I’ve played a lot of video games in my time, and let me tell you Capitalism 2 is a doozy.  You can get it on the Steam store for about 10 dollars and that’s about what it’s worth because it’s decades old and the UI is painful.  Still, I’ve played a lot of it and it does help you appreciate some nifty real-world concepts.

For those of you who have never played it (ie everyone), Capitalism 2 is a game in which you take control of a large corporation with nothing more than a few million dollars and a dream of riches.  You then use that money to try to turn a profit by manufacturing and selling one or more of the games 50 or so unique goods.  There’s food items, furniture, electronics, cars, and they all have their own production chains and sales strategies for you to manage.  Food items are all about quality and price so you just need to invest a lot into your farms and try to outcompete your competitors.  Designer clothes are all about branding, so you need to spend millions of dollars on advertising to gain market share.  While electronics require investment into R&D before you can even begin to try making them.  It’s kind of fun to throw down with a few AI companies and compete to turn $1 million into $1 billion, but if the game has taught me one thing it’s that loans are overpowered.

A loan, both in game and in real life, is a way to get money now in exchange for money later.  While the total amount you’d have to pay back is greater than the face value of the money you get loaned to you, you can do a lot of things with money now to make that be a net gain.  You can invest it, start a company, build a factory (if you’re a corporation), and all those things can net you a bigger gain than the interest and principle you will need to pay back.  The difficulty is of course that the real world is a world of uncertainty, you don’t know for sure if your investments will pan out or your factory will work, you’re taking a risk and that risk includes a downside.

In Capitalism 2 however there is near perfect information so most of the risk doesn’t exist.  You know instantly what the price of every good on the market is and how they will change in the future.  You know exactly who your competitors are and usually you know what they’re building.  With perfect information there is almost zero risk, and with zero risk there is never a reason not to max out your available loans to build new factories to make new profits.  The AIs in this game by the way don’t seem to be programmed to ever take loans, they wait until they have the cash in hand before ever buying something, so this is a technique only available to the player.  But as I said pretty much any investment is a certain success, so loans are just free capital for the player.  And that’s why they’re so OP in Capitalism 2.