Why Is It So Easy To Break Videogame Economies?

there's this weird thing that happens with all video game economies it doesn't matter whether you're dealing with a more traditional economy involving buying low selling high and balancing your finances or a more video gaming one involving Mana ammunition time itself or just a small mountain of cowhide eventually that economy is gonna crumble before your eyes sometimes that's because the economy in question is too generous The Horizon games have this great system where you make all your ammo out of monster parts and you tip your primary Arrows with metal shards which also servers your money it's awesome but sooner or later you get so many materials that you can just make an infinite amount of whatever you want and any interesting choices this system provides just evaporate and in the Pokemon games you get given so much experience that if you're remotely diligent about fighting trainers you quickly become massively over leveled and the game becomes so easy that it's just boring other times economies are too stingy forcing you down the dark path of grinding many old school RPGs will stick a big difficulty wall in front of you until you go out into the woods and spend an hour beating out goblins until you're strong enough to start having fun and way too many games with survival mechanics seem to accidentally make by far the most boring bits of gameplay Gathering and making the same thing over and over again by far the most efficient strategy and sometimes game economies just end up in this weird state where stuff that used to be really important just sort of becomes obsolete as time goes on Diablo 2 famously gave players so much money that gold coins became functionally worthless as a currency and players started bartering in rings like Savages instead long story short video game economies are weird and very fragile whether you've got too much stuff or not enough whether a game's too lacks with its currencies or too restrictive additional economies often start out with a lot of promise but even under cursory examination seem to fall apart as dominant strategies quickly emerge and a bunch of potentially interesting options and play Styles just fall by the wayside why does this happen why do all game economies seem to crumble and reveal some sort of exploit or optimal strategy sooner or later well for a long time I thought the reason was that there was some sort of secret solution that game designers were just missing and that if you balance the numbers right and used the right mechanics you could make a digital economy that's self-balanced and sustained itself just as well as the real life economy or you know maybe better unfortunately after a bit of research I've come to the conclusion that I was dead wrong in multiple respects the reality is that all video game economies are broken yep fundamentally even the fun ones in fact especially the fun ones just like how combat systems don't accurately simulate real-life Warfare but abstracted video game economic systems are designed primarily to be fun to engage with for the player to be able to come out ahead with a bit of skill and to be comprehensible without a degree not to accurately model a real economy which is none of those things so because all video game economic systems even the really complicated ones you find in MMOs are by necessity much simpler than real life economies they're going to be much more vulnerable to exploitation for example if random old monsters in an RPG didn't drop low to our experience points then there'd be literally no reason to fight the vast majority of enemies and players will lack that nice drip feed of rewards that keeps them interested however the presence of monster loot also opens up the potential for players to just Farm them forever and grind down a bunch of money robbing themselves at the fun they were supposed to be having it's a bit of a double-edged sword designing and balancing an economy is just as much to do with behavior as it is to do with numbers and gaming economic systems are maybe the truest example of this as the great Sauron Johnson said given the opportunity players will optimize the fun out of a game and the inherent weaknesses in most if not all video game economies provide massive potentially destructive incentives to play a certain way from infinitely responding resources to dumb NPC merchants and a lack of anything even approaching taxation or a reason not to hoard a million hearty radishes in your infinite refrigerated pockets it's hard not to be tempted to abuse a video game economy and unfortunately while loads of games have tried to fight players natural instinct to take advantage of powerful strategies while introducing carry limits limited Merchant inventories and item degradation they're usually not very successful either making it just more boring to do the same overpower tactics or actually introducing new vulnerabilities famously Fallout new Vegas's weapon repair mechanic designed to keep powerful guns in check actually let you use worthless junk to keep rare guns with intentionally low durability in Tip-Top type making them way stronger than intended so instead I think the best way to fix this big problem with video game economies gradually falling to bits isn't to try and restrict players but to lean into this optimizational Instinct by making the most fun strategy also the one that takes the best advantage of an inherently flawed economic system the simplest way that games can leverage their economies to encourage particular behavior is by fiddling with the relative prevalence or scarcity of particular resources or currencies limiting resources stuff that's rare or precious we naturally highly value and as such we'll go out of our way to spend this stuff efficiently and acquire more by any means necessary Surplus resources or currencies on the other hand function in the opposite way players will use them liberally but equally don't really want to go out of their way to acquire more because they're so common ammo is a great way of demonstrating this effect because it's a resource you constantly spend just by playing the game and it's something the player is constantly aware of so in the newer Doom games ammo is incredibly plentiful you'll almost never actually completely run out because it's lying around all over the place and you can also just chainsaw it out of enemies what this means is that combat becomes less about efficient use of each shot and more about matching the right gun to each enemy befitting Doom's more hectic feel in Doomer tunnel the devs actually removed the infinite ammo backup pistol from the previous game because a lot of players ended up over using it and trying to play efficiently and save ammo when they didn't actually need to which ended up with them having less fun for no reason on the flip side games with scare Samo make each use of this limited resource feel impactful and pushes players to consider whether every shot is worth it it must have Sims often do this stuff really well in the OG Deus acts and Dishonored for example the tranquilizer crossbow is basically the best way of dealing with baddies non-violently but the ammo is rare so you have to think really carefully about which problem guys you want to deal with easily and which you think you can take care of with a lovely sleepy hug instead however developers do need to be careful with this sort of stuff sometimes limited resources can end up discouraging the exact situation they want us to be getting into in the first place in signalis a survival horror game that I mostly really like ammo is incredibly rare for obvious reasons tense Resource Management combat is really fun but because you don't want to waste ammo avoiding combat outright and just sort of running away from the spooky Robo zombies becomes a very good ammo saving strategy meaning that you also end up avoiding the reason why ammo is so rare in the first place this is also a problem that RTS games have learned to deal with in games with an infinite or very large reserve of cash and harvestable resources players often end up just turtling in their base and refusing to interact with their opponents because they've got no real incentive to leave their home turf not only is this not very fun because these players rarely actually have a fair fight it's also not a powerful strategy because Turtles aren't making the most of the potential resources outside their supercastle so how could developers encourage players to act more aggressively and make better use of the economic strategies available simple they made money in your starting base run out in Starcraft mineral veins are on dry in Command and Conquer Fields have all become less and less efficient to mine from and in June spice Wars taxes keep increasing forcing you to expand to do spice Fields before you piss off the space government the result of turning money from a surplus resource into a limited resource is that players now feel a pressure to get as much as possible as quickly as they can and in the process expanding their territory towards their opponent and building more units thanks to the increased income this ultimately leads to more interactive more aggressive gameplay which is where the RTS shines of course it's not just a player's attitude towards individual resources and currencies that determines their relationship with an economy as a whole any economic system is going to be made out of multiple elements and the way all of those variables are structured is a huge determining factor in how us players end up trying to crack things open For Better or For Worse take economy structured around money as a central currency for example it by nature is an all-purpose resource that can be exchanged for everything from Goods to services to bonus patreon rewards it represents abstract buying power and this flexibility makes it very powerful but also very dangerous often games that give money too much prevalence and up with players ignoring 90 of the game because raw cash solves all their problems look at Souls like games like album ring for example everything from increasing your stats to upgrading items to buying basically any other resource ultimately requires runes meaning that there's often little incentive to spend time crafting reconcilables or finding some cool new weapon that might turn the tables because that time will be better spent just murdering these dumb frogs over and over again and brute forcing your way through the game by sheer weight of finance orienting an economy around a single currency with every other resource feeding into it will all both ensure a player focuses on that specific element of the game above everything else but this needn't be a negative look at Persona 5 a game in which you play as a regular teenage boy who leads a regular double life as a psychic criminal when he's not in school regardless of how you want to play Persona you have to do so via the time management element so that means that story Focus players players who like the battling and players who just want to kiss the best character until they realize that the game won't let you kiss yusuke or a catchy because the game's Creed as homophobes and it won't let you kiss Psy either because they have no taste and so you end up settling for one of the game's boring Trad why wait where was I going with this oh right because of persona's Central Time economy all players are incentivized to play with the most fun part of the game characters so in Persona 5 all the best stuff from cool passive abilities to cheap access to powerful items and brand new moves are gated behind leveling up your relationship with the game's NPCs and in order to make friends with characters you need to spend time with them creating this fun series of choices we have to balance each character's schedule and which bonuses you want all under a limited time frame the game then Builds on this by requiring that you level up your social skills to gain access to higher levels of a confidence relationship or even start making friends with them at all Makoto for example won't even talk to you unless you have Rank 3 knowledge and leveling that stuff up also costs time this is also where money comes in rather than being the be all and all fundamental elements of the economy money in Persona 5 is a flexible resource that you can spend to use your limited time more efficiently you can pay to have this creepy made do chores for you you can buy gifts for people which give a lot of friendship points quickly or you could buy books movies and games all of which allow you to rank up your social stats more quickly and how do you get money you got it you've got to spend time by going to the metaverse and killing some nfts by anticipating the fact that a central currency creates a massive economic weakness and using this to the game's Advantage Persona 5 both removes grinding as a possibility because making friends is more efficient and also funnels players towards the best bits of the game in one Fell Swoop it is great of course games don't need to have a single Central currency at the heart of their economy and more open structure can give the player a great feeling of control which only makes breaking the economy wide open more fun in off-world trading company for example which treats money as more of a win condition than a core resource the game instead becomes all about setting up monopolies on Key Resources sabotaging opponent's production chains and manipulating the stock market to your advantage with the most lucrative strategies involving crazy adjacency bonuses or big building projects testing your Logistics and planning skills instead of your ability to just rack uploads of cash when laxa more open economic structures run a rival games can often lose a sense of Integrity because players could easily just ignore bits of the economy and still get what they want this is really obvious in some survival games with the lack of trading or converting items into a currency you care about means that a lot of materials and food items in particular go completely ignored because there's literally no reason to engage with them over the mathematically Superior choices this happens in roguelikes too where the ability to collect currencies that increase your power from run to run render all other resources worthless because they're the only ones that tie into a broader economic framework Hades actually fixes this quite well now that I mention it each half of its currency system appear in separate pools so they never directly compete and there are various late game bonuses you can get for picking up permanent resources so even if you've say already made friends with everyone picking up nectar of the God still gives you some sort of in-game bonus in the form of a boon level so it doesn't feel totally worthless this actually brings me on to another way the game economy's quote unquote break that can really help them feel like more than an unfeeling set of numbers and that's resources changing in value over time and by that I don't just mean monetary value but their importance to the player as well in a lot of games inflation or all planning mean that some resources like money in an MMO or experience points when you're at max level lose their value and you suddenly have no incentive to engage with vast ways of a given economy but by deliberately baking in these moments where certain resources or currencies increase or drop off in value games can create some really cool gameplay frostpunk does this really well early on in the game wood is incredibly important for building houses so your people don't freeze but as the game goes on buildings start requiring more and more steel so you've got some interesting decisions to make in how hard you want to invest in Shoring up your early game foundations but potentially having a bunch of worthless wood in the late game but suspecting it to steal early but having some Growing Pains as a result Additionally you could fix your wood Surplus by researching charcoal burners turning it into coal but this puts pressure on your available Workforce which becomes Tighter and Tighter as people start dying towards the mid game basically you're changing relationship with this resource actually makes the economy more interesting as the criteria for optimal Play Changes too when games have a kind of static economy and your valuation of each constituent part never has the change it can often feel like the game is stagnant and you're just repeating the same gameplay choices but with different currencies and resources moonlighter really felt like this to me where every dungeon and every item just kind of blend in into one because their relative values are always the same everything has a fixed in-game cost items from later dungeons always supersede older ones and there's no incentive to craft anything outside of the one weapon and armor path you like best meaning that knowing what to keep and want to sell isn't really much of a challenge and knowing the best price for each item is always just a matter of doing some basic maths this leads to economic systems that feel sluggish and undynamic not just because you've optimized the economy but because you only had to do it once in a different better economics game on the other hand like poshonomics these kinds of calculations are constantly changing for one lower tier ingredients are sometimes really useful not just for balancing out Persian component ratios but also for imparting specific traits onto your bruise increasing their overall value or making them eligible for lucrative custom orders not only that but the kind of ingredients you need changes over time too in week two of the game the best adventuring location is open to you the mushroom Maya and the bone wastes need you to make poison and Fire Resistance potions for your adventurers if you want them to survive and both of those require both red and yellow Mana to make massively increasing the value of ingredients with both of these qualities but by the time week 4 rolls around and all three of the competition potions that you need to brew to beat this adorable cat lady require purple manner your internal valuation totally changes and the most efficient path forward changes too introducing a bunch more fun optimization to figure out it's not just management d games where this happens either Minecraft's crafting economy changes over time too and it helps to lend an otherwise very simplistic game and Incredibly compelling Arc of increasing power Woods value is relatively stable because you always need it for torches and arrows Stone drops off dramatically once you can make better tools iron slowly depreciates as you get more and more diamonds but they're too rare for armor so iron always has some use and gold spikes up from worthless to crucial right at the end game because you needed to make top Tier netherright gear by the end of the game you can look back on when you thought a stone pick was a major Milestone or when you had to um and R over how best to use your first diamonds and feel like you've actually made some tangible progress in a way that will be impossible if the economy actually functioned more like well an economy and that's kind of my point the closest games really get to creating a realistic economy is in an MMO and that's because real people are way better at modeling Market forces than NPCs but equally this usually makes their economies the least fun in all of video gaming in most MMOs almost nothing players can craft has any actual value making it this massive money sync anything remotely scarce costs an arm and a leg and the only way to get any sort of foot in the door is to get on the boring menial Daily Grind or Farm stuff so that a rich player can skip the effort of having to work for the items themselves even in games like Eve online which has arguably video Gaming's most realistic economy including a core currency literally backed by the dollar the economic systems aren't very fun either despite the cool stories of corporate Intrigue and big space wars you might hear about everything in Eve is owned by Massive cartels of players and just like in real life people with more real money have a distinct Advantage because they can just buy in-game currency and outcome beat you what this means is that the only real path towards wealth for regular people is essentially becoming an employee of one of the big player-owned corporations it's either that or become a space criminal which is so unreliable so as to be basically gambling and I don't know about you but that hits a little bit too close to home for my liking the real economy is stressful restrictive and disempowering by Design at best it's a ruthlessly efficient machine designed to encourage humans to be as productive as possible regardless of how much fun they're having or how much control they feel like they have and at worst it's a rigged system where the only way to succeed is to be astronomically lucky or to already be rich with that in mind is it any wonder why video games don't try very hard to replicate real economics in video games the very fact that we don't play with a properly balanced economy kept in check by teams of financial experts that isn't concerned with long-term stability allows us to wield influence and explore opportunities that real life never would have given us I think this is what makes video games the model the not fun elements of real economies such effective tools for creating evocative experiences in Diaries of a Spaceport janitor you aren't just being shown someone working a menial degrading job in the hopes of making their way out of poverty you have to put your own face to the grindstone and try to get by because there are no easy Alternatives citizen sleeper's main premise is that you play as a cyborg who's dependent on a pharmaceutical drug produced by the corporation that built you and if you don't take it regularly you die meaning that you have to do horrible manual labor commit crimes and avoid eating to save cash in order to ward off death for another few days and in hard space shipbreaker you're highly incentivized to rush take risks and play fast and loose with safety Jacks that his mantle ships as fast as possible because it's by far the most efficient way to play in terms of raw cash and your massive debt is only going to keep piling up even in games that aren't trying to make Grand Social critiques this stuff can still create some really cool moments in Fallout New Vegas one of the DLCs accurately called dead money has a recurring theme of Letting Go and encourages you to leave behind the stack of incredibly heavy super valuable gold bars found at the end in order to escape an exploding vault but if the player chooses the game and keeps the boss anyway they get a hollow Victory because the gold bars are so expensive so as to be basically useless no Merchant except the Gun Runners can cover the cost of even one of the multiple bars and if you're good enough for the game to have got the bars anyway then chances are you don't need anything The Gun Runners sell leaving you with all the riches in the world weighing you down and nothing to spend them on which is a very fun way of reinforcing The dlc's Core theme whether we like it or not we're all beholden to the whims of one or more economies but in video games average people get the chance to tip the odds in their favor for once and that's why stopping gaming economies from being broken if it was even possible wouldn't actually fix them at all because ultimately they're not really supposed to be balanced it's also what makes it exploitative microtransactiony nonsense so infuriating by linking a pretend video game economy which is ostensibly supposed to be fun to the real world one which definitely isn't not only is there a massive perverse incentive for developers to make real-world transactions the only viable meats are playing but also it's impossible to view games no matter how fun in the same way when your limited time has a literal dollars and cents value associated with it so maybe what we really need is a change in perspective video game economies don't start off broken it's our duty as players to break them and it's the developer's job to structure the fault lines and strategic weaknesses in an economy such that they'll break in the right way once they Collide With Their audience which is to say that I think we can all take a few real life lessons from how video games handle their economies whether that's conserving ammo selling loot or most importantly of all giving a hot nerd cactuses over and over again until she falls in love with you trust me it works every time welcome welcome come in from the cold yes yes it's the after the video segment huddle up and warm yourself against my gentle rambling about random [ __ ] that I think you should be made aware of is that what I do at the end of every video yes why is me doing that suddenly warm not sure am I writing this at four in the morning oh how could you tell anyway as I often tend to do around this time of year I like to point people in the direction of a personal favorite charity calls of mine that's also relevant to You video Gamers and that is the Yogscast charity jingle jam bundle a massive pack of games with all the proceeds going to charity some highlight inclusions are the hex Little Inferno which just had an update plate up Tenderfoot tactics Age of Wonders planetfall absolute drift and also a bunch of other games that I've not even played it's great value it's a great cause and if you're watching this after the bundle is over the Charities are open all year so you've got no excuse not to give them a look anyway of course there is another charity case that's near and dear to my heart and that is the architect of game is patreon keeping me fed in house and home and able to make weirdo nonsense videos like this one it's not a one-sided relationship though people who support me on patreon get all sorts of bonus goodies like early access to videos some behind the scenes content and my extra bonus ramblings that didn't make it into the Final Cut supporting the channel on patreon is by far the best way to ensure these videos keep happening and that's why in addition to all the other stuff I like to give a special shout out to my top tier supporters who let's face it are just a little bit cooler and slightly better looking than the rest of you and those handsome people are algae brute Ali Wright asaran alner 94 bardik Dragoon Brennan Spalding Brian notoriani constantinamend cosmics 360 Daniel midges Das kangaroo David Setzer Dirk Jan karenbeld diglettier doltwo ecton Edward Franklin Woods Eugene balkin gaskall Isa W Dano iofer 93 Jacob Dillon riddle Jordan gear Justin Dent Lee Berman mace window 54 nwdd Nate Graf Patrick Romberg Peter D tomasak Phoenix thurakaz rettidex Regal regex Rey's dad rajagar Sheldon Hearn Simon Jacobson sir snakespeare Steve Riley strategyer in Ultima The Forbidden shrimp tin markovic Ty guren tigorn Tyler Duncan Uprising Whimsical wisp Zach Randall and Chow apologies to some people on the list who should have gotten a shout out ages ago but haven't that's my bad the patreon interface for this stuff is not very good and I didn't check it very well anyway that's it that's all for me I've been working on one final regular video before we get started on the end of year Extravaganza so hopefully there's gonna be time for that so I better get to work which means that I will see you then bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 524,927

Keywords: Games, Video Games, Gaming, PC Gaming, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, AoG, Architect of Games, Review, Analysis, Game Design, guide, Level design, New Games, elden ring, Pay to win, Video game economies, free to play, eve online, world of warcraft, persona five, Citizen Sleeper, Fallout, Fallout new vegas, Money making, best moneymaking guides, Witcher 3, Potionomics, Minecraft, Yakuza, DOOM, Destiny, Dune, Dune Spice Wars, Hades, Genshin Impact

Id: GMtIAXtAGxw

Length: 23min 42sec (1422 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022