Economy

Attention: The Digital Services Act (DSA) requires Unity to notify our customers’ end users if Unity takes an action which impacts those end users under the DSA. To comply with this requirement, if you use Unity Gaming Services (UGS) products that rely on the Unity Authentication Service, you must integrate the notification API by the effective date of the DSA: February 17, 2024. The notification API is ready for adoption in late January 2024.

For more information on DSA, refer to the Digital Services Act - compliance update.

To make your game compliant, refer to DSA notifications.

Unity’s Economy service provides you with an easy way to create, manage and publish an economy system to be used in your game.

Economy includes the following for your game:

  • Currency: Currencies allow a user to have a balance of one or more currencies/denominations in game.
  • Inventory item: Inventory items represent a definition of a resource that is created as part of the configuration. Players can own instances of inventory items (for example, multiple copies of the same swords, shields, hats) and, unlike currencies, each instance can have its own properties.
  • Purchases: A player can buy in-game currency and inventory items with different in-game currency and inventory items (virtual purchases), or by using real money via a digital storefront.
  • Configuration: You oversee the Economy service from its Configuration panel. This centralized repository governs the management and publication of your game’s resources, and also allows you to add Custom data.
  • Publication: After creating your economy, while respecting the Parameters of operation, you need to publish it. Publishing an economy transfers the current configuration to your game, allowing your players to interact with it.

Set up Economy in Unity Cloud

You can set up and manage Economy through the Unity Cloud Dashboard:

  1. Go to cloud.unity.com.
  2. Select the Products tab from the sidebar.
  3. Under Game Economy, go to Economy and select Launch.

When you launch Economy for the first time, this adds Economy to the Shortcuts section on the sidebar and opens the Setup Guide page.

Sample projects

Download the Unity Gaming Services Samples project to see how to implement Economy to solve common game development challenges: