefully, it’ll be helpful to all you Farmville fans! And if you find new discoveries or have any comments, feel free to share!

Update: Per the comment below, a much more comprehensive and complete Farmville spreadsheet is located here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rrFQP5AOGa4yUZCL-1VLUyg&gid=9

Now that I’m up and running on my domain and have some free time, I should be blogging. Yet, I haven’t. No excuses.

So with that prefacing this post, I’ve been “social gaming” on Facebook. Partly because it’s FUN! and partly because I’ve been highly interested in this space lately. I want to share this conversation regarding the game, FarmVille:

Joshua: i don’t think it rots on trees If you read the help file, you can leave them on trees for as long as you want.

Me: Thanks for the tip! awesome.

Me: How sad, I’m not buying a tree until I figure out the NPV on the tree investments.

Yeah, we’re big FarmVille fans (and apparently, we’re not alone. Over 20M monthly active users on this Facebook game!) Is what is FarmVille? Well, it’s a SIM-type game where you build out your own farm. Planting crops, raising farm animals, harvesting crops to earn coins, getting your friends to play with you and be neighbors. We think this is pretty awesome game — great concept, attractive game design, fun icons, friends, achievements, and yes, math. I’ll explain the math part in my next post. Stay tuned!