Game Economics: The role of money in single player games, Part 2

A quick recap from the intro:

The logical inverse of money in a video game is cost and prices in the game.

What is the role of prices in a single player game for the designer?

1. It provides a way for the designer to set player power growth by limiting availability of items.
2. Prices can be a subtle hint as to what "Power Range" the player should buy.
3. Controlled/Constant reward mechanism for doing certain actions.

1. Prices are a way to control the availability of items to guide or set player growth/power.

Some items are simply too powerful to have unlimited access to and yet they are too neccessary to the game's function to do without. You don't want players to lean on certain items like a crutch 99% of the time. The ubiquitous example is healing potions. If you don't want players to have infinite life but it is also crucial that the player has something to fall back on, consider making healing potions really expensive. They are too expensive to use 100% of the time, so hopefully players will play extra carefully to conserve their limited resources (money) so they don't have to buy so many healing potions every single time.


Another example would be fast travel mechanisms, such as instant teleportation, warps or checkpoints. If the player was able to use these constantly all the time, there would essentially be no need to have any normal based travel and thus a large part of the game would be negated. However, by providing limited teleportation with a high enough cost attached to it (Say, by making a quick portal of return to town cost 10,000 gold each time), you can ensure that players have access to the mechanism without completely negating all the detailed work you put in when the player is going the scenic route.


2. Prices are a subtle hint and a tantalizing gesture to what the players should have and what the players will have.


There's two parts to this. If you make solid baseline items cheap then the player will more likely buy that armor because it is what he can afford inexpensively. Let's say we make a suit of normal plate armor relatively cheap on the player's budget. That provides a subtle indicator that this is probably the armor that the designer intended him to wear at this level.

At the same time, we can provide the next tier of armor at a prohibitively expensive price that the player can't afford (or could only afford a tiny limited quantity of). In this instance we create excitement and expectation as the player was able to preview the next powerful item he can use and giving him an intermediate goal (acquire more loot) in order to obtain it. I mean, you can't afford this shiny platinum armor of spikes just yet but wait until after you've played a little more and it's yours!


3. High prices essentially make money rewards better. It lets you drive the player in one direction with the reward mechanism.


Let's say that you make an especially awesome prize or special mount 1000 gold. Now with the price that high, if the player really wants the prize, every single action he can take that would grant him gold looks more appealing than everything else. In fact, the questlines that reward money become secondary goals that the player sets for himself in order to achieve your primary prize (the special mount.)

Or let's look back on our score analogy. Let's say that lives are rewarded every 100,000 points. Now if there's a safe low-scoring way to play and a risky but high-scoring way to play, the fact that the player only gets a bonus if he chooses the high scoring route makes that route look more appealing. It gives him the motivation to pursue the high scoring route knowing that a special bonus awaits.