Basic Trope: In some videogames, prices remain the same even no matter how far you travel nor how long you take, so you can never profit off of buying and reselling goods.
- Straight: Benny travels the world. All prices remain the same, whether in the metropolis, the straw hovel, or any locale between them.
- Exaggerated:
- Benny travels to other planets. Not only do the aliens use the same currency as humans, their prices are also the same.
- Benny is a Time Traveler. The prices in the distant past, present, and distant future are all the same.
- Downplayed: Benny travels to a Boom Town, and all items of same types there yield the same prices.
- Justified:
- All the stores Benny visits are from the same franchise.
- The items for sale are all ubiquitous and so easily interchangable with each other, any price difference is quickly corrected as part of the Anti-Frustration Features (if one store tried to price higher, it loses all business; if the store tried to price lower, it gets so much business everyone else has to drop their price as well).
- The game is set in a Commie Land.
- None of the items the shops sell vary much in availability at any given time or place. The country is rich in resources all around and efficient in their use, meaning that even poor communities aren't in any danger of running out any time soon.
- The world is set in Post-Scarcity Economy where people can craft things without need for money, rendering capitalism obsolete.
- The world is set in an Energy Economy where the price of goods is interchangeable with the price of the energy used to manufacture them.
- Nearly free teleportation and efficient markets mean that the value converges to be the same everywhere very quickly.
- Inverted:
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts
- The prices make little sense, but you'll never find the same pricing twice.
- You can sell items back to the people you bought them from for more than they charged you for it, allowing you to grind for infinite cash.
- You can buy and sell things for profit however your capacity for buying and selling are the bottleneck.
- Subverted:
- The prices remain constant in the beginning of the game, but when Benny travels to a different country, the prices are different.
- While the market doesn't vary by location due to teleportation it is influenced by global supply vs demand although it is very hard for anything the player does to influence it much.
- You can actually sell goods for profit but the populace will progressively hate you for it more than if you were actually pillaging them as everything has a fixed price therefore you must be a con-man.
- Double Subverted: It turns out that the prices only seemed different because the new country uses a different currency.
- Parodied:
- All the shops use the slogan "You'll never find cheaper items!", which is technically true.
- "I know my shop is the only one in miles, so I could triple my prices and you'd still have to pay it. But for the convenience of players, and developers that were too lazy to make a better economics system, I'll just charge as much as everyone else."
- Karl Marx himself establishes this system.
- Karl Marx is a character in the game, but his only function is to walk up to other characters and say, "I hate your guts."
- Zig-Zagged: Alternating this method with Adam Smith Hates Your Guts.
- Items cannot be sold at a profit instantaneously. You can acquire a shop with limited slots for goods where you can set the value higher or lower than the base price to effect the odds of it being sold every day. More expensive base items also take longer to sell.
- Averted:
- The game has realistic economics.
- While the economics aren't realistic, the prices still vary between shops.
- Enforced:
- The developers don't have the time/capacity to make a realistic economics system.
- The game is light-hearted and not particularly realistic, or is set in Post-Cyberpunk worlds, so the developers decide that realistic economics would feel out of place to most players. Besides, who'd want to buy and resell items to make money when they can craft their items or hunt for treasures instead?
- Meddling Executives decide that the players won't appreciate and understand a realistic economics system anyway, so they force the developers to use fixed prices everywhere because that'll allow the players to keep track of it.
- Lampshaded: "How much does a Healing Potion cost?" "Ten coins." "I should've known. It's always ten coins."
- Invoked: A Reasonable Authority Figure decrees that all shops must use a fixed set of prices.
- Exploited: Knowing shopkeepers won't change their prices, Benny uses a magic spell to make an item very common and sells them by the truckload.
- Defied: A shop owner decides to lower his prices, knowing that it'll attract more customers. The other shops gradually change their prices too.
- Bob mentions in the tutorial that since it buys for 100 gold and sells for 50 gold it will be that way everywhere. Charlie calls the concept of a fixed universal price the stupidest thing he has ever heard. In game even attempts to impose price controls by dictat will create black markets which obey actual economics - including the mark up from the danger.
- Discussed: "I dare not risk the wrath of the Mad King, but cannot wait for the day he's thrown out of power so I can go back to pricing items the way I want."
- Conversed: "Why does everything in this game cost the same, no matter where I buy it? I wish I could buy the stuff where it's cheap and sell it expensively."
- Deconstructed:
- Since shopkeepers can't compete with each other via different prices, they find other ways to differentiate their particular product from others. Some might advertise that their weapons are more reliable, others might claim that their healing potions are 50% more potent, still others might offer a more pleasant shopping experience, etc.
- The shopkeepers have the same price for a type of products, which leads to investigations that reveal Cartels being formed.
- Reconstructed: There is no copyright law and the shops make a similar profit. Therefore, each time one shop advertises an advantage for its products or uses a better supplier, the other shops can do the same. As a result, the products end up not being differentiated enough to prevent the player from finding functionally identical items in any shop in the game.
- Played for Drama: People end up standing in line all day every Monday for their ever-dwindling rations. The appearance of an adventuring party nearly sparks a riot.
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