I do not know the details of how that specific game is played, but in general maybe the idea of "investing" in a game, especially if not actually playing the game yourself, could be a weak idea.
One of the major risks whenever players can earn anything is of their earning more of it than there is a market for, more even than the players themselves by enthusing others can create a market for, resulting in the prices of whatever players sell more and more of going down and down.
That is a formula that discourages outside investment of course but which internally to the game - that is to say, to the actual players of the game - merely means they as producers of products to sell are on a "treadmill", needing to keep increasing their own production as compared to how much other players are producing, in order that despite the prices they can get per unit of product going down they can be selling in larger and larger quantities thus keeping up in total income.
Players who succeed in manufacturing 100 times as much product can maybe continue to thrive even when prices per unit go down to 1/100th of what they had been.
A lot depends too of course upon what percent of the game's total income goes to its players rather than to bandwidth, server capacity, maintenance, art and music assets, coding and so on. (Which is why the
Galactic Milieu uses existing free open-source games: a heck of a lot less overhead costs thus a much larger percent of income able to go to the players rather than development administration and hosting costs.)
In the Milieu's case if you want to earn by playing it becomes very much an economics game, including arranging alliances that build trade, allies trying not to compete in driving prices forever downward but, rather, co-operating to maximally supply all demand and even create more demand, branching out into more different products to open new markets rather than destroying all markets by over-supplying them...
Over the years the game becomes more and more like universities and such that grow more and more income from capital built up over the long term, but if number of players grows faster than the profit-centres such income is drawn from the income per player is obviously going to drift downward, so that it unfortunately is not necessarily good for the players to draw in more players; there is quite a tendency, rather, for players to want to just quietly keep on increasing their share of the total income of the system rather than bring in more players with whom to share it all...
-MarkM-
