Valve hired a well-known economist to study the processes in the game economy

The Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, who has recently been on the BBC, CNN and Bloomberg Television screens due to the Greek crisis, tells how fate brought him to Valve . Recently, Janis has become a renowned expert and receives hundreds of letters a day from desperate investors and businessmen. At first he took the message from the director of Valve for spam, but then became interested. The head of the gaming studio suggested that he study the virtual economy. It turned out that this is a very exciting business.

Thus, Valve has become the second or third developer, whose games will be analyzed by a full-time professional economist. The pioneer here is the company CCP and the game EVE Online - there Eyjólfur Gudmundsson (Eyjólfur Guðmundsson) has been publishing quarterly reports for five years with a review of the game economy, the change in price indices and other statistics.

Janis Varufakis says that in his case it all started with a strange letter, which he fortunately did not have time to delete. It was a letter from Gabe Newell, head of Valve.

Hello!
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I am the president of the company that makes video games (www.valvesoftware.com).

We have a number of problems in connection with the increase in the scale of our virtual economies and their unification. Could you advise us?

For some time I read your blog ... Inside the company, we discussed the issue of communication between the economies of two virtual worlds (creating a single currency) and solved some difficult problems with the balance of payments, then I thought, "this is Germany and Greece," this thought would not have come to me if not for your blog. Instead of supporting the emulator of you inside my head, I decided that maybe we could be interested in the present to see what we were doing.

Janus immediately became interested. He says that the virtual economy is an ideal simulator for economic research, because every step is recorded here, any transaction leaves a digital mark. Here you can carry out risky experiments that are impossible in real life, and here you can try different scenarios. The most important thing is that there is no need to focus on the so-called econometrics - the verification of economic theories with statistical data, which is extremely popular in modern economics. Janus calls it "computerized astrology," and it may lead to conclusions like "the reason for the New Year is the growth in sales of toys in December."

In a virtual economy, you have real access to all data, so absolutely everything is under the control of the researcher. The virtual economy is easier to learn, and it also needs to be regulated just like a regular economy.

Varufakis decided to visit the Valve office after completing his tour with lectures at American universities. He came to visit, but was so impressed with the office and the atmosphere at Valve that he decided to stay here. Now Janus will keep a blog of Valve Economics and study the economic processes in the game universes of Valve.