Unity game economy

A casual game that's fun for one session is a prototype; a game that retains and monetizes has an economy and a meta-loop designed on top of the mechanics. This skill is the design discipline that decides what currencies exist, where they come from and go, how progression paces against difficulty, and how the IAP catalog and rewarded hooks are shaped — then models the numbers in a spreadsheet so they can be tuned live. It is design, not wiring or measurement: unity-monetization wires the ad/IAP SDKs, unity-analytics-liveops measures and remote-config-tunes, and this skill decides what the numbers should be and why.

Balance is a spreadsheet exercise you then tune live — not a guess. Model sources vs sinks and the cost curve before you ship (see references/economy-model.md), ship soft with safe defaults, and move the numbers against real ARPDAU + retention via remote config — never by hardcoded instinct.

Doctrine

1. Design the loop before the numbers. The unit of retention is core loop -> reward -> meta loop: play a round (core), earn a currency/progress (reward), spend it on something that makes the next round better or unlocks new content (meta) — which creates the reason to return. No meta loop, no D7. Design this shape first; the balance numbers come after.
2. Few, legible currencies. Two is the casual default: one soft (earned constantly) and one hard (rare/premium). More currencies than players can reason about is a smell — every currency must answer "earned how, spent on what" in one sentence.
3. Every currency needs balanced faucets and sinks. A currency with sources >> sinks inflates (rewards stop feeling meaningful); a currency with nothing worth buying is a dead economy (no reason to play). Both kill retention. Balance is the whole job.
4. Progression must outpace difficulty, never lag it. If difficulty walls ahead of the player's earned power, they churn. Tune the power-vs-difficulty gap as a curve, live.
5. Design for the non-payer AND the payer. Only ~1.8% of F2P players ever make an IAP — so the ~98% must be fully monetizable and satisfiable through ads + free progression, while the payer gets a catalog worth buying. This is why hybrid (ads + IAP) is the default, not pure-IAP or pure-ads.
6. Model it, ship it soft, tune it live. The sheet is the source of truth pre-launch; remote config is the source of truth post-launch. Keep every economy constant tunable (unity-analytics-liveops) so a bad curve is a config flip, not a resubmission.

Currencies: soft vs hard

Keep the set small and each one legible.