Abstract
Problem: Why do RPGs almost universally end with the player swimming in money, and why don't developers fix it before shipping?
Approach: Tim Cain breaks down game economies into their fundamental components — sources, sinks, and currency — and explains the structural reasons why balancing them is so difficult, drawing on his experience with Fallout, Arcanum, and The Outer Worlds.
Findings: Economy balancing must happen late in development when crash bugs take priority; fixes often require changing interconnected systems with no time to retest; and RPGs that allow diverse character builds inherently let players maximize sources while avoiding sinks, making true balance nearly impossible.
Key insight: Game economies mirror real-world economies in their intractability — as long as players can choose how to play, they will find ways to game the system, and that's okay for single-player experiences.
Why Money Imbalance Doesn't Get Fixed
Tim identifies three reasons RPG economies ship unbalanced, responding to a commenter who asked why money imbalance isn't treated as a critical issue:
It Has to Be Done Late
Economy balancing requires all other systems (vendors, loot drops, quest rewards, crafting) to be finalized first — just like optimization. Balancing too early means redoing work when those systems change. But by the time economy should be addressed, crash bugs and progression-blocking bugs take priority.
Fixing It Means Changing Other Systems
Addressing money imbalance often requires modifying vendors, loot tables, quest rewards, or crafting — systems that individually work fine. There may not be time to make those changes and test them, so they get left alone.
It's Genuinely Complex
Developers may disagree on what to change. Different player builds interact with the economy differently — a fix for one class may shift the imbalance onto another. Changes in step two sometimes don't work and just move the problem around.
Sources: Where Player Wealth Comes From
Tim identifies five major sources of player wealth:
- Found items — things on the ground, in chests, harvested from plants, mined from minerals
- Drops — items from killed enemies, including skinning/harvesting abilities (boss drops can be treated as a separate category)
- Quest rewards — items and money given for completing objectives
- Vendors — buying items (vendors are both a source and a sink)
- Crafting — player-created items
The Item Availability Matrix
Tim describes a practical design tool: a spreadsheet with player level bands on one axis and item types (chest armor, helmets, weapons, etc.) on the other. Each cell specifies which source provides the best version of that item type at that level range. For deeper games, this becomes 3D by adding character class as a third axis — so the best wizard weapon at level 1-5 might come from crafting while the best fighter weapon comes from a boss drop.
Sinks: Where Wealth Goes
Sinks are anything that removes wealth from the player:
- Vendors — buying consumables like ammo, food, water, healing supplies
- Smiths/repair — paying to fix equipment durability
- Healers — restoring health or removing status effects
- Trainers — paying to spend skill points or increase rank (used in Arcanum, Might and Magic)
- Rest/camping costs — paying to rest and restore spells (Pillars of Eternity did this)
- Rent — housing costs or shop upkeep (Ultima Online charged monthly rent for player shops)
- Paid companions — mercenaries who take payment or a cut of found loot (Temple of Elemental Evil)
- In-game microtransactions — cosmetic purchases using in-game currency
The Core Problem: Sinks Are Avoidable
Almost every game has more sources than sinks, and sources are easier to exploit than sinks are to enforce. Players don't have to buy from vendors if loot drops are generous. They can heal themselves, repair their own gear, skip trainers by being generalists. Unlike real life — where you must eat, drink, and pay rent — RPG sinks are almost always optional.
Currency: The Hidden Wealth
Money isn't the only currency. Weightless, stackable items like ammunition function as de facto currency. If a player doesn't use bows, their arrows accumulate and can be sold at any vendor — effectively free money. Many RPGs are full of these hidden currencies that quietly inflate player wealth.
The Unavoidable Sink Nobody Likes
Original AD&D required paying gold to level up (1,500 gold × the level you're leaving). It's one of the few truly unavoidable sinks, but Tim notes he's never met a player who loves it, and no modern RPG uses it.
Pay-to-Win Destroys Economy Balance
Tim draws a hard line: if real money can convert to in-game wealth beyond cosmetics — even if it's just healing potions that can be resold — the economy will never be balanced. External currency as an in-game source is a "monkey wrench" that permanently breaks the system.
The 100% Content Problem
Tim has never shipped a game where he experienced 100% of the content before release. Even after playing The Outer Worlds 16 times start to finish, there were things he'd never seen — crates placed near fences by level designers, quests added after his playthroughs, faction reputation changes that affected vendor prices. With 70+ people working on a game, last-minute changes can introduce economic imbalances nobody anticipated.
A key safeguard: open-world RPGs should enforce that items have a fixed minimum buy price and maximum sell price to prevent buy-sell loops between vendors.
Tim's Personal Take
Tim doesn't lose sleep over imperfect economies in single-player games, for the same reason he doesn't worry about save scumming or cheating — you're only cheating yourself out of an experience. He acknowledges every game could be better balanced, but accepts that game economies, like real-world economies, will never be perfect.
References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne9IIn7nEV4