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Playing with Balance: Game Economy Design is your guide to understanding why games are unlike any other medium: they are built on verbs, not nouns. Players don't just watch or read-they do. Every choice, action, and interaction forms part of a living system designed to engage, challenge, and reward.
Great game economies are about far more than numbers or virtual currencies. They are intricately designed systems that blend anticipation, frustration, fear of missing out, and the relief of success. Through systems thinking, we can create experiences that keep players coming back-not through manipulation, but by balancing curiosity, challenge, frustration and satisfaction across days, weeks, and months of play.
Oscar introduces the three loops of engagement -
Core, Context, and Culture - showing how they build authentically on intrinsic player motivations to create value loops that feel desirable, meaningful, and fair. These foundations provide a framework for designing progression, difficulty, and rewards that truly resonate with different kinds of players. You'll discover why ethical design isn't just the right thing to do, but a commercial necessity-and why short-term exploitative tactics inevitably undermine long-term loyalty and success.
Drawing on deep industry experience and insights from leading designers, this book combines diverse perspectives with practical tools to help you calculate value, balance economies, and adapt from launch through LiveOps.
Whether you're building a small indie project or running a massive live game,
Playing with Balance: Game Economy Design gives you the tools to craft mechanics that feel alive.
List of contents
1. INTRODUCTION, 2. DEFINING AN ECONOMY, 3. DEFINING A GAME ECONOMY, 4. WHY DO WE PLAY? (AND PAY?), 5. WHAT IS A GAME ANYWAY?, 6. THE THREE LOOPS, 7. UNDERSTANDING UTILITY, 8. FUNCTIONS OF EXCHANGE, 9. SINKS AND SOURCES, 10. BALANCE, 11. VALIDATING YOUR GAME, 12. EVOLVING ECONOMIES, 13. SUSTAINABILITY AND ETHICAL DESIGN, 14. GAME DESIGN PRINCIPLES IN OTHER INDUSTRIES, 15. CONCLUSIONS
About the author
Oscar Clark is a pioneer in mobile and connected games. He has been working with online games since 1998 running British Telecom's online games platform, Wireplay. Since then, he has been global lead for games for Hutchison Whampoa and their mobile operator Three in the UK, the most successful mobile games platform in terms of revenue per user in the world in 2005. In 2006, He headed mobile strategy at Nvidia, where he led efforts to bring 3D gaming to mobile phones. He was also Home Architect for Sony's Online Virtual World, PlayStation Home and Evangelist for Ads at Unity Technologies. He is currently the CEO at Fundamentally Games, a PC and mobile games publisher focused on the distribution of live service games. Additionally, he works with the team at SteelMedia as a Contributing Editor.
