> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://sdk.metamarket.tech/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://sdk.metamarket.tech/use-cases/game-economy.md).

# Game Economy Infrastructure

A live game economy is a set of taps and drains that have to stay in balance: currency comes in from play, goes out through purchases and upgrades, and energy paces how fast a session runs. Building that means a wallet you do not have to write or debug, timers that refill on schedule, prices that hold, and the ability to retune all of it while players are online. MetaMarket runs that machinery so a studio spends its time on the numbers, not the plumbing.

## The currency loop

Local currencies belong entirely to your game. You define them, credit them when a player earns, and spend them when a player buys, all within your own tenant and invisible to every other game. Balances settle at read time and hold a floor, so a currency cannot drift negative and a purchase that a player cannot afford is refused rather than silently overdrawing them. That gives you the two halves of an economy, the faucet and the sink, without a bespoke wallet service behind either.

Some values are meant to move on their own. Energy that refills over time, a resource that decays between sessions, a stat derived from others: each is described by a rule the engine applies when the value is read, so you get regeneration and decay without a background job ticking against every player.

## Pacing with quotas

Most session economies gate something: a number of moves, a set of free actions, a daily allowance that comes back tomorrow. A quota is a refillable allowance with a cap and a cycle, so "four care actions a day" or "ten free spins" is configuration rather than custom timer code. Spending the last charge refuses the next attempt until the quota regenerates, and regeneration is anchored to the calendar so every player on a daily allowance rolls over together and no one banks a week's worth by staying away. The exact request and the response a spent quota returns are in the [Worked Examples](/evaluate-and-integrate/examples.md).

## Shops and sinks

A shop is where currency leaves the economy. A studio-run catalogue lists products priced in the game's own currency, and a purchase debits the player and delivers the product through the same reward pipeline every other grant uses. Because a shop, a quest reward, and a starter kit all deliver the same way, a studio prices and merchandises without wiring a separate fulfillment path for the storefront.

## Retuning without a redeploy

An economy is never balanced on the first try. Rates, prices, and caps live in configuration the engine reads at request time, so adjusting a regeneration rate or a shop price is a configuration change that reaches the running game with no client update and no engine redeploy. That is what lets a studio run an economy as a live operation instead of shipping a patch for every tuning pass.

The concepts underneath are in [Resources and Quotas](/core-concepts/resources-and-quotas.md) and [Local and Shared Economies](/core-concepts/shared-economy.md). When the economy you need is on this page, [Evaluate MetaMarket](/evaluate-and-integrate/evaluate.md) is where a wallet, a quota, and a shop get proven against a real environment.