A lot of time, effort and money goes into the creation of new drugs. A new game Big Pharma, which came out Thursday, is giving users the opportunity to see for themselves by running a virtual pharmaceutical company.
Not unlike Big Pharma in real life, one of your biggest priorities is money. It’s up to you whether or not you want to sacrifice efficacy to make cheaper products and yield more profit.
Chances are you’ll want to, unless you’re fine with being a loser.
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The game, developed by Twice Circled, begins with purchasing a warehouse, then importing reagents and processing them into drugs and laying production lines of equipment. You’re also paying to hire people for research and development.
In order to create and effective drug in the game, you must take raw reagents, which have both good and bad qualities, and concentrate them to a particular level. This is where the strategy comes in and money becomes the main factor.
As a Kotaku review pointed out:
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Often the positive effect of a reagent and its negative effect overlap, so whilst developing something to cure headaches, you might also make it give the patient warts. Sometimes you can remove side effects with processing but that means more machines and more floor space (which is often in short supply). A high quality drug sells better but it has to sell proportionally better to cover the cost of the extra machinery.
Then there’s the competition aspect. There’s constant competition that you’re getting informed about. Another company might be making a more effective drug that is bringing in more profit individually, but if your less effective drug is much cheaper to make, you might be fine and still have some standing in the market.
The idea of the game is pretty hilarious because it not only pokes fun of how the industry works in real life, but it will inevitably bring out the dark side of people when making money is really what it means to succeed. Even if we consider ourselves to be altruistic, that doesn’t matter in Big Pharma if you’re in it to win it.
Here’s a full review and tutorial from Sips (it’s a bit long, but really breaks it down — and with a sense of humor):
Photo: bigpharmagame.com
