Why Is It So Easy To Break Videogame Economies?

[@ArchitectofGames]

KZbin YOU BIG BASTARD PROCESS FASTER Wow there are so many easy economy 'give me money' jokes I could be using here honestly, I'm spoiled for choice! Best suggestion gets one free Archipoint^TM: www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames Genuinely considering not plugging my twitter any more because it sucks but I'd be remiss not to link Elon's latest investment as an example of smart economic sense and all around financial wizardry: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot

[@michael12345699]

Sir, I think there's an audio problem for the video as I can't hear anything.

[@Cman04092]

@@michael12345699 that must be on you, i hear it just fine

[@ArchitectofGames]

@@michael12345699 Strange, it all seems to be working on my end!

[@mighty_spirit8532]

@@ArchitectofGames Are you aware the video is only in 360p at the moment?

[@Daniel.K_]

360p isn't enough? XD

[@Drekal684]

Link: "So what powers do I get as the Hero of Time?" Zelda: "Oh, a few handy things. You get the Sword of Evil's Bane, the Triforce of Courage... and the power to find currency by cutting down tall grass." Link: "..." Zelda: "Please - please don't break our economy. The last few heroes we had wound up being a bigger threat to Hyrule than Ganon."

[@Ramsey276one]

The FBI meme videoclip One of the breaks a vase! “WHERE YOUR RUPPEES?!” XD

[@pennding3415]

Link: so I get a yard care job?

[@seqka711]

The Minish are true communists, they know what's up.

[@IndustrialBonecraft]

Invest in the ceramics industry. You will own everything.

[@Ramsey276one]

@@IndustrialBonecraft O M G XD

[@RetepAdam]

Because it’s hard to accurately simulate somebody speed-running a socioeconomic climb from literally having no money to being the most powerful person alive.

[@benedict6962]

It turns out that a realistic economy also involves spending 30 years working, and that is usually not fun.

[@aturchomicz821]

@@benedict6962 In the Sims 3 you can literally find 10k VR headsets in the dumpster, wtf?🗿🗿

[@LeMicronaut]

Time*scarcity=value

[@KopperNeoman]

You could use real-life examples.

[@tedarcher9120]

Because it needs a market adjustment

[@Jonkenstonk]

Pretty easy to break the economy when you can save, attack a shopkeeper, load that save and their inventory resets. It just works

[@mr.rainc0at614]

4 TIMES THE SIZE

[@Jonkenstonk]

@@mr.rainc0at614 16 TIMES THE DETAIL

[@NYKevin100]

While this is true, Skyrim's economy is broken even if you never exploit glitches or steal anything. It just survives a little longer in that case. IMHO gold isn't even the primary resource in mid-to-late-game Skyrim, because it's so plentiful that you'll never realistically spend it all, despite the massive gold sinks of real estate and/or training levels. Instead, the main resources are: * Perk points * Smithing and enchanting levels (and maybe alchemy too, I just never bother with it) - most other skills are either unimportant or level up organically without needing any grinding. * Carry capacity (especially in vanilla where you end up carting around 50,000 crafting ingredients because it's not worth the bother of constantly unloading them into external containers - there are a variety of mods just aimed at dealing with that problem) * Rare ingredients like Daedra hearts * Enchantment slots Slots are a fixed-quantity resource (you get one enchantment per item, or two with the final enchanting perk, and you get one item per armor slot), but all other resources are basically grind-fests; the best way to maximize most of them is to smith and enchant jewelry, sell it for gold, and buy training from the same merchant you sold to (usually Neloth or somebody at the College of Winterhold). Unfortunately, this breaks the primary gameplay loop of exploring the overworld, clearing out a dungeon, returning to town to sell off the junk, and then going exploring again. The other problem is that Skyrim mostly stops being difficult around level 30 or so, and entirely stops being difficult around level 45 or so. The difficulty options are frankly not very good at fixing this, because stealth archery is just too powerful. Even without stealth archery, you can stack all of the following: * 80% physical damage reduction (armor) * 80% magic resistance (combination of enchantments and the Book of Love quest, which itself is an excellent example of "players doing boring fetch quests for min-maxing purposes," although I will concede that it might be entertaining on first playthrough) * 80% fire/frost/shock resistance (potions or enchantments, stacks multiplicatively with magic resistance, so you get an effective damage reduction of 96%) * 80% probability to completely absorb hostile spells (from the Atronach stone and the Alteration perk of the same name). Can be boosted to 100%(!) with Miraak's equipment, but this interferes with other min-maxing. * Up to 100%(!) reduction in magicka cost for any one spell school of your choice (typically destruction, because you can spam incinerate or thunderbolt and kill everything in sight). * Massive damage bonuses on all non-spell weapons (smithing and the relevant weapon skill). * Any single weapon enchantment, or two with dual-wielding. * Various overpowered poisons (like paralysis/lingering damage health) * The ability to transform into a Vampire Lord (does not stack with armor or armor enchantments, but does stack with most other effects, and provides stupidly broken passive bonuses as well as a very overpowered drain life spell). The game simply gives players too many things to max out and not enough restrictions on how to combine those things, so it ends up being way too easy to build a completely broken character in the late game.

[@Jonkenstonk]

@@NYKevin100 you clearly thought this out quite well

[@Shatterverse]

Perfectly balanced.

[@QuantumHistorian]

Because planned economies designed to encourage a specific behaviour are always easily exploitable. Especially when created with people with very little understanding of economics. I'm sure there's a lesson for the real world in there somewhere... But even more so in games where many of the actors (ie NPCs, or whatever mechanic spawns resources) are pre-programmed and don't have the agency to respond appropriately to changing circumstances.

[@peterwang5660]

sometimes "exploitation" is the desired effect. Maybe when people actually understand economics they keep people to "farm" the right things in the right way.

[@alexanderredhorse1297]

centralized planning in economies actually saves resources and proper allotment of those resources rather than just letting the anarchy of overproduction and waste go wild.

[@Ramsey276one]

C: The Money of Soul and Possibility It came to my mind as I read your first sentence For some reason XD

[@alexanderredhorse1297]

@Blood in the Water no in fact you are wrong. the largest multinational trillion dollar corporations have centralized planning - so your whole argument falls apart there. hell the federal reserve is a bourgeois banking cartel that controls the dollar itself. The USSR was a coup waged by Boris Yeltsin and China lead down the path of revisionism with Deng - oh im sure you know so much about those details and how they effectively ruined the economies of both. After the USSR was dismantled by Yeltsin and his western backed regime there was riots in the streets and life was a living hell for it's former citizens. your arrogance is telling. planned economies have issues yes of course - but it is NOTHING like the anarchic state of unplanned markets. you have no idea what youre talking about. the irony considering you tell me how much i have to learn. planned economies are not about raking profits at the cost of everything else. they serve an entire different function of which of course would appear to be a failure to a billionaire trying to accumulate as much capital as possible.

[@rayiull5220]

@Blood in the Water central planning was a major part on the development of both South Korea and Japan. Western Europe also recurred to central planning although to a lesser extent afaik. Japan used central planning because all the economic and social development went towards the capital while the rest of the country had very little.

[@principal_optimism]

If a resource becomes rare enough, it can become seen as a "potion/consumable" - referring to an old KZbin video by Razbuten called "Consumable Items (and why I barely use them)"

[@Posby95]

Name of the video?

[@principal_optimism]

@@Posby95 Consumable items (and why I barely use them) By Razbuten

[@Posby95]

@@principal_optimism Thanks!

[@Boltscrap]

@@principal_optimism Yeah, healing costs G+R herb, reloading costs nothing, it's obvious which one will be picked.

[@gabe2237]

Crazy that you call it old cause it feels like it came out not that long ago lmaooo

[@MasterGhostf]

Same problem in DND. The systems that make economies real, players would hate. Imagine having to pay fines, taxes on property, fees and etc when entering cities. Paying more for goods and services. It wouldn't be fun. Another thing is that in video games were competing with the AI. If a player-based economies like In some MMO's it does elevate the issue but then it becomes difficult for new players to join in the economy. As the prices are reflected by the whales and the long-time players. Real world economies suck for the average person. If your born into wealth you are the whale. Making it harder for new players (poor people) to get involved. If game economies were realistic, it would be come another job and no longer fun.

[@Lishtenbird]

In D&D, weapon speed economy used to be a thing. You didn't just hit with a heavy hammer, you started swinging in one round, counted turns, and finished in another. It was very realistic, but extremely clunky and unfun... so no one used that, so that was eventually dropped.

[@collinbeal]

Sounds like you haven't played a Wizard in 5e lol. All the other characters treat gold as money to blow or perhaps to save up for a couple relevant things like plate armor and a battle-ready steed. Wizards are like, "Okay I need 1,000 gold worth of diamond dust like yesterday. What kind of connections do I need to make, how do I protect my assets, how can I accrue wealth while traveling, how can I balance my downtime effectively, where are the best merchants for specialty items?", while Barbarians are drinking every day and throwing gold coins at prostitutes.

[@AnotherDuck]

@@Lishtenbird Taking several turns to swing a hammer doesn't sound realistic to me... DnD economy has entirely separate economies for players and people actually living in the world. And when they interact, it can easily blow up if the DM isn't careful.

[@gabrielandradeferraz386]

if the sistem doesnt ask for taxes, how is the rogue supposed to avoid them?

[@aprinnyonbreak1290]

Not to mention D&D and many other games ignore the major damage of equipment that has failed to the point of its wearer dying impacting sale price, and the fact that merchants will readily buy the evidence of manslaughter, not to mention potentially damage their reputation of being associated with corpse looting. Lest we forget, looting the dead is usually considered a no no.

[@alexanderwizardjar9540]

Last time i tried to sell 20 wheels of cheese to a random person, the thought i was crazy for carrying all that cheese on me. Todd lied to us, people!

[@fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Story checks out, milk is the far more liquid of the dairy assets; cheese is a better long term store of value but harder to liquidate in the immediate term.

[@fartloudYT]

You have to sell the idea first. If someone asks why you are carrying 20 wheels of cheese, just answer that 'it just works'.

[@Mikewolv007]

@@fartloudYT nmmmm mmm mmm mmm MB B b high

[@Mikewolv007]

Oh my god I did not mean to write any of this!!!

[@Pmurder3]

@@fartloudYT "Noone has as many friends as the man with the many cheeses!"

[@spheromancer_]

360p is the true Adam Miller watching experience. Truly the way it was meant to be experienced, I don't think I'll be able to watch any future videos in this channel in a different way again.

[@ArchitectofGames]

😎The lower the bitrate, the better the content😎

[@DarkFoolJin]

@@ArchitectofGames thats why the late 2000 early 2010s were the prime time of youtube xD

[@dragonmaster1500]

@@DarkFoolJin Man, remember when 720P was considered HD?

[@minusX]

@@dragonmaster1500 It is still. Full HD is 1080p

[@THExRISER]

Jokes on you I'm watching it on 360p regardless because I have limited internet.

[@petsdinner]

I really enjoyed the base economy in Mount & Blade, where prices in a local area react dynamically when you buy or sell anything. If you buy a town out of stock of a particular item, prices rise and if you flood the market, prices crash. This forces the player to a) switch up their inventory once the most profitable items are exhausted; and b) risk more dangerous trade routes once the safer ones are no longer worth the money. Sure, M&B has plenty of ways for you to destroy the economy for fun and profit but the base mechanic is pleasingly simple and strong.

[@AnotherDuck]

The economy there (mostly speaking about Bannerlord) works fine if you don't try to exploit it too much, or if you don't grind too much. Though sometimes you end up in a newly rebelled town and find all prices completely out of whack, like half the stock at 1/5 of the normal price, even if you buy up all of it.

[@screamingcactus1753]

Prices can also be affected in other ways. All of the stuff you can buy outside of weapons armor and horses I'm pretty sure are created dynamically. The surrounding villages produce the raw resources, then sell them to the city. Once raw resources are put on sale in the city, the various artisans of the city will start buying them up and turning them into refined goods. If a wheat producing village is raided and stops supplying wheat for a few days, the price of bread in the neighboring city will skyrocket as the local bakeries can't make it anymore. Conversely, if a grape producing village has a lot of money put into it and is allowed to prosper without being attacked, then the price of wine in the neighboring city will drop as the wineries have the resources to make more wine than they used to,

[@Azure9577]

You enjoy starsector, its mount and blade but in space with ships The economy is pretty great

[@AeonKnigh432]

Paper Mario of all things does this really well. Prices don't adjust to the player's actions, but in certain locations, certain items will sell for more or less. Cold items will sell for more in the desert, and hot items sell for more in the ice area. Its a neat idea.

[@BroadFieldGaming]

Genuinely interested if you've been watching RTGames play of persona 5 because he's figured out a way to break the economy and has been having a blast doing it, much to chat's chagrin.

[@Icekaiser]

I play it normally (I tryhard Ed it) and I still am rich so breaking or glitching in persona is pretty useless

[@wakipai3D]

@@Icekaiser "Fun"

[@ObviousToast]

@@Icekaiser Well, yeah, that's the natural way that Persona 5 eventually builds up to, but what the OP forgot to mention is that RT had a near lvl 70 black frost at the beggining of the fourth palace. That is definitely not something that usually happens in the average playthrough.

[@diersteinjulien6773]

The real problem is that no matter how much you break P5 money system, the girls won't let you buy your way into making an harem

[@WedgeOfHeaven]

RT gave a whole new meaning to “breaking the bank”, one could say.

[@lostmarble540]

I don't always see having too much money in the late game as a bad thing. Like yeah you don't have many interesting choices since you can buy whatever you want, but you've (hopefully) been making choices for several hours now, gamers can have a little bit of buying all the high tier ammo and murdering everything in their way as a treat.

[@Xx_Oleander_xX]

But alternatively that can create a boring ending. The elite four don't feel as satisfying to beat compared to the second gym, the final boss in a resident evil game isn't fun if you have multiple grenades and plenty of shotgun ammo.

[@mrbigglezworth42]

@@Xx_Oleander_xXThen the issue wouldn't be that players found a way to hoard supplies specifically for those moments, but that the Devs didn't account for the chance it would happen. I finished RE4 rather recently and it's ammo(and money) economy is only ever just generous enough to ensure you can't completely run out, but you never feel like you're in a good spot to start hoarding things. Made an explicit point that RE4 doesn't have a chest to unload certain items for later, like all the herbs or spare bullets. That and you can't buy ammo from the shop, only guns and occasionally a healing item. It really encourages you to lean into the knife to save ammo...or just not kill anything if you don't have to.

[@Xx_Oleander_xX]

@@mrbigglezworth42 re4s ammo supply was pretty balanced I was thinking more about the re2make where I had so much ammo I began wasting it and goofing off during the last few fights. I love the rbd section of the game it was the underground parking lot and onward where I accedentally had a stockpile.

[@AnotherDuck]

@@mrbigglezworth42 I think RE4 is a bit on the generous side, but then I'm more used to the earlier games where ammo is more scarce. But several of these games also depend a lot on the player not being wasteful, so you need a certain level of skill. And if you're above that skill level, you're going to have more ammo than you need.

[@Buglin_Burger7878]

@@Xx_Oleander_xX The second gym, where you can fight the gym leader with 6 fully healed Pokemon vs Elite 4 and the Champion which is 25-30 Pokemon in a row without access to a center? What it sounds like is you entered the 2nd Gym and didn't use the Pokecenter but used all the items in the E4. This is more of your fault then the game, you're taking the path of most resistance early on and later on when you've likely got tired of that path you started using items.

[@MinorCirrus]

Oddly, when your essay started, I was thinking to myself that part of a game's fun is finding the way to break its economy and that's actually what you also came up with.

[@SmallvilleStudio]

I truly felt that last one, the mixing of real world economy and video game economy. Nothing reminds you of your unfortunate place and circumstances more like not being able to literally afford some cool gear in a video game like micro-transactions. You know, video games, the thing we use to escape the real world and it’s unfortunate hold over us.

[@bg357wg]

Game economies have virtually unlimited resources. NPCs and quests are like bottomless pits for rewards.

[@Trephining]

Also lots of them have no internal responses to supply and demand changes. Players shows up and learns to mine 10,000 units of Frodylanium ore, price stays the same at 100 gold sinars per unit, player gets rich perpetually. In real life, the price would adjust to an influx in supply.

[@helplmchoking]

And the only investment required is time, which real world earning does need but games operate (usually, anyway) on a dramatically condensed time scale, so a few hours grinding materials - with no need for transport, storage, logistics, staff etc. - can earn you far more than spending 5 hours irl chopping trees or whatever. And while NPCs have strictly programmed rules, the player is free to do anything the engine and the player's knowledge allows. Infinite resources also mean that, given enough time, the player becomes immensely wealthy even without trying. Play BotW long enough and you'll just randomly pick up so many chopped up monster bits that I found them more lucrative than the gems the game expects you to use for wealth and makes rare to suit. Like 80 hours in I realised that while moblin horns are worth bugger all, the pile of 200 I'd somehow accrued was worth a fortune

[@cewla3348]

@@Trephining but having a hard cap of 100000 dollars in frodylanium ore at once is not fun, because now people are unwilling to spend 1000000 dollars, when it's impossible to use up all of that anyways.

[@cewla3348]

@@helplmchoking and the fact that you can dupe gems endlessly doesn't hurt the bank, either.

[@Superabound2]

And this right here is proof that Communism wouldn't even work in a post-scarcity environment

[@safe-keeper1042]

Sort of relevant, in Disco Elysium you're encouraged to diversify your skills because the various mandatory and optional checks you have to pass require different skills to pass them.

[@FirstNameLastName-lg7yz]

Wompty Dompty Dom Center and Actual Art Degree can easily break the game.

[@diersteinjulien6773]

And some skill actualy become curses when over leveled

[@at_vinta6730]

Disco elysium doesnt encourage you that bc you can always change clothes

[@GamedevAdventures]

I think that players these days are becoming more optimization focused than ever and leaning into that to direct players is a great idea. I think 20 years ago most people wouldn't find out about exploitable systems and things that let you push economies to their limit. But these days the internet lets everyone find out about the most overpowered strategies. Optimization then becomes a new sort of tutorial for how to enjoy the game if you take advantage of it. Great stuff Adam.

[@ChristopherCricketWallace]

that's because games waste our time more now than ever. We all feel the pressure to optimize because our time is limited.

[@luk4aaaa]

What the first reply said, but also like, have you played lego star wars the complete saga? Pretty sure you can max out your money in that game in like 20 hours by rushing specific red bricks lol. Games were exploitable before too, we just couldn’t see everyone do it or look up a tutorial for it.

[@Shatterverse]

You're talking about _metagaming._ They're better or even more interested in gaming the mechanics than playing the actual game. Why get money the slow way when you can manipulate the mechanics to get money faster?

[@scorpioneldar]

when does now a days start? StarCraft had to entirely change the RTS in order to stop the turtle Strat he mentioned 1998. there are so many stories that come from even board game of this cocept. the internet may have accelerated the speed these exploits spread. but exploiting is a baked in part of human nature. (irronically that is how banking got started in the firstplace. it was an economic exploit that ended up reshaping the economy entirely.)

[@ColonelSandersLite]

"I think 20 years ago most people wouldn't find out about exploitable systems and things that let you push economies to their limit" Oh no... You are so incredibly wrong about that. I gonna give you 3 examples, just off the top of my head, from more than 20 years ago. Mechwarrior 2 had tons of semi-formal rules used in games. There where very good reasons people limited the number of machine guns and missile launchers you where allowed to take. Even in single player, people where min-maxing with obvious stuff. Go ahead an look up some old strategy guides if you want to see common builds. Lords of the realm 2 is a classic game. Kind of a predecessor to the total war type games. Anyone with half a brain figured out wheat was better than cows. There was also a well known exploit that let you count as if you fed your peasants more food than you actually did. It was so wide spread that you had to assume that literally everyone online was using it. There where also other exploits that had to be banned in polite circles because they would make the game just stupidly silly. Flooding the map with like a thousand single peasant armies that would tie everything down and destroy all your opponents manufacturing and agriculture for example. X-Com... Man, X-Com had so many *incredibly* broken things... Everyone knows to manufacture junk laser cannons for cash for example. Honestly, you figured out PDQ that a third of the things in the game are honestly junk, a half of the items are good, and the last 16ish percent are just brokenly OP. That was just the character of the game and half of the point of it. I could literally go on and on and on with rants about old games. I'm gonna spare you any more history on the subject though. The main point is that just because you personally where ignorant of this sort of thing 20 years ago doesn't mean that it wasn't there. It was.

[@THExRISER]

Because unlike real economies which are being exploited by everyone simultaneously all the time and thus are constantly changing and adapting to everyone's bullshit, game economies however, are rigid and predictable and thus very easy to swindle. The only game economy I found that actually works as intended is Slime Rancher's, since if you flood the market with one kind of Plort, it's value will quickly drop and it will become worthless, and you'll have to find another source of income.

[@helplmchoking]

Yeah but you can still game their system. You can wait for a price to ramp up to near the max, saving up the plops for days or weeks in game, then dump hundreds at once for huge profits. The values only reset at midnight, so you can sell as many as you like until midnight

[@THExRISER]

​@@helplmchoking And that's just what scalpers and stock traders do in real life, besides, the game gives you storage units for that exact purpose (aside from storing food and other materials), so you're not really gaming the system as much as you're playing the intended way.

[@helplmchoking]

@@THExRISER that's true, I actually think there are two ways a game economy can seem "broken". One is something like Skyrim where there's such a range of values that anything not found deep in dungeons or quests is effectively worthless. Thievery, hunting, trading etc. Are all completely pointless and even "treasure" like gems, rare ores or whatever is worth a pittance compared to clearing out a mid level bandit camp or vampire den so you end up disengaging from big chunks of the game. Persona 5 does have a timer for your activities, but you can spend unlimited time in memento dungeons piling up mountains of valuable items from infinitely spawning enemies (and with the ability to instant kill them with no battle eventually). This things make parts of the gameplay worthless and you don't get to engage in them. You basically never buy or sell anything in Fallout 4 because money is so easy to accrue elsewhere and there's nothing for sale that comes close to a quick trip through some abandoned factory or whatever so why bother spending time in settlements? But the other kind of "broken" is more like slime rancher's exploitable economy, that's exploited by you still playing the game. Or how you can earn huge amounts of money in Stardew valley farming the right crops, which still requires a lot of planning, preparation and still means carefully managing your farm to produce the value. Basically, good broken means engaging deeply with the game puts you at a massive advantage but is earned by putting in the time and effort to engage with the games systems. In Cyberpunk I can clear a whole gang hideout in seconds from 2 buildings away, which is "broken" but required hours of levelling, getting good at it and seeking out specific items and abilities. Bad broken is where economies are so out of balance that whole portions of the game are rendered worthless by far more profitable ones. Oblivion's thieves guild has a fantastic story and quest but you have zero incentive to break into a house, carefully steal every single item, risk fines or experience loss if caught only for maybe 100 gold - a fun and often tense experience - when 2 minutes spent killing goblins - no risk, very little involvement - nets way higher profits

[@THExRISER]

@@helplmchoking Ah so the good kind broken is when it requires deep understanding of the game's systems, and is still within the bounds of what the developers planned? I love that interpretation. Plus you just put into words why I love immersive sims so much, you can get into all kinds of shenanigans in those types of games, but that requires understanding how the game works, and is almost always within the bounds of what the developers intended. (assuming you're not exploiting a bug)

[@Ramsey276one]

MMORPG Marketplace shenanigans make more sense now XD

[@dragunovlove]

I work in electricity economy research(I don't know how you'd call it in English). Making economic system in real life is very difficult too. It has to be run and we find issues or exploits that we never thought of. We have to make "patches" and tweaks to make them work. I imagine game economy can take into account only so many variables, and as gamers are often so creative, they will always find new exploits.

[@GameDevYal]

A lot of RPGs tend to have an issue where you start finding priceless ancient artefacts with really high stats / unique special abilities on your adventures; once you get enough of those things you'll never need to buy regular gear from a town ever again. (This is one of the reasons I love the Souls approach to new items - you always need to pool some upgrade materials into gear for it to be worth using, so items will generally never completely obsolete your current gear and you always have something to sink your pile of currency and upgrade shards into)

[@kamikeserpentail3778]

RPGs almost never let you buy good gear. Because if they did, you wouldn't have to take the risk going on a quest to find those rare drops, and might instead just sit around farming.

[@Buglin_Burger7878]

@@kamikeserpentail3778 You mean farming to find those 1% rare drops, instead of selling the stuff you're not using to get the rare stuff without going out of your way.

[@AeonKnigh432]

Until you have your final weapon for your build and the rest of your upgrade items become useless.

[@iminumst7827]

I like adaptive economies like how Alyx does ammo. If you are low on ammo, ammo is more likely to spawn. A similar design can be used elsewhere, like selling the same item repeatedly will make that item drop in value. Or you could do this with exp, where defeating the same enemy has diminishing exp returns. Or if you steal something of value, the world increased its security. All of these can be used as disincentives to grind with a semi-realistic reason.

[@zefile]

alyx is fine if the player doesn't figure it out. gotta say, i felt cheated.

[@iminumst7827]

@@zefile I think adaptive economies work best when the mechanic isn't hidden, for the reason you mentioned. For example, if someone doesn't know you are getting diminishing exp returns from defeating the same enemy, it doesn't discourage grinding, it just makes it so the people who spent time grinding feel unrewarded.

[@octakhan4673]

Half-Life 2 did this as well in the crates. The key is that the player had to find the crates. Left 4 Dead also had the AI that gives players different items and zombie spawns based on the player's performance.

[@devforfun5618]

@@iminumst7827 which is why i think games like pokemon shouldn't give any xp if you kill something weaker, caught pokemon already have the advantage of having evs, so only trainers or higher levels pokemon should give xp, that way they can even reduce the required xp to level up late game, i would make the required xp a flat amount making the late game about exploring new areas with trainers instead of walking inside the same cave to kill the same high xp wild pokemon over and over

[@unluckystaravia2352]

@@devforfun5618 That idea works sort of So if it worked like this where you only gain EXP from higher level enemies but gain absolutely none from lower level enemies that is kind of a worse version of something already done in pokemon but in a different way since either Gen 4 or 5 you gain more exp from higher level opponents and less from lower level opponents, the advantage of this is that it forces you to use use more pokemon since you can't just overlevel 1 which is the whole point of the series the downside is that in post game leveling up becomes a massive slog because lower level pokemon are pretty much all you'll ever see besides the elite four rematches Adaptive EXP gain is a good idea but my biggest problem is that too many games will have adaptive EXP gain and then have a super boss at level cap like 99 for example but then only give you enemies that are like level 70 to grind against so the pacing slows to a hault due this lack of foresight, this is the exact reason I have not fought Red at Mount silver in Pokemon Soul Silver despite having well over 200 hours in the game

[@notoriouswhitemoth]

In my experience, the best way to make sure the player will use a resource is to make it common and therefore easy to replace, but limit how much they can carry. In the original megami tensei, finding a gemstone when you're carrying as many as you can and have a demon at low health _hurts,_ because it's a _huge_ opportunity cost.

[@benedict6962]

Yeah, let players buy 99 potions, but only carry 4. That lets you control the value of each individual item much better without screwing up the TURN economy instead.

[@Tigersight0]

@@benedict6962 This is what I've been loving about some of the consumables in Elden Ring lately. You can't hold too many of them at once, but you can either you can buy piles of them, which restock from your box into your inventory any time you hit a rest point, or you can craft them using a near-endless supply of materials whenever you're out of combat. So at least for the common ones that you use all the time, it takes care of that 'maybe I'll need it later' mentality because even if you do use up the whole stock from your inventory and have to go without, you'll fill up again soon enough.

[@bramvanduijn8086]

Inventory management is seldom done well, since you need to make sure that almost each item is interesting in a different context, without triggering the players to just walk up and down fifty times to get every last drop.

[@darkmega5477]

The whole persona 5 segment about not encouraging grinding is wrong. Just look at rtgame’s playthrough. He spends hours in the metaverse at a time due to your time there being unlimited (you can just shift floors if the reaper comes) and yet still manages to max out confidants. And due to the hours spent grinding, RT got a powerful persona far earlier then intended.

[@dontstealmydiamondsv3156]

Yeah it's harder NOT to break persona 5 then to break it. That goes doubly for royal. My experience with the game involved a lot of me making up self-enforced rules and limiting my options in an attempt to counter the fact that the game _really_ wants you to be OP

[@Default78334]

I guess you could do that if you really want to, but the diminishing rewards for grinding make it generally more rewarding to just progress the game in order to get access to new personas and other resources.

[@pavise6333]

The fatigue from Persona 3 was a good way to prevent grinding

[@boobah5643]

@@pavise6333 It only _limited_ grinding. It by no means prevented it.

[@collinbeal]

@@pavise6333 yeah I wish the fatigue system was carried over, but I get that they wanted to make the game more cinematic and streamlined (to the game's detriment to a degree. You feel much more railroaded than in P3, where only story-critical moments were mandatory, going to P5's 3-hour tutorial. I think it takes like 45 minutes to be able to freely go to Tartarus in P3, whereas Mementos is like a normal game length before even unlocking).

[@blastburnz]

I think Factorio is pretty cool in how it balances its 'economy'. In a lot of games, players tend to have an exponential efficiency in acquiring currency. This is true in Factorio as well, however the costs for building things also rack up exponentially. Kind of sends you into a spiral of optimization and efficiency. You don't feel stagnant because you somehow always need more iron no matter how much you try to get. Just thought it was cool how they handled it. Really cool video. Kind of got me thinking about game economies in a new light!

[@PeacefullWarrior420]

Enderal is a beautiful conversion mod for skyrim. A complete new game. You need to buy skill books from different traders to use your skill points. The books are getting more expensive as you Progress through the levels. So you are constantly looking for high valuable junk items. There are also these juicy mushrooms, which increase your inventory capacity permanently. Which means you can carry more loot to sell to the traders. All of this leads you to engage with every single aspect of this masterpiece of game design

[@Lernos1]

lol I just reached Ark, sold some items, got the initial capital, entered a bank, plopped all my money in there, slept for an eternity, collected infinite money from interest and proceeded to play. Honestly enjoyed it much better that way.

[@mishagaming1075]

@@Lernos1That reminds me of a speedrun of some kinda stickman rpg..

[@diewott1337]

​@@Lernos1 That seem like a boring way to break the system, just marginally better than actually engaging with it. Reminds me of exploiting vendors in Skyrim, even though you can get gold like crazy with basic gameplay loop.

[@bruhtholemew]

6:35 Avoiding combat when it's unnecessary has always been a thing in survival horror games though. Often times the player will save their ammo for bosses that end up eating up most of it.

[@jeiaz]

A bit of a stretch to call it an economy but the management of reputation, relationships and alignements (literally expressed on a scale of 1 to 10) in The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante is extremely good. You have one resource, the actions you can take, and have to constantly choose where to invest it. Any factor you favor means you can't invest elsewhere, with actual and sometimes devastating impacts on your story. It's trade-off after trade-off and getting your preferred endings requires a very precise management of your 'resources'. (not super well written but excellent game imo, dunno why I never see it mentioned anywhere)

[@Aniaas1]

One thing I often look at when evaluating game economies is actually how the transition from limited to surplus resource is handled, as this can be a key factor in progression. For example, early game you might need to go out and gather mushrooms and herbs to make your healing potions, but later in the game you want the player to be focusing on other things and have to put the quest to reconquer the fallen wizards tower on hold to go stomping around the first forest for half an hour restocking ingredients is a pace-killer. There are so many ways I've seen this handled well and poorly - sometimes in the same game.

[@kirby_mode]

Citizen Sleeper's soundtrack is so good. If you play "Density" over any kind of speech talking about something out of my control I will immediately jump to a dystopian mindset. Hence, Adam talking about how the real world economy is designed to make us as productive as possible, and me thinking that I am a slave to powers out of my control. Wait...

[@Daemonworks]

Worth noting that on person's fun is another's slog. Using economy (or anything else) to push towards a particular thing often just shifts which players are having the most fun.

[@the_senate8050]

Am I the only one getting anxious when the Minecraft clip didn't have the player close their door before opeinging the furnance?

[@sixthcairn]

A true sign of someone with no fear.

[@DuctTapeJake]

I've always been interested in an RPG where you actually have to pay for things to survive. When you think about where most of you money goes in real life, it doesn't go towards buying cool new things, it goes towards food, bills, rent and things you need. Most people eat 2-3 meals a day, but you almost never actually need to eat in most roleplaying games, and if you do it's only for a stat buff. Citizen Sleeper did this pretty well, where you had to actually pay for things to survive as well as continue the story. Disco Elysium also had you having to find enough money to rent your room every night, but if you hadn't found enough then the game had to sort of give you money anyway. The issue would be how to treat you if you didn't have the money for food. Would you have to go into debt until a lucrative dungeon run where you had to pay it off with interest? Or would you just start starving the longer you went without food, decreasing your stats. While I personally think it would be a really interesting way to play a hardcore roleplaying game, I'm not sure it would be 'fun'... It's the issue you touched on at the end. Real life economies aren't fun unless you're rich enough to bypass them.

[@stifflered]

One of the challenges to this is in how time progresses in games, including RPGs. They (mostly) don't follow a 24 hour real-time clock. Generally a day/night cycle is anywhere between 10-30 minutes. Having to find food, a bathroom, water, a place to rest, etc... would be done so frequently it would become the most un-fun grind-fest imaginable, keeping you away from the gameplay mechanics that make it all worthwhile. On top of that, a true-to-life day/night cycle would prevent some players from ever seeing certain types of content (if it's restricted based on the day or night). You'd end up with many of those players resorting to cheats or hacks to force a different day/night cycle, which could break different loops or lead them to hacking the game in others ways to further optimize-out the fun. Could be possible in some scenarios, but I imagine most games wouldn't sit in that well.

[@AnotherDuck]

@@stifflered Yeah, a lot of survival games tend to become tedious with food since it usually doesn't take long until it's pretty much a non-issue to get more food, and at that point it's just a chore. In general, eating in games, excluding just for buffs, is restricted to survival games (although generally not survival horror) and simulation games. Those are usually not classical RPGs (in the story sense), but often have some or a lot of RPG mechanics.

[@Xalantor]

@@stifflered A pretty easy way around this would be to abstract it into a weekly cost you'd have to pay. So things you need every day get itemized and billed to the player for feedback. No need to sit down to eat 3 times a day, just do: "cost of the meal x 3 times a day x seven times a week = xxx gold" for that week. Or for you to need to carry around supplies which get consumed automatically each day.

[@brianhsly]

@@Xalantor Yup. I'd pull my hair out if I had to go to the store and buy food every single time I ate, instead of going to the fridge. Same for finding a place to sleep. Whether it's a tent and bedroll in the wild, or a sleeping bag under an overpass, people generally try and find places methods of sleeping they can return to. I modded the hell out of Skyrim a couple years back and got a pretty great survival experience out of it. I had to make my own bow, hunt for my meals, skin my hunts to make a tent, and use the tent for sleeping and avoiding extreme inclement weather. It was fun, but the survival aspect was definitely a main focus while starting out. Once I got to populated area's though, it was less of a big deal. Spend a few gold on an inn, and buy some ingredients for food that would keep for a few days, and I was good to go.

[@Nitsirtriscuit]

“Outward” does this decently. You have to get food and water regularly, but food goes bad in your inventory with time. So you need to adventure to get loot and sell loot to get food, potions, bandages etc. the more risk in your adventure, the more valuable loot you’ll probably get, and the better you are the less you’ll spend on fixing gear. Even mid-late game it tends to not feel bloated because you’re constantly buying buff potions to fight bosses. But late game it gets broken because you have free access to everything you could want instead of buying it.

[@demomanfromtf2669]

one of the better have economies is in Deepwoken in my opinion, the progression is well balanced for notes for the average character, with notes being very useful early in on for basic necessities like training gear, tools, and early weapons, progressing to better weapons, boats, and armors. The endgame has less use for notes, but there is a money sink in the form of the rotating shop from an npc in the depths that can give weapons that can be enchanted. Unfortunately due to how often people lose their money from being mugged/wiping or just buying lots of stuff, the endgame trading community is still very much a bartering system, due to the amount of money that could be equivalent to such rare items being not agreed upon, and infeasible to actually amass without hours and hours of mindless grinding, which would likely be less efficient compared to just levelling a character strong enough to grind for the rare items anyways.

[@Yamartim]

Here's a hint if you want to make the persona 5 economy much more interesting: *don't use the accessories and money you get from the box in your room*, the game was clearly built to be played without those and if you don't get/use them it becomes a lot more complex and interesting Because you don't get SP repleneshing items until very late in the game, every time you go to mementos or a palace your magic becomes a very valuable resource and you have to use it very resourcefully to advance as far as possible, that also makes grinding for money very hard since your resources for grinding it are limited unless you're willing to spend multiple in-game days doing so (and there's tons of better uses for in-game time than grinding). That makes it so the money you get to use in the real world gets very limited so you gotta think a lot harder where to spend it at (and you will still want to spend it because most of the things you can spend money on in P5 are really valuable) It's insane how playing like this the game makes it so much better, suddenly the ability to spend time to make SP recovery items makes a lot more sense, the will seeds recovering SP become a godsend late in a palace raid, powerful personas in your compendium become a lot more valuable, you have to think well about which weapons or gifts to buy, combat becomes more tense because spending lots of SP to knockdown enemies gets expensive real quick so you can't rely on it as often... And when the game actually gives you means to heal your SP little by little through items, powerful personas and especially confidant abilities later on it feels a lot more earned and you value it so much more I seriously recommend people playing P5R to try this! You'll appreciate the game so much more trust me

[@vxicepickxv]

Sounds like they fixed the problem with Persona 4 with the Hermit Arcana allowing for SP recovery

[@sugarfreejelly5577]

SP replenishing items actually come fairly early as You can buy adhesives from goth nurse. It's also a link that's hard not to do because especially early in the game you want the guts that it gives since few places actually provide it at the start, and you're provided an incentive to focus on it Via Iwai's link being blocked. The Adhesives are expensive tho but again, people will just go to the shadows for financial assistance.

[@Alexia-ys6yx]

I want to add onto this by giving an example of a really interesting money system from tales of Xillia 2. The game is a pretty normal JRPG, kill monsters, gain exp and money, level up, get stronger, etc. However, a key plotpoint in this game is that the protagonist is in a ridiculous debt for the entire story. The debt is 20 billion, which is a ridiculous amount even if you were to try to grind all of that with all the money boosts available. The game has a bunch of thresholds where it just pops up and tells you "Hey, you go another 20k. Wanna pay up?". You don't have to pay the money as soon as you reach those points, but if you don't pay, then you won't unlock new portions of the map, which in turn unlock the main story and more content. And should you already have unlocked those major things, the game still reminds you whenever you have enough to pay back and give you some extra items like Consumables, Skill Tomes, or even costumes that can't be gotten anywhere else. The part where this gets interesting is when you want to go and buy new gear for your entire party. Suddenly, you're at the shop and notice: "Oh, I just paid back some of that debt. I don't have any money to buy gear right now." So, you have to make sure you pay back the debt to keep playing the story, but also not pay it back too frequently, or you'll have trouble getting better gear. It fixes the issue I have with a lot of RPGs, where you have very limited money at the beginning, but can never run out later on. Since the game keeps wanting you to pay back that debt, you'll never reach that point where you have "infinite" money. But instead of it feeling too limited, you can just say no, grind up money, spend it on whatever you want and then just pay it back later to continue the game.

[@tik2368]

It’s amazing to see someone cover signalis, and I think to add to your point on ammo it’s inventory system actually caps the amount of ammo you can carry, meaning that at some point, this ammo that you’re saving is not only unspent, but in the case of saving for boss fights, it’s almost completely useless past a certain point, I just thought that was an interesting addition, masterful game nonetheless, but an interesting point on it

[@LizardOfOz]

Minecraft developers have been changing the economy lately to appease a particular audience: so called "Technical Minecrafters", who play Minecraft like Factorio - they strive to acquire all in-game in endless amounts using automatic contraptions, and the developers have adopted this mindset. While it's a very fun way of playing Minecraft, it also means that acquiring resources in any other way than building a factory is inefficient, and people who don't want to spend months learning advanced machinery based on obscure code behavior are missing out that "most efficient way". This has reflected on Minecraft's balance, and a decent amount of building materials can not be obtained in reasonable quantities without a factory. At this point, resources themselves have 0 value - only the factories that produce them. And I'm talking about Vanilla Minecraft - in Modded Minecraft hyperinflation was an expected standard for almost a decade.

[@joemency2242]

Thankfully you don't have to research for months to make a factory, you can just look up a video about it. Unfortunately, these contraptions are often so complex I don't feel like building them

[@nautil_us]

I get your point, but i do feel like the recent updates have done a lot to address this. 1.18 added the iron ore veins and the copper veins, so you don't need a drowned or iron farm to get large amounts of stuff. (And in 1.14, the iron farms became a lot more easy to build). In 1.16 they added gold to the nether, so building a gold farm isn't necessary if you're a casual player. And then there are villagers, which require 0 redstone skills to exploit, only patience to deal with villager AI. There are very few, if any, resources, that you need in a casual world which require advanced redstone knowledge, but if you do want to experiment with it, almost everything is farmable!

[@Ramsey276one]

I’m just planning on mapping the world and place Inns with individual banners on a tourist route… O_o

[@Wintercat1]

It's definitely a change for the better. Even though there's a definite split between players who prefer exploration and gathering and players who prefer exploitation and crafting, the latter makes more sense to enable in the long run. Gathering your resources by hand, especially ores, will only be fun for so long. Even particularly resilient players are going to be doing their mining while listening to podcasts after playing for 100s of hours. In contrast, gathering resources through automation is a process that stays fun for a lot longer. Since the farms themselves can require massive amounts of resources, what resources are most valuable to you changes much more dynamically than the simple stone > iron > diamond > gold formula. The process of building farms allows for a lot creativity and self expression, or just rote optimization from video guides if that's all you want. Historically, automated farms have been much more heavily affected by patches than the gathering routines. That can be annoying, but it also has kept it fresh since we're not building the same exact farms for years and years. It makes sense to base Minecraft's economy around the playstyle that naturally creates a fun, dynamic endgame instead of a boring, grindy end-game. It does mean that players might feel bad about being inefficient if they aren't working on automation early on, but it's okay to just play the way that's fun to you for as long as it stays engaging. If you're not in a competitive multiplayer server, there's no one right way to play the game. That being said, I'm really interested if there's any way for the devs to assuage that by giving fresher players more incentives to explore and gather and just ignore automation until they're deep into the game. The experience system has been their biggest attempt at this, but it doesn't work at all because experience is always something that we want automate in the mid- to end-game, while being near useless in the early game. They would need to use a resource that is no longer useful to someone who can automate.

[@aturchomicz821]

@@Ramsey276one Look this guy here building a bunch of modern infrastructure in the wild with the hope that there would any kind of Tourism pull towards the dangerous Continental Empire of Minecraft like this is the fucking Republic of Cuba OMEGALUL

[@TheGeneReyva]

SupCom was worth a mention in the RTS section. You can build energy as you please, but metal can only be gained in specific locations or from extremely energy intensive buildings. This means you can inefficiently turtle, BUT playing aggressive will 90% be the ideal.

[@csucskos]

Maybe it's a tangent but in the board game Power Grid (Funkenschlag) the resources are generated every turn but only a fixed amount. The more you buy a given resource the more expensive it gets. Players have to buy power plants and then power them. This makes a really fun balancing mechanic because everyone tries to buy the cheapest material but they are committed for the power plant which can only use a given material. So let's say everyone buys coal burning power plants the price of coal jumps because it gets scarce but since noone uses oil as a fuel it gets abundant and the price drops. I know it's different because what makes this economy uncheesable is the fact that other players try to cheese it too and it all balances out.

[@lukasprazak7362]

And in the late game, uranium often becomes cheaper than trash and almost free when compared to oil or coal, leading to players investing into nuclear plants because they are suddendly extremely cheap to operate.

[@csucskos]

@@lukasprazak7362 My intention was to point out the selfregulating nature and not to outline a winning strategy or something. (If everyone buys uranium the price shoots up as that takes the longest to mine so people realize that trash or even oil was not that bad afterall.)

[@lukasprazak7362]

@@csucskos You are right of course. I would actually say that only one or two players will actually invest into nuclear and the rest will leave it be, seeing that it won't be that cheap anymore. I just find it extremely funny that uranium so often becomes cheaper than trash.

[@billy65bob]

I would certainly like to see a bit more realism with game economies. For example, in Arcanum, if you sold stuff that wasn't junk to the merchants, you could visit a similar merchant in another city and sometimes see that exact item reappear there; it's not just destroyed and turned into cash for the player. Which is something I thought was a very nice touch. I would certainly like to see more games have moments of player caused times of shortages and plenty (ala Recettear), I also think it would be cool that if the player flooded the market with endgame gear, some of those very same items ended up in the hands of bandits and other ne'er-do-wells.

[@bramvanduijn8086]

My main Arcanum memory is from randomly finding and accidentally picking up a massive rock, dumping it on some random part of the map, and then later finding out I needed that.

[@davekachel]

Im suprised how this video ends on the philosophy "lets optimize the fun out games and pretend thats fun" instead of "the economy will always be broken, either endorse it or try to retain yourself for more fun"

[@_Fernando.]

That first scene was of Yakuza 0. Don't get me wrong the game is amazing, the funny part tho is that the entire plot of the game revolves around securing a small lot of land worth a billion yen, all while you're literally able to make hundreds of billions yen in, like, one fight. 🤣

[@romiarkan450]

Cash was also experience points in that game though

[@JamesonMcLeod]

9:35 is the most accurate description of persona 5 romance I’ve heard

[@MaxHaydenChiz]

Re: Elden Ring There is no point in killing those frogs. Runes are basically infinite without grinding and, in any event, leveling up has a very marginal impact on your character's capabilities beyond the very early game. (During which, there are so many sources of free runes just literally lying around, that you don't need to kill anything.) The truly limited resource is upgrade materials. Even a single weapon level upgrade will drastically boost your power. And the only way to get those is by exploring. The same goes for upgrades for spirit summons. Exploring also nets you new weapon options and better armor and accessories. When fully upgraded, a few summons (i.e. Tische) can basically solo or nearly solo every boss in the game. And a large number of weapon abilities will trivialize the boss fights down to single digit numbers of hits. Many of the earliest items in both categories can carry you like this for most or all of the game if constantly upgraded. (And in the case of summons, just doing Ranni's quest will get you the ability to max out at least 2 of them within the first 1/3rd of the game.) Conversely, if you assume that you *always* lose all the runes you get from killing ordinary mobs and *only* level up using the runes from bosses, you'll be *way* over-leveled by the end of the game if you try to do everything. (And since there's a flask mixture that will keep you from ever losing your runes anyway, you'll end up with even more than this.) At the same time, all of the stats have diminishing returns, and once you hit the stat requirements for your gear and hit 40 / 60 vigor, there is basically nothing to spend runes on. Those extra levels will add a bit of scaling damage very late into the game *after* all your weapon upgrades are maxed out and you have no better option. But before that point, they don't really help much. Increasing your base damage by leveling your weapons and summons directly is the thing to do.

[@gergokerekes4550]

yeah, basically the frog-farm is in for player who are just bad and just need to brute-stat their way through a fight. a good player not need to resort to that, just by playing the game organically you will have enugh to keep yourself in the challange range. you are on point with the mats.

[@MaxHaydenChiz]

@@gergokerekes4550 My point is that even if you are "bad at the game", it isn't going to be helpful. You can max out your HP by going to 60 vigor. But that's about it. Whoever started this whole "farming can help you" thing was either trolling or didn't understand how the game works. The extra damage you'll get by boosting the other stats is marginal until you have fully upgraded weapons and very high levels. I can't recall a single weapon in the game where you'd get more from increasing scaling damage by a few RLs worth than you'd get by increasing the weapon level from an upgrade and benefiting both from the higher base damage and from the improved scaling with your existing stats. If you are stuck, pick one of the really good summons, upgrade it, and then go upgrade your weapons as much as you can. Rinse and repeat. Use multi-player to get help if you need it to get through the catacombs and mines in order to get the upgrade materials.

[@TheSeptet]

@@MaxHaydenChiz Spoken like a true martial. Try playing a mage and tell me you don't need to grind at least a little bit.

[@MaxHaydenChiz]

@@TheSeptet how does being a mage change that? You still need upgrade materials for your casting items.

[@zacharywong483]

Stupendous video, Adam! Your scripts are beautifully eloquent, your choice of topic is always superb, and your ability to illustrate ideas through an immense array of game examples is very impressive!

[@satyakisil4289]

A very clever way to exploit economics that I can think is the market system in age of empires games. You can trade gold/coins for any other resource type, the idea being that gold is a very limited resource so players are intended to buy gold and rarely sell it. However, the more you buy gold its value increases so you need to spend more and more of your resources each time you trade to get the same amount of gold. This leads to situations where one player tries to control all the gold mines forcing the opponent to use market value for gold. However, the player would often intentionally kill off his own stocks after capturing the gold mines to inflate the price of gold as much as possible, thus leaving himself vulnerable to getting attacked from the opponent who would otherwise have a balanced economy for a short period of time. This leads to large fights where players try their hardest to defend gold mines and capture other gold mines in a battle of attrition.

[@Lishtenbird]

One function of a "universal currency" though is making games more accessible. In a roguelite, if you can't handle an encounter with pure skill outright, you may be able to grind for upgrades first, and still face the final boss. In an MMO, if you aren't good at coordinated PvP, you may be able to still acquire similar items through solo PvE content, and still get to experience all the new locations and stories. Yes, this all needs delicate balance to make sure people do not optimize fun out of the game, and "proper" ways of play are encouraged. But having a universa; currency as a failsafe fallback may be needed when you aren't only aiming at a single, clearly defined audience.

[@KopperNeoman]

This idea that making games EASIER is making them "more accessible" is horrifyingly toxic. Adding colourblind options and control customisation makes games more accessible. Making games easier for "accessibility" is more like "Oh, you can't tell friend from foe? Don't worry, baby. We'll cut out the friendly fire so you don't have to worry! Aww, look at the cute colourblind who thinks he's people!" Making games easier does nothing but discourage diligence and punish those who enjoyed them before, and using the disabled as an excuse to bully developers into it is vile.

[@leobastian_]

@@KopperNeoman the word accessible can have multiple meanings nobody is talking about disabled people in this conversation. Accesibility in this context just means making the game appealing for a wider audience

[@astartes777]

Devil May Cry 5 really got this down. With the Dr Faust weapon, you can spend red orbs as ammunition. The more powerful the attacks, the more you spend.

[@stanleychan3212]

Adam, what do you think about the economic system in grand strategy games such as Stellaris, Victoria 3, Total Wars series, etc?

[@sixthcairn]

Been a while since I played Stellaris; are wide empires still OP?

[@giorgionegro5750]

I'm my opinion Vicky 3 economy kinda sucks for a game that has economy as the main mechanic, prices can't increase or decrease over 75% inflation doesn't really exist( in a way yes but not really that influencial to pops demands), no exchanges, no currency devaluation(no exchange ),no private sector investing(kinda rappresented by investor pool but not really possible a laissez-faire economy if the government decided what to build, it's always a command economy), no foreign investment. It's still a fun game don't get me wrong but I can't find it really fulfilling, they took away the military management to give us an half baked economy

[@Gak237]

My answer before watching the video The basic market regulators are supply and demand, and most video games can't control either of these factors. Supply can be limited somewhere by making an item rarer or adding time gating mechanics, but these just slow down the problem and can lead to unfun gameplay if not implemented very carefully. In the end, supply for some or most items in a game will be unlimited. Most games do nothing to control demand. Things like limited merchant gold or local pricing can help somewhat, but player conveniences like fast travel and waiting quickly make these systems useless. Basically video games have a command economy rather than a market economy, and it has no way to adjust based on the actions of the player. Edit after watching the video: one thing I forgot to say in my comment that your video reminded me. One reason they break in single player games is because the player has different rules from everyone else. Take Pokemon for example. If a trainer beats you you can just go level up or change what Pokemon are on your team, while the npcs can't do anything to prepare for three rematch.

[@jmcmorris]

Great video! Game economies are finicky creatures that can be broken by a singular source. One interesting aspect I would have loved to hear you go into is when game economies are tied to real money and how that can distort gameplay. At one point and possibly still, Diablo 3 allowed you to purchase Auction House items with gold and you could purchase gold with real money. I remember farming for hours and finding that I was able to buy better gear for less than a $1. This completely undermined the entire game and truly discouraged me from playing at all.

[@bramvanduijn8086]

That was mentioned several times.

[@rabidradioactiveraccoons]

For my Economics 101 final, I wrote an essay on video games attempting to simulate real economies. There are two I feel worth mentioning: M.U.L.E. is an over-simplified free market economics simulator which is both cooperative and competitive. There are four resources, each of which are mined by the players; three of those resources are necessary for the generation of more resources, the fourth is the crystals which are ultimately used to determine the victor. At the end of each round, players can sell their mined resources to the colony and other players. If, at the end of the game, the total value of the colony is below a certain point, everyone loses. If you try to break the economy, everyone is going to lose. Also, and this is one that most people probably won't discover, Mount & Blade's economy reacts to the effects of the player using money created by cheats. If you pull a lot of money out of nowhere to buy some really nice gear from a city, that city is going to wind up buying more from the surrounding villages, increasing their prosperity. Because the prosperity of a village inversely affects the number of troops you can recruit from it (less people are desperate enough to join your mercenary band if the village is doing well), you now have less troops. More money also means the city can trade more with others, distributing this magically generated wealth across the world. It is far from being impossible to break, but the economy is balanced in a way that creates a natural reaction that directly affects gameplay.

[@majinweabuu6679]

Something you forgot to mention in Hades is the exchange in the lounge where you can trade currencies for other currencies. So not only do nectars give you a boon bonus, but they can also be considered 1/10th of a Diamond.

[@Lazzil]

18:15 Finding games like these are why I'm glad I'm subscribed to your channel. :) I don't think I'd ever hear about Citizen Sleeper otherwise.

[@blackcitadel9]

Yes, you are correct. Videogame economies serve a specific gameplay purpose and not to model an actual economy. They also (with the exception of MMOs or other multiplayer stuff) only really have one actual agent involved, you the player. This is why in most every RPG I am rich beyond belief as none of the NPCs can react to changing circumstances and are stuck accepting pointless junk valued at 100 whatevers for all eternity, even though they should never have purchased the item from you at all, and defo probably should have stopped after 10. As you say, instead of trying to balance in-game economies into some kind of boring, realistic garbage, devs should build pre-determined fault lines into the game and allow players to break them in ways already predicted, so that we can maximise fun. As for microtransactions, well we just need rid of them. They just extend the game into a weird semi-real place that's not fun, but then that's by design, since microtransactions are all about lining pockets not having fun.

[@Captaincrazy36]

always happy to see Signalis mentioned.

[@ailius1520]

Economics is a *social* science studying the distribution of goods and services between *people* . If it's a single player game, particularly the type where the protagonist is the chosen one saving the world, there isn't an economy. It's just resource management. MMOs can have economies. That's where you see players grind, and they will self sort into the most productive activity.

[@bramvanduijn8086]

Economics is not a science, it is a pyramid scheme pretending to be a science.

[@ChrisMarti96]

Darkest dungeon has a beautiful economy. I never feel like I have enough money or options for all the things I want and I know one bad or unlucky run can set me back pretty hard. I love it

[@HGForrest]

It's probably because the game has some kind of taxation for when your parties die, their upgrades get lost

[@davidbrickey8733]

I got thrown off by Darkest Dungeon's economy in the mid game, because it descends into pure grind. Once you've got the gear to reliably complete mid level dungeons but not high level dungeons, the only way to progress further is to grind a lot of upgrade materials. But the hard limit to how much you can carry back (which doesn't increase in higher-tier dungeons) kills the risk-reward mecahnic and removes all incentive to actually try to harder or longer dungeons unless you use the setting where your heroes refuse to enter dungeons that are beneath them (a point they reach long before you have the equipment to survive a high-level dungeon). Even if you can sometimes find loot worth more gold than you could fit in one inventory slot, harder dungeons can't accelerate the upgrade currencies which are the actual bottleneck.

[@KopperNeoman]

@davidbrickey8733 Bear in mind that the setting you mentioned is the intended design. Your characters' egos are meant to force you into harder dungeons. That's what happens when you make games easier: the very act breaks their design balance to make them easier to exploit.

[@davidbrickey8733]

@@KopperNeoman Maybe, but if I slowed down my progress by getting my guys killed half the time in dungeons or having to flee halfway through, without getting appreciably more loot, that would just make the grind even longer. At the point where your adventurers become too "experienced" for the medium dungeons your town upgrades are still too low to survive the hard dungeons.

[@Spearra]

Another game that has a similar feel is Madness: Project Nexus 2. I never felt like I have enough money to get maxed out equipment for just me, let alone my party members. So I needed to decide. Do I upgrade infrastructure? Better weapons? Armor? Love it.

[@wingsofzero5732]

Wanting to kiss Yusuke and/or Akechi? I see you're a man of culture as well

[@armelior4610]

In RPG you tend to be broke at the beginning and when you break the economy it's to reinforce the feeling of becoming powerful so it's not a problem IMO - the sooner the better, it's not fun playing a pack mule that carry 2000 leather armors to sell to the nearest village after each dungeon

[@JKozlovable]

This was a great video. It really breaks down a complex topic, I had never really given much thought to, into simple digestible chunks. Many thanks, Architect!

[@cerberv5040]

Probably a lil late but you should've made your own community fundraiser for JJ since they enabled this as an option this year. Would have been fun to see how much Architect of Games community could've raised.

[@joshwew9551]

Optimizing economy leads to reducing the time to spent grinding mindlessly to achieve the same result. Time irl is finite, so planning ahead and searching for ways to break the economy feels rewarding. Personally, it's fun when you can "break" the game economy, be it EXP exploit (see Sick Day Reaper farming on P5/P5R to get yourself to level 90+), gold exploit, and many more examples.

[@archeryguy1701]

Even if one isn't trying to exploit a system, open games or games with lots of optional content are super easy to break because devs basically need to choose between 2 separate games to balance- the players who stick to the main story and the players who are going to do EVERYTHING. And they'll always balance for the people who just do the main stuff because doing it the other way around would leave the story people entirely resource starved. But the flip side to that is that the everything players are suddenly the richest characters in the known universe.

[@EnderMega]

I like where the _most view_ part of the video is. Also, I thing that (I believe) only works for Minecraft is that normaly there isnt a valuable resource, like diamonst in the late game with fortune can be pretty abundant, but you care more for the amount of it. So, 1 wood in late game doesnt make nothing, but 4 stacks can make 2 stacks of chests. For me this is good 'cause it encourages me to make farms, which I think is fun in Minecraft.

[@Justking]

I really do love the economies of idle games. Players are constantly improving, but the rate of inflation is so high that you can never be overpowered for too long. And the economies are so complex that players devote hours to optimizing their strategies

[@iruleatgames]

I wouldn't really describe an idle game as "complex", lol (though there are exceptions)

[@Justking]

@@iruleatgames It depends on the game and the player I suppose. I have seen a ridiculous amount of work being put into games like Realm Grinder to figure out the optimal strategy at each point of the game (the game's discord page is fun to scroll through), and even seemingly simple idle games like Adventure Capitalist have had a great deal of player discussion and debate about how to best optimize their progression. I've even seen scholars like Deterding argue that idle game players can be quite similar to speedrunners

[@tankofnova9022]

Reminds me of when I bought 2nd hand gear out of the auction house in Neverwinter that was suppose to be massively out of my reach just by spamming my workshop full of R10+1 potions and selling them. I bought gear from other players that allowed me to trivialize the campaigns I was on so badly I forgot how my build actually worked.

[@henrriquetordoya1637]

God the moonligther village theme is so good

[@Apex_Slide]

Dyson Sphere Program has a very interesting form of economy as well. It doesn't matter if you play with infinite resource veins or extremely limited veins, at some point you're forced to look outside your little slice of the galaxy into other systems, eventually being forced to explore the very edge of your slice of the galaxy for the rarest of resources, all in order to bring them back into your little system. But the game forces you to build bigger and bigger, thus requiring more and more resources. Shit, in order to build one of the very best Dyson Sphere's in terms of power generation, you need something like 50 million rockets launched, which that in itself requires massive amounts of resources just to build. To do it efficiently you'd either need hundreds of very small and efficient rocket makers, or 5 or 6 entire planets dedicated to making rockets. Then you've actually gotta transport and launch those rockets.. So for a single dyson sphere, you could end up converting 3 systems into just making rockets, and the system you're building the sphere in having every planet (between 1 and 6) converted into just rocket launch pads. The amount of resources required to do this per minute is absolute insane. I think the most efficient one still requires a good 500k iron ore per minute to be sent just to build the base components.

[@kingslayer2414]

"Either work for a rich player in a slow grind or become a criminal and get really lucky" Now I don't know if that's supposed to describe a game or real life. 😂😭

[@RidireOiche]

I'm sorry this might sound dumb to anybody who knows anything about game design but one solution could be to incorporate a hidden counter to track of the amount of money in a village with a secret cap on the amount that circulates between all the shops and naturally grows in time with the player's story progression or faster the more the player invests in the village by making purchases on things like potions, arrows, food, bait, the inn, armour, weapons, repairs, horses, and so on. More money circulating thoughout the village, will see better items and services become available. With new side quests opening up to the player when certain hidden milestones are reached up to a point loosely tied to story progression. However, if the player takes advantage of the village's economy by, for example, selling 9999 rat butts for one money each, the village itself will start to decline causing certain items, services, side quests, or areas to no longer be accessible to the player, eventually leading to the village's abandonment. That, in my opinion, would end the motivation for exploitative grinding, cheese stats and balance issues as well as instil a little compassion or realism in the player, teaching the player that if they take all the money out of the village, they will be leaving nothing for everyone else or that they are harming others and themselves in the long run. If the lesson is not heeded, sure, you will have all the money in the game but you cannot spend it because there is no NPC left in the game to buy anything from.

[@ziwuri]

Don't you just love it when you write a video essay about games and accidentally end up with a critique of real-world capitalism?

[@generalZee]

Whenever someone talks about video game economies I have only 3 words "Star Wars Galaxies." That game was the best MMO for economics of all time. Resources spawned for a few weeks at a time, and some players were dedicated crafters, seeking out rare resources, extracting them, and then building powerful weapons and items. Combat characters could loot rare components and schematics which would allow the crafters to craft the best items in the game, provided they had the best resources available for it. All the while, money was taken out of the economy by maintenance fees on houses, harvesters, and vendors which didn't stop inflation entirely, but did slow it significantly when compared to other MMO's. Until the developer decided to destroy their own game, it was really an amazing experience.

[@tomohawk2177]

Imagine watching in 360p. 144p all the way 😎

[@Kaeldorn]

Kind of already knew the answer, and you kinda answered the question in the first sentences. Though I don't agree with everything that was said in the video. There is no scarcity. The problem with 'rarity' as it's used in most games these days is that it's just a lower chance on a roll of the dice and additional time spent eventually yields every resource you need anyway. This can only be made 'unbreakable' in games where time itself is a finite resource. Just because the way to gain resources isn't a menial task doesn't make it any more difficult to break the economy in a game. Besides RTS games, there's a few older business/economic sim games that do it fairly well. Though I get that those aren't as flashy as some of the stuff you showed.

[@Carrio_Customs]

I love your videos man. They’re also great. Keep it up man

[@onetwo5155]

You speak of economies, but I believe the concept of wisely allowing breaking of balance is something that can affect many other fields as well. One of my most memorable experiences when young and playing Baldurs Gate was when I found a frostbrand longsword +2, which was, IIRC, side content or in a part that I was supposed to visit later. Older games had some of these moments where, if you could handle the challenge, you could find something impressive and very useful. Most modern games of that sort operate on a very safe design, where risks are very managed but so are rewards and options. Tactics Ogre Reborn, for example, is a completely modern game which I find very boring in comparison with the original. Meaningful options are reduced in what I would expect to see in a pvp environment instead of a regular pve game(to preempt, I don't miss the insane difficulty or very slow progression, but the redesign could have been so much better than what we got)

[@amsgamingandmusic]

Paraphrase, "...Ammo is plentiful in the newer doom games..." My good sir, you drastically underestimate my ability to treat every weapon like a modified pulse rifle: mag dumping in hopes of exponentially increasing damage, a feature only integrated in the heat release system 🤣

[@giacomobergonzi4906]

That was just false information tbh, Doom Eternal doesn't give you much ammo, you really need to make every single shot count feom UV onward

[@amsgamingandmusic]

@@giacomobergonzi4906 Yeah, bit aside, I agree completely.

[@bigxberzon]

THANK YOU FOR TALKING ABOUT HARDSPACE SHIP BREAKER!!!! It’s my 2022 game of the year. So fun and meticulous I love it. But it needs more balance or difficulty. More incentive to be more cautious with breaking ships in relation to your debt. You shouldn’t be able to throw away ships you don’t want to finish because of an explosion. You should be charged for not breaking down the ship completely. You should be discouraged by the company from wasting too much of their resources. It needs auto saving. I guess what I’m saying is I want a hardcore mode lol

[@harpoonlobotomy]

I love that game and agreed. After I finished it the first time I went to try the 'limited lives' mode for a challenge... And the limited lives allowed for twice as many deaths as I had in my first playthrough. Self-imposed ironman mode is fun though, and even if the economy/progression is totally broken I still spend hours taking ships down to 97.3%. ...I'm gonna end up playing it again this evening, aren't I...

[@rlocks7253]

I think a game called Stalker Anomaly does it decently, since merchants each have different inventories and buy things for different amounts, even if they are the same type of merchant. For example, the clear sky's merchant won't buy jewelery or "junk" items that are good for selling or for crafting if you are willing to make use of the cash to borrow a vice. And ammo is both common, and scarce, and the game even encourages selling and hoarding ammo because it can take up inventory space and also worth some cash, although most equipment in the game NEEDS purchased, or you can repair shitty weapons and armor grabbed off corpses, and everything is expensive. So it's encouraged to scavenge, and make use of what resources you can scavenge, and sell what you can't use to the right merchant, and although in theory you can grind quests, it's not as worth while as heading more north to find more quest givers, since quests are the main source of cash outside of artifacts. Edit: forgot to mention, even random stalkers can buy and sell things to you, for different prices than merchants, and even if said items tend to be random. And although I haven't tested this, I think their inventories in terms of what they sell is based off what they been scavenging, since the entire zone is simulated, even if you aren't in areas, so npcs will do things. Go deeper, loot things, kill and be killed, even if you aren't around to do things

[@typemasters2871]

Honestly, an RTS based around turtling sounds interesting How do we encourage players to attack other players? Have army size affect the amount of land needed (I.E. each land square holds x number of unit space), and when that the army limit is hit then there would be a consequence (unable to make new units, new units spawn outside of the base, core of the base starts getting weakened, etc) Or I am just thinking about an RTS version of the civilisation series

[@AnotherDuck]

That's how tower defence games were born.

[@sarat6488]

5:29 the reverse is true of Doom Eternal. The chainsaw does not give ammo anymore, and ammo is far more scarce than in Doom 2016. One of the complaints of Doom Eternal is that the ammo economy and enemy weaknesses funnel you down a specific playstyle and removes a lot of player choice and agency.

[@furiouscorgi6614]

Who's gonna tell them the chainsaw gives ammo

[@BerniiGames]

Incredible video. I enjoyed it every second. Extra props to explaining systems like Dishonored, which I have never played. It makes a lot of sense how you explain it!

[@histhoryk2648]

"Until they realise the game won't let you kiss Yuske or Akechi because game's creators are homophobes and it won't let you kiss Sae either and you end up settling for a boring tradwif.." Gold

[@Chodor101]

I'm so fast that video is only in 360p and yet there are comments from over an hour ago, crazy.

[@MartinGreywolf]

Seeing Deep Rock Galactic up there got me thinking - DRG managed to achieve a rare feat of making the money sink fun, or at least part of the fun. It's pretty clear after a very short amount of time that you are a working-class miner dwarf who is over-stressed and underpaid by the Management, and they absolutely want to scam you off of your hard-earned minerals and money. Your dwarf will comment on this almost every time he makes a purchase. In the DRG context, it creates this sort of camaraderie between players, because Hoxxes is trying to kill you, the Management is trying to scam you and doesn't care about your life and the bugs are super turbo definitely trying to kill you, and all you can (sometimes) rely on are your fellow miners. I guess all I can say to that is: Rock and Stone!

[@lunamariahawke9320]

09:30 Don´t worry, we have doujinshis, fanfics and fanart for that ;D To be fair, P5R is far easy to level up/bond with your friends than the vanilla P5.

[@Romapolitan]

I remember always having so much money in Skyrim, that I never had to care about the price of anything, just by playing the game normally.

[@randomcommentor]

15:52 Minecraft is also a good example of a broken economy though. With the way villagers work, you can put all of your focus into an automatic pumpkin farm (or any other automatic resource that can be sold), and make tons of farmer villagers. Almost everything you'd ever need can now be bought with emeralds, of which you have an infinite amount. I often lose interest in a given save or server after this point, as building new farms feels pointless.

[@sixthcairn]

Funnily enough, the exploitation of villagers reminds me a lot of how exploitation of captive workforces is such a large part of many industries even today; from foreign construction workers with confiscated passports in the Middle East, to pseudo serfs in nations without good agrarian reform, from illegal immigrants working under the table in the First World, to the countless victims of sex trafficking around the world. Minecraft is disgustingly accurate in this regard; people in power, a literal colonialist even, treating the weak no better than farm animals.

[@randomcommentor]

@@sixthcairn I think minecraft is an interesting (and funny) subject of analysis in general. Everything about it at first glance, its branding, its developers and gameplay seems so innocent, but if you actually want to be as efficient as possible, you have to be the worst, most cynical exploiter of animals, people and natural resources. Mojang changes the villagers, making them more human and life-like with dynamic professions, beds and so on. Not a day passes before someone finds the perfect way to lock them in a 1x2x1 cubicle and traumatizing them with zombification to get the lowest prices. Mojang adds dolphins to the game that follow you and give you a nice speedboost when you swim beside them, and not long after, I'm over here constructing underground water tunnels, trapping hundreds of dolphins in small chambers, dangling them above water so they don't drown themselves, so i can travel 60 blocks a second and avoid nether travel. But there's a funny absurdity to it. And mastering these mechanics, learning everything there is to know.. There's something insanely captivating about it. I hope that's just me being interested in a game and not a human trait we inflict upon the world, hahahhh.

[@Lernos1]

Honestly, if I'm playing a singleplayer game, I always expect there to be some way to break the economy completely and get infinite money by mid to late game. Otherwise I end up feeling disappointed that I won't be able to try everything there is and finally receive a proper payoff for my blood-and-sweat playthrough.

[@russellsanders4535]

I spent the entire video thinking about Super Paper Mario’s rupee farming and the time I tried to manually reach the amount necessary to leave. So happy to see 2 seconds of that in this video

[@ooffilipinopatriot7605]

try economy of eve online. It's not easy to exploit it. It's kinda like the economy of our world except the game doesn't have laws for trade. It's driven by consumerism. It will mold you into a psychopathic accountant.

[@mayanightstar]

Your take on the dating sim aspect of persona 5 was so accurate hahahaha

[@HGForrest]

Worst economies are the ones that fail to be relevant or significant. In most rpgs, early you don't have the money to buy anything of value, but once you do, your loot almost always outvalues anything available in the shops.

[@Juliett-A]

Eve Online's economy is one of the rare ones that works because it's a real economy and everything is produced by players. Path of Exile is another great example as the "currency" is also used to upgrade/craft your equipment. Most economies break because they were never thought through or designed to function long term.

[@mylescasey8914]

The Witcher 3's economy works well, I think. Early on, you can barely scrape 2 crowns together; monster contracts offering only 200 a job. But later on, by the time you have thousands of crowns, you're conversing with kings and queens, so it would make sense to have a chunk of change.

[@lukasprazak7362]

But the game quite often pretends that Geralt doesn't have much money and is constantly in need of more cash.

[@-opus]

Would be great if videos like this labelled the games on the screen

[@DrZaius3141]

Path of Exile is valiantly trying to create a MMO economy that doesn't fall apart at the seams, but in turn they have so many different kinds of currency that it takes a long time for new players to wrap their heads around what it actually means. Stardew Valley has time and energy as primary resources, but goes out of its way to encourage diversifying one's portfolio.

[@JustinKoenigSilica]

Plus, poe is kind of cheating by resetting the economy every big patch. Standard is hyperinflated as shit.

[@Yotanido]

I'd argue that PoE only has two currencies: Chaos Orbs and Divine Orbs. Sure, there are many more items called "currency", but for trade between players, it's usually one of the two. Vendors are a bit more inventive with their pricing, but their items tend to be super cheap anyway.

[@Sir_Lagg_A_Lot]

As someone who has played Path of Exile, I would call its economy an unpleasant mess. I would not consider it a good video game economy, but an interesting one.

[@Fibless]

9:28 i do love me a good tangent

[@joda7697]

I love Minecraft too because as a technical player, there's a ressource that isn't even directly in the game, yet very essential: Lag. In the late game, farms that provide ressources seemingly infinitely are limited by the lag they cause the server, which slows them back down again. And i love that that's literally a ressource you need to start thinking about eventually, even though it's practically limitless in the early game, before you have massive farms.