Earned versus spent across your players' whole tenure

The ratio between currency earned and currency spent is the most compact description of an economy's health. Above one and players are accumulating; below one they are depleting; near one and the system is in balance.

As a single game-wide figure it is nearly useless, because it averages populations in completely different situations. Plotted against tenure, it becomes one of the more informative charts available.

What the shape usually looks like

In a functioning economy the curve has a recognisable shape.

Early on, the ratio is above one. New players earn faster than they spend because they are accumulating toward their first meaningful purchases and because early rewards are generous. This is correct — a new player with nothing needs to build up.

It should then dip toward one as the player enters the main loop. They are earning and spending in rough balance, making regular decisions about what to buy. This is the healthy middle, and the longer a game keeps players here the better.

Late in tenure it typically drifts above one again, as players run out of things to buy. This is the content ceiling appearing in the data, and where it appears tells you how long your game holds someone.

Deviations from this shape are where the findings are.

The failure shapes

A ratio that never comes down means the early game is not producing purchases. Players accumulate from day one and never enter the spending loop. Usually this means the first meaningful purchase is too far away, or nothing early is worth wanting.

A ratio that drops well below one and stays there means players are permanently short. They spend everything immediately and never accumulate. This looks like a healthy spending economy and is often a frustrating one — players are always broke, which is a different experience from always choosing.

A ratio that spikes above one at a specific tenure point marks a wall. Players reach that point, stop spending, and accumulate. Something there is either unaffordable or uninteresting, and the tenure position tells you exactly where to look.

An early ceiling — the late-tenure rise happening much sooner than expected — means the game runs out of things to buy faster than it runs out of players. That is a content problem visible in economy data well before it appears in retention.

Splitting it further

Two additional cuts make the chart considerably more useful.

By spending status: paying and non-paying players have different curves and averaging them obscures both. Non-paying players are the ones whose earn-to-spend ratio describes the earned economy purely, and they are the population the economy design should be checked against.

By currency: if the game has more than one, each has its own curve and they frequently disagree. A game where the soft currency is balanced and the premium currency accumulates has a specific problem — premium purchases are being made and the premium catalog does not have enough in it.

Neither of these requires new data if currency transactions record their cause and the player's tenure is derivable from install date.

See how we read economy health across tenure →

Using it to check a change

The chart's other use is as a before-and-after for economy changes.

An adjustment to reward rates or prices should move the curve in a predictable direction at a predictable point in tenure. If it moves somewhere unexpected, the change had an effect nobody modelled — which is exactly the thing worth catching early.

The comparison should be between cohorts at the same tenure rather than between calendar periods, for the reasons that apply to any cohort measurement: a calendar comparison mixes tenure changes into the result.

The practical cadence is to look at it monthly. The curve moves slowly, so weekly inspection produces noise, and quarterly is slow enough that a drift can establish itself before anyone notices. Monthly catches the shape changing while it is still a small change, which is when adjusting is cheap.

The reason this one chart earns its place over most economy dashboards is that it answers the question people actually ask — is the economy in good shape — with a shape rather than a number, and shapes are much harder to misread than averages.

One caveat on reading it: the curve describes players who are still present, which means the population at each tenure point is progressively more selected. Players at month six are the ones who stayed, and they are not representative of everyone who reached month one. A ratio that looks healthy at long tenure may be describing a small, unusually committed group rather than a working economy. Checking the population size alongside the ratio at each point keeps that visible, and it costs nothing — it is the same query with a count added.

Talk to us about economy health measurement →