Watch The Skies 2 - An arms dealers perspective
I had the immense pleasure of spending seven stressful, hectic and entirely confusing hours at with the Megagame Makers and the three hundred people who attended. We were all new to Megagames but had been introduced to them through the amazing SUSD video.
We represented GMIC - a global military technology and research company, based in India with facilities in Venezuela and Egypt.
Our CEO made things very clear. We were going to be an honest company. Run by mostly honest people. We stuck to our principals. We ended the game with the lowest share price. But my god, we could sleep in our beds at night.
Our first quarter, we had two priorities:
Find a host country for our satellite launch facility
Reduce the burden of corporation tax ($3m/quarter!)
After the initial paralysis of panic wore off (replaced by the “we just need to DO THINGS” panic which lasted for the next 7.9 hours), we spoke to South Korea, who were extremely keen for us to build in their country. They also offered to host our HQ with no corporation tax, which we thought was a good bargaining chip for our second objective.
We then succeeded in reducing our corporation tax by a third with India, after some bartering. After that, we quickly sold a bunch of our stock to Pakistan, which slightly annoyed India, considering their historical tensions. Those concerns were not raised again when they were looking to buy military technology, though.
We were soon approached by Humanity First, a humanitarian charity who Definitely Weren’t A Cult. Me and the CEO were very suspicious but we thought it would look good in the papers so we agreed to give them some regular donations. In return, they gave us some rather nice little badges which I have since lost.
They helped us bully India into us paying even less tax, which was nice.
As the first few months flew past in a blur, we rapidly approached our dividend projection. This is where the panic and fear really started to ramp up. I remember approaching the Stock Market Control with the CEO, desperately trying to think about what to project. Too much and we’d cripple ourselves. Too little and the other corporations would sail past us.
We didn’t come to any significant conclusions, so instead I eavesdropped on one of the other corporations when they announced their dividend projection and copied that.
We did not see much of our Head Of Applied Science. He would basically come to our table during team time, tell us about all the scientists hating each other and then ask us for money. We’d have a brief chat about what to research, mostly driven by him and then he’d disappear to another conference.
We didn’t sell or produce much before our Annual Report was due, a few months later. Many of the other megagamers might not have seen this, but the Annual Reports terrified our CEO.
You had to go into a side room and be grilled by Stock Market Control about some facts and figures, before giving a statement about the year your corporation had, all in an effort to assure the market and boost your share price.
Our CEO did a decent pitch... then we hung around and listened to Wimpey Fergussons report. They predicted double our dividend, then paid $4m extra. I felt sick. I had to leave.
We struck up a Most Favoured Customer deal with Venezuela, which proved to be our most profitable move in the entire game. We ended up selling them a lot gear, including the only satellite we produced and launched on their behalf.
When I was in Venezuela on business once, I asked them how their region of the world was going. Their replies of “GREAT, JUST GREAT, THANKS” were somewhat reassuring, in that I’m glad I wasn’t the only person feeling like everything was slowly but inevitably going horribly, horribly wrong. I just hoped they didn’t get nuked, because they were our best customer.
Throughout the game, we would get clued in to global crises, like tsunamis and asteroids and deadly viruses. Most of the time, I read about the horrible things happening to our planet, then casually discarded them if it didn’t provide any opportunities to sell tanks to people.
We didn’t care what happened to the world. Because we had a share price to worry about. And it was on a steady downward trajectory.
But perhaps we weren’t being (honestly) aggressive enough. We expanded and began producing a lot more. Our head of PR was harassing the press until they gave in and printed some nice stories about us in the news.
Sales were hard to come by. At certain points, I’d jump in when I saw a country talking to another corporation and say “I’ll do it for a million less!”
We were pretty much selling everything we could produce and at a profit, but we couldn’t shift the Old Tech Upgrades we’d been holding since the start. I kept harassing our Head of PR to sell it.
My CEO told me after the game that she kept seeing the Pope on the Moon. Which is not something that many people probably say. It is a testament to the awesome power of megagaming that this is a perfectly normal thing. Especially because it made the mysterious note Control bought over that said “Moon Pope will return” make a lot more sense.
In the months that followed the entire UN being abducted by aliens, Egypt came over. They wanted to buy everything we had. And then some. Including the Old Tech Upgrades. We’d been offering it to countries for $1m. We sold it to Egypt for $4m (although the lack of negotiation means we should probably have sold it for more - we are not salespeople!)
Some of it they couldn’t afford all at once, which made me worry they were going to take our technology and run, but they came good and paid in the coming months. I hope our willingness to trust them helped them out of a tight spot - I need to find out! We had our science facilities in Cairo, though, so we had a vested interested in stability in the region.
At some point, Tokyo was destroyed.
Our share price continued to tumble, though, despite all the press we could muster and all the dividend we could afford to pay without crippling our science. We advanced into improved SIF territory, which was something we could sell at a premium. We seemed to reach this around the same time most governments did, though, so there wouldn’t much advantage in this, I felt, although it’s hard to tell, so much information was just unknown to us.
The head of PR was busy expanding our customer base around the world, which we continued to sell what we could. As the final months of the game approached, we were struggling to sell the things we’d produced. Governments were either broke or simply didn’t need our technology.
While we were patrolling for desperate customers, we came across a Humanity First representative. We made the generous gift of some alien technology to him, to which he responded by inviting two of us aboard a shuttle from Angola to meet the aliens.
The game ended shortly afterwards.
I was exhausted. We all were. In the hours afterwards, we considered our missed opportunities. Things we could have done so much better.
We were all new to megagames and it showed, the final update to the stock market showing we’d come dead last. But it was amazing fun and I can’t wait to go again.
