How Video Game Economies are Designed

[@GMTK]

This video was originally a lecture I gave at a university in The Netherlands. Thanks to the students at Breda University of Applied Sciences for being the guinea pigs on this one! GMTK Patrons on the video tier can now access a recording of another lecture I gave, called "How to steal like a game designer". www.patreon.com/posts/gmtk-talk-how-to-65578597

[@tonelsen]

This channel is so well structured it’s giving me chills!

[@salem8231]

Do you lecture at universities often? Starting at Abertay this year and seeing you speak would be amaying!

[@Speculaas]

G E K O L O N I S E E R D Anyhow, great video as always Mark. Tot ziens!

[@GMTK]

@@salem8231 I actually spoke at the Abertay game dev society earlier this year!

[@salem8231]

@@GMTK Oh awesome! Hope to see you while I'm there

[@PcGameHunter]

The Bovine Defense Force Initiative isn't even the best part, the best part is from the Heart of Stone DLC. In Oxenfurt a tax collector stops you to question you about using all of the different exploits as well as stealing from peoples houses. He also prevents you from using banks until you pay your taxes.

[@TerrorLTZ]

the tax collector: stop u must pay taxes. Geralt: from where i come we do tax evasion as a sport.

[@hoodiesticks]

Better yet, if you play your cards right, you can talk your way out of your tax punishment, and actually get rewarded for being an "upstanding citizen".

[@Sharkey007x]

oh wow!

[@Lumberjack_king]

That's hilarious

[@spairus4492]

@@hoodiesticks I hope you're insinuating you get to play Gwent with him over you having to pay or get paid /s

[@MJTRadio]

My favorite gaming economy is the original Fable. “Good morning, trader. I see you have a hundred barrels of cider. That must mean they are cheap today.” “What ho, Hero, that’s right. Here you go, all of them sold at a bulk discount price.” “Thank you, kind trader. But now I see you have no cider, that’s no good is it? I have a hundred barrels I can sell you here, but since you are desperate, I’m sure you can understand I must sell at a premium.” “Tis fair, good Hero, I’ll buy them all at a premium!” “Good day, literally the same trader, I see you have many barrels of cider, I’m sure you must be willing to sell them at a discount…”

[@Ramsey276one]

O M G XD

[@Xonatron]

Wow. That’s great design.

[@konradvonschnitzeldorf6506]

Strangely realistic hahaha

[@cloudburst27]

What? 🤣

[@Heolses]

You can solve this easily by ensuring that the price of each individual item in a bulk buying/selling is adjusted by the number you're attempting to buy/sell That's what they do in Starsector

[@canorth]

Zelda’s breakable weapons lead to a strange late game play style for me. I roamed the world killing lynels. My inventory was entirely my favorite lynel weapons and I got really good at shooting them with their own multi-arrow bows, right in the chin, stunning them, and killing them in one loop just to stockpile more of their stuff.

[@TheDigitalAtlas]

I feel like this and guardian hunting was the intended late game grind. Because if you take the time to grind this way like you're playing some sort of Monster Hunter, the final castle feels like you're equipped the handle EVERYTHING. Or you can use Revali's Gale to skip all the traps. BOTW is awesome, man.

[@rage_2000]

I went though the world killing weak enemies with urbosa’s fury and hynox with arrows to get weapons and parts, then spending those weapons on lynels and exchanging the monster parts for arrows and insects

[@bendystrawz2832]

I literally entered a cycle of "Kill Lynels for weapons, use those weapons to kill more Lynels and Guardians, use the Guardian parts to make more weapons, blood mood, repeat murder." I legit used to have a map route to take me to as many Lynels as I had found with a few pit stops at key bokoblin skulls and Hinox (for more weapons, Lynels are beefy), making a few Guardian-murder pit stops on the way, and then the blood moon would hit after I finished the loop. It gave me nothing in the long run (cause all my weapons were used in the loop itself), but it was oddly satisfying to run from one monster to another and master fighting them.

[@TheDigitalAtlas]

@AndrewWithEase11 11 don't remember asking!

[@TheDigitalAtlas]

@XenonZed yeah it's def not required by any means!! Ganon is such an easy fight that it can almost feel like a waste getting such good gear, and if you have good stamina (and food) you can just bypass a lot of the castle. I like that the game is that flexible but I wish Ganon was remotely difficult.

[@lucasfranke5161]

That's an interesting topic. Take Skyrim for example: enemies usually drop everything they have equiped. That's realistic and rewarding, but it also necessarily means the amount of gold you will get for selling an item has to be much much lower than the amount of gold spent to buy that same item. Otherwise the player would be rich very very quickly

[@Billycca3]

I think the encumbrance system helps with that too though. It's difficult to make a quick buck off of basic gear since its hard to carry much of it.

[@lucasfranke5161]

@@Billycca3 I mean, kinda? But fast traveling to a city to sell/store your loot then fast traveling back to the dungeon is pretty fast. It's more of a slight inconvenience than a limitation In fact, I'd argue finite inventories on games like Skyrim are just bad. Limited inventories only make sense on survival games IMO. Like, I can carry 299,9 Kg of stuff, but 300 makes the game unplayable? What's the purpose of that? The game isn't trying to limit the amount of resources available at any given time, it's just trying to annoy the player

[@tj-co9go]

Lol, you are saying Skyrim economy does not make the player rich very quickly? Oh boy. Even without dabbling in alchemy or enchanting your financial worries are over after only a few hours. Buying stuff from vendors is nearly useless in Skyrim anyway since loot and bosses in dungeons contained much better level-scaled gear. You can even pickpocket items and steal them from people's houses and sell them.

[@lucasfranke5161]

@@tj-co9go true. Skyrim's economy is pretty fucked anyway lol. Other than buying houses and raw materials, gold is pretty useless

[@klauzwayne4215]

@@lucasfranke5161 well, i once used the alchemy loop to craft carry boots lv9000+. After I looted an entire dungeon I opened the inventory and then the game froze for half a minute. Turns out the carry cap is actually technical to prevent massive lag.

[@aslandus]

To be fair to the Witcher, it sounds like the problem isn't that the cows can be killed or that they respawn too fast, I'd wager that there's a fair few monsters that do the same, but that the cows don't fight back and thus can be slaughtered without consequence. If a player's willing to stay in one place and fight the same monsters for four hours, it's kind of on them if they break the game's economy, but being able to just generate infinite wealth by attacking peasants' livestock does sound like a pretty un-Witcherly thing to do.

[@nick7072]

I don't get why they made cows respawnable or didn't make peasants hate you for killing them and ruining reputation. Doesn't make any sense. Seems like a lazy fix.

[@asneakychicken322]

@@nick7072 because those other fixes are far more involved that what they figured it was worth to fix this problem that only some people are exploiting, there is no reputation system so you'd be asking to implement one in tandem just to fix this, or you'd be asking them to track the world state between instances which it doesn't do either outside of completable one off things like monster nests, again, another system entirely to be built just to facilitate fixing this minor issue.

[@sirjmo]

@@asneakychicken322 I guess spawning a monster is the simplest solution. Alternatives: reputation system, diminishing rewards (drop value of loot as you repeat), diminishing respawns, no respawns.

[@ShadowDragon7015]

@@sirjmo Minecraft does something like that with trades from villagers. The trades for the resources will go up in cost, or they reduce the number of trades based on how often and how quickly you attempt to trade. But that extra cost or reduced trades resets back to normal if you don't interact with the villager for a few ingame days. It makes it so players don't sit and grind the same thing over and over and encourages them to find resources elsewhere or to put in effort to find more villagers to trade with.

[@NyleGames]

@@nick7072 For big open world games where small changes can effect anything and everything, sometimes fixes need to be lazy.

[@tomkleinenberg]

Time is a resource that is often overlooked. It's the primary currency in most free-to-play games (you can convert currency into a time bonus, however the game store presents it). It's also immediately apparent in a lot of competitive multiplayer games (something like the old 4 pool zergling rush in StarCraft was a direct gamble of potential resources for combat advantage).

[@starcraft2own]

Time is by far one of my favorite resources in games that do have it. (In any meaningful way and not like a barrier of access) Starcraft is a perfect example as it displays the cost of actions in the measurement of time. What can you do, where can you shave off some seconds, how can you use the time you're given with the most efficiency. I'm a huge Anno fan and would die on the hill that the old Anno games were the best, but after i properly played Anno 1800 i definitively feel like it's the best one for a very simple reason. Time. Unlike the other games, Anno 1800's most important resource isn't what you get from your islands but rather the time you have to spend on the various aspects of the game. It is so chock full of features and game mechanics that there is no realistic way to keep up with everything it throws at you in any reasonable way. Trust me, i have 180+ apm. So instead Anno 1800 forces you to value the time you place on each action. It becomes a resource that is undeniably the most important aspect of the game. And lets not forget that turn based games are built around the concept of time being the main aspect of the game. It only advanced by a set amount every time you press a button. So turn based games are essentially about using time as perfectly as possible.

[@fabiandik8839]

Time is a resource in games and in real life. Putting pressure on the player to reduce their time to make decisions affects the difficulty of the game as well. Having more time to build up a defence compared to being rushed to build a defence will have great different outcomes. In life, similarly, spending weeks to prepare for a test will generally give you better results than giving you only 5 minutes.

[@RaZeyLWindBladE]

@@fabiandik8839 unless you have photographic memory, then all you need is those 5 mins. Kinda like Serral and Reynor.

[@declanprobably]

I once wrote an essay on Superhot that essentially became about how its primary resource is time. It was a really interesting perspective that I stumbled into while analysing it.

[@EmperorSigismund]

Another example is 'death by draw' decks in Hearthstone, decks whose sole victory condition is to stall the game until your opponent dies from overdrawing. These decks would often win ladder matches as the opponent would concede immediately because they would rather play 5 other matches with their rush deck in the same timeframe

[@Chorutowo]

I love the focus on other aspects of an economy often not considered, like exp and loot. I never though that exp and killing bosses are a form of economy. Another great video!

[@utisti4976]

Same!

[@robocu4]

Same

[@gabrote42]

Diablo III flashbacks. *EVE ONLINE FLASHBACKS!*

[@foldupgames]

Yeah, that was pretty sharp. Well worth looking at them from that viewpoint.

[@tolkraft1883]

If you think that's interesting, you should check out Action Economy in turn based games.

[@hemangchauhan2864]

Can't express enough how well you distill hours of GDC talks and Gamasutra/GameDev articles into a cohesive video. You save us games enthusiasts (who mostly need to know crux of things) a lot of time. And it's an amazing skill to have IRL. Boiling down things to just essentials is one skill I really want.

[@GMTK]

Thanks Hemang, that's a nice comment - exactly what I'm going for with GMTK :D

[@mudsp1ash]

Was gonna start designing my game's trading system in 2 days , perfect timing Mark!

[@Imperial_Squid]

Would also be a really good idea to look into the concept of "arbitrage" it's an economics/gambling term about systems or bets respectively where you can guarantee a payout, eg if I sell wood for 3 gold but will buy it for 4, you can make infinite money just moving the same bit of wood back and forth! Real examples are way more complex and hard to spot obviously but it's a good thing to keep an eye on!

[@mudsp1ash]

@@Imperial_Squidit's basically a battle royale in which players have to fight and trade only using a single resource . I have a rough idea about the direction I want to go in but now I gotta learn how to turn my ideas into code

[@nicollasplate7479]

Same to me bro, this timing was just perfect

[@Imperial_Squid]

@@mudsp1ash Ah fair enough, not much cause for concern regarding exploiting a converter since I guess you might not really have one... Best of luck putting your stuff down into code!

[@KootFloris]

If there ever was a place where one could experiment with large scale alternative financial systems that could be solutions to real world problems, it’s games. In the MMO’s whole societies play alternative worlds, yet our capitalistic money system stays the same. Insane. So invent alternatives. How are these (alien) worlds truly different even in how they run their economy? There’s a ton of ideas on the internet. And see how people react. One can even scale aggressiveness or peace by changing the rules. Or have different tribes with different value systems, so dealing and understanding each other really becomes a problem. Invite scientists to observe which system actually helps and which system leads to more war. Example: Gift economy. Everyone gives to the needs of others and players are expected to do the same. Those that don’t share freely are called ‘hoarders’ which is an offense or makes you a social outcast. (Go catch them.) At the same time, any hero needing new equipment can get it for free when he needs it at any storage; if available. It’s just the aliens or enemies of the gifting culture that need to be beaten. And, will the player hand over that awesome sword when another knight asks for it? Or become a 'hoarder'? So do more than just balance rob/steal/gather to sell in order to have money, to buy stuff or resample the items into a new one with new uses. A huge questions in the real world is: Can we create a financial system that rewards improving the natural world and social conditions, rather than greed and the ravaging of the planet (as we have now). When you succeed your fame will last centuries, let alone that you'll help us all.

[@shirgall]

The fundamental rule of economics is "people respond to incentives". It's not just supply and demand, it's about managing what players want and don't want.

[@Archangelm127]

The best quote for this is "show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome" by Charlie Munger

[@pjsamm6980]

Is "what players want and don't want" not demand?

[@this_is_japes7409]

@@pjsamm6980 not exactly, demand can be very high for something, but not necessarily because of want. for example, the demand for cow leather could be extremely high but only because it sells for a decent price. the demand for cow leather is artificial. no one actually wants cow leather everyone just wants to sell cow leather, for coins or another currency. this *usually* doesn't work in the real world, because of physical supply limits, but in game since supply isn't always managed or affect demand it can have consequences like this.

[@shirgall]

@@pjsamm6980 A lot of people think economics is the supply and demand curve, but it really boils down to incentives and disincentives. Every player will have a different reaction to them, and that is not driven by supply and demand.

[@AnotherDuck]

@@shirgall Supply and demand curves aren't really for individuals, but for populations, like most statistics. Incentives and disincentives are part of what affects supply and demand, which includes cases like a high demand incentivizing higher supply. Well, I don't study economics, so I might be off, but that's my understanding of it.

[@CMWinter]

Joking aside, CDPR finding that hole in the economy and plugging it with their own style of humour is just as effective as the comparisons you used after it. Really love things like that, especially because it was a few months later, so CDPR can say, "Right, people are stuck on farming cows and haven't found anything more broken, so we'll just fix that."

[@exysa2798]

CDPR made this patch weeks after launch.

[@NerdyCatCoffeeee]

Best part is that after you kill cows, and the monster (that now spawns only once), you can go back to cow killing

[@unvergebeneid]

Right, because Witcher 3 doesn't remain incredibly buggy up to this day or anything... 🤔

[@harshulbarooah6556]

@@unvergebeneid What are you talking about? You're just being a contrarian for the sake of it.

[@unvergebeneid]

@@harshulbarooah6556 you haven't played through the game recently, have you? I have and it's very glitchy. I never encountered anything game-breaking but glitches are everywhere.

[@narukedag]

There is another way to avoid exploit and streamline the economy: horizontal needs. You briefly mentioned it but it's worth digging the subject. In many games by progressing in later part of the game you start to need different kinds of materials to keep upgrading your character. For example in AC Valhalla to enhance a gear from Fine to Superior you need Carbon Ingots. Then to enhance it from Superior to Flawless you need Nickel Ingots, etc. This has 3 benefits: - It avoids endless grind: Once the players have enough Carbon Ingot to enhance their gears to Superior grinding more of them will not fasten their progression. So they are forced to go in later game region to keep progression. - This limit the impact of choices: you'll chose what to enhance first but then finding more ingots will allow you to enhance other gears - It's a great way to create catch-up loops: the leftovers ingots you have can be spend on newly found gears without slowing down your current progression. This means that you can try new stuff without having to worry too much about wasting important ressources. Of course creating meaningful choices is important, and fewer materials help for that. But sometimes you also want to guarantee a good flow of progression to any players and make sure they do not make mistakes that can slow down their progress or even block them totally.

[@awesomemike3857]

I love this explaination

[@cupriferouscatalyst3708]

That's like the Titanite/Smithing Stones in Dark Souls/Elden Ring.

[@kaioshinon5954]

This system of economy doesn't really work as you say. Take Elden Ring for example, it has different level of smithing stones that you need to upgrade your weapons. When you are in advanced area, and have already used a lot of these stones on some weapon with one favourite above the others, and you don't have already unlocked the mechanics that let you buy those lower stones, then you will not find low level stones to upgrade a weapon. Another big issue, and for me bigger then the first one, is that you have your weapon, for example, at +17 and you can't use weapons at +10 or +12 because they are too weak compared to the strenght of the enemy in the area where you play with your highest enchanced weapon. The game force you to play with the first 2-3 weapons that you decided to max earlier because of this second issue.

[@Jacob-yg7lz]

One way the Witcher could've solved the cow problem was to have armed guards come after you. or make you lose reputation to the people in the surrounding areas. In a way, that's adding a cost to a resource that's nominally free.

[@Stratelier]

Meanwhile in Skyrim, if the player kills one chicken: _40 gold added to Whiterun bounty_

[@noizepusher7594]

Yup, what I call the wooden hammer solution. Essentially when there’s an exploit, when patching it, say “what would happen if you attempted this exploit in real life?”

[@lucasfranke5161]

@@Stratelier *Kills one chicken:* "Skyrim belongs to the nords!"

[@Stratelier]

@@lucasfranke5161 "Never should have come here..." "I'll mount your head on my wall!"

[@moonknightish]

In order to do that you need to create new systems, you can't do that after launch

[@nicolaskraj]

Thanks for the link to my "Keys to Economic Systems" article! Love the taps/drains analogies in the video, makes it definitely easier to grasp while discussing systems than sources/sinks/currency destruction. Keep up the good work!

[@N77Shogun]

An interesting follow up would be on times economies in games collapsed, in the first Fable there was a well-known exploit to gain infinite currency by buying items in bulk, then immediately reselling them to the same shopkeep. The developers tried to implement supply and demand prices for items to encourage trading between the game’s towns, but because it recalculated cost at the end of every transaction it created instant profit for players.

[@giantenemycrab5596]

I feel like they could’ve added another patch to the Bovine Defence Force Initiative where if you farmed 6 of the cow monsters, an even higher level monster would show up

[@lucasfranke5161]

That's a good one lol

[@the4spaceconstantstetraqua886]

And then 6 of the CM+s spawn a CM++, And then 6 of the CM++s spawn a CM+++, And then 6 of the CM+++s spawn a CM++++, And then 6 of the CM++++s spawn a CM+++++..... (CM is for cow monster)

[@Urfin_Djus]

Bovine Defence Force Defence Force

[@razvanefros411]

thats a positive feedback loop, higher level players will abuse the crap out of it. Current solution works because low level players cannot abuse it, and high level players have no incentive to keep farming cows as the money they generate is insignificant at their level. They could have also made the Chort drop no experience and no money, so its a clear punishment and not a challenge

[@chuckchuk14]

It'd be cool to see you do a similar video on "MMO Economies" Because when other players are mixed into the economy it presents other interesting questions, and designing an economy with flaws becomes even more apparent when you're competing with other players in that market. Some of the issues I have often found, however, was also in trying to weigh the 'emotional value' of an item versus it's 'economic value' In Oldschool Runescape, you can buy and sell any item to any other player, though the re-introduction of the auction house makes this process exceedingly easy and impersonal. And it also comes with the caveat that every item becomes so easy to sell to other players that they lose the emotional value to them. You can buy an incredible staff within seconds using the Grand Exchange (auction house), use it until you don't need it anymore, and then auction it off to the next person, and it's just used as a step in your path rather than a personal item that has a story to it. And I don't attribute this problem simply to every item being tradable. While a game like WoW might escape the problem of making items only worth their economic value and not their emotional value, it does so by blocking the trade of certain items that are "soulbound." An item will become soulbound to a player once it's equipped, or Raid Items also cannot be traded outside of Raid Members. This creates another issue of making items not feel like your own property. Since you can't simply pass the item off to a friend, or trade it for big money, it doesn't feel like your item that you can do what you want with. It's bound to you and you alone, which also squanders a bit of the player to player economy. Going back to runescape, I believe there's a beauty to every item being tradable, and I do like how the Grand Exchange creates a sort of mini stock market for items, as their prices might inflate or deflate depending on current news about the game or a number of other factors. However, the ease at which you can just walk up to the grand exchange, look up this exceedingly rare item, and then purchase it there on the spot, that makes every item worth some sort of economic value and that's it, and you can almost certainly get your money back later if you resell it. It feels very impersonal and items don't have any sort of history behind them. And while the re-introduction of the grand exchange brought in a HUGE player base to Oldschool Runescape, it also removed this feeling of a market place where players interacted with each other, buying and selling goods. Even though there may have been a lot of scammers, that was almost part of the fun, because it meant you had to be a little smarter with your dealings. There's a lot more I could go into, and I already rambled on too much without making too many coherent points but oh well!

[@lucbloom]

That’s a 3-year graduation study.

[@gogauze]

Two of the things I've considered for MMO style economies are transaction fees and trade degradation. The first one is just a tax on getting the item at all from another player through a trading hub. If there aren't any exploits for reasonably quick currency, it can stall stepping stone gear trades, somewhat, depending on what kind of threshold is set and where the actual values are. I'm positive that this solution needs systemic consideration and balancing on a game by game basis. And possibly consideration by type and tier of gear within the same system. But I'm pretty sure it can work. Trading degradation is the craftier idea, imo. Essentially, each time a piece of gear changes hands it goes from a fully powered unique item, from a quest or drop, and becomes a used generic item with the values reduced and possibly losing certain properties all together. The debuff can be handled by an algorithm tied to a value on the individual instance of a piece of gear in a master list, so there's no need to have a billion actual versions of the thing inflating the size of the game. The reduction curve should also be logarithmic. The first transaction sees the sharpest decline, the next less decline, and it eventually flattens out to the least powerful version. So first hand gear always has the best bonuses, traits, and unique names, and the traded used gear ends up feeling less epic by comparison. Of course, carving out a few exceptions for raid partners, and a possibly a type of grace period or limited circumstances in which you can sell something as new, can help soften the blow. But I think that could neatly deal with stepping stone progression.

[@AzNZinc]

RS3 sort of "fixed" this impersonality problem indirectly via the 'Invention' skill which allows you to augment (soulbinding an item) and allows you to make gizmos to give them specific perks for what you want. It ends up giving off the feeling of "I saved up for this, I earned it, now I can make it my own."

[@nschwerte8324]

i agree. the value a player places on an individual piece of item depends a lot on the economy of the game, especialy in a mmo. In Albion Online everything is traded and created by players and gear gets permanently destroyed when people die with it. This means that you have a flourishing economy with functioning crafters, but it also means that your gear turns into more advanced consumables. You dont go out into the world with your great armour that has served you well during your playtime, you use one of your multiple identical sets you bought from the market or crafter and accept that you have invested this amount of silver(because items are just money invested into means of production) into an uncertain expedition, where you could die and lose the invested silver(the items dont matter!) all or you are successful and bring back value you can use to finance unsucessful tries, the various silver drains or using it to better your personal economic base. But if you are successful you can put your gear back into the stockpile and it will become indistinguishable from any other set, you just got back your investment and can risk it again at a later date.

[@chuckchuk14]

@@gogauze Yeah I've definitely thought about item degradation before too! However, it has some downsides to it as well. If you make gear significantly worse after one use, it'll rarely be valuable for someone to purchase said item the next time around, the price of a degraded item wouldn't only dip slightly, it would dip astronomically in a system where min-maxing can make a huge difference. So it really depends on what kind of game system you're putting this concept into. In a game where every little stat can make the difference between a victory and a defeat, then degraded gear becomes useless. But in messier systems, where a lvl1 enemy can still theoretically kill a lvl100 something or rather (think something more akin to souls series where you can beat the games at lvl1, but taken more to a less extreme cause it'd be hard to place into an mmo setting), then degraded items can still be incredibly useful.

[@thedapperdolphin1590]

I feel like it doesn’t take long for me to end up with more money than I could hope to spend in most games, especially RPGs. Making the currency the thing you also need to level up helps with this, as it creates interesting choices about what to use it on. But it would also help if more games focused on balancing scarcity and higher cost of items. If I can afford to buy 90 super potions mid game then the tension during combat is largely gone.

[@aurin_komak]

In STALKER, you kill a lot of people. However, you can't sell their weapons because they're always and I mean always in such a bad state that nobody wants to buy them. This prevents players from carrying 20 rifles on their back and getting rich in an instant

[@rolfs2165]

Lost Ark has solved this pretty cleverly, I think. Killing enemies only gives you minuscule amounts of xp and silver (like, barely double digit amounts), the proper way to get those is through quests and daily activities. So even if you spend all day killing eels to craft the meal in your adventurer's tome, you don't walk away from it with two levels gained and pockets heavy with cash.

[@DarkBloodbane]

It's tough thing to balance. Some games limits how much money player could hold preventing money hoarding. However this require balancing cause it might make purchasing expensive items harder and tedious.

[@boingkster]

Hence the inventory limit - look at Metro Exodus. You can only carry a few medkits, and crafting them mid-combat isn't possible. Your weapons rely on ammunition you must craft (with the same recources as everything else), loot or obtain from downed enemies - however unless you melee or heatshot an unaware enemy you often expend more ammunition than you gain. New areas have new stashes to loot and new enemies and secrets to enagage with, thus motivating it to be a game of exploration, stealth, precision and thriftiness. Surprisingly realistic if you think about it.

[@bsherman8236]

Expensive superpowerful consumables usually does that well, or tons of unique overpriced items like in new vegas.

[@Mr3rdChoice]

Great video, I love this topic! I feel like it's worth emphasizing that Drains aren't important because they drain resources from the PLAYER, but rather from the ECONOMY ITSELF. Because value (Gold) is added consistently (every time a baddy is slain), there should be massive inflation on the value of a GP (assuming this is a multiplayer economy). But as long as there are ways for GP to disappear from the world (say, buying items from a shop), then inflation can be kept in check.

[@the11382]

What about singleplayer?

[@Stratelier]

Correct. Indeed, in games (like _Skyrim)_ where purchased goods and cash are actually tracked, there can be bugs/exploits that allow a player to steal back whatever resources they just sold/traded to a merchant literally seconds ago. The game needs to occasionally purge this information from the system to compensate for the fact that spawning new enemies means adding new resources.

[@Alche_mist]

@@the11382 You can see that in oldschool JRPGs. One of the key parts of the power fantasy is that fairly early, the "gold" you have becomes nearly meaningless, because you can afford basically anything you can get for it. Exactly because the core gameplay loop with all the random encounters links you directly on a significant tap of this kind of resource. On the other hand, the progressive XP requirement (here attributed to Elden Ring, but being older than Pokémon Red) in fact are a form of inflation, pushing you towards the continuing by making the grinding of easy creeps inefficient. So, in singleplayer, the experience is heavily curated and as such, you can easily run with the inflation or inbuild the drainless (or the drains being not even close to the power of the taps - looking at you, laughably cheap Trauma Inns) effect into the power fantasy and the experience.

[@the11382]

@@Alche_mist Inflation can still be a problem though. This isn't specific to JRPGs, Skyrim is a good example of inflation. Everything in Skyrim is broken, taps are too much, inventories don't make sense, sinks are almost nonexistent and converters can actually provide more than they cost.

[@Alche_mist]

@@the11382 Whether it is a problem depends heavily on what the intended experience is. If it's a power fantasy where you get massive resources anyway, inflation is often not a problem or a problem so small it's not worth solving. On the other hand, in resource-strapped cases such as survival games or economy simulations (including tycoons), such issues can be very detrimental to the intended experience. It's very much a case-by-case situation, but in general it's far less of a problem than when multiplayer gets involved.

[@koholos]

As someone who designs board games, I find your breakdowns of video game mechanics really fascinating. Bruce Geryk once wrote a fascinating opinion piece about the fact that as computers get more complicated, they can offload more and more of the game until it essentially becomes a “black box”, so seeing someone try to remap the box and let us peek inside them is really interesting. Because video games are easy to start and end, and can be played solo, many people can beat on them for tens or even hundreds of hours. whereas for most modern board games the average player will probably only play 5 or 6 times, so while they need to be well balanced for the aggregate, players don’t neccesarily have the same time and ability yo beat on them - so adapting some of these tricks back into the board game world work very well.

[@Seymour101]

This is an exceptionally well crafted and researched presentation , I can tell you're someone who genuinely loves video games and appreciates the work that goes into making them. I'm thankful you made this available for free and I hope you continue making great content !

[@threemeters1425]

Then you have games like Mount and Blade with actual working economies with interactable supply and demand built in. It’s surprisngly fun to be a merchant in that game, hope a mod comes along to expand on it

[@villus9384]

Or even crazier in a game like Victoria 2 which is all about a global economy and production

[@rzrx1337]

The X series does this too.

[@okdude8215]

Prophecy of pendor is a great mod for warband

[@Ripcode2233891]

It's incredible how many things Mount and Blade got right in their first game. I found it really addictive and enjoyable compared to Warband and M&B 2

[@geeshta]

I like the "maintenance" cost in Warcraft 3 - the bigger your army is, the less gold your miners bring. This also means, that if you just defeat an enemy army, they suddenly gain more gold and can quickly come back. Also it can lead to different strategies how and when to boom.

[@Stratelier]

Maintenance/upkeep really is an underrated negative feedback loop. For example, in current headlines we have a small country fending off attacks from a _vastly_ larger military, in large part by hampering its ability to maintain and upkeep its units over distance.

[@PrimordialNightmare]

and WoW implementing upkeep in the form of equipment repair & food later.

[@todorus]

@@Stratelier I would say that's a supply chain problem and a different beast altogether. The upkeep in Wacraft 3 is basically a tax and a linear equation. A supply chain is a graph problem.

[@esotericsean]

Another great GMTK video to takes notes on. Great info!

[@vantablack6288]

the best part of victoria 2 is that even the devs dont know how the fucking economy in that game works. it just does.

[@Ramsey276one]

*WAT* XD

[@613aristocrat]

Honestly, exploits that take effort are awesome. Finding the right position in older games where the boss can't get you and nailing it is so satisfactory.

[@nicollasplate7479]

This video just saved my life, I'm stuck in balancing the economy in my college project, thank you so much for releasing this now ❤

[@whoisj]

love this episode, I am going to be linking a lot of people to this video to explain "why does the game ... ?" questions I always hear. why "tap" and "drain", and not the more traditional "source" and "sink" terminology? 🤣

[@Leptons_]

Can't use the leaky tap analogy I guess 😅

[@whoisj]

@@Leptons_ best answer 😁👍

[@JamesChurchill]

The intro slide for the tap and drain also say source and sink. The problem is just one of simple descriptive clarity. But also, in more complicated systems a sink is also a source for the next stage of a pipeline, which can be confusing. Here, Mark is specifically referring to the terminal endpoints of the entire system.

[@WiresDawson]

@@Leptons_ is that a Broden Kelly pfp i spy?

[@oisincleary9542]

because drain gang

[@CoyotesOwn]

A fun bit of economy in Gothic 1: All the Gothic games have limited exp. the economy as a monster only respawns at the start of a chapter. So once kill all the monsters you could kill, you need to wait till you started a new chapter limiting your xp gain. Only in a late part of the game, you find a puzzle that if solved incorrectly summons a demon. Which is supposed to be a punishment but at that point, it can easily become a source of infinite XP.

[@chocobofangirl]

The pre-Inquisition Dragon Ages had this same set-up, suffice to say I walked through a certain glitched doorway a lot of times lol

[@benedict6962]

Great video. It's also important to note the different scales of scopes there are to the economies. We view money and shops as relatively open systems with new shops around every corner, but there are many, many closed systems as well. Combat being a very important one. Mages have to manage their MP consumption and recovery to get the most bang for buck. Barbarians juggle rage meter with far more precision than the stereotype implies. Depending on the kind of game, what the enemy does can have little or a lot to do with the internal economy of each class' gameplay loop. If it's not your job to heal, you might not even care about that void ray eating away at your health bar beyond pointing your aoe up at the sky. No matter how many mechanics or numbers you place, the choices you have in the moment are about control over taps, converters, and drains. Try not to focus too much on +2% bonuses in a game where the player's most meaningful choices are whether to use red colored damage juice or blue colored damage juice.

[@Duffy_SSBM]

I never thought about EXP being a part of a game's economy before. Great video!

[@Meese12]

One of my favorite ideas but least favorite executions is actually a mod- Enderal. Its a skyrim mod that returns to a Fallout like system, with XP and level ups granting skill points. Those skill points are unallocated, and need skill books to be invested into skills. This is great, as it makes players think about money unlike base Skyrim, because you need to buy the books from vendors. The issue is their price. Theyre so high that from a whole quest chain you can end up buying only about 10 of the highest level books. So, you do quests to get money which also grant XP, so you level up and get more skill points, and you end up getting more skill points than you could ever hope to use.

[@ISolNacienteI]

I really didn't liked the level system of Enderal. It was way to dependend on money. In Skyrim, I was thinking about the value of the loot and if it was worth collecting, but in Enderal you want to have ALL the loot, because every bit of money counts. But this was extremely anoying because of the weight limit. You're over encumbered all the time but you just don't want to leave money on the ground. This led me to cleaning out half a dungeon in this slow encumbered stat, which was no fun at all. It also makes you feel like you need to put twice the amount of work into getting the same reward. First you have to earn the skill point, then you have to earn the money, to actually put that skill point to work. That's not really a good motivation for me. If I earn a skill point, I also want to use them. Because what else was I earning it for?

[@Meese12]

@@ISolNacienteI that's the thing, it was such an extra worry on top of everything else it becomes irritating. If books were cheaper or money was a bit more abundant, i believe it really would've worked, because in the current state of the game you basically have no money if youre using all your skill points.

[@suyci]

I've always loved Fable: the lost chapter's economy, which worked as follows: If a trader has a high stock of items he sells for cheap, when it's low it becomes expensive. However, if trader has 150 apples for 1 gold each you pay 150g for 150 apples if you buy them all at once. If he has 30 apples for 3 gold each you pay 90 gold for 30 apples. This worked the exact same way in sales. The moment you got 100 of anything you could have infinite money because the traders have infinite money. Lovely system.

[@andrewp6738]

Wow, especially for a lecture-turned video, the editing in this one is really great; maybe the best we've ever seen from GMTK. Great use of video clips for humor and context. Keep it up!

[@Fluppr]

Yo, industry game designer here. Loving these intuitive videos, helping probably thousands of people getting into game development. Keep it up and thanks for your hard work

[@StefanLopuszanski]

I've been trying to figure out the economy system for my game for a while. It is a multiplayer competitive board game so some things are pretty different than what is listed above, but there are still some similarities. The economy system of any game is one of the core pillars and such a foundational thing that derives so many other systems. Getting it right is incredibly important for any system designer. EDIT: From my own work on the topic. It is a bit similar to economy systems in board games, but board games have a few more layers where time/actions are a resource and another layer if it is competitive which makes the resources not exist in a vacuum. Been writing some notes on trying to break down and quantity games at their most fundamental elements, for my own edification and for possibly talking on the subject of system design in general, and this touches on some of that. Would be interesting to see more game design stuff outside of video games.

[@YvensReboucas]

Hey, that's actually amazing that you referred to 2 of my articles in the additional sources for the video :) Thank you very much and hope you enjoyed them. This is a topic I am quite in love with.

[@shureyh]

Finally A full on GMTK Video🙏🏽🙏🏽

[@wishvolo]

Good video as always! I try to remember all these exist when I think about _eventually_ making my games. Wanted to say that it was very neat of you to raise the To Be Continued graphic above the captions ( 7:42 ). Makes it a lot easier to read than having it covered up!

[@Stratelier]

Yeah, more people need to remember how video captions display on the bottom 10% or so of a video and keep that space available. And perhaps take time setting their own captions (for example, if a portion of their video has subtitles baked in then captions will just get in the way).

[@Shadowreaper5]

Firstly, thank you for making another video. Secondly, Drains can also be a positive feedback loop for the game side. Drains can remove money from an MMO economy (for example, fast travel fees) to keep the currency from getting hyper inflated. Extra Credits actually did a good video which explains this much better than I can, but basically if your game goes on long enough then your taps can put in more resources than the systems take away from the player. Thus, the value of each individual resource goes down. This is especially a problem in multi-player games.

[@Stratelier]

Heck, even outside of MMOs specifically, RPGs in general tend to see inflation creep in over time (usually through the specific pattern of defeating infinitely-spawning enemies while spending a minimum of resources). Heck, even _Monster Hunter_ sees it: by the time you reach late and endgame stages, your next gear upgrades are more often bottlenecked by lack of raw materials than lack of cash.

[@memetic_hazard]

@@Stratelier From my experience in Iceborne, the raw materials are your primary currency. Soon after you start, you get enough zenny that for most usage patterns, you don't really need to worry about running out. Gear upgrades should be bottlenecked by raw materials because they encourage you to farm specific monsters, as opposed to zenny which is used by everything, obtained from everywhere, and has one boring place where you can rapidly farm it if needed.

[@benco804]

I think this is your best video yet. People don't realize how important the economy is to make a great game.

[@1chaplain]

Back when I first played Metro 2033, reality quickly hit when I realized that bullets were the currency. Sure you could use those bullets to proceed and kill enemies efficiently and with relative ease, but then you're loosing out on supplies for those 'what if' situations. You inadvertedly make the player spend the resource that's supposed to make the game easier, on 'upgrades' that supposedly the player knows that'll help him in the long run. IMO that was a really good economy design.

[@rudolffatransky581]

I did not like the economy in Metro 2033. I saved money for hours and than I could buy and upgrade only one weapon in the shop. But which one? You could not just test them and return them. You get much less money for reselling weapons. You can hold only 3 weapons total (in Ranger mode only 2). There were no damage numbers like in Fallout, so there was no way how to know, what was good. And I was usually broke, so I could not try all those other weapons. In Metro Last light I saved money even longer, finally bought good third weapon. I wanted to continue the story, went to the NPC and he told me: "See the Flamethrower there? You need to get it for the ride." My first and second weapons were basically essential so I had to get rid of the new weapon I just bought.

[@empdisaster10]

@@rudolffatransky581 Thats like, the idea. The idea is that you're supposed to not be rolling in money. You're supposed to have that "Oh man i dont have enough for everything i want and i probably will. More often than not, you reach the next area with less bullets than you started with. Its supposed to pressure you with that lack of security and ability to do everything you want. Its kinda like elden ring and darksouls in that sense that theres no hand holding when it comes to the economy. You either do or dont in it. Go without the weapon and have a harder time but have more bullets to spend in fights. Or get good at shooting/good at stealth and buy the gun for last resort situations and have less ammo. Its why the game is as difficult as it is because a lot of players end the game in either the same or worse standing with gear than when they started because of the pressures it puts on you

[@rudolfensisOne]

@@empdisaster10 Metro 2033 should have had an option to try all the weapons first like at the beginning of Metro Last light. Each weapon should have had a basic stat info like in Stalker. Not upgraded weapons should have been a little bit cheaper to encourage players to try different playstyles. You were constantly broke and could only spend it on something, you had no idea if it is good. That is just bad design. Give me an example of a good game, where the resources are ultra scarce, but you have no idea what you get, when you spend them.

[@nicholaswilliams6475]

Gotta admit that when Mark was listing off the resources a player could collect and then played a clip of Arthur saying "Money!", I just lost it. XD

[@SaItogaming202]

i like how at 10:37 hes talking about a hunger meter while playing in the gamemode that removes it

[@michaelnelson2976]

It's really cool to hear that this came from a lecture series, I mean educators have been using your videos for years now, it's incredible!

[@charlieni645]

One of my few criticisms of New Vegas is how of an non-issue accessing the Strip through credit check is. You only need 2000 caps to pass the securtron, which is quite easy to amass if one plays the game in a casual pace and accumulate wealth through side quests and selling loot. I installed a mod called Harder Strip Access which does it exactly what it says. I customized the mod to raise the credit check route to 20000 caps instead.

[@UnreasonableOpinions]

Given that you have multiple ways to access it through having tolerable skills or a combat check, or just for being friends with a major faction, the credit check is clearly there to stop a player from just walking directly to Vegas and sauntering in, so they have to play in the world before they get inside. It takes only a few hours of random play to amass the caps required, but it means you have at minimum played the few hours in the Mojave that you need to have the context of what everything outside the Strip looks like.

[@charlieni645]

@@UnreasonableOpinions Thing is 2000 caps is exactly what sauntering into the Strip feels like to me. I didn't even bother to explore out of the way locations besides REPCOON facility as part of the main quest to get information from Manny. Still I got to the Strip with 2500-ish caps with Hardcore mode on. The caps are even less of a problem if you know how to play Caravan which's basically a legit way to rob every merchant blind. You mentioned context. To me, the context of the credit check is it is a geographical manifestation of the class and wealth divide between those who can get into the Strip and those who have to settle for Automic Wrangler. Passing it should be a demonstration of wealth that is above average Freeside residents by orders of magnitude. So 20000 caps instead of 2000 makes more sense to me.

[@dragonhold4]

@Charlie Ni If the entry fee is so high how would the mob NPCs have access. An economy should never revolve around the Player. However, the Player should still be able to influence the economy indirectly by story or sandbox interactions that change the world

[@charlieni645]

@@dragonhold4 Which mob NPC? Every NPC on the Strip is sponsored by a faction, members of the three families, a vendor, or extremely rich gamblers. Yes, players should be able to influence the economy, but I don't think casually passing a supposed to be prohibitive wealth check even when not playing as a Barter focused character that horde wealth at every turn before reaching the Strip counts as player influencing the economy. It's just underdeveloped balance.

[@dragonhold4]

@@charlieni645 Just any of the in-game characters that are needed to make the casinos profitable and fund Mr. House's ambitions.

[@claytonkohut1195]

I literally re watched your last uploaded video this morning because I was missing your content. Yessssss!

[@seafafrage6934]

man this channel is the definition of Quality over quantity.

[@0znerEighth]

A small note to remember, like many other content producers, that this channel also have a Patreon and receives monthly money to put up videos. I guess the small community of Patreon's patreons nab Mark more money than the rest of us.

[@arnavthestar]

True, amazing content

[@felipebdc4316]

truly!

[@TerrorLTZ]

This and ahoy (this mad lad releases a video documentary that last an hour but holy shit it has a lot of info.)

[@casedistorted]

Thanks for putting the names of the games in the top left. Love when creators do that with either music or video games so I can look up things later if I find something interesting. That's how you know Game Maker's Toolkit is quality.

[@jellyterrorist]

I loved in Fable: The Lost Chapters how I could go into an early town and buy all the trader's apples, and then sell them back to him for more, and then buy them again for less, and repeat til I got bored. I think in single-player games, it's not worth completely ironing out these exploits, especially if they are kinda tedious. Players will play how they wanna play. And if that means grinding for hours to get the best armour and then steamroll through the early game, I think that's fine.

[@deeps6979]

Did something similar in Suikoden II. Buy out a market then re-flood it with a huge inventory, rinse repeat to get a ton of cash. But the "converter" aspect meant leveling a character's weapon took quite a bit of cash, so it sort of evened out in the end. Money flowed like water, apropos of the title, I suppose.

[@Sagaan42]

It depends on your game's intended experience. In most games , it's totally fine. Say, however, you have a game whose experience strongly depends on its well crafted difficulty curve. An exploit would let you completely destroy that curve. Some players will have fun doing that, and therefore it is a valid form of play, a correct way to play the game. However, some players are, whether they want to break the game or not, simply incapable of resisting using exploits. They might even be aware that they're making their experience less fun for themselves, but still feel obligated to use the exploit because it is the "most efficient" route. In that case, such exploits can completely ruin the game for a portion of the players.

[@snarkywriter1317]

@@Sagaan42 I'd say that depends; does the game exist more to execute the creator's artistic/design vision, or to be enjoyable to the player? (Note that I don't think there's a right answer.)

[@Sagaan42]

@@snarkywriter1317My point maybe wasn't well explained. I didn't talk about the artist's vision! I was executing off the premise of a game that is undeniably more enjoyable with a respected economy curve, and how exploits may render the game less enjoyable to some players!

[@Flak47]

@@Sagaan42 Given the possibility, the players will optimise the fun out of the game (c) Sid Meyer

[@MrFirefox322]

this is suuuuuper abstract in the best way possible. gonna have to watch at least 4 times to get everything here. really well laid out (as always) and super interesting!!!

[@chrs-wltrs]

I would love a video on damage, or "hit points." While their usage didn't originate in video games, they are certainly a staple of the medium today.

[@sarajohnsson4979]

In that case, you should probably check out the video "How Games Do Health" from 2016

[@ThousandairesClub]

*for the past 7 years, I've been brainstorming a game, putting loose concepts and ideas together....and I just want to thank you personally for these videos Mark. you've really helped stir my creative process and gear my thoughts in a productive direction 👍 your content really is inspiring for ambitious creators and I hope you keep the videos coming because gaming needs your knowledge now more than ever* 🙏

[@shmookins]

I love Anno just for this reason: collecting resources and manufacturing more. The town starts to grow and people start having fancier demands witch take more resources and production. Extremely engaging yet relaxing game. The game even tells me to take a break, and I'm like: "No way! What I need is more wheat flour!".

[@andylozano5193]

Is that the super futuristic Sim City like game?

[@shmookins]

@@andylozano5193 It's a franchise called 'Anno'. Each one has a year date in the title. I think all but two of them are set in 'old times'. The other two are in the future. The last one so far is 'Anno 1800'.

[@NerdyWordyMatt]

This confirms a few things I had been thinking about game economies but expands on it massively. Thank you.

[@justarandomanimegirlpassin5341]

Carries 1000 potions until the end of the game coz you know just in case * couldnt be me*

[@philherb0656]

Really enjoy this style of content

[@nosdregamon]

Awesome analysis. Makes me think - What if the Tap is very limited? You killed all the cows, plucked all the fruits and now you have to wait for the villagers to grow some new ones (if they don't lynch you before). Do you wait 6 Months or move on? Oh wait, you're trapped on a tiny island with them. Maybe plan better on your next playthrough ;-)

[@dragonhold4]

More games should attempt this-limited enemies, people, guards/cops, harvestable plants, sentinels, ... It would help a lot in the way of less gamification.

[@chocobofangirl]

*pre-Fates Fire Emblem anxiety intensifies*

[@UrielMoreiraSilva]

Having a bachelor's degree in Economics myself, I find your definition of "economy" surprisingly accurate, haha Great video, as always! :D

[@LuthennRatus]

I'm currently playing Bannerlord, this video reminded me of something. I used to make money by selling the stuff I looted after my battles, but I unlocked a perk that allows me to discard said loot in exchange of EXP for my soldiers so I had to found a new way of making money because I need stronger soldiers. That was the useless anecdote of the day haha

[@cupriferouscatalyst3708]

That's what I really like about the Souls games, and it's deceptively simple: your currency IS your experience points. There are plenty of items to buy that are immensely useful in very specific situations, while leveling up is slower but never a waste, and you have to decide which benefits and drawbacks are bigger. An item that turns your weapon into lightning for half a minute can decimate a specific boss in seconds, but it's not cheap and you have to buy it with the same points you could've used to permanently upgrade your health or damage, for example.

[@a7xaddict4676]

My guy, you just earned yourself a subscriber! BBA in Economics and a huge video game nerd.... this is right up my ally!

[@rashkavar]

Honestly, I feel like the reason they fixed the White Orchard cow economy thing was less "oh hey, infinite money early, that's bad" and more "oh hey, we have players who have chosen to grind for a million hours and suck the life out of the game rather than playing on and having fun with the *actual game* part of the game. And they're telling everyone else to do it too, that will make people hate our game." They've been significantly less willing to "fix" the fact that you get tons of money by picking up every piece of weaponry and armour off every dumbass who thinks he can take on a witcher and shilling it to the game's main weapon and armour merchants, because while yes, that does make you significantly wealthier than the narrative seems to think you are, it also requires engaging with the core gameplay loop of 1: find new place 2: meet new people and creatures 3: kill the bad ones.

[@sockatume]

Outstanding editing, even by your usual standards. The B-roll usage was top notch.

[@rashkavar]

One feedback loop I like (when it's well implemented) for XP is the reduced XP gain trick. In games like the Witcher 3 and Knights of the Old Republic, the amount of XP needed to gain a level remains relatively constant, but the amount of XP gained for a given challenge is calculated based on how difficult the game thinks it is and what your current level is. For example, in The Witcher 3, quests and monsters - the XP taps - have levels and if you're ...oh, 5, 10 levels higher than that, you get 1 XP instead of the 100 or 200 that it would've netted you at a normal level. The downside is for things like Knights of the Old Republic, where when your character reaches level cap (which happens ahead of the rest of the party in every run I've played) enemy XP is reduced to 0, despite it being quite high and seemingly intended to help you reach the kind of level you'd want to be during the endgame dungeon. So that leaves your party languishing a couple of levels behind, which is pretty significant in the system KOTOR uses. And since the endgame area is quite low on side quests to generate XP, it's very possible you'll lock yourself out of leveling these characters up entirely. (This problem would have been alleviated entirely if the XP gain modulation was applied by character or based on average party level, or several other options - it's not a problem with the XP modulation thing, it's a problem with this particular implementation of it.) This wouldn't work as well in a Fromsoft game, though - those games tend to share a resource - souls, runes, blood echoes, etc - as cash, effort expended on item repair, and xp all rolled into one. And for that you'd want players to have a bit more ability to harvest early areas to repair tools or buy much needed healing items, while still withholding the sweet reward of a level up for more adventurous areas.

[@Luanmm]

Pokémon has that same feedback loop. If your mon is too high level, there is no use to grind in the same grass over and over again

[@tsunamininja]

One tiny thing that I've seen a few games do is limit how many items you can use in a battle for RPG style games. If you're limited to only 3 potion uses per fight you're also incentivised to make use of the 3 potion limit (Ideally encounters will be designed with the 3 potion limit in mind too)

[@BAIGAMING]

You should do a video describing multiplayer (MMO) economies next. Because they're completely different than single player economies and it's tough to do correctly. One thing I found interesting in MMO economies is that you need money sinks, otherwise you end up getting massive inflation of the currency. I used to play games like NeoPets and Runescape, and I remember within just a few years there'd be so much inflation of the currency. But this was far before you could spend real-life money on in-game currency, so I don't know if that aspect changed things..... EDIT: 7:10 LOL I didn't know this was a thing in Witcher 3. You know, it's fascinating to see how developers patch their games - in the old days if a game was broken, it was broken unless it was a PC game, then they'd release a patch on their website (before Steam and other clients, now it'll even install the updates automatically for you thankfully). But it's odd, I don't see the point of patching PC games except for game-breaking glitches and really bad stuff. Witcher 3 was never a multiplayer game, why not leave in an exploit to get some money easily? It wouldn't bother anyone else. I really hated this in the newest Gran Turismo, they'd patch easy races that had good money prizes and now you have to grind like mad, sheesh.

[@GTAVictor9128]

Another good example of inflation in multiplayer games is GTA 5 Online - over time new updates introduced better ways to make money faster, but in return the price of stuff became inflated to prevent people from accumulating too much money and buying everything out. Worst part is that the pricing of Shark cards (macrotransactions that allow you to but the virtual money for real money) remained the same, so these Shark cards are a much worse value for money than before.

[@roboninja565]

Never thought I'd see a Markov Chain when watching video game analysis videos. Cue PTSD Flashbacks to Linear Algebra in college; Great video as always, Mark!

[@boateye]

Looking forward to this one. Economies always eluded me

[@orlandobrown8190]

This is something I've been struggling with for a while. This is just in time.

[@MikeGemi]

Another way CD Project Red could have fixed the cow exploit would have been to make it a crime to kill villages cows, although The Bovine Defense Force Initiative is much more exciting

[@rudolffatransky581]

They learned about the exploit after the game was released. Crime system would open up like a million other questions and problems that need to be solved and it would also need voicecasting. Developers wanted a quick and easy solution.

[@dusklunistheumbreon]

...Did the game not already HAVE a crime system? Just treat it like attacking random peasants.

[@rudolffatransky581]

@@dusklunistheumbreon How would the cows report the crime to the guards? Even if the guards automatically know about your crime and spawn next to you, it does not solve the problem. If I remember correctly, you can just run away from the guards and wait.

[@dusklunistheumbreon]

@@rudolffatransky581 Why would the cows need to report it? There's a farmhand clearly visible in multiple clips. One almost got hit by some shockwave attack.

[@rudolffatransky581]

@@dusklunistheumbreon just kill them, without him seeing it and if he sees it , just run away from the guards....

[@jackmagic8420]

What an awesome video! I love how you returned to the Witcher 3 example with the cows for rhetorical effect.

[@johntitor272]

I still think RE4 has the best in-game economy when it comes to shooters.

[@streifig]

And the best Trader!

[@Leonn9000]

@@streifig Welcoomeeee!

[@julianosilvarodrigues4732]

Thank you stranger!

[@helper_bot]

i nearly thought this was a Mental Checkpoint video, seriously both of you have good production quality

[@PokeMaster22222]

The problem with "drains" is that, if handled poorly (such as extremely fragile weapons/tools, or ludicrously expensive shop items), it can frustrate the player if they run out of the resource too quickly and cannot replenish it quickly enough - and with breakable equipment, if said new stuff isn't of high enough quality. For example, a major problem with BotW is that weapons and shields break far too easily, forcing the player to use whatever stuff they can find - even if they don't like that weapon, or if the new weapon is weaker than what they just lost. It also makes equipment gained as rewards feel disappointing and unrewarding, since "it's gonna disappear soon enough; what's the point?" It's why I generally loathe breakable equipment, as it's rarely done well and can feel incredibly cheap.

[@mick9707]

For the most part, I loved that about BotW. Looking at equipment as consumables rather than permanent upgrades made searching for more feel essential. It made fights feel tense when an item broke and you had to improvise new tools in some instances.

[@PokeMaster22222]

@@mick9707 ​I just wish Nintendo had added a compromise, of some sort; such as increasing durability across the board, so weapons and shields don't break as frustratingly quickly (and they don't feel like wet tissue paper), or adding a way to increase a favoured weapon's durability and to repair it as well. Minecraft, another sandbox game with durability, wisely decided to give its weapons, tools and shields hundreds of durability points - with diamond (and netherite) receiving around 1500 points. Not only can you repair a damaged tool in a few ways (using a diamond, or combining two damaged tools, or the Mending enchantment), but you can also slow down degradation through the Unbreaking enchantment. Assassin's Creed, from Origins onwards, also has weapon and shield loot - but they made equipment unbreakable, removing the frustration completely. They still encourage weapon experimentation by gradually raising weapon level, but also allow the player to spend in-game cash to improve older weapons you enjoy using. Either of these would be far superior to what BotW did.

[@hahman12]

the editing for this video is lots of fun (also very much enjoyed the subject)

[@SimonPrefontaineGames]

I've been working in game design for many years, often as an Economic Game Designer. Happy to see a video that shows how in-game economics can be used as invisible levers in so many ways to change the feeling of a game (despite the bland-sounding name!). Similar to MMOs, free-to-play games have to take in-game economies very seriously: an early game cow glitch like The Witcher's would be the death knell for a free-to-play game!

[@AnniFrikki]

This video came at the right time! For my Video game development course at uni I'm at the stage where I have to present the economy of my final proyect game, tomorrow, so thanks for giving me and my team more info on that!

[@SocraTetris]

I found that Moonlighter almost never dropped the price when you sold many of a single item. Perhaps it was tied to number of sales, because I mainly just found the optimal price and stuck to it for the whole game. NPCs bought the stack no matter how many were being sold at once

[@Rackstack234]

"What do we call repeating the same content to get what we want? ...Grinding." *Cuts to Tony Hawk grinding his skateboard at 6:54 Wow. The editing on GMT videos man

[@gamerargus9391]

Honestly, my favorite game to have a somewhat complex system for an economy would have to be Horizon's Gate. If you want to be a high sea's trader, but with tactics rpg combat as well, it's the only game I know that does it.

[@Ant0knee0zzz]

Your video editing has become so slick! It's a pleasure to watch

[@this_is_japes7409]

14:33 a bit disappointed that in the trader aspect, you forgot to mention that in certain scenarios you could risk giving power to someone else that could use as an advantage over you. especially in games like stellaris and civilization.

[@GrimmerPl]

About Animal Crossing: at one point there was a whole thread on reddit about turnip prices because in this game you can "fly" to other players islands and sell your stuff there. In a few days there was even a rule that you have to give back some % of profit or a set amount of money to the host for their "service". Edit: typos.

[@matthewdavis3421]

Hey, Mark! I thought I'd tell you about a game you may not have heard about called Starsector. That game simulates a real world, real time economy of goods and resources for the player to mess with in a sandbox. It's actually pretty neat. Cheers!

[@williamwhitehouse8741]

I came through this entire comment section waiting for a starsector reference lol

[@robsands6656]

Awesome vid as always. I'd definitely like to hear your take on multiplayer economies. I've been playing Path of Exile for years and always find the ecomony of it pretty interesting especially given how much a certain league mechanic can mix up the "normal" economy. One of the things I find interesting about Path of Exile's economy is that there is nothing that is just "money". Every item that is considered "currency" is also an item that can be used to craft other items. The main currency, the chaos orb, basically just randomizes a rare item with up to 6 modifiers, each of which are a random tier of power between 1 and 9 I believe. But in the multiplayer part of the game you can buy anything with enough chaos orbs. The most rare currency in the game costs several thousand chaos orbs. But you can get some pretty good stuff for only a few dozen. And prices of items and even currencies relative to eachother can wildly fluctuate based on tons of different factors ranging from an exploit being found to a popular KZbinr or streamer discussing a super strong build they just made up that requires a certain item. It's wild.

[@WadeAllen001]

I feel like an easier, better, and more immersive fix to the Witcher 3 cow problem would be to make the cows just never respawn. Why are cows respawning anyway? There should be some sort of consequence to killing everything in video games, which would be that you make the game world empty. Respawning is usually what breaks game economies, and it's also not very realistic. A simple fix to these issues would be to make your game world not respawn creatures at all (or to base the respawn rate off the number of currently existing creatures of that species so that you can cause extinction), or to put a hard cap on the amount of any resource that can exist in the game.

[@Stratelier]

Part of the problem with respawning as a mechanic is that if you _don't_ want something to respawn, the game must persistently track whether or not the thing still exists. And the more persistent the world as a whole is, the more things need to be tracked and the more ways there are for those things to break. For example, in classic Mega Man games, defeated enemies will respawn when offscreen, while in classic Mario games, defeated enemies do not respawn (unless you leave the zone). Internally, the Mario games are tracking the fact that you defeated the enemy (i.e. removing its spawn point from the level map) while Mega Man games are not.

[@crimsondespair_9505]

It's difficult to keep track of where animals are getting killed since you would have to save that variable to your save file, which could lead to save file bloat (think Bethesda games). That said, if it is just one area that is breaking the economy, I don't see why they just keep track of animals there.

[@MaakaSakuranbo]

@@crimsondespair_9505 I don't follow. Clearly these cows have clearly defined spawns and not just "okay, in this wide area enemies spawn that are 30% goblins, and 70% wolves" or something. so you basically just store a flag for each spawn that says it was killed?

[@crimsondespair_9505]

@@MaakaSakuranbo yeah but the problem starts when you have to keep track of EVERY animal that was killed, monsters included. But like I said before, if the problem is just with one area, I don't see why they didn't just make a special spawn for the cows in that area that stops them from respawning

[@MaakaSakuranbo]

@@crimsondespair_9505 I don't see the issue. Even if your game has 10000 monsters, thats like.. 39 kB to keep track of all of them even if you implement it badly 1.2 kB if you do it a bit smarter. Probably even less if you only store the one that have been killed rather than all of them.

[@FTChomp9980]

Spongebob:"Write that down! Write that down!" This is very helpful learning how to make a good Economy is very good to make a good game.

[@JTCF]

Would be interesting to see Space Engineers compared to Factorio on this topic.

[@ua2894]

Another top quality explaining-stuff-about-how-games-work video!

[@BlackStarForge]

It is a well made video, and it is fascinating to see someone categorizing everything I know about games intuitively. On the other hand I think it comes with a risk of simplification. First of all, these categories are not exhaustive even in strict definitions (lottery?, time?), and their relations are also not complete (trading often serves as sink). But more fundamental problem I see is implying that game economy can or should be broken to these categories. It might be handy for game design, but comes with risk of mechanicaly produced patterns without any originality. Especially if associated with rules on how these categories should function. For me it should be always from opposite direction, first game idea and gameplay and then create economy that would fit. That way you might not even use some of these fundamental categories (imagine there is no tap in game just converters), or better come up with completely new systems.

[@tbotalpha8133]

What are you talking about? You can't come up with a game idea and gameplay, and only afterwards consider its economy. A game's economy arises naturally out of its systems and mechanics. And the ways it arises may not be immediately obvious, which is why this kind of breakdown of economic elements is necessary. It's not going to lead to unoriginal games. If anything, it's more likely to lead to more originality, as more devs will have a better understanding of how their games fit together, and how they can do interesting things with their games' economies. It's nice that you understand all of this stuff "intuitively". But lots of people don't, and need it explained to them. Which is exactly what this video is for, you self-important asshole.

[@razorback8300]

Been a long time watcher of GMTK . I really enjoy your videos and I find them quite informative. Keep up the good work Mark!

[@AoifeForrester]

At about 9:00 you mention that Elden Ring "if you graph out the number of runes needed to reach the next level, then you will see that it makes a sharp upward curve. Where it costs more and more experience points to reach the next level." Be very careful with this, because I still find that Elden Ring (and all souls games) have grinds. With item 'farming', and damage scaling there is always a reason to be looking to maximize ways of increasing soul/blood echo/rune gain and item discovery in these games.

[@pufthemajicdragon]

I think this is a great high-level overview of game economies from a resource perspective. I think something that could use more depth is how those resources can be applied to perform useful work. Ultimately, any game resource exists to allow the player to do some kind of useful work with it, but your overview on that here is very broad and generalized. Economies are complicated, even the simple ones.

[@wr4338]

Another funny thing about the money exploit in the witcher 3; late into the game you can meet a few guards in one of the main cities that will ask you if you have done the exploits! It's a fun little interaction that I believe was added in a dlc

[@TheRationalPi]

On the topic of limiting positive feedback loops, you can implement diminishing returns on the other side as well. Instead of increasing the amount of resources needed by the converter, you can make the taps give out decreasing returns. For example, maybe the first cow you kill will give you 50 gold, but the second only gives 45, then 40 and so on. Eventually you aren't getting any resources from that tap and you are forced to move on to find a new source of cash. You can also implement diminishing returns on the "trader" side. The first cow you sell to the butcher is worth 50 gold, but they don't really need or want to buy 100 cattle off of you.

[@Depressed_Spider]

"I swear to god, if you don't stop killing my cows, bad things are gonna happen." "What's the big deal they just respawn." "What."

[@blackasthesky]

Awesome work -- might pick up this descriptive model as a basis for a general purpose economy framework I am currently developing.

[@Sx-xy2zi]

I'm in favour of breaking single player economies

[@elliebee3520]

This not only did a good job explaining Video Game Economies but also sinks! : )