Who owns the economy in a studio without a specialist

Large studios have economy designers. Most studios do not, and the work still happens — prices get set, reward rates get tuned, events get costed, offers get priced. It gets done by whoever is closest to the change, which is usually a different person each time.

That distribution is not a problem in itself. The problem is that nobody is holding the picture the individual changes add up to.

How the drift happens

Each change is locally reasonable. A designer makes an event more rewarding because playtesting said it felt stingy. A product manager adds a starter offer because new-player conversion looked weak. An engineer raises a reward on a quest because the drop rate was producing complaints. A marketing lead schedules a bonus weekend.

None of these is wrong. Each was made by someone with good information about the specific thing they were changing. And each of them adds currency to the game or reduces what things cost, because that is the direction almost every locally-motivated change points.

Over a year, this produces a game where currency is much more plentiful than it was at launch and nobody decided that. The individual decisions are all defensible and the aggregate is a drift nobody chose. When somebody eventually notices that purchases have softened and the economy feels loose, there is no single change to point at, because there isn't one.

The absence of an owner is not felt as a gap. It is felt much later as a problem with no author.

What ownership actually requires

The instinct is to hire an economy designer, and for studios that can, it is a reasonable answer. For those that cannot, the useful question is which parts of the role are load-bearing.

The load-bearing part is not designing the economy. That mostly happened once. It is maintaining a view of the whole thing while it changes, which is a much smaller job and does not require the same expertise.

Concretely, that means someone who can answer three questions at any time. Where does currency enter the game, and at roughly what rates. Where does it leave. And has the balance between those moved in the last quarter.

That is a job of a few hours a month for one person who has agreed to hold it. It does not require being the person who makes the changes — it requires being the person who sees them, which is a different and cheaper commitment.

The minimum process that works

The lightweight version of this has two parts and both are boring.

The first is a written list of every source of currency and every use of it, with rough magnitudes. Not a model — a list. Most teams do not have one, and building it the first time reliably surfaces sources people had forgotten existed. It is common to find two or three faucets nobody currently on the team added.

The second is that changes touching either list get mentioned to the person holding it. Not approved by — mentioned to. The failure mode is not that bad changes get made. It is that good changes get made in isolation and their sum is never looked at.

A single recurring check — has anything changed on either list this month, and does the balance still look like what we intended — catches the drift while it is small. Once a quarter is enough for most games. The reason it works is not sophistication; it is that someone is looking at the total, which currently nobody is.

See how we track what enters and leaves an economy →

Who it should be

The natural instinct is to give this to the most senior person, which is usually wrong because they have the least time to look at it consistently.

It works better with whoever already reads the numbers most often. In a lot of small studios that is a product or analytics person rather than a designer, and that is fine — the job is noticing movement, not designing systems. When something is off, the design conversation happens with the whole team.

What matters more than the choice is that it is one person and that they know it is theirs. A shared responsibility for an economy behaves exactly like an unowned one, because every individual change looks like someone else's remit.

The other thing worth being explicit about is that this person needs to be able to say no, or at least to say "not this month". A great deal of economy drift comes from changes that each felt too small to argue about. Someone with standing to observe that three small changes in one direction is a large change is most of what the role provides.

None of this is a substitute for expertise on a game with a genuinely complicated economy. It is the difference between a game whose economy moved deliberately and one whose economy moved while everybody was busy, and that difference is available to a team of eight for a few hours a quarter.

Talk to us about keeping an economy under control →