Do you operate an online game? Are you planning on making a game to take advantage of the latest app gaming phase, planning on creating a more ambitious project that needs a gaming computer, or something in between? The financial benefits of having fun and creating a universe to tell stories as interactive novels are great, but there are times where you need to spend money to make money--and opportunities to make money while you spend it.

Microtransactions are a part of the game funding puzzle, and a few details about cash shops and gaming can help you figure out how to make it all work together.

What Is A Cash Shop?

In many games, there are ways to buy an advantage or a customization with real world currency rather than in-game currency. This is one of the earlier, more popular uses for the term microtransaction, but it's known among fans, critics, and developers alike as the cash shop.

The cash shop manifests itself in different ways depending on the type of game. For the sake of brevity, this article will cover the action, adventure, and roleplaying super-genre that represents games such as Destiny, World of Warcraft, Rift, Everquest; survival games such as DayZ, Fortnite, and Ark; and other games that revolve around making players and groups strong through items and completing in-game goals.

In these games, you either buy pieces of equipment, consumable items for augmenting your character, or consumable items for augmenting your character's equipment (which in turn augments your character, or can be sold for in-game money). Cash shops allow players to skip either the time it take to hunt and gather or farm materials that may be random and difficult to find, or skip the time needed to buy these items from someone else through making money in-game.

You can pay for your game's development by making cash shops an optional part of play, but there are risks involved. Make it too easy to succeed with money alone, and people may leave the game from either boredom of winning easily or getting tired of people paying to win.

Cash Shops, Game Economies, And Coding

Many online games offer interesting insight for how supply and demand works, and how fragile the concept of an economy can be. Before cash shops, players would have to figure out their own prices by considering the amount of time to gather the item(s), the skills needed to create certain crafted items, the amount of money one would receive by selling to Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in the game, and how rich the other players were.

Cash shops usually change game economies over night. The predecessor of cash shops--illegal gold selling, in which players sell their in-game money or items for real world money without consulting the game company--created inflation and defined the amount of gold per hour that was worth a player's time as their techniques made it to the public. Cash shops created similar values when you look at how much the real money item costs versus the pre-cash shop value and the amount of time taken to earn that money.

To implement a cash shop, you'll need a software support team that can handle financial security and link an updating, sales team-accessible cash shop for players to purchase from. You may also want to hire an economist with a penchant for gaming to figure out what the potential gains--or fallout--would be.

Contact a software service professional, like Advanced Business Systems, to discuss the many ways to implement a cash shop for your game's continued financial success.

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