Currency Confusion

The currency confusion pattern (also known as “intermediate currency”) occurs where “real money is taken from users and converted into an arbitrary secondary currency.” and where “the undesirable effect for users is that they are no longer able to discern what things cost.” (Chris Lewis, 2014). Researchers suggest that “The goal of this pattern is to disconnect users from the real dollar value spent in order to cause the user to interact differently with the virtual currency. This may result in users spending the currency differently than they would with fiat currency.” (Gray et al., 2018).

Fortnite is a free-to-play game that sells cosmetic items through an in-game shop. Items are priced only in V-Bucks, the game's virtual currency. The "Safari" skin shown below costs 1,200 V-Bucks, but the user is not told what that is worth in pounds or dollars. To buy it they must first convert real money into V-Bucks, and these are sold in fixed bundles. 

The real cost in fiat currency is not shown in the item purchasing experience. Buying the currency and spending it are separate activities, and may occur days or weeks apart. So, by the time the user is choosing a skin they may have forgotten what they paid, or what the conversion rate was.

If they bought 4,500 V-Bucks for £27.99 (as pictured), they would need to turn this into a conversion rate, (£27.99/4,500= roughly 0.62 pence per V-Buck), and then multiply that by 1,200 to work out that the Safari skin actually costs about £7.46. This is a memory burden and an arithmetic burden that some users will not manage to do, and so will not learn the true price of the item. Some researchers refer to a psychological gap between the “pain of paying” and the “pleasure of consumption”, finding that when it is “decoupled”, people may overspend (Prelec & Loewenstein, 1998).

Currency confusion (Zagal et al., 2013), intermediate currency (Gray et al., 2018), premium currency (Zagal et al., 2013), predatory monetisation (King & Delfabbro, 2018), polymorphic currency (Tran et al., 2025)