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The Best Part of Grand Theft Auto V is the Stock-Trading Platform
- atlbeer 13y agoWhat this article fails to mention is the most interesting aspect of the GTAV stock market. You can buy stock in a company and then accept missions to assassinate a competitors keep employees!
- dmbass 13y agoActually it does mention that. FTA Throughout the game, you're given opportunities to manipulate the markets. Some missions, for example, require that you kill the CEO of a company. You could, theoretically, buy the stock of that company's competitors and profit when they rise after the killing. And since there's no SEC policing stock trading in Los Santos, you're not going to be busted for insider trading.
- philwelch 13y ago"theoretically" The guy giving you the assassination missions more or less tips you off each time what stock to buy.
- LandoCalrissian 13y agoOne thing you can do that I enjoy is invest in the AuguryInsurance (AUG) then start destroying a ton of cars. It actually causes their stock price to rise.
- jredwards 13y agoA few issues with this: 1. My understanding is that this has been widely theorized and fairly well researched, and most people have concluded that there's no relationship. 2. I don't understand why a rampage would cause the stock price of an insurance company to go up. You could argue that in the long-run, living in a town with regular rampages might encourage people to buy more insurance, but one would think that in the short term all of those payouts would be really bad for the insurance company.
- scarecrowbob 13y agoNot that I've played the game, just skimming comments but here's a possibility: although the game focuses on a single character and thus makes the actions of that character carry supreme importance, in the larger context the actual effect isn't that great compared to the average. However, the media effect in the context of the game would probably be pretty fantastic, in effect creating free marketing for the company. At least, that's how news media plays into things like that where I am living.
- Tloewald 13y agoThat's awesome. I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to short the stock of the drug company whose jurors I was sent to kill, but gave up and simply bought the rival's stock. (I think I made more money off that one transaction than any actual mission aside from the final one.)
- utefan001 13y agoBill Cosby calls Grand Theft Auto Entrance Exam for Prison http://nativenotes.net/bill-cosby-calls-grand-theft-auto-entrance-exam-for-prison/ http://nativenotes.net/bill-cosby-calls-grand-theft-auto-ent...
- mathattack 13y agoInteresting. I could see this as the intellectual genesis of an entirely different game. Imagine tying the virtual market to Bitcoins! One comment on being able to short... Based on how the game is described (I may be the only one the planet not to be an active player) it should be possible to short a stock. Every time you get new money, split the purchases evenly between all stock. (Can do a weighted average if you want) Then when you have information (like you're going to kill the CEO) then you have shares to sell on the bad information. It's not a concentrated bet, but you still can effectively short it.
- jaynos 13y agoThat's not a short, though. You don't profit on the difference between prices, you only get the chance to buy again at a lower price, but not sure if the stock will go back up.
- mathattack 13y agoLet's oversimplify for the sake of showing the calculation... There are 4 stocks in the world, A, B, and C, and D, all trading at $25. I invest $100, buying $25 in each. Now lets say that I know for sure that stock D will go down because I'm going to whack the CEO. So I sell my $25 of D, and put it in A, B and C (A stake of $33.33 in each - let's assume fractional shares are ok.) If Stock D goes to 0, while the others all double. I have a net gain of $100 - $75 from the stocks I already held, but $25 from the new investment, and I've avoided $25 as well. Let's say you lived in a world where shorting was ok. If instead you invested $25 in A, B and C, and shorted $25 on D, you would gain $75 in A, B and C, and $25 on your short of D. In essence it's the same $100 profit. Now this only works if A, B and C are also going up. Let's say that D does move on the event, but A, B and C don't. If you do buy back D after the event, you ultimately are in the same position in both cases. In the shorting case, you have $100 in securities ($75 original, plus $25 of D bought near 0) and in the "sell now buy later" you sell back $25 of A, B and C to buy at the bottom. Net - you create the effect of shorting. This falls apart if you want a very concentrated bet, but it's a way that long-only professional money managers who compete against indexes find a way to effectively short.
- slg 13y agoI had a similar fascination with the stock trading component of the Railroad Tycoon games. I am almost ashamed of the number of times I tried to make myself a virtual fortune by destroying my own virtual railroad company.
- yxhuvud 13y agoIt was almost always more effective to gobble up debt and then invest the money in productive capability if you were looking to earn a real fortune though. The balancing act was to not overdo it - depressions was not fun if you were overly indebted. Shorting the stcok of competitors were always good fun though, but mostly since they were so horribly bad at building which resulted in that it was sometimes a good idea to shorten stock. Sigh - how I wish for a spiritual successor to Railroad Tycoon 3.
- jredwards 13y agoIncidentally, there are already a multitude of subreddits which have formed for the express purpose of manipulating the public markets. This is a really interesting interaction, though it's somewhat skewed by the fact that a player can simply revert to a saved game if the stock they've purchased tanks.
- ASUmusicMAN 13y agoDo you have a list of a few of the larger ones? I usually glance through /r/grandtheftautov every day or so but this is the first i've heard of subreddits organized for manipulation.
- bradleyland 13y agoTo say it's "skewed" is an understatement. Any market in which a group can collectively take a dive, then revert their losses while the winners commit (save) the upside is destined to be exploited.
- erdle 13y agoFairly certain he's basing this article on the top /r/gaming post the other day about trading. He only mentions hours passing between trades. Also, I know writers at NY Mag and others that have literally said to me "I don't know why you go on Reddit, I get paid to find stories on there and I still hate using it." HuffPo and everyone else literally just sits on the site waiting to take content.
- QuotedForTruth 13y agoThe author needs to login to PSN or XBOX live, and create a Rockstar Social account. That unlocks the BAWSAQ market which is based on other players trades.
- dxm 13y agoI don't have a Rockstar Social account and I've managed to use the BAWSAQ market, it opens during some of Franklin's assassination side missions given by Lester. It's not under maintenance throughout the entire game.
- erbo 13y agoHmm, I'd have thought it would be tied into GTAV online multiplayer, which doesn't open until tomorrow. In any event, market PvP might provide an interesting counterpoint to actual PvP in the multiplayer environment. (My fiancee's gaming clan is planning to be in GTAV in a big way, starting tomorrow.)
- nlh 13y agoI...bought...twenty shares of Augury Insurance (which sells auto insurance — a good bet, considering all the cars I've been wrecking) I'd argue the opposite, no? The 100-year-storm of destruction that we, as Player 1, unleash upon the poor Liberty City automotive world would probably make any insurance company run screaming and crying in the opposite direction of profitability. "We had HOW MANY claims yesterday afternoon??" :)
- coob 13y agoThat's what reinsurance is for :)
- petercooper 13y agoI'm naive on this topic, but wouldn't a high number of claims be either neutral or positive if said level is anticipated or consistent (as in the crime-ridden metropolis of LS or LC)? Ultimately, all policyholders will pay through higher premiums, and it'd be easier to make a profit (in absolute amounts) on high premiums since bumping up $1000 to $1030 looks a lot less onerous than $300 vs $330. As I said though, I'm naive on this, but I'm guessing only unanticipated high levels of claims would hit insurers hard.
- boomzilla 13y agoAssuming efficient market, insurance industry will do best in more volatile conditions. The reason is insurance is essentially risk trading and they have the advantage of having access to more information and therefore can come up with more optimal risk trading strategies.
- 6cxs2hd6 13y agoTo stay in business, casinos need to be a bad deal for customers _as a group_. Did I say casinos? I meant insurance companies. Seriously, insurance is a bet on something bad happening. Usually it only makes sense to buy insurance for the equivalent of long-shot "lottery jackpots". Like a catastrophic health problem. Or like the damage you might do to other people and their property in an auto accident --- but probably _not_ the damage to your own car. i.e. Insure for personal liability calamities, but not collision damage if you could pay for it out of savings.
- nslocum 13y agoThe BAWSAQ is by far the most interesting market. The BAWSAQ is an online market driven by the buy and sell orders of all 15M+ players. Early on, before people started to realize how the market worked, I did some pump-and-dump schemes and made >$400M. That's a lot of money, even in GTA. Now that I have that much money I can drive stocks up or down and milk the market for all I want. GTA isn't just for blue color crime anymore. I know that a few other players did equally well, I suspect they are doing similar market manipulating schemes.
- choult 13y ago"The BAWSAQ is by far the most interesting market. The BAWSAQ is an online market driven by the buy and sell orders of all 15M+ players." I'm surprised no Scots have popped up to point out how hilarious that market's name is ;)
- Nate75Sanders 13y agoI was thinking Southern American English, but I suspect we're on the same page.
- Tiktaalik 13y agoThe game is developed in Scotland so it must be intentional.
- choult 13y agoOh definitely - Rockstar know what they're doing :)
- mey 13y agoCare to enlighten the non-Scots?
- vinceguidry 13y agoPut on your best Scottish accent and say the name out loud. Think the Sean Connery character on SNL Celebrity Jeopardy.
- sown 13y agoWorld of Warcraft's Auction House is similarly interesting. It can get really complicated trying to corner the market on different goods, although it's less integral to gameplay over all. It's more like an embedded minigame at times. One thing I learned in that game is that while one can make a lot of money being the middle man, the real value is from labor (as far as WoW is concerned) -- but grinding for materials can also be monotonous and not so profitable if you don't go about it in the right way. So, there are lots of addons (Auctioneer being the most popular) to help one track data throughout the market.
- aqme28 13y agoI made far more gold in WoW as a middleman than I ever did with "labor" alone.
- sown 13y agoYes, grinding, dis enchanting, etc was boring and it seemed like I never made much money. Towards the end of Cata it seemed like I made more money selling materials I collected in the AH while grinding up to 80. I think connections and information also helped out a lot
- socillion 13y agoI think there are far better games for market PvP such as EVE Online, Guild Wars, or Kingdom of Loathing. Making profit on the WoW AH was very formulaic (refining raw materials into the largest variety of items possible to maximize turnover - see JC shuffle), the best route was to find botters who would sell raw materials to you below market rates, and the huge number of shards made markets much less interesting. Every action also required far too much clicking, which meant many people just used tools like autohotkey (cheats, although nobody ever got banned for them), and having to relist products constantly to beat minor undercuts was a terrible experience. WoW AH is to virtual markets what hitting a pinata is to hitting something that fights back - it's simplicity makes it unrewarding.
- sown 13y ago
- Apocryphon 13y agoEmergent gameplay is always fun. For all of the huge space battles between armadas and great train robberies of EVE Online, that MMO supports a flourishing economy of many different roles that one wouldn't expect: http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/07/14/eve-evolved-freeform-professions/ http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/07/14/eve-evolved-freeform... Makes sense that in a open sandbox crime simulator, players would try to make a killing in the stock market. Too bad you can do insider trading to get involved in white collar crime.
- electic 13y agoHa, one thing I love about GTA is the witty puns they have in there. Krapea, Life Invader, nice.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cargo8 13y agoPro tip: wait to do the assassination missions until after you've completed the main storyline. That way you can invest the players' ~25 million in the stocks you are directly affecting and make bank. You supposedly can also game the market by investing in competing companies (like Cluckin Bell and Burger Shot) and just destroying a bunch of the opposite companies. Then after the drop, reinvest in the opposite as they equalize and come back (or just keep going back and forth). Haven't tried this yet, though.
- invalidOrTaken 13y agoOne game that, like GTA, is not focused around making tons of virtual money, but has some neat emergent lessons, is Escape Velocity Nova: http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/ http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/ You have a small starfreighter, and one way to make money is by buying goods where they're inexpensive, loading them up in your cargo hold, and flying somewhere where they're expensive to sell them. Eventually you realize that it makes sense to pay other freighters to help you carry stuff so you can make more per trip---but since they charge a daily rate, at what point is it worth it? And does it make sense to risk it all ('cause, you know, space pirates) putting your life savings into a load of expensive opals which will make you a ton once you arrive, or should you play it safe and stick to inexpensive but barely-profitable foodstuffs? If you've got an appetite for risk, you can carry drugs or illegal biological weapons, both of which will make you a ton of money, but will cause law enforcement to attack if you're scanned. It's a sort of mini-version of EVE this way, in that it's the only game I've made a spreadsheet for.
- codezero 13y agoThis sounds a lot like the old BBS game TradeWars. Thanks for sharing it!
- martindale 13y agoIsn't Ambrosia the company behind the amazing turn-based RPG series, Exile; with Exile I, II, III, and Blades of Exile being some of the most critically-acclaimed independent RPGs of all-time? edit: nope, that would be SpiderWeb, who has apparently renamed the series to "Avernum" (???): http://www.spidweb.com/ http://www.spidweb.com/
- mafro 13y agoAh man that Exile series was awesome. Awful, but awesome.
- daned 13y agoAnd of course, the grand-daddy of this genre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TradeWars_2002 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TradeWars_2002
- picomancer 13y agoIf anyone here wants to play a game about building a business, that includes a better stock market simulation, Capitalism Plus [1] and its sequel [2] are really good. [1] http://www.gog.com/game/capitalism_plus http://www.gog.com/game/capitalism_plus [2] http://www.gog.com/game/capitalism_2 http://www.gog.com/game/capitalism_2
- adwf 13y agoThey've also released a new standalone expansion for Capitalism 2 called Capitalism Lab [1]. It's a combination of updates to make the game work on modern systems/resolutions and a bevy of new features/usability improvements. [1] http://www.capitalismlab.com/index.html http://www.capitalismlab.com/index.html
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jonnathanson 13y agoCalls to mind "Wall Street Kid," a stock-trading game released on the good ol' NES back in 1990. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Kid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Kid The premise of the game was fairly ludicrous: if you could earn a decent return on a $500,000 loan, you stood to inherit a $600 billion (!) family fortune. But the stock market in the game, while randomized, was pretty innovative for its time. (It's been awhile since I've played it, of course, but I vaguely remember that there was some sort of internally consistent logic behind the stock pricing movements that seemed to be randomly seeded at the start of each game). As far as I can tell, the entire game revolved around getting rich off of stocks, wining and dining an increasingly high-maintenance trophy wife, and making a series of very conspicuous consumptions (a yacht, a penthouse, and even a castle). But the mini game in GTA V seems very similar.
- moneyrich4 13y agoOh I hated this game! I was so bad at it and made no profit in the week I had it rented. Turns out I did about as well in the real stock market. gg. The game was really fun though
- jonnathanson 13y agoI sucked at it for the longest time, but every now and then, I'd have an incredible run of luck. A 10-year-old Gordon Gekko, I crushed it on Wall Street, bought the boat, the houses, and even the family castle (why I bought the castle from my own family trust, I'm not really sure; in retrospect, I assume it was some sort of complex inheritance-tax-evasion mechanism). Lots of fun! Unfortunately, I grew up to be considerably less successful and, at least for now, castleless. :)
- Turbots 13y agoHe should play Eve-Online.. He'd have so much fun!