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Saints Row: The Third is my first experience with the franchise, and I'm trying to understand when city income will be available for me to transfer out.

The game says one hour, but it seems I have funds I can transfer out at least a couple times an hour, and at one point I thought I got 'paid' rather quickly, with a death in-between.

Is an hour a set time period, or do in-game activities (deaths, missions, etcetera) have an impact?

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    This is a good question... I had been wondering it myself. It seems to me to be about every 20 minutes, but I've not actually measured it.
    – Aeo
    Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 15:15
  • @Aeo Most games (Ubisoft is notorious for this) that have a time based economy system run on 20 minute timers, so I'd guess you're correct.
    – Mr Smooth
    Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 17:45

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I did some testing, and I think the time it takes to earn another round of cash from your owned buildings is right around 15 minutes. Unused time doesn't seem to carry over between restarts of the game, so if you play for 5 minutes, shut it down, and load the game later, you'll still have to wait a full 15 minutes for more money.

There's only two things that stop it:

  • Hitting the "Transfer Limit" which increases as you gain city income. This is a multiple of your money-per-unit-time value, and it's just there to keep you from leaving the game on overnight to make mad cash.
  • Pausing/quitting the game. If the game isn't running, you don't gain money.

If you thought you got "paid" twice in quick succession, it's possible that you had money laying around from a previous bank transfer that you hadn't picked up yet. There's no "push" notification that money's available, so you might have taken money out twice 5 minutes apart, even though it was really 15 minutes of clock time between times you actually got paid.

"Game time" is a bit weird. I don't know if my sample running time was too small, or if the game rapidly transitions between times of day at certain points, but I took a save just after the climax of Act 1 and let it run for about 40 minutes, and the sun stayed in the same spot. A 15 minute test of my cleared save yielded similar results. However, I'm certain that eventually, time passes and there's a day/night cycle. It's possible that, as others have speculated, it doesn't pass until late in the game, but I feel like I've seen this happen earlier in the game as well.

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  • I was wondering about the day/night cycle as well. Still being in Act 1, I assumed day/night was triggered (at least this early in) by missions and not by the in-game clock.
    – James Skemp
    Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 23:11
  • I thought for sure time passed, but I'm not so certain now. I'd have to do more testing.
    – agent86
    Commented Dec 8, 2011 at 1:29
  • I logged in for a quick 20 minutes (which somehow became closer to 40 ;) ) and when I started it up it was daytime, whereas last night it was night. Seemingly real time does have a role to play, but perhaps only in the day/night cycle. That might also explain why I keep thinking the game takes place at night :D Marking this as answer, though, since the ~20 minutes estimate seems to be correct for income, based on last night and this morning's play.
    – James Skemp
    Commented Dec 8, 2011 at 13:04
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Its actually every fifteen minutes of actual game play... I tested with a timer for about three hours now...

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The day/night cycle is caused by the missions/activities you participate in. If say you end a mission and it is night time, it will stay night time until the next mission/activity you start.

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