DYNAMIC PRICING
Prices that move in response to supply, demand, or player behavior — flooding a merchant with iron ore drops the ore price, war raises the cost of weapons, scarcity spikes food.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN STRATEGY · SIM · OPEN-WORLD · MMO
Offworld Trading Company builds an entire RTS on live commodity markets, X4: Foundations simulates station-level supply chains whose prices reflect actual regional stock, and EVE Online's player-driven market is the genre's deep end. Mount & Blade grounds a simpler version: buy salt where it's cheap, sell where war made it dear. Designers use dynamic pricing to make trade a skill instead of a faucet — profit requires reading the world — and to self-balance economies, since exploited surpluses devalue themselves. Key decisions: how fast prices respond (instant response feels reactive but is exploitable in loops; slow response reads as static), whether prices are simulated from real stock levels or just elasticity formulas, and how much price information the player can see remotely. Pitfall: elasticity curves that let players ping-pong two markets forever — without price recovery time or transaction costs, dynamic pricing becomes a money printer that trivializes the whole economy.
SEEN IN
- OFFWORLD TRADING COMPANY
- MOUNT & BLADE II: BANNERLORD
- X4: FOUNDATIONS