I wish having way too much money was a problem I had in real life...

I've never thought "Why didnt they fix that" When I finish a game with a lot of money, Im usually a local legend by that point and it feels right to be loaded

There are some games where it's hilariously obvious the designers had no idea how the economy was going to work while they were making it. For example, in the original Mass Effect, they deliberately leave your reward for quests incredibly vague ('I will pay you a fortune' and the like) and then just give you a huge sum of credits that scales with your level. Except for a memorable instance on Noveria, where the quest-giver explicitly offers you a few hundred credits reward for doing a quest. A few hundred credits. In a game where, in later levels, you will be earning millions of credits just from basic combat and exploration.

this is why strongholds, spaceships and sailing ships are such good things to have in RPGs, cause you can make their upgrades and maint be super expensive!

I really liked how Pillars of Eternity did the XP economy by saying "you fill out the info on an enemy type and then there's no more experience to be gained". I don't see it work for money, but when it comes to XP in RPGs, that was a very good system.

Some of my favorite RPG "quests" revolve around trying to raise enough money for something. I think of Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Dragon Age 2's first act. I really like the context it gives to going out and completing quests and gives you a direct reason for trying to make as much money as possible. Sometimes this obfuscates the game economy problem, sometimes it enhances it. But I always like the narrative and mechanical mixture here.

Your channel is like a course on what makes a good RPG game.

Tim, Dark Souls is the game where leveling up costs the main currency. Leveling up means boosting any attribute by a single point. That costs around 1,500 souls at the start. While doesn't multiply by the level you're leveling out of, it does does get more expensive for every level. More over when you die, you drop all the souls you're carrying on the spot. If you fail, or forget to go back to your bloodstain and pick them back up? Well the next time you die they'll be gone for good. Plus if you're buying a equipment, spells, and/or consumables from a vendor? That costs souls. Repairing equipment at a blacksmith? That costs souls. Repairing equipment with the repair box you bought costs souls too. Upgrading weapons and armor also costs souls and another less common currency on top of that. Anything from titanite shards on the low end for basic upgrades, to chunks of titanite near the top of the standard upgrades. Which you can do with a smithing box, but it still costs souls and resources. Then specific ascensions. If you want to add magic damage, then you need something like blue titanite and you can't do it with a smithing box. You need to find a blacksmith who can do that and bring them a unique item, a specific ember, to unlock that. In Dark Souls one there are 4 different blacksmiths too and they can't take just any ember. Each one has specialties. In Dark Souls 2 they made this easier, there's only one blacksmith that can ascend weapons and he only requires a single ember to do it. Still costs exotic materials to upgrade in those fields. But the point remains. From upgrading equipment, to leveling up, to buying items. All forms of character progression costs souls and those souls are trivially easy to lose. Which means you want to spend your souls as soon as you have enough to make a change, or buy something. It's both elegant and will brutally punish mistakes.

In the currencies topic, one especially interesting game in that is Path of Exile, because there's no gold in that game. So the players arrived at an agreement of trading itens for special stones that changes the attribute of equipment. So those stones, which drops from enemies, essentially became the official currency of the game.

Cash inflation: there is always the option to add "ego based" money sinks. That could be very high priced cosmetics (wardrobe, weapon skins, decorations) or high priced minor boosts (like a 2% max weapon damage upgrade kit) that dont throw off the balancing. Or spending money for a funny or mean ingame event, that does not affect story progression. Players dont need those items to progress, but are incentivized to spend their unused cash on them, so they always have the option to shrink their money pile.

Another blessing from our lord and savior Timothy Cain, bless 🙌

Elden Ring (Runes), and the Souls Games (Souls) by Fromsoft combine their money and XP together into one currency. When you level up it's because you spend enough XP to pay for it. On top of that, when you die in those games you drop all your XP on the ground and have to go try to get it back without dying again otherwise it disappears forever (Major Sink), which happens often because the game can be very challenging. You also use XP to upgrade gear (In addition to material components you have to search or grind for), buy things from merchants, and as additional costs to some niche situations or consumable items. I'm really inspired by these games, and I think they have some robust mechanics to learn from. Great video btw, I've been looking for a place I can learn more about game design, and it looks like I found it.

This kinda reminds me about how I hate crafting systems (but love minecraft). I find that having crafting in games often feels 'tacked on' and if I specialize in it I just spend the whole game looking through menus to make useless (or wildly overpowered) items that makes the crafting kinda useless (or in the case of overpowered items, makes the questing feel useless). It is by far my most ignored mechanic when I play a videogame. There are a few games that go all in and really focus on the crafting (minecraft, monster hunter etc); and in those games I like the crafting. but I think it goes to what you are saying, since it was such a major part of the game it got a lot of focus (where in most games they are not the focus).

I was gonna mention Dragon's Dogma and the reason why they scrapped the Monk class, but you explained it in the video hahaha. Basically, the player character would never have to worry about buying or upgrading weapons. Dragon's Dogma economy is still super exploitable though, and after watching your video, I get a better sense of why it is so. Not a lot of sinks, and the ones there are (like resting) cost practically nothing (especially in Hard Mode, where one wolf can drop you 10,000 gold, but the most expensive inn still costs 500 gold). I remember farming for Discipline Points, going from the starting area to the encampment nearby (two early resting spots), and the cost of resting so enemies would respawn was nothing compared to the amount of gold I was getting on the way.

I love that youve talked about economy so much lately. I would be one of those people in that hypothetical class, because i love discussing and playing with complex systems. I definitely think more games need to take it seriously, even so far as having someone whose main job is economy. For large-scale RPGs especially, it can significantly impact the player experience, so its importance should not be underestimated.

As an economy designer, I love this summary. Great overview of the chaos of game economy. 😂

I've always found that survival horror games with rpg elements are better at pressing the player to use their resources, the trade off doesn't feel so bad because most encounters could spell death for the player so buying that extra item doesn't seem so bad. Plus because of the genre starving the player for sources is expected.

Arcanum has a big divide in sinks between builds. Magic builds can make do without anything really, mana pots if you want to make things faster, while tech builds have to use ammo like bullets or electric charges. Also, as there is no equipment in the game that increases the power of magic, the magic builds can just wear nice looking town clothes from start to finish. Could probably make similar point about Unarmed in Fallout (and 2), but as both of those games have infinite random encounters to generate infinite gear to sell, money doesn't really matter in either of those games.

Ultimately I just want things to do with my money and not just have it at too much

The other big factor is the opposite problem is a major fail state: If an average, reasonable player can go effectively broke, the game is at the very least somewhat niche, and probably has its brutal economy as a focus. You're limiting your market severely if the game breaks from suboptimal bean counting, so errimg on the side of caution is the obvious fix. And then, anyone who's slightly above average is making subsistence+X%, and compund interest does the rest Some MMOs will strictly limit currency sources by time for this very reason, they can plot out the exact maximum of any currency(even microtransactions) and plan accordingly. Nikke does this, though if you did max it out and sink thousands of dollars per month into it you would hit the content wall where there's nothing left to spend your money on pretty quick

I play most RPGs and open worlds to become a millionaire as quickly as possible. As such I enjoy a broken economic system. The problems start when the game still "thinks" 3000 Bottlecaps is a fortune for my Bottlecap hoarding millionaire. "Your puny rewards do not concern me anymore, begone beggar I don't work for spare change" is a dialogue line that is most sorely missed, much more so than a working economy in the game. Bethesda "Open-Worlds" are the worst offenders in my opinion. Everyone still treats you like a broken and poor street urchin no matter how much bling you actually have, while the game mechanics make it almost impossible to stay poor. So that would be my suggestion to devs: Acknoweldge the wealth of players and you don't need to balance it too much. Those are my two cents, I mean bottle caps, uhm two million Bottlecaps... Anyway, as always thank you for the excellent video Tim!

Game Economies has always been a tricky thing, Especially wanting to make it engaging and have something to do with the money

I found this channel yesterday, can't stop watching, pure gold, thank you for sharing your experiences with us

I would love a Tim Cain course on game economies 😁 How involved were you with Pillars 1 economy? It was surprisingly robust for a game that let you have an infinite stash! I really wish games tried to work in economy and resources more into their questing system. Speaking of which, are you planning a video on how to design a robust quest system? Thank you for the great video Tim! Have a wonderful day!😊

The problem with the economy is intertwined with the levelling mechanics. It's no coincidence that at the early levels, you're picking up 1 or 2 caps (or copper coins), but at end game? You're picking up hundreds/thousands of caps or gold coins. As you mention at 07:30, it's specifically because of meta gear. Once you have the BiS gear, what else is money for? There should be no best, but better for a specific role. And*equipment degredation. The best weapon might do the most damage, but it should be fragile. The worst weapon might do the least damage (outside of clearly trash items, like a stone club that takes 30 seconds of gameplay to make), but it should have the most durability. I blame the levelling mechanics we still have since the 80's, back when computers weren't able to do real time combat, large levels, complex systems, etc. To compensate for basic and short games, padding it out with a formula grind is how the game gets padded out. And now that computers are much better, that we have dozens of hours of content, active combat, etc.? We still have the exact same RPG design from way back when, which were developed as compromises. MMO's are the worst for this. Especially mature ones like WoW, because the inflation and content invalidation is so blatant and in your face.

The early part of RPGs where you're barely scraping by are always the best part, but eventually you have become so rich you don't even have to worry about money. The only game I can think of where this wasn't the case is Solasta. Higher level gear and skill books were so expensive, you couldn't afford to buy them all, so you had to decide which character you wanted to have the best gear or extra skills/attributes. I had an idea I for a Fallout: New Vegas mod that I tried to create, but it was way beyond what I could do myself (some of it may not even be possible). I basically wanted to create a barter only system. The default currency that everything was valued at would still be caps, but caps themself would be rare. Items that a vendor didn't sell would be worth much less to them. For example, if you wanted to buy a gun from the Gun Runners, and all you had was random junk to trade, it would be better to trade that junk at a general merchant like Mick & Ralph's and buy something the gun runners would pay more for, than trading the junk to the gun runners. If you traded a bunch of things to a vendor that was worth more than what you were getting back, or you were just "selling them" you would receive an IOU from that vendor that you could only redeem at that vendor. You could trade or sell your IOU vouchers to other people/vendors but at a vastly reduced value.

Makes me think about a related issue, which is grinding. I think I tend to not have issues with unbalanced economies because I tend to enjoy grinding, so there's always a way to get money. A few games did such a good job at implementing anti-grinding measures that it actually took some of the fun out of the game, because I was forced to get by with a lot less money than I'm accustomed to. It's interesting to think about. It makes me want to go back and play some of those games again with a different mindset.

I like how Metro 2033 approached Game Economy. It had two types of ammo; low-quality and military-grade. Military-grade ammunition was rare and did nearly three times the damage but it was also the primary currency. It's been awhile but I recall shops being spread out, so there also wasn't much opportunity for deliberation.

This is why merchant classes common in jrpgs are such genius design. Money in games will almost always eventually become an abundant resource that you have no use for. The answer? Just make a class that burns money for combat utility or damage. Keeps money relevant far past the point where its actually useful.

This is especially true in open world games. Right now in starfield, I'm basically lugging every bit of loot from encounters to the same vendor, and when he's out of cash I wait 2 in game days on a chair to do it again. Sadly I haven't found many things to spend the money on.

I love game theory optimization-based dev meta theory and so forth related to digital economies more than anything. Really impressive to hear and learn this type of thing when it makes even a master like you scratch your head about it while presenting the difficult concepts-- and more than anything thank you for not dumbing your talks down! New fan yesterday and will be binge-watching all of your videos before I do anything else! ❤‍🔥

There's a couple of points you brought up that made me think of FromSoftware titles. The Dark Souls series, Bloodbourne, Sekiro, Elden Ring: All require souls/runes to not only level your character, but purchase items in the world, upgrade gear, obtain spells, etc. Whatsmore, they're also stripped away entirely upon death. (only half from Sekiro if I remember correctly) You're given an opportunity to reclaim them by returning to your corpse, but if things go astray and you die a second time they're gone forever. When you first mentioned the D&D cost for leveling I initially thought it sounded tedious and unnecessary. Shortly after I realised some of my favorite games of all time do just that, and I'd even say having a sink in this fashion contributed greatly to my overall experience. Perhaps there's some merit in the design.

00:47 I'm currently enrolled in a game design course, and one of my classes this semester IS Game Economies! Thank you for the extra lecture, Mr. Tim Cain, sir!

"I could lecture..." please, I'd love that

Also makes it hard that some players will be completionists, and others will skip every optional piece of content and it should probably be possible to finish either way.

Great video! Would love to see "Game Economy Pt2" with some examples of how you balanced the sources and sinks.

Wow such a rich content, I'm watching your channel for 3 hours now since I discover it. It made me reflect about a lot of things, since real world situations with people, to my old experiences with games and abusing them. I'll start to write some notes, because I love games and your explanations expanding my understanding of how a game works.

Fallout 3 probably had the best way of counter balancing player wealth. No matter your level, no matter how many caps you have, you just can't buy the best weapons. They're exploration rewards for players who delve into the dungeons. This also applies to bobbleheads and skill books. Those are exploration rewards. And that's actually amazing.

I think the Dark Souls series of games uses the "unavoidable money sink to level up", in addition to the ever present sink of dying before recovering your body. And even with sinks like that people still end up with way too much money in those games. money sinks are tricky because much like real life once you have enough money the sinks stop working.

Thanks for this great explanation of game economies. Recently, I have noticed a trend of making games' economies extremely complicated for no apparent reason. I have played games that had as many as a dozen different currencies you needed to keep in mind, besides actual crafting materials, just to build a basic item needed to play. I have quit games that could have been enjoyable, but they made the player jump through so many hoops just to get to the action that it sucked all the fun out of it.

That was fascinating. Thanks Tim

Hey Tim, can you talk about the Magick vs technology mechanics in Arcanum? I'm making a DND add on inspired by arcanum and I'm not sure on how to implement it in a fun or balanced way. Thanks!

I like it when your main character is a bit of a god at the end of RPGs, and that also means being filthy rich. Not every game has to be Pathologic.

One of the things you kinda implied but didn't state directly is that the consequences of getting economy wrong in a single-player RPG are fairly benign. If players are rich, so what? There's usually an easy ceiling on how players can convert money into power, so you can just balance around a "powerful" player and shrug your shoulders if they have a backpack full of loot because they've gathered & sold every broom and fork in the world. It's a different beast in multiplayers, especially massively multiplayer games. Balance in general is - as a designer, you don't have the easy out of "let 'em play the way they want so long as they're having fun." Communities in competition with themselves will "optimize the fun out of a game" to pursue what's most profitable/powerful. I don't know if that's a topic you'd be interested in speaking about, but it's one I'd be interested in hearing about.

I think a great way to both add currency sinks and also detail out a setting is putting a diverse amount of sinks in cities. Smithies for armor/weapon repairs and purchasing, general shops, a wizard tower or clergy which sells services such as poison/disease curing, etc. You can add character to these small corners of a large city. You can also add quests around helping the owner which can lower your cost or unlock new items/services. You could also steal from or harm the owner’s business which could prohibit you from that shop. Maybe steal from enough shops in a city and word gets around, raising your price for services you haven’t even interacted with yet.

This was very enlightening. As a little comment, back in 2020 when the pandemic started, I went back to WoW and played on a free account. I just wanted to immerse in a world without any form of reminder or stress or having too many things to do. Because of this, the characters I played were varied, but I could only really do so much, which kept my attention focused and realized I was thoroughly enjoying myself. Far more than I remember in previous years. After some tinkering with my characters and always having money issues, I ended up creating a worgen hunter and focused on well, hunting. I gave them skills in skinning and leatherworking and spent a couple of weeks doing that. Found myself having quite a sum of money but unfortunately not a lot to do with it. There is no ammo in the game, which is probably a good thing for most people. And today in retrospective, coming to these videos I think my growing desire to create my own world beyond just the comics, comes from this and similar and recent experiences in game. I think I will start drawing and writing a design document while I listen to your experiences and answers. And go from there.

I've always wondered why more games don't have the highest quality weapons or armor be purchaseable and just have them be prohibitively expensive. I get that the designers want to encourage exploration, but in a lot of games it seems like high tier gear just ends up as random drops, requiring the player to grind the same encounters until they get what they want. I feel like this can also contribute to the economy feeling less broken, actually having something to spend your Scrooge McDuck stash on.

this channel is really a gold mine for game design information, thank you for all of these videos! Could you make some vids related to multiplayer games like MMORPGs as well?

I really like the straight up gamba sink - like Borderlands or Diablo 2, where the more gold you get, the more you can gamble away at random items that may or may not be good. Lovely video tho, very insightful.

I really liked the first Gothic because economy and setting (magic ore in a jail colony) worked so well together.

I really appreciate this breakdown of game economy, and the discussion of sources and sinks is a good starting point. I think the sink part of that unfortunately does not take into account the received value from said sink. If developers (which of course are not economists unless you happen to have one on team or hire one explicitly) only think of currency as something to be gained and then spent, they miss the mark on the value received from what is spent. Sinks can easily be considered just another source. My opinion with game economies is that absent a day to day upkeep for just existing (who wants that outside of some survival life sim?) the most effective way to balance it is to force the player to exert effort to participate in the economy itself. In short - if making money and acquiring valuable items happens during normal gameplay using other systems, then to offset that, it needs to be not nearly as valuable as actually pursuing mercantile activities, such as using non-combat skills for trading, and expanding these mechanics so that it takes time to make significant sums of currency which would then augment other aspects of gameplay. One example is Morrowind - the economy is horribly imbalanced, in particular because of alchemy, and certain vendors have restocking alchemy ingredients. Your initial play time could be spent exploiting this to create potions that are worth more than the ingredients themselves, netting a positive income flow. Rinse and repeat this and eventually you have enough money to dump into training skills, making you more effective in combat long before you even set foot on your first quest. It can trivialize, but also be a valid way to enhance your character by being a merchant first, adventurer second. To balance this, restocking inventories would have to take longer (or be eliminated forcing the player to harvest themselves). And more mercantile mechanics would have to be introduced if you wanted to leverage large sums into your character's overall combat proficiency. I think this should be encouraged in more RPGs in general. Since they purport to let you play a role, being a merchant would be a great way to navigate through the game's systems.

Really enjoyed this one. Thanks.

Very helpful insights!!!

Great video Mr. Cain, as always but this one in particular. I could notice it must have taken its fair time to prepare, as the subject of economy is quite challenging.

An interesting option in my opinion is to include character needs. More survival based games have this to an extend, food and drink comes to mind first. But also 'self care' could be an option that the player has to care for, something like getting a nice bath, good inn rooms and the like. That be explored in interesting ways i think. For example you could base it on class or perks. A monk or a paladin wouldn't be spending money on brothels or luxurious foods, but maybe they have to always give up wealth to their order? Maybe you have to choose traits at character creation that give special interests you have to fulfill. And depending on how much wealth you have, the more you have to invest to satisfy your desires. For example: Your having a party consisting of a wizard, a paladin and a rogue. After some time adventuring in the wilderness you return to the central city. Once you enter the city, desires kick in: The paladin goes to his orders and has to return 80% of his earnings to them (but receives free provisions, informations etc in return). The rogue has to go to the local inns and brothels and has to, at least spend 30 % of his stuff on alcohol, love interests and gambling. With the option to invest more and get additional information, contacts or even earn some money through gambling. And the wizard wants a luxurious room to sleep and has to invest at least 30% in room, more books and ingredients for his studies. If invested more he might discover some magic spell, increase the potency of known ones or alchemist recipes. Just an idea for the most stereotypical desires. But maybe you could choose more options on character creation, so your wizard also has a gambling problem, or prefers expensive company etc. Maybe after reaching a higher level you need better clothing because you're now a high ranking person and can't just run around in your normal clothing, so silk clothes are expected, and gilding on your armor etc

Thank you for thorough answer . Now , I will be less annoyed when i encounter next game with no good economy ;) . I really enjoy your explanation on topic . I think you would have been great university professor .

This is why I like vanguards diplomacy arc so people who didn't want to fight could still acquire gear despite not being able to kill and not just be limited to craftiny

Great points made. I would love to see a more indepth video on this with some examples you may have encountered.

The problem with balancing money sources and sinks is that if you make it too realistic, you run the risk of just surviving and grinding for money becoming a real drag for the player. So games that aren't explicitly focused on that sort of gameplay tend to go the opposite route just so the player can focus on other things. The player might struggle initially with getting money but when they reach a certain level money just stops being an issue. Often this design is even intentional - it's a part of how the player is rewarded for their efforts and made to feel powerful through them. There are other games explicitly based around constantly having too few resources but then that deliberately becomes a main gameplay mechanic. One of the best examples of such a game is FTL.

If you did your career over again, what would you do differently?

Looking forward for a lecture on the games economy, Tim!

I haven't been in school in a number of years but I would take that Game Economy class!

I don't get why people want hard games even harder. I know that super easy game may not be fun if there is no challenge, even I want some challenge, but then not too much. I play games to have fun, not to overcome hard obstacles, I have enough of these in real life, so I usually play my games around medium difficulty and I am happy with it. If someone hoards or earns lot of money in a game or finds a loophole to get rich, that is the player's choice. You may not do it if you don't want to. It all comes to player's choice anyway. Add a challenge to yourself if you want it, like using only melee or some other restrictions, something like Nuzlockes in Pokémon, or mod your game if you like, it is always up to you.

I would pay for a masterclass on game economies.

I have a question: Do you have any advice for people pitching games and; what's the optimal way of finding someone who would be interested in hearing your game pitch?

This is honestly very educating. Am playing The Outer Worlds and am walking around with roughly 14 000 rounds of ammunition, as I tend to disfavour fully automatic weapons. With the hunting rifle I kill marauders in 1-2 rounds, and there's ammo everywhere.

I started writing up this comment for a concept I had, and then I heard the part where you talked about AD&D having you pay for levelling. I'll still post the comment though. "I had this concept that you can only level up a skill by paying for it. Maybe its a trainer, or the materials needed for a ritual. You earn the XP for the skill by using the skill, then when you have capped the XP on the skill, you pay to have the level go up."

"having lots of money like Scrooge McDuck makes games super easy ..." I don't think this is true for a lot of games. A lot of games have a ceiling for what you can get with your money. Often you can buy somewhat good items with it, but if you want better items you have to run a dungeon, kill a boss, do quests etc. So you still have to engage with the content even with a lot of money. Money often makes the game easier, but it rarely trivializes it.

Amazing topic, more on this if you feel like it :D The length was perfect btw!

It's funny, I can't think of a single game I've played in the last 30 years that had a vendor in it that was actually useful. One that I would just go to and see if there's a weapon or tool or piece of armor that would be worth buying at any price. Vendors are notoriously useless while often being a source of exploitation. But you bring up a really great point in the discussion about difficulty of balancing an economy, which is players hated an unavoidable sink. We already have so many of those in our day to day lives just to stay alive and be able to even play these games. It is what it is, but it sure sucks when you analyze it. So games reminding us of this fact is exactly counter productive to the purpose of playing games.

My all-time favorite game economy has got to be from OSRS. Player-driven, and scales nicely with character progression. Prices on items inflate exponentially as their utility increases, but these inflations tend to loosely align with the sources of wealth players have access to at the moments those items are considered worth picking up. Early game items are rarely valued at over 200k, mid-game items are rarely valued at over 20 million, and absolute best in slot end game gear is usually placed around the 1 billion mark give or take a few hundred million. When you're in the early game, you don't have access to the same reliable money-makers mid and end game players do. So it might feel like a lot for them to drop a couple million on gear upgrades to progress. They'll tend to feel the value for the price. Same goes for mid-game items. Since it costs a considerable amount to acquire these sets, the value isn't lost on players when they finally acquire them. And the end game best in slot items are so wildly expensive that it takes players quite a while to purchase them, but they have access to content that has a chance at the golden ticket. So it isn't a total pipe-dream for them to eventually obtain an item valued at 1.5 billion, when they're semi-routinely getting item drops valued at 200 million and up. The upgrade path is always closely tied to the means of the player all the way through the player's journey. And yes with it being an MMO they've got the issue of inflation and currency flooding the market because the items keep dropping so long as people keep playing the content, but they're attempting to curb it with a small tax system on selling items. 1% of the market value of the item is taxed from the seller, and sent directly to mods who use the tax money to buy items and delete them from the game, sinking both currency and items themselves.

I think the gold that a player has to spend when gaining a level in DnD partly covered living expenses, along with guild fees and training fees. Surprisingly, the genre of tabletop RPG systems that seem to take into account living expenses the most are those with cyberpunk settings. For example, Shadowrun covers monthly/annual living costs for different qualities of lifestyles (minimal, average, comfortable, extravagant etc), and costs are also modified for different metatype races. E.g. dwarves and trolls end up paying a bit more in daily life, whether they're shadowrunning adventurers or normal corpo civilians, because clothing, equipment and appliances sized for them cost more, due to them being a relative minority. If you're running dangerous jobs against highly secured facilities for high profile clients, you should be making enough money to easily cover the monthly expenses of a normal lifestyle, but it's still a consideration. Economies in CRPGs will always be broken as long as there's limitlessly renewable sources of wealth generation, and the characters have no living expenses. If you throttle the rate of wealth generation, it simply makes it "grindier", so I think it's better to just let players go nuts with their money.

I remember playing and rpg where you buy spells from vendors. And in it you can max out barter and get infinite money just buying and selling back the spells. It was very amusing and extremely broken.

Paying to level up reminds me of mmorpgs like Maplestory where leveling is free and you gain stats per level, but a majority of what makes your damage numbers go up is buying the next gear set every 5 or so levels. So you effectively pay to level up.

I remember back in the day doing an infinite "sell to vendor/buy it all back for less money/repeat" in fallout 1 with sufficient barter skill... and honestly it was a blast! I didn't mind as a player, it gave me the joy of feeling like I was "pulling something off"

I am an absolutely outlier, both in your viewership (I think), and as a ttrpg enjoyer (which also i think makes me a bit of minority here as Im not a video game designer). As a minority in ttrpgs Im 41 and still play classic D&D and have not really enjoyed modern (AD&D 3e and on) versions of the system myself. As a mater of fact not only do I not mind the training cost as a player, but as a DM I not only still use training costs to this day but also charge players a tax each year. The tax is 3% of your total XP by years end - 1% goes to the gods, 1% to the guilds and 1% to the king - however I have also made it possible for players to avoid at least 1/3 of these taxes by creating the correct type of domain/stronghold. Love your channel and I really enjoy allot of the games you birthed into this wonderfully boring world we live in Mr. Cain!

A big factor that you can't really fully balance a game economy is also that every player is different and plays differently. Some people mostly only play the main story and the economy should make it possible to do that. On the other hand, there are players who explore every inch of the map, pick up every single item, finish every single side quest, pickpocket every NPC, minmax charisma mechanics with vendors etc. Impossible to balance.

Hi Tim, I'd like to know how you manage damage reduction in your games and how the approach has changed over the years, thank you for these videos which have allowed me to better understand how the worlds that I love visiting so much are created

I like how the Mount and Blade games approach economy through using real life economic principles. For example, towns generate wealth according to the resources gathered by nearby villagers, the movement of merchant caravans trading between towns, and the presence of bandits. Items that are scarce in one region are expensive, and those that are common are cheap. A pure RPG is a different beast, but I like this idea of using the principles of scarcity, supply and demand in this way to approximate a realistic economy. I think inflation also definitely needs to be incorporated, since in real life, increasing the supply of money leads to a dilution of the value of money. Perhaps if you keep track of the total quantity of gold in the game and calculate buy and sell prices based on the percentage of total items that are of the same class of item. I also think items in drops should come from a finite pool and not be infinite, as that's a huge source of imbalance imho.

That's really what it comes down to with single player RPGs/open world RPGs. If players want to find a way to make fast cash in games, they will. All you can do is try to make it reasonably balanced and let players do their thing.

I'd love to take that Course. I think overall understanding each element of a game's design,both in a vacuum and interacting with other systems makes it so,hypothetically,one can close to designing the "Perfectly Imperfect" Game.

Prey 2017 sort of had a "payment" for "leveling up" where you had to spend neuromods to gain abilities.

If you were ever up for it, I know that I at least would absolutely adore seeing lengthy courses on developing game economies. Or basically any design subject you think would warrant long form discussions like that, really.

Dark Souls has a pay-to-level-up system. The core reason why people dont like systems like the one you described is it requires that 2 progression stats be earned at near the same pace. Short of perfect balancing, you'l always have more XP than money, or more money than XP, which creates (perceived) unnecissary friction. The Souls games fix that by making those 2 resources the same thing. Not that it would work for most games.

I think Yakuza 0 addressed this by making money an important game mechanic, even to the point of buying your skills/leveling up. eventually you need to raise and spend absurd amounts of money to progress the story.

I actually like the a D&D level up sink. What I want to do though is make it that it's more of a continuous cost as opposed to a point cost. So you'll spend that $1,500 gold per level, but you don't do it all at once. The idea is that you have to see your trainer on a regular basis in order for the XPS to take

@15:20 Elden Ring/Dark Souls/Bloodborne: the _only_ component of leveling is also the primary currency of the game (to the point where I would say that its role as "currency" is pretty secondary-it is experience first and you happen to also buy stuff with it).

I would love to hear you talk about the “game development cycle” a lot of your videos reference it but as someone who works in a different sector I have no idea what you make first and what you work on right before launch. Would also like to hear about what your crunch time is like right before launch

Cyberpunk's economy completely bricks if you just pick up your enemies equipment and sell it lol

Some thoughts about one of your last points: although I understand the balancing reasons, I always HATED the buy/sell ratio caps imposed on the players to prevent trading profits. Sure, these things could be abused, but as a counterpoint so too could a lot of sources of money. The caravanning trader fantasy is a legit archetype I always want to be but I feel like games unfairly go out of their way to penalize me to prevent it. In fact, I wish games would actually lean in to that path with skills/perks that embrace trading as a full build. The same way a fighter and a wizard may use their strength and magic to solve problems, I always thought it'd be interesting to let some trader class use their money as solution (access to the best items, hirelings, bribery, etc.). But for every reason you mentioned in the video, it's something that probably won't ever work in practice. One way or the other the economy won't ever function in the way I want to imagine it to let this fantasy happen in a balanced way ):

My favourite "remedy" from Baldur's Gate 3: have vendors that sell ridiculously expensive items that are only slightly better than their much cheaper alternatives. Will +1 AC on my armor break the game? No. Will I pay 11,000 gold for it when I have 45,000 gold saved up? Absolutely. And it's such a safe and easy solution. If you get it wrong, people just always/never buy the item and the game keeps going. Tangentially: this is also why I love RPGs that keep the "numbers" low. I can reason about +1 AC far easier than "+580 armor", and every little sliver of added stat feels meaningful. World of Warcraft had the leveling sink for a while. If you played a fairly average pace, you couldn't ever afford all the new skills/spells. Eventually they greatly lowered the cost, and eventually axed that whole system.

Game economist here with two thoughts I'd like to add: (1) To bring economics to an even higher, bird's eye level, an oft-overlooked currency is HP itself. It has a cap and a floor, you manage how to get it (potions, regen, spells), mitigate it (armor, skills, healing), and how you lose it (by sucking, mostly). (2) If a game spends a ton of effort making the economy super balanced, or self-regulating like player-based multiplayer economies, it can be really easy to accidentally make the economy of the game into work, which is not the point of playing games (looking at you EVE Online).

Steambot chronicles was perfect because travel was dangerous and expensive it was a world amid an industrial revolution that used robots instead of cars. So you could make money buying and selling certain supplies once you buy the part to carry it, like a barrel for liquids. And you can transport people. But further you can invest and develop the economy by finding things like the railroad and participate in the stock market, then when the great war happens you can be evil and capitalise.

One of the major rpg (tabletop, pen&paper one) has something along those lines: in Shadowrun, you can spend xp to get money, and vice versa. Depending on the editions it was a core or an optional rule, in the main book or a companion sourcebook, it varies. And while I personally don't like this level of gamification, it was from anecdotal experience (including a LOT of time spent on Dumpshock) a very popular option. The goal of the rule is to help GM balance reward (by making it simpler to do, less gotcha, less pitfalls), and to tackle the fact that various builds have very different needs. Some will need huge amounts of money to buy, upgrade and maintain cyberware or drones or state of the art computers, while others don't need a lot of equipment. It's possible to add a narrative twist to that (the best GM did in Shadowrun, but at least up to 4th edition there wasn't any meaningful guidelines or help from sourcebooks on that, at best a couple of paragraphs with example) mechanic to make it palatable to immersion fascists like myself: things like spending time and effort and social debt (i.e. xp) to get extra money or discounts, or spending money on special training equipment or personal trainer (i.e. spend money to get xp). It's not perfect and can fall apart very fast on tabletop ("I spent millions to get this unique rare magic tome to improve my magic skill... why can't I lend it to my teammates, or just re-sell it?") but in a more constraint and scripted game, i.e. a videogame, it could work.

Tim, I was thinking on this topic after also watching your video on emergent gameplay and maybe more rpgs should have at least some rudimentary simulation of supply and demand to determine prices, and it could be abstracted to nodes so that the game doesn't need to necessarily over complicate the needs of every individual npc. basically learn from strategy games like anno, victoria 2, eu4, etc. and this would be a systemic attribute of the design. So you could have a player sell a lot of say, iron swords within a trade node, but once the amount of iron swords within merchant inventories in total within that trade node, the price will drop and the player, at least for a time, gets diminishing returns on selling certain items. you could also build on top of this to dynamically adjust the challenge of the area, so if at the merchants within a trade node the player sells a bunch of high level gear and the buy/sell price goes down, then after a certain amount of time npcs like town guards might start carrying the same high level gear that has recently been sold. Also, in the same way that players in rpgs can often have houses or a home base, it would be cool if the player could own their own store and have a management minigame as part of it, which would become both a sink and a source, and it works on the basis of market simulation mechanics described earlier. This would all make the experience of simply buying and selling goods in the gameworld more dynamic and offer more rp opportunities, even if it doesn't necessarily balance it. You could also have the barter skill of players impact how much immediate or precise data players have about these metrics in the ui (or in management minigame). Another potential way to have a sink is to have some kind of simulation of inflation, like in EU4. Could also even have unique events and quest chains based on predictable player behaviour, like the possibility of players causing hyperinflation or something like that.

@0:45 I experienced the opposite, Tim, GTA 3 has that game mechanic from previous games that it is easy to gain huge amounts of money ingame without almost nothing to buy by destroying things. In GTA 2 money represented damage and you need to incur a certain amount to get to the next level. @3:06 In GTA 3 IMHO it was relatively easy to fix because the gun shops were already pretty restrictive with the amount of ammo you could buy. @4:10 It is not the job of the government to control the economy anyway. @18:25 Yes, the infamous dupe glitch in Fallout 4 where you can save 1000 of hours grinding for money and resources that apparently is way too time consuming to fix for Bethesda. @18:53 Yes, but there are time and resource constraints.

what a way to be inspired

The system where you have to pay to level up actually sounds great. You would have to save up and plan ahead. Unfortunately I think games are too focused on casuals to implement that. Not making a judgment on that either way by the way. Great video thank you :)

For me i dont care about too little or too much currency in lets say FO76 it does not change my experience.

When you brought up paying to level, I actually think fromsoft operated like that a great deal. And it was a pretty good limiter or ‘setter of flow’.