The Single Unit of Value
the metric every live-service team needs and almost none have
It’s Monday morning standup. A designer pitches a new event reward and someone asks: “is that too generous?” Nobody actually knows. The Lead opens the premium currency dashboard. The dashboard shows last week was fine. The reward ships. Three weeks later, premium pack sales fall off a cliff and the team spends a sprint trying to figure out why.
If this sounds familiar, your economic reporting is broken. Not because the dashboards are wrong but because they’re measuring the wrong thing.
Premium currency tells you what players spent or earned, not how those purchases have impacted their progression. Whether it is platinum pieces in Everquest or gems in Clash of Clans, games are monitored by the granting, spending, and wallet sizes of these currencies. But premium currency doesn’t capture the full game design. Player progress isn’t measured by their wallets and the gains and drains of a single currency.
SUoV: Tying the Entire Game Together
The Single Unit of Value (SUoV) is the metric every action, reward, drop, sink, and SKU in your game gets normalized to. Pick one canonical unit and force everything else to express itself as a multiple of it. Now every design decision has a price tag and every LiveOps event has a measurable impact on the same ledger.
The four steps to implementing an SUoV:
1. Identify the SUoV. Ask three questions: What does a churning player say they wanted more of? What does your highest-spending whale spend their last dollar to get? What’s the noun players use when they describe progress to each other? That’s your unit. It’s rarely the premium currency. It’s usually one layer downstream: what the currency buys.
2. Price the entire game against it. Every reward source (pack, mission, event, login bonus, store SKU) gets an expected SUoV output. Every sink (crafting cost, upgrade cost, time gate) gets an expected SUoV cost. Backfill historically, the prior year’s data is the cheapest baseline you’ll ever get.
3. Set thresholds for healthy generation and drain. Per week, per content piece, per cohort. This is the band where last year’s revenue and retention were where you wanted them.
4. Run LiveOps against the unit, not against revenue. Designers price rewards in SUoV. Economy team sets pack loot tables in SUoV. PMs root-cause in SUoV. Revenue becomes a consequence of SUoV health, not the leading metric.
Case Study: Madden 23
I joined EA Orlando as Lead PM mid-cycle on Madden 23. The product was tracking 7-figures below revenue forecast and heading towards 8-figures. The previous PM was monitoring premium currency flow, exchange rates, and average team OVR; three separate dashboards, no single view of whether the economy was healthy. Nobody could answer the basic question: why is spending dropping?
Madden 23’s Ultimate Team game mode is a combination of a trading card game and traditional American football. It had 3 different currencies, 14 to 18 different card packs live at any given time, and multiple pieces of content that reward cards. A card has a list of stats with the most important being the card’s OVR, or overall rating. The game year starts with cards in the 70 OVR range and by end of year cards have 99 OVR.
This creates an interesting problem where cards become less valuable as the game goes on, and the buying power of currencies is always better saved until an outlier OVR exchange appears in the form of special packs or special events.
Naturally, the previous PM tracked the premium currency as the base unit in the game, measuring its ability to generate OVR via premium packs, and the exchange rate between it and the two other currencies as a basis for their purchasing power. But it struggled to connect the earning and spending to the player’s motivation to continue to spend within the game.
I needed a better solution than monitoring multiple disparate metrics for historical abnormalities: create a new SUoV for Madden.
Step 1
What is the biggest motivator for players? Why do players want currency? Why do players want to open packs? Why do they engage with events? They want high OVR cards for their team. Specifically, they want cards where their OVR is within 1-2 points of the leading edge OVR, which the highest OVR cards can carry.
The SUoV is leading edge cards generated. From here you can tie together the buying power of all 3 currencies, the power generation of all live packs, the value of completing content, and best of all, this metric stays relevant when OVR increases every few weeks.
Step 2
I implemented the SUoV as the underlying unit of measurement across currency rewards, pack openings, and engagement rewards. You need to track the SUoV gains and drains across the game and create a historical ledger of SUoV values for the content.
In Madden Ultimate Team, not much changes from year to year. So Madden 22 and 21’s historical SUoV gains and drains are extremely valuable for creating thresholds for what is healthy in Madden 23.
Step 3
Using existing and historical data, I created acceptable thresholds for each week, for each piece of content across Madden Ultimate Team. The issue became apparent, a single non-premium pack was generating an insane amount of leading edge OVR cards. Through a complicated web of currency exchanges, players were exploiting this card generation by turning the leading edge cards from this pack into other leading edge cards to fill out their NFL team roster.
Step 4
Over the next two months we repriced the offending pack against the SUoV target band, drained the over-generated leading-edge cards through targeted sinks, and rebuilt premium content with SUoV-anchored loot tables. Madden 23 closed 8-figures above forecast for the year. Madden 24 ran on it from day one.
What Does This Mean for Me?
Stop reporting on premium currency as if it’s the economy. It’s a single piece of a larger puzzle. Pick the unit your players are actually playing for, price the entire game against it, and run LiveOps from there. The teams that do this catch problems three weeks before the revenue chart does.