I’ve been doing this game critic hustle for over a decade now, and one question that keeps popping up is, “Why are in-game economies so broken?”\u00a0 How come nothing makes sense? You’re halfway through a game and you’ve got enough money to start your own country. It’s weird that your character has this much wealth, and it’s even more weird that you can’t really do much with it.<\/p>\n
So people ask me: What’s the deal here? Can’t game designers create a properly balanced economy? Why do roleplaying economies always dissolve into nonsense like this?<\/p>\n
It’s annoying, I know. Different games have different kinds of currency, different ways of handling progression, and different ways of handling loot, but it’s still really common to have games where the player is able to trivialize the economy by just collecting and selling loot.<\/p>\n
The good news is, there is a reason for this. The bad news is, it’s your fault.<\/p>\n
Or more specifically, it’s the natural result of a perfectly reasonable series of expectations on the part of the player, and those expectations lead inevitably to this absurd conclusion.<\/p>\n
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