GhostPlay runs your own economy model through 5,000 deterministic personas × 360 simulated days × 3 stress vectors and returns a severity-rated findings report in 48 hours. The evidence behind an expert pre-launch economy audit — backtested to reproduce real economy collapses. Board-ready PDF.
Illustrative layout of the findings report. Figures are not shown here because forecast-accuracy scoring is under revision — see /proof for the backtested economy-health signal, which is the validated result.
Each follows the same pattern: behaviour that only emerges once a large, heterogeneous player population interacts with the economy simultaneously. Internal playtests can't replicate it. GhostPlay's stress vectors are designed to surface it before launch.
Post-launch monetisation changes that hit a community whose spending expectations were set by prior seasons. Invisible until the first season transition — by then, the backlash cycle has started.
In-game currency loses utility when sink mechanisms underperform at live scale. Players revert to bartering. The economy's trust infrastructure collapses without a clear trigger visible in pre-launch data.
Early adopters — the most engaged, highest-LTV segment — reach the progression ceiling far faster than the design model assumed. Retention cliffs follow. The pattern is structurally reproducible, but only visible at concurrency.
Economy sinks calibrated around top-tier spenders collapse when that cohort churns. The remaining economy inflates rapidly. A Whale Flight stress vector surfaces this before a single real player touches the game.
The spend ceiling is only legible once a large player population is spending simultaneously. The gap between design intent and community perception doesn't appear in any pre-launch dataset — unless you simulate it.
Connect your economy model. GhostPlay runs it at 50× speed, injects three economic stress vectors at Day 180, and returns a severity-rated findings report.
Paste your economy model as a CSV, or paste a PlayFab Economy V2 catalog export. GhostPlay maps your four asset classes and validates in minutes — no finished build required.
5,000 seeded parametric personas — Exploiters, Whales and a baseline casual cohort — run your economy for 360 simulated days. Three stress vectors inject at Day 180.
A severity-rated findings report: a per-class economy-health read against all four Systemic Asset Classes, plus a mechanic-to-revenue ("fun-to-money") analysis — flagging where the economy holds and where it drifts.
We can. GhostPlay is backtested against real, publicly documented economies — it reproduces the ones that collapsed and clears the ones that shipped healthy. Getting both directions right on outcomes that are already public is the credibility check most tools in this space simply can't show.
Uncapped SLP emission let farmers mint currency far faster than the single breeding sink could burn it — a mint-to-burn ratio reported around 4:1. SLP fell from roughly $0.40 to under $0.01: textbook faucet/sink hyperinflation. Rebuilt from its published post-mortems, GhostPlay flags the same collapse signature — before a single player is exposed.
A sink-positive design with no gold: currency orbs are crafting reagents consumed on use, so every faucet is also a sink. It has stayed healthy across years of leagues. GhostPlay reads it as healthy and does not cry collapse — a tool that flags everything is worthless.
A seeded parametric rate model. Same model in, identical simulation telemetry out, every run. Any finding can be independently reproduced.
Reproduces documented collapses and clears economies that shipped healthy — the differentiator most economy tools can't claim.
We simulate from the model you actually built, imported by CSV or PlayFab catalog export. In Phase 1 the persona simulation is driven by your Class 1 faucet rate and Class 3 sink rate; the remaining rates are validated and reported but do not yet drive agent behaviour.
A severity-rated, per-class read plus a mechanic-to-revenue analysis — evidence your board and publisher can act on.
First-class PlayFab Economy V2 ingestion and a UE5 Lyra economy extension. Direct game-binary ingestion is on the Phase 2 roadmap.
No black box. Here is exactly how the 5,000 personas are constructed, what "360 days" means operationally, and what each of the three stress vectors tests.
Each persona is driven by a parameterised rate model with a fixed random seed, so the simulation stage reproduces exactly run to run. The population is built from three economic archetypes: Exploiters (20%), who maximise arbitrage opportunities; Whales (10%), who spend at the top tier of the monetisation funnel; and a baseline casual cohort (70%) that forms the economic floor. Each archetype is parameterised across the cohort so the 5,000 agents span the behavioural range, not a single average player.
"360 days" is the simulated lifespan of your economy, not wall-clock time. Every persona runs all 360 in-game days on ephemeral cloud infrastructure, so a full year of economic behaviour completes in wall-clock hours. Stress vectors inject at Day 180 — the major-expansion inflection point — and Day 180–360 is the post-shock evaluation window.
At Day 180 the simulation injects three extreme-but-plausible shocks, each mapped to a Systemic Asset Class, to model the events that historically destabilise live-service economies:
Forecast-accuracy scoring (MAPE per Systemic Asset Class) is currently under methodological revision and is not used as a pass/fail gate. The validated signal today is the backtested mint-to-burn ratio. Historically it was measured independently for each of the four Systemic Asset Classes (Fiat Currency, Velocity Catalyst, Progression Sink, Wildcard Faucet) across the Day 180–360 window, against a ≤5% per-class accuracy gate. The output is a severity-rated findings report — a per-class economy-health read that flags where the economy drifts and how badly, plus a mechanic-to-revenue analysis. It is a diagnostic read, not a go/no-go stamp.
GhostPlay is in pilot. Formats below describe scope, not a price list — we are working with a small number of design partners while the forecast methodology is validated. Get in touch to discuss a pilot.
Design tools, spreadsheets, and manual QA each solve part of the problem. None of them stress-test a built economy at launch scale before release.
| Capability | GhostPlay | Machinations.io | Spreadsheets | Manual QA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-launch validation | Yes — stress-tests the built economy before release | Design-time modelling, not validation of the shipped game | Static formulas — no behavioural simulation | Small-scale human playtests, not launch-scale |
| Economy read | Severity-rated findings report — a per-class economy-health read, not a go/no-go stamp | No structured read — a modelling canvas | None | Subjective reviewer notes |
| Backtested credibility | Yes — reproduces documented collapses, clears economies that shipped healthy | No published backtest | No | No |
| Board-ready report | Yes — structured findings report for stakeholders | Diagrams, not stakeholder reports | No | Informal notes |
| Simulation depth | 5,000 parametric personas × 360 simulated days × 3 stress vectors | Designer-built model graphs (manual) | Single-path formulas | A handful of human testers |
| Time required | Simulation completes in seconds; report delivered within 48h | Weeks of manual modelling | Days–weeks of manual upkeep | Weeks of playtests |
| Cost | Per-audit engagement | ≈$49–$299/mo per seat/studio | Internal staff time | Internal staff time at scale |
Game economy validation is the process of stress-testing a live-service game's economic systems — currencies, rewards, progression sinks, and monetisation loops — against simulated player behaviour before launch. Unlike post-launch analytics, which detect economy failures after real players experience them, pre-launch validation runs thousands of deterministic player personas through the full economy lifecycle and produces a severity-rated findings report: a per-class read of where the economy holds and where it drifts. GhostPlay automates this process using a parametric simulation engine: 5,000 economic personas, 360 simulated days, three economic stress vectors, delivered as a PDF findings report in under 48 hours. The engine is backtested against publicly documented economies — it reproduces known collapses such as Axie Infinity's SLP hyperinflation and clears economies that shipped healthy such as Path of Exile.
Paste your 4-row economy model and get an instant Mint-to-Burn health verdict. No auth required. Perfect for a quick sanity check before you commit to a full audit.
Explore a real GhostPlay audit deliverable. This fictional economy analysis shows the report format, severity ratings, remediation guidance, and stress vector results you'll receive.
Leave your email and we'll set up a call. Every engagement starts as a conversation — tell us about your economy and we'll scope the assessment.