Wow.  The traffic from the first two blog posts on Farmville has been high.  In fact, the Zynga blog even picked up the two articles.  Very flattering.

I was all set to write a post tonight on the economics of trees in Farmville… but then I caught Pablo’s post on “Treeconomics”.

Brilliant.  Leveraging some of the work I had done, he does a evaluation of a 16-square of trees in terms of “yield” vs. crops.  Very interesting, confirming that a 16-square of Date trees can compare very favorably to almost everything. Before we continue diving into the games, lets come back out into the real world, trees are good for the environment, but if you really need to get them out of your way and plant them somewhere else, then click here to get the best prices on stump grinding from this company. Now back to business…

I’m going to have to think about this a bit more – I want to build a model where I incorporate a few additional factors:

• The “down payment” for trees.
• The freedom to never have to “plow” or “plant” again. (value of time)
• The freedom from working capital for seeds on an ongoing basis.
• The removal of “withering risk”.  Crops wither after 20% of their growing time, yielding a complete loss of the capital to plow & plant.  Trees never wither.
• The lack of experience points from trees
• Incorporate the data from all the trees, not just the ones you can buy.

I’ll still write a follow up here, but tonight there is no need.  Check out this table from Pablo as  sample:

And this one:

Too cool.

Now go read it.

Updates: I’ve now posted additional articles on Farmville Economics:

• Farmville Economics: What Price Experience?
• Farmville Economics: Risk Adjusted Crop Profitability
• Farmville Economics: Sweet Seeds are *Almost* Genius
• Farmville Economics: Flowers & Updated Tables
• Farmville Economics: Cranberries, Pattypan Squash, Acorn Squash