MMO Economies - Hyperinflation, Reserve Currencies & You! - Extra Credits
Extra Credits1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2016-2020
1.5M views · 9 years ago · explainer · evergreen
An Extra Credits episode on how MMO economies get overrun by inflation when players can mint unlimited gold by killing monsters. It covers approaches borrowed from real-world economics, such as anchoring or pegging currency, as alternatives to simple gold sinks.
Cited in game-economy threads as a clear explanation of why vendor-sellable loot causes hyperinflation and how designers counter it.
6:26Games Should Not Cost $60 Anymore - Inflation, Microtransactions, and Publishing - Extra Credits
Extra Credits
678K views • 8 years ago
21:19Manufactured Discontent and Fortnite
Folding Ideas
1.7M views • 7 years ago
34:13The Addictive Cost Of Predatory Videogame Monetization (The Jimquisition)
Stephanie Sterling
1.3M views • 7 years ago
52:22Exposing FRAUD And DECEPTION In The Retro Video Game Market
Karl Jobst
2.8M views • 5 years ago
19:49Let’s go whaling: Tricks for monetising mobile game players with free-to-play
PocketGamerbiz
757K views • 10 years ago
2:31:44This is Financial Advice
Folding Ideas
8.4M views • 3 years ago
48:27Jonathan Blow: Game design: the medium is the message
CreativeMornings HQ
119K views • 13 years ago
14:05TUN: Un-Ruining the MMO
MrBtongue
291K views • 13 years ago
1:44:09Jonathan Blow: Video Games and the Human Condition
rubbermuck
158K views • 15 years ago
44:23The Immoral Design of Diablo Immortal
Josh Strife Hayes
4.4M views • 4 years ago
1:09:54Gambling and the desire machine | Pay to Win
Jimmy McGee
222K views • 4 years ago
36:24How Valve is Profiting from Steam's Back-Door Casinos
People Make Games
425K views • 4 years ago
1:49:22The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse
Folding Ideas
8.2M views • 3 years ago
22:44Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers
People Make Games
2.7M views • 5 years ago
39:47How lucky is too lucky?: The Minecraft Speedrunning Dream Controversy Explained
Stand-up Maths
8.4M views • 5 years ago
1:15:54"Games as a service" is fraud.
Accursed Farms
1.1M views • 7 years ago
7:24How Gamers Killed Ultima Online's Virtual Ecology | War Stories | Ars Technica
Ars Technica
3.2M views • 8 years ago
39:52Ross's Game Dungeon: Deus Ex
Accursed Farms
1.5M views • 10 years ago
6:58The Skinner Box - How Games Condition People to Play More - Extra Credits
Extra Credits
1.2M views • 14 years ago
1:28:30Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
GDC Festival of Gaming
565K views • 9 years ago
4 comments from Hacker News
until you have an established player base and are using 95% or your time for balancing and the economy ( ▶ this video )
Anchoring the in-game currency is one of the main strategies for preventing in-game currency inflation: ▶ this video Instead of paying player characters to grind, and therefore have players consume game content, why aren't we paying players to create game content?
Meh. It's a by-product of the typical hyperinflation you get when you try to devise an economy where everyone gets to print as much money as they care to. (Which is what MMO grinding for cash basically amounts to.) Their trying to peg ISK to real world money through PLEX is a typical strategy to try and counteract this, which also typically kind-of works, but only typically kind-of. ▶ this video My solution for this will be "first-principles." Quite simply, I'm not going to let players print money.
Extra creditz just published an excellent video on why auto-generated vendor-sellable items lead to hyperinflation under most circumstances, and a few ways to avoid it: ▶ this video | When buying from a player, the player bot will try to resell the same item for double the price. Given this, and assuming auto-buy from vendorbots, I'd predict the second they open the game for auto-grinders (or puppeteered bots) to appear, kill anything in sight, sell stuff, pump any bitcoin any vendorbot might hold, until the game economy holds no more bitcoin. It's probably more CPU-efficient, than mining bitcoin; and there's a manual workforce readily mobilizable for it. The game looks really promising, and I'd love to grind a few hours in it as it stands, but I'm not sure if dropping a bitcoin dependency into it won't sink it prematurely.