Valve has hired an economist to help them balance their inter-game economies (and intra-game too I suppose). Valve Economics is written by Yanis Varoufakis who seems to have some really nifty thoughts on the global economy and how screwed up it is. His first post on how he came to work at Valve through a strange email.

I’ll definitely be following this blog, if anybody knows of any other blogs/sites that discuss game economies please leave a link in the comments!

The real question of course is what’s the conversion rate between TF2 hats and dollars?

The first article that had me think really seriously about game economies was this one from The Walrus which was published way back in 2004.