Currency balancing , Game Economy

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#1

Hello developers, I am here to present a question for you all that you can answer from experience or personal prefrence.

Money!, or really any possible currency you can think of that may help progress in your experience.

Näyttökuva 2022-08-01 174131
Näyttökuva 2022-08-01 174414

Question, how valuable should your in-game currency be?

In some “Simulator” games, well in most of them actually, they have one or multiple currencies and usually the amount of that currency the player can earn in a short period of time is alot, For example

our currency goes by the name “Cash” Now
the player may grind for about 10- 25 minutes and get to around 10 million cash, no gamepasses or extra boosts used, just playing the game , maybe buying some upgrades that might increase the rate , but let’s just say he got to that point in that amount of time.
Now thats alot of Cash

Now, I was thinking I would make my currency in my personal game harder to acquire, but I came to thinking even tho its easier and less confusing having maybe thousands instead of billions of the currency.
But then I thought, do bigger numbers attract more players?
I would assume that if a Noob joined the game they would stay there longer if the game gave the noob bigger amounts of currency.
Versus when the Noob would play my game and think, hmm I am not progressing alot since my currency feels like its not increasing rapidly.

Even if the actual game progression wasn’t faster would the Noob prefer to play the game where the amounts are larger ?

My personal thought would be that this could be the case for some people, but I can’t verify that since some games that don’t give out trillions of their currency in a second still tend to have players actively playing the game.

Although I would still think the bigger numbers do work on alot of people since thats the case in real life too, we just want more of whatever, like money or maybe followers on a social media platform. New Simulators usually have the habit of giving the players loads , but also so the progression rate isn’t too fast, they make the Unlockable things more and more expensive. That leads to the currency being worth less than it would have been making the newer players have a harder time reaching those goals, Do you think this Inflation in these games is Okay or is it a serious problem.
Please leave your thoughts down below

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#2

The issue with being able to earn a large amount of in-game currency is the players can get most things quick and then it will make them play for a few mins and then leave.

The things that really attract people is having cool things to purchase. I personally think if a game gives lots of money quick it just does not make me want to play for long cuz there is nothing to work up to.

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#3

I agree, in some simulator types of games, specifically the problem is the things get more and more expensive as time goes on, and progression becomes boring and time consuming and repetitive

#4

This might be controversial, but I think limiting the amount of money players can get each day could be possible to keep the game fair to everyone to make it consistent IF and WHEN players make it to that point. Rebirthing is one of the options but it’s been used over and over that when I see anything like that in game I kinda go bleh

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#5

Yup. You want to ensure you don’t go up in cash fast but at the same time not too slow.

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#6

So you think that the players should have limited amount earned, but if the money is limited and the “pros” make more than the new players and they all got the same limit it doesn’t really sound right in my eyes, some kind of limiting is always nice so people don’t waste their day on your game .

I would probably make it so Pros would not have a huge difference in how much money they make compared to noobs like in simulators (most of them), so for Ex, the noob can make 10 coins doing a task and the pro can make like 50 coins or a 100 coins a task, not like in simulators where the pro makes about 456 quintillion and the noob makes 100 thousand.
Would that be good or should the pros still make loads more, or just that they make more and do the task easier , but don’t have too big of an advantage in the game so the noobs can eventually become pros so when the next update rolls out the noobs who became the pros aren’t all of a sudden noobs because the game did not add a ridicilous change in the economy of the game.

#7

The problem with simulator games these days is that they keep adding more and more stuff which in return do return good player count yes but it makes the game more repetitive and boring. It’s fun to play a game that lasts forever, but would you really wanna click your mouse hundreds of times only to do it over and over until maybe, just maybe you get lucky. Limiting the money earned by the players will definitely sorry out of the biggest problems here but in return you will get questions asked.

#8

I don’t think limiting in general is a good idea. Imagine if I am super occupied and I don’t have time to play my favorite game, then the weekend comes, and I have some few hours to play. I would feel stolen if I couldn’t get as much just because I can only play on the weekends. Another thing is that bigger milestones may require more money but then instead of a linear and satisfying experience it would be an overexaggerated exponential curve since I can only make the same amount of money than another person that just started playing.

However, if you refer to limiting the ways of getting money then I am all for it. Let’s say there is a heist that generates a lot of money. Adding a delay after you finish the heist will force players to get another way of getting money meanwhile it resets. Adding random factors would also help since the player would always need to change their plan slightly to be able to keep generating money, these factors can be random events or even the players themselves (Let’s say someone already robbed that heist).

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#9

The same task having a cooldown is a good idea , and when you were talking about heists for ex what rockstar games did was add a cooldown for when you can replay the heist , so the grind isn’t constant

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#10

I believe I should just stick to my original idea of my game not having such inflation as alot of simulators.
But I truly believe that higher numbers make people go crazy, because that is just the way it is right now.

#11

You almost want the inflation to be at a point where what seems like a large amount to a new player is achievable but not easily withing 10-45 minutes.