Why Is It So Easy To Break Videogame Economies?

Eve has a ok economy

So they made a currency so bad the players made their own.

Pixels

Because game economies are usually designed to be fun and IRL capitalist economies are designed to just funnel power into the aristocracy.

I adamantly disagree with your thoughts on Eve Online. First, there are many paths to wealth, including solo paths. For example, I personally got wealthy through a combination of solo PvE, scamming, and swing trading. So, that point is demonstrably false. Then there's the plex thing. Some players complain that Plex is unfair, but (1) efficient players can make so much in game currency, that you would have to be a straight up whale to keep up by buying plex, (2) since Eve is a skill based system with a full loot death mechanic, those that try to plex their way to success just end up enriching their enemies, and (3) I'd argue that the biggest beneficiaries of plex are not those that pay cash for it, but those that buy it on the in-game market in order multi-box in PvE and PvP. Which, of course, gives rise to another set of players complaining that multi-boxing is unfair -but that's a whole other can of worms. Regardless, your talking points are are basically what you'd hear from forum whiners who always have excuses as to why they can't succeed, just without the emotional component that typically accompanies their complaints.

Also, Eve's economy* can be hella fun. Of course, it's not for everyone, but some guys love it so much, that that's all they do -don't even engage with the rest of the game.

I once tried to actually sell a bunch of walnuts I found on the street to a convenience store owner because I actually thought that was how things worked

I was not a very smart kid

This is why I like the economy of Guild Wars 2. Even after the playerbase complained about the gold scarcity so they put in a daily "do three things and get 2 gold" and took out a major gold sink by making armor repairs free, the economy still isn't broken for the casual player. Yes, there are some items players value more than the trading post limit, and there are trading post barons that take the economy seriously to get even richer than they already are, and there is a real money to gold pathway, but unlike many other MMOs common materials and items often aren't overly expensive from inflation. There are plenty of videos on how to grind gold but none of that is really necessary to play the game and interact with the economy.

Considering we are currently living through the third once in a lifetime economic crisis in my lifetime, I'm not sure real world economies are any better.

This video made me realize that trying to make gamers embrace economic realism in-game is a lost cause because if they weren't Marxist they'd be working instead

In all honesty, video game economies are broken because economy is broken. Like, we dont know how to balance a real world economy, why the fuck do you think we would be able to balance an entirely new economy with additional craziness like infinite money generation, and little costs.

All good points, except Subnautica taught me that a game doesn't have to incentify you to kill anything to be fun and meaningful. No loot, no XP, no need to fight except in self-defence or when you catch fish for food and water --still a fun game.

Adam when talking about persona 5 : I put the « bi » in bitch !

it's worth noting that the real life economy is also broken and full of exploits. it's like pay to win in the sense that if you don't either a) start with tons of cash or b) get one of few insanely lucky drops, then most of the world's Big Money is off-limits (because without tons of luck, you need tons of startup capital to effectively game the stock market or start a multimillion dollar business). for 99% of people, the only way to progress is via grinding (8-hour shifts at a difficult or boring job, 5+ days a week for 40 years, in the hope of scrounging up enough to retire).

we do it in real life because we have to for survival. p2w gacha games emulate it, but they succeed by dedicating millions in R&D to researching the most exploitative ways to addict vulnerable populations. no fun, ethical video game is going to emulate that system, which means there really isn't a working model to aspire to.

Borked

If they are not broken, you won't play them, genius.

Isn't Sae like, 10 years Joker's senior in Persona 5? I think it's right and just that he isn't allowed to kiss her. Frankly he shouldn't be allowed to date Dr. Takemi or his literal teacher or that journalist either. But other than that, love the game!

If I had half the money I made renting out houses to people in fable 3, Id quit my job and retire my friends and family....

If you made monster loot types and amounts change every day, it would be too hard for people to just pick one spot and farm too much. People would occasionally find a lucrative spot and it would feel really gratifying to discover that farming spot, even if you know it will not be an option in the future

Because they don't have economies.
If they did the players wouldn't be able to afford shit just like in real life.
Or a lot more resources would be put into stopping the player.

lets talk about eve online.

I've always found the currency situation in single player RPGs interesting. It seems like most of them operate as follows. In the early game, the player is poor and weak, and there are never enough gold coins (or whatever the in-game money is) to acquire all of the stuff that the player would like to have, so there is always an early game grind. At some point, the situation reverses. The player begins to acquire more valuable loot, and there isn't as much stuff that the player needs to buy. At this point, loot and money begin to accumulate. Eventually, the player gets so overloaded with loot that it isn't even worth picking up stuff unless something has a specific use (or unless the player is a compulsive hoarder). In Skyrim, for example, it seems inevitable that the player will eventually buy every available house, with all the upgrades, simply because there isn't anything else worthwhile to spend money on. I've always found this situation absurd, but it is fun in a way. Turning the player house into a jam packed hoarder's nest is an activity that I enjoy.

Ultima VII Part 2 has an interesting twist on this situation (MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD). It starts normally, with the usual early game grind for cash, and it takes some time to get past this because spells are expensive. At a specific point in the game, a catastrophe occurs, and most of the NPCs are killed. At around the same time, the player can find massive quantities of valuable treasure. The irony is that all of this treasure is worthless after the catastrophe because all of the money changers are dead, and even if the player has the right currency, very few merchants survive to engage in trade. This just might be the most extreme case of a game eventually providing a surplus of money but no use for it. I have a feeling that this was a conscious design choice, perhaps a sort of commentary on the broken economy typical of the late game in RPGs.

I think wyncraft was a great eco that actually is self balancing, even if it had a few problems but it’s all player caused

I think some form of inflation to keep a game fun is overlooked in a lot of games. Without inflation to compensate for fun bonus mechanisms leads to exponential growth. The Civilization series is a good example of that. If you can gain an advantage early on in the game (taking the city of your neighbor for example), it becomes almost impossible to lose. While I hate Stellaris for its game breaking updates, it does a better job with inflation. Expanding faster then your empire can support leads to a negative growth penalty making it harder (not impossible) to walk away from your opponents.

Actually games that become more like a 'Marxist' economy, have better economy without interfering fun of it. Universal currency is generally tend to break economy so easily.
That's why most video games those have better economy is developed by Eastern European, Chinese and Germanic states(like Sweden)

Charities are scams

I felt the Persona rant in my soul

I'm not a programmer but is it hard to make the value of the currency depend on how much money there in the world just like our real world? Where if there's too much money in circulation, the price of things go up and vice versa?

The reason video game economies break is that in single player at least, you are a god. You have far more agency than any npc, and the whole game is literally there for you to beat it. If you succeed in real life the same way you succeed in most video games, you can be filthy rich in real life too.

I'd like to bring up factory games as a kind of peak of multiple currencies, changing in value constantly.
The valuation mostly rests on how hard it is to produce a thing, and how much consumption you have of it, and only mildly rests on the resource cost.

Real life economy is broken, of course videogame's will be too

i understand, its really like Monopoly, and Minecraft...they both really are roundbased, Monopoly id realistic but it would be like when the great depression hits, woah, that was fun

I'm a Makato man myself.

EVE Online has entered the chat

Pretty thorough video as always! Two examples where I feel there's a somewhat incentive to engage with the economy are Tales From the Borderlands and XCOM.

Tales makes you want to spend more for some additional swag, or maybe hold on to another point of the narrative. It is by no means perfect, but it allows for some unexpected decision making.

XCOM EU (haven't played 2 to know)I feel is a pretty strategic use of investments, planning base expansions, satellites to lower panic or gear for the soldiers. Having a limited currency per month (akin to a salary or taxes) makes every little bit counts, and sometimes you gotta do some urgent critical decisions, even if the next month is almost there.

star trek online has a large number of currencies. some people (myself included) make fun of that, but after watching this i guess maybe it's a way for the devs to try to keep people doing various activities by giving each set of things their own reward currency. though...i'm still perplexed by one which seems to have no other use than to be converted into...another currency. i thought "surely there must be something i could be using it for other than conversion, else why have it at all?" but i have yet to find that use 🙂 it's such an old game i don't know if i expect too much of it to make sense. i find myself doing dailies without even bothering to unpack the season rewards. it's like i've entered a zombie phase

I think you kinda overlooked Minecraft. You casually mentioned how the economy shifts as you go, but you glossed over one of the most significant issues: ALL OF THOSE MATERIALS CAN ALSO BE BUILDING MATERIALS. This fundamentally means that none of them ever COMPLETELY lose value. They can ALL be useful in VAST quantities at any given time if you just want them to be. Iron, gold, diamond, emerald, they all have some OTHER use than 'make the next stage of gear', which means the value CHANGES, but never disappears.

I'm playing through Terraria right now and I see something similar for certain early game metals. Lead/iron is used for Ironskin potions, and so the material is still valuable (at least a little) even in late hardmode. Silver is used to make silver bullets, which is one of the better ammos for quite some time. Copper is... pretty much useless after you get lead/iron. You can make building blocks with it but that's not nearly as much of the game in Terraria as it is in Minecraft. And ironically, gold/platinum are similarly almost useless once you pass a certain point. There are a few things you can craft with them, but you won't need those in massive numbers.

It's a bit of a failure of Terraria's economy, but it also provides a fascinating insight. It's fine to let material go from 'The next new thing' to 'old and no longer useful for THAT' as long as it's still useful for SOMETHING. Encouraging you to get massive amounts of it at one point only to completely ignore and negate all of that value in the next period is what's painful.

Thank you about the little kick in personas creators face :)

Did you seriously not talk about Victoria 3??

The point about "getting better weapon or crafting consumables in Elden Ring" is so wrong i cannot believe i hear it. Are we speaking about the same game in which most of your damage output is regulated by the weapon or spells you use? And the same game in which to upgrade said weapon you need crafting materials that you cannot buy fast enough to keep weapon upgraded?

Perhaps a niche example but I really feel like one of the most interesting economies I've seen in a game was the way Slipways handles money. Time is a (mostly) totally finite resource, since you have a set number of years to build a trading network, but money can either be scarce or overabundant, and in either case the game still holds up because it never scores you on money. Which is a cool way to handle that sort of thing; access to the ability to buy things is only useful if money is the limiting factor, rather than time or available technology.

Games like Way of the Samurai were doing what Persona was doing more than 2 decades ago haha. It's not using time as a currency so much as it is using it to increase replayability.