MULTIPLE CURRENCIES
Several parallel money types — gold plus gems plus tokens plus reputation scrip — each earned from different activities and spent at different sinks.
- SOLO-DEV COST LOW
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN MMO · ARPG · LIVE-SERVICE · ROGUELIKE
Path of Exile runs the radical version (no gold at all; crafting orbs are the currency, so all money is also material), MMOs layer honor points, raid badges, and faction tokens beside coin, live-service games split earned soft currency from purchased premium currency as monetization's core architecture, and roguelites like Hades separate per-run resources from meta-progression currencies by design. Designers multiply currencies to partition economies: separate currencies mean separate faucets and sinks, so raid rewards can't be farmed by fishing, whales can't buy tournament standing, and per-run economies stay balanced independent of meta wallets — each currency is a firewall against one activity's inflation flooding another's rewards. Currencies also encode activity identity (the arena token is a badge as much as a balance). Key decisions: how many before wallet sprawl (each currency must answer 'why can't this be gold?'), convertibility — exchange rates reunify economies, deliberately or exploitably, and expiry/caps that prevent hoarding from trivializing future content. Pitfall: currency proliferation as disguised gating — when players need a matrix to know which of eleven tokens buys the upgrade, and most currencies exist to slow specific purchases rather than to protect economic boundaries, the system reads as bureaucracy; every currency should feel like a different kind of value, not a different-colored queue.