Constructing the Ideal P2E Economy
- Medium
- Apr 20, 2022
- 1 min read
How do you construct the ideal P2E economy?
Warren Buffet once said: “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it’s typically the reputation of the business that stays intact”.
As the limelight continues to shine on Play-to-Earn, Lumikai deconstructs the fundamental economics behind building the ideal P2E game. We pulled out our dusty ol’ economics textbooks to try and demystify the in-game economies of P2E — with the help of real-world analogies.
Success in this new frontier harkens back to fundamental mechanisms driving the economies of nation-states and invites comparisons with real-world macroeconomic mechanisms that have stood the test of time.
We cover topics including Axie Infinity’s economics problem, challenges in a sustainable economic design, and conclude with some guidelines for how to construct ideal P2E economies.
I buy the argument that sustainability depends on keeping “earning” secondary to “playing,” but I’m still stuck on onboarding: if early progression is too generous you get mercenary behavior, and if it’s too stingy nobody sticks around long enough to care. Do you think personalization (quests tuned to player types) is a realistic lever here, or does it just add complexity that creates new exploits? It’s funny, outside games I’ve seen the same motivation gap with tools like StyleLookLab where the plan is solid but people still need a reason to come back day 2. Would love to hear what you consider the cleanest metric for “fun-first” in an economy design.
The part about sinks needing to be “felt” (not just mathematically sufficient) is the bit most projects miss—players notice friction even if the economy dashboards look healthy. How do you think about cosmetic-only sinks versus power sinks in a P2E context, especially when speculation pressure ramps up? Kind of reminds me of how fast people will chase novelty like some fun ghibli ai image styles for a week and then move on; retention feels more about the underlying loop than the reward headline. Curious what you’d prioritize first if you had to simplify the system down to one sink and one source.
The “ideal” P2E loop always sounds simple on paper, but I like that you keep circling back to time-to-fun and the reality of player churn once rewards flatten. I’m curious how you’d model the point where optimization behavior starts to overpower the game itself; I end up sanity-checking time costs with https://caesarcipher.org/calculators/playback-speed-calculator when I’m planning grinds, and it’s wild how small tweaks change perceived ROI. It feels like economies die when players can too easily convert “time” into a spreadsheet problem.
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