Virtual Wealth: Real-world economics inside Adopt Me?

Written By Cognac Van

Roblox is one of the world’s most popular online gaming platforms, allowing players to create and participate in millions of games. While many games focus on adventures, building, competitions, and even role-playing, some feature player-driven economies. One of the most notable examples is Adopt Me – a game where players collect pets, decorate houses, roleplay and trade items with others. The trading system in Adopt Me is one of the most popular features of Roblox, offering surprisingly clear economic principles at work. Within the game, pets function as goods whose value is determined by demand, scarcity, and player preferences—similar to goods in the real-world market.

While pets are originally determined by supply, demand and scarcity, some players strive to influence the market, known commonly as value manipulation amongst players. Value manipulation occurs when players attempt to influence how others perceive the worth of a pet, causing its value to change despite there being no change in rarity or demand. This sort of manipulation can be seen in the Giant Panda, a pet that players have claimed to be “rare”. However, its scarcity has been reduced by bots that continuously grind the game to obtain large quantities of the pet. This has severely affected the overall supply circulation, meaning the availability of the pet is far more common than players are made to think.

In Adopt Me, information gets spread through a variety of network platforms such as YouTube, in-game trading servers, and social media. This allows players to shape the market perceptions by labelling certain pets as “high in demand” or claiming that the value for the pet is increasing. Gradually, as more players believe these claims, demand for the pets rises, encouraging other players to seek a certain pet and offer more valuable trades for the pet, known as an overpay. 

The economy in Adopt Me demonstrates how the same principles found in real life markets can be applied to virtual environments without players even noticing. While pets are usually determined by supply and demand, players can easily influence the market. Ultimately, Adopt Me acts as a case study that portrays how markets don’t always follow common rules of supply and demand, but can be manipulated by many other factors.