Animal Crossing’s massive popularity has made it less like paradise and more like Wall Street

With hours of extra time on their hands because of social distancing and quarantine, new players to Nintendo’s “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” like Ash Wolf, also known on Twitter as Ninji, have been drawn to the slow, laid-back life simulator that allows them to build idyllic islands, decorate their homes, visit friends and more.

“People are using this as a sort of escape,” Wolf said. “I joked when I first got the game that it was literally the only thing giving me structure in my life.”

But this influx of new users produced an unexpected evolution, recalibrating the game’s serene speed to a fast-paced hustle one player compared to Wall Street.

Animal Crossing isn’t designed for such gameplay — in fact, it purposefully slows players down by design. Yet the game’s community became obsessed with optimization, in the process exploiting features meant to encourage day-by-day progress. Now, they’ve become a dominant part of the audience, finding loopholes or strategies to get rich fast.

So what happens when gamers focused on efficiency collide with a system that isn’t designed for them? For Animal Crossing, it means a shift from a take-life-as-it-comes paradise into a competitive economy. The influx of players has led to a massive trading system and, inadvertently, inflation. Others have made creative new tools to help with earning money and to ease in-game commerce. But these tools feed back into the same issues and even come with their own risks — among them, upsetting the game’s intended natural balance.

How inflation and trading turned the game upside down

It all starts with two things: money and trade. Animal Crossing was never meant to be a get-rich-quick type of game. In fact, the design steers players toward slow, gentle progression, said Jennifer Scheurle, current lead designer at game development studio ArenaNet who previously worked on titles including “Guild Wars 2” and “Objects in Space.”

“It puts literal barriers in front of you to make sure you don’t burn through the entire content it provides,” she said. “I think it’s designed to be played slowly and intently and with some sort of mindfulness in mind.”

“Animal Crossing: New Horizons” is a game that progresses in real time. Many of the game’s cycles take a day or more to complete, and there are only a handful of randomly selected items available to purchase each day. If there’s a particular piece of furniture you want, you’ll have to check the store each day and hope you get lucky. But it also creates a system of diminishing returns. While there are a few mechanics that players can grind — like daily goals for Nook Miles, an in-game currency similar to airline mileage — on the whole, the game doesn’t readily reward people who log more playtime.

For longtime fans of the franchise, that relaxed nature is part of the appeal. Nick Ransbottom has played Animal Crossing since its GameCube days (in North America, the first game in the franchise was released in 2002) and likens it to a “meditative experience” that lets “you make your own fun.”

What throws off that balance is the huge growth in secondary markets and online resources because of the influx of new players. While trading existed in previous editions like “Animal Crossing: New Leaf,” it was not nearly as robust or popular. This new network of trading changes the game from a random item dispenser into a full-blown economy, according to Eyjolfur “Eyjo” Gudmundsson, president of the University of Akureyri in Iceland.

Gudmundsson, the former in-house economist for MMO “EVE Online,” explained that there are three parts necessary for any economy, digital or otherwise, to function:

1. Trade or the ability to exchange items.
2. Scarcity — “not everything should be available to everybody at the same time,” otherwise there is no reason to trade.
3. Utility or incentive, which for video games is usually the fun or gameplay itself.

“Most game economies are very restricted by design, because the designers do not want to lose control of the revenue stream, of the value stream, of the notion of what happens within the game. But then you don’t have an economy,” Gudmundsson said.

But Animal Crossing’s economy is not restricted at all — players can exchange currency (“bells”) or barter with furniture, but it’s all a free-form exchange with no oversight by Nintendo. That has led to a few problems.

Something happened to upset the trading economy almost immediately after the launch of “New Horizons.” Players found ways to make absurd amounts of bells via time traveling (manually setting your console’s time to trick the game’s internal date system), turnip trading and duplication glitches that could clone items. Suddenly, this slow, laid-back game turned a corner. Anyone could have 3 million bells without much effort, and players began to generate more and more currency. Economists have a name for that: inflation.

Nintendo did not comment on the game’s economy, but in a previous interview with Launcher, the game’s producer, Hisashi Nogami, noted that although they don’t consider time travel cheating, they do discourage it.

“We think that in order for the players to play for a very long time, and also for players to share the experience with their friends or family, we do think that playing without traveling would probably be the ideal way,” Nogami said.

“It’s money printing,” Gudmundsson said. “If there is more money in the system than there is value to be bought, then you indeed would simply create inflation.”

‘Dupe glitch’ slashes katana price

The katana, a decorative item, was one of the more expensive items listed on Nookazon.com (nearing 4 million bells) until early last month, when a new duplication, or “dupe” glitch was found that worked for items of a particular size. The trading market quickly adjusted and the price has settled around 200,000 bells. Although many players exchange Nook Miles tickets instead of bells, Nookazon lists prices in bells using an internally calculated exchange rate (as of publication time, 60,000 bells per ticket).

In response, with bells losing their value, players either drastically upped item prices or stopped using bells entirely as a medium for exchange. Instead, another standard for trading became Nook Miles tickets, which can only be slowly acquired by grinding a daily list of goals, like catching a certain fish or planting a new tree. Players also use rare resources such as gold nuggets and star fragments.

Nintendo released a patch for the game to reduce the amount of money flowing into players’ pockets, including cutting interest rates at the in-game bank and making it rarer to find high-value insects.

“Money is so easy to come by,” said Lacey McLear, who was introduced to Animal Crossing through this latest iteration. “The currency is almost meaningless once you get even a little bit of the way into the game.”

Animal Crossing’s gameplay had drastically evolved. Trading became ubiquitous, even competitive, but inflation also meant you needed to either earn more money or get more Nook Miles to obtain the items you wanted. The latter could be done through grinding — highly undesirable and antithetical to the laid-back nature some love about the game — or digging even further into trading (e.g., trading your own items for Nook Miles Tickets).

In other words, the priorities became twofold: Make money and trade more.

Inflation and trading lead to more useful tools, but the cycle continues

In response to the increased need for bells and trade, player creativity and innovation also rose as people worked on solutions to ease the way. Unfortunately, the tools created a feedback loop — they made it easier to earn bells or get items, which further increased inflation and competitiveness.

The stalk market, an invisible algorithm that fluctuates while players buy and sell turnips, is a big reason why inflation has hit bells so hard.

“I don’t think it was ever intended to be a gigantic community where people would just come in and out of people’s islands and trade turnips and go completely crazy on that system, because it’s not meant for that. It’s meant for your friends and your family and closer social circles,” Scheurle said. “But it’s not at all how people are using it. People actually build gigantic websites where they [help players] visit strangers’ islands” to sell for higher prices.

To demonstrate how huge online communities completely change the landscape of Animal Crossing, imagine a solo player, who doesn’t play online with friends at all. Assuming they have an upgraded Nook’s Cranny, the in-game shop, they might see four new items each day in their store. In a week, they’ll have had the opportunity to buy 28 items.

Each friend they add to their network is an additional four new items each day (although some of the items will be repeated between islands). If the player is in a group of six friends, they’ll each have the opportunity to buy 168 items in a week. And if the group gets large enough, each player could have access to every item in the game — with thousands of users, marketplaces such as Nook.Market and Nookazon can offer huge catalogues.

The same principle applies to the stalk market. If a player is not connecting with others to compare prices, their chances of getting a very high turnip price are slim. In fact, they have a roughly 1-in-5 chance of their maximum price for the week being below 100. And the chances of a price over 200 are about 1 in 4.

If that player is part of a group of six friends who play together, their odds improve significantly. With six players comparing turnip prices, the chance of getting a price over 400 is better than the chance of getting heads in a coin flip.

As more players join the social circle, they are virtually guaranteed extremely high prices. With a group as small as 64 players, there’s a 99-in-100 chance that somebody will have a price over 500.

Websites like Turnip.Exchange allow people to post their turnip prices and invite strangers to their islands to sell at a high price. According to Matthew Jakubowski, the CEO of Warp World and lead developer on Turnip.Exchange, an average of 100,000 prices per week have been posted on the site since it launched. In a group of 100,000 players, it’s virtually guaranteed that at least one person will have a price over 600 bells.

“The biggest thing that I’ve seen this time is, the ability to have seven visitors on your island has really changed the game. When you could only have three people in previous versions, it was fun for friends and stuff, but you couldn’t do events,” Jakubowski said. “We’ve been seeing people do weddings. People are having TV shows. And we do our podcast in it.”

Although Nintendo built multiplayer interaction into the game, the developers probably didn’t expect Nookazon.

Software developer Daniel Luu was spurred to create the virtual marketplace when he saw how chaotic and frustrating the trading process could be. Nookazon is designed to facilitate trading of all kinds (as long as it doesn’t involve real money) and allows players to list or find items they want to sell or buy. As of June 10, Nookazon has over 37 million listings and 360,000 daily unique visitors.

“I honestly think the beauty of Animal Crossing is that you can kind of play it at whatever speed you want,” Luu said. “Me personally, I play it day by day. So I don’t even really buy anything on my own site. … I think that’s the beauty of it. I really don’t think anyone should get discouraged to keep playing or building their island the way they want just because they see these other islands. But one of the things that we have noticed is that [Nookazon] actually has extended the life of the game for a lot of people.”

Nookazon is able to catalogue the game’s thousands of unique items thanks to enterprising players who have dug into the game’s code. A community-built spreadsheet enumerates the details of nearly everything in the game, an extraordinary amount of work done for no pay by fans of the game.

The downside of a popular marketplace, however, is that trading becomes more competitive as more players use it.

Ransbottom noted this change from previous Animal Crossing games and how the attitude around trading has shifted suddenly.

“It just feels a bit sleazy to me, because suddenly there’s such a serious tone to the trading aspect of the games that wasn’t really there before,” he said. “It’s like Wall Street sometimes!”

At the same time, he also finds tools like Nookazon or Turnip.Exchange “genuinely useful,” and that the shift was more positive than negative in the end. “At the end of the day, even if I had access to everything another player with an incredible island has, what I created would turn out different from theirs.”

Scheurle says this level of engagement isn’t uncommon, but it’s not usually part of the game’s mainstream player base.

“It’s a very unique thing that this is happening as part of the mainstream Animal Crossing community. I have not seen that before in another game. … Because it’s the first time, my gut feeling is that it’s part of the desire for understanding the game better — and the game was not particularly good at explaining it to you,” she said.

Ash Wolf plays casually but has spent hours reverse-engineering the game’s code in order to understand how the system functions. In the process, his research has uncovered lots of details about turnip prices, villager friendship levels, insect and fish spawn rates, and more.

“I just do things for fun. Most of the reason I’ve been doing this is to basically satisfy my own need to know how things work,” Wolf said.

Wolf’s research into the turnip pricing algorithm allowed websites like Turnip Prophet to launch, giving regular players who aren’t decompiling the game’s source code the chance to look inside its systems.

“I think it's cool that these things are being made a bit more accessible,” Wolf said. “You're getting this sort of ecosystem where people are building all these tools around the game.”

But even though these tools and virtual marketplaces are an exciting example of player creativity, there are dangers associated for those who use some of them.

“Those [player-created] markets are less secure,” Gudmundsson said. “There’s a higher risk of scams. There’s no guarantee of service. There’s no guarantee of enjoyment. And it has the potential to destroy the experience of being in that world. So I would say it’s a risk.”

The dark side of secondary economies

Nookazon and other player-created marketplaces all closely monitor their listings and try their best to prevent scams or real-money exchanges. But those transactions run rampant in video games, not just in Animal Crossing, and can still sneak through.

A quick look on eBay shows hundreds of listings for in-game currency, items and villagers. Some users also advertise custom-made items that are hacked into games through save editor software, like star fragment trees.

Save editors allow players to change almost anything in the game, from the villagers on their islands to the amount of money in their bank account or the items in their pockets. These programs require players to extract their save data and transfer it to a PC and can carry the risk of data corruption. They also allow players to access rare items or easily get the cute animal neighbors they want.

But beyond breaking Nintendo’s terms of service, others are just outright scamming other players by failing to follow through on their end of the trade. Nookazon tries to account for this by flagging and labeling users as scammers to warn others of the person’s history, but without an official Nintendo marketplace, there is always an element of risk.

“EVE Online” dealt with this risk by creating a formally approved platform allowing for not just item trading, but also purchasing items with real-life money. Some players, though, disagree with the idea of using real-life dollars to buy in-game items.

Luu said that while he loves the idea of an official Nintendo marketplace, incorporating real money “starts to detract from the gaming experience."

Some have also already started to push back on the “gotta trade ’em all” mentality that pervades much of the community, including those who have restarted their games from scratch simply to enjoy it again with a slower pace. One player, frustrated by the way the cat villager Raymond has been sold for sky-high prices, told Polygon he used a save editor to create dozens of Raymonds and gave them out for free in a form of protest.

Ethan Coohill, who lives in Denver, is a veteran of the series but didn’t sink serious time into any entries until New Horizons. He says the secondary markets can get too competitive and ruin the game’s vibe.

“I think there’s two sides to the Animal Crossing community right now. One is the very loving, very lighthearted side, and the other is the very greedy … ‘I have Raymond, he’s moving out. Come pay me 10 million bells,’” he said. “It’s pretty hilarious to see these grown adults that are just fighting over minuscule stuff.”

But with widespread development and use of player-created tools, it seems like the evolution of the Animal Crossing player community is likely a permanent one. Indeed, for longtime players like Ransbottom, it’s the inevitable future.

“This is going to be the new online standard for AC games going forward,” said Ransbottom. “People taking it more seriously and creating an almost competitive environment will be unavoidable in future installments.”