Game economy design is much more than just monetization. An intriguing game economy design is what keeps the game ticking, as it is a quiet yet crucial force behind player engagement that defines how gamers progress through the game. This blog will get you through a detailed exploration of in-game economy design and how to create one that makes your game stand out from the crowd, impacting the overall game revenue and success.
Be it Coins and Gems in Bal Hanuman, Gold, and Dark Elixir in Clash of Clans, or V-Bucks in Fortnite (Battle Royale), they’re a few of the well-designed game economies, making their respective games standout. Game economy design is about creating and managing the economic systems within a video game.
It includes integrating currency, resources, and trade systems that hugely influence the player’s progression, motivation, and overall game enjoyment, often to maintain balance, engagement, and profitability. It fosters a seamless, more enjoyable player experience while ensuring the game remains sustainable down the line.
The key purpose behind the game economy design is to provide players with an opportunity for economic growth and advancements within the game setting while generating revenue for the game studio. This blog will be navigating you through a detailed analysis of everything you need about game economy design and how its benefits.
Game economy design is the process of creating and managing the in-game resources, currencies, and progression systems. It ensures a balanced, engaging, and rewarding gaming experience for gamers. Game economy design aligns players’ progression with game monetization strategies, ensuring fairness in the game while fostering player retention and revenue. A tailored economy design optimizes gameplay and encourages revenue while keeping imbalances at bay.
The game economy design aims to create a balanced, engaging, and rewarding in-game experience for players while promoting the game’s overall objectives which include the following:
Monetization: In case a game is free-to-play or has in-game purchases, it is required to create a scenario for the player to trigger investment, and, that too, in a way that feels fair and non-exploitative.
Taps and sinks are mechanisms that control and manage the flow of resources, engagement, and economic balance. In-game economy design, taps tend to determine the rate at which resources such as points, or coins enter the system, whereas, sinks manage the rate at which these resources exit.
The concept of taps and sinks is applied in industries such as cryptocurrency (minting vs. burning tokens), FinTech (cashback vs. fees), healthcare (wellness incentives vs. deductibles), and urban planning (transport subsidies vs. tolls). They balance the resources and their expense in the game economy while driving desired behaviors.
When it comes to balancing sources (inflows) and sinks (outflows) in a game economy design, you need to have a predetermined strategy. When done properly, it prevents inflation, and ensures long-term sustainability, while keeping players players engaged. Here’s how to balance sources and sinks in the game economy:
Game economy design plays a vital role to influence spending behavior across industries like FinTech, eCommerce, Retail, EdTech, healthcare, and the like. It also plays a significant role in video game monetization, specifically in free-to-play games or mobile games. One should design a game economy in such a way that encourages interest and spending with no counterproductive impact on engagement.
Game economy design and monetization tend to be closely linked together. It impacts how users, customers, and players interact with the service provider (game, banks, educational institutions, etc.), and how spending is encouraged. A well-designed game economy ensures the right balance between rewards, progression, and engagement. It leads to the natural flow of monetization, such as in-app purchases or premium content in games.
When there is a rewarding and fair game economy, users are more likely to spend for convenience customization or user experience enhancement, eventually giving a boost to revenue and success.
Game economy design involves several components and the following are some of them:
Choosing the type of game economy is essential before you move on to the designing. Look at the pointers below to see the types of game economies:
As discussed above, the game economy is one of the crucial elements of game monetization, however, balancing is significant to a successful game economy. The key challenge here is to create a game environment wherein the player experience is motivated to spend money while avoiding making non-paying players feel kind of left behind. Here are the core principles of a successful game economy balancing:
Knowing how to balance the game economy is right, however, you should also know how to avoid common pitfalls when you design it. Avoide following pitfalls when conducting game economy design:
There is a wide range of game economy design examples, however, World of Warcraft (WoW), Path of Exile, Minecraft, and Fortnite are among the top ones. Look at the example below to know the top-notch examples of game economy designs:
World of Warcraft features an excellent set of game economy, allowing players to earn gold and trade items. The game economy is created on the player-to-player interaction, focussing on auctions, and creating loot drops. Moreover, WoW’s economy incorporates both free-to-play elements and optional paid subscriptions.
Path of Exile is a free-to-play action RPG that has a deep loot-based economy, focused on providing gamers with a variety of item types capable of being crafted, traded, and enhanced. It has most tradable items including currency to be used to upgrade or craft gear. It enables players to participate in a highly dynamic marketplace.
Based on resource collection, crafting, and trading, Minecraft has its game economy designed simply. The very game design has a robust community-driven aspect where gamers trade items and resources. Its open-world design enables players to set up their economies and establish personal or server-wide trade systems.
Moreover, resource scarcity, for example, rare ores such as diamonds, fosters a sense of value, driving player interaction.
Supercell’s design for Clash of Clans ensures an excellent balance between fair progression and monetization. Game enthusiasts can progress in games through hard work or can spend money to accelerate the process of progress. The best thing is that the game never restricts critical content to the paywall.
Fortnite operates on a free-to-play model backed by an in-game currency system, V-Bucks. Players need to purchase V-Bucks using real money, which allows them to bury cosmetic items like emotes, skins, and battle passes from the in-game shops. The cosmetic-only monetization model is successful as it doesn’t try to take inappropriate advantage while still providing a rich set of incentives for spending money on cosmetics for game progression.
Designing a game economy that allures gamers and makes the game interesting is crucial, however, only the creation of a game economy fails to last longer. Therefore, owners should monitor and iterate the game economy after a certain period of time. Here is how to do so:
Continuous Adjustments: Make small, and iterative changes to the economy as per the data gathered. They can be event-based changes, resource rebalancing, or making adjustments to the prices for in-game items.
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Be it game design, development, game economy design, or environment design, our team of accomplished game developers excels at delivering all-encompassing solutions to satisfy your needs. Dots and Boxes, Bal Hanuman, and 2cars are among our top-notch creations and contributions in the game world.
If you’re someone on the lookout for a game design agency for game economy design, you can simply contact us and we’ll help you get there with all convenience. It will help you take your game to the next level, opening up excellent opportunities for growth and success.
A game economy designer is one who designs, develops, and ensures the balance of the game economy. Their roles and responsibilities include designing the game economy, how gamers interact with them, and the way the game responds to player actions. Furthermore, they are also accountable for setting numerical values like price, progression rate, thresholds, and the like.
Game economy design principles aim to create a well-balanced, engaging, and thereby rewarding in-game economy system. The primary aspects of the game economy design involve resource management, player-driven progression, meaningful rewards, scarcity, and currency sinks intending to restrict inflation.
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