I never thought that I’d learn about pricing psychology through a free game on my iPad. Imagine you’re going to a coffee shop, and they’re charging you $20 for a latte. Despite your protestations, they’re firm in their pricing; it’s as if they really don’t care what you think.
In real life, this would cause an uproar, and that café would be cancelled on TikTok. In the game RollerCoaster Tycoon, you can charge whatever you want and opt to ignore the negative feedback. You see these little avatar people complain via speech bubbles with bright red text – and yet, despite being upset, they still buy the expensive drink.
I’ve been playing RollerCoaster Tycoon Touch (the iPad version) for over a year now, and it’s taught me how to think like a business. It’s a free crash course on pricing psychology, value perception, and the emotional detachment required to build wealth. It’s the best example I’ve ever seen of what it takes to become wealthy, and how the traits that make you rich in the game are the same ones we dislike in real life.
How the Game Works: Placing Pricing Psychology at the Forefront
The premise of RollerCoaster Tycoon is that you run a theme park and have complete control over how it operates. You set prices and place stores, rides, restaurants, and decorations wherever you want. The main driver of whether your park will succeed is how you control all aspects of pricing, whether for food, drinks, rides, or even park entry. The game gives you a lot of flexibility here. For example, you can set the price for all lemonade stands across the park to be the same, or, if there’s one that’s near a beautiful plaza, you can increase the price at just that one since the satisfaction score is likely to be higher.
Another aspect of this game is that you get direct feedback from your customers via speech bubbles, and if you price your venues too highly, fewer people will come to the park. Yes, you have a lot of flexibility, but you need to be able to strike a balance between your profits and satisfaction for the customer.
In this way, the game creates tension immediately: do you raise prices to earn more, or lower them to bring in more people? This balance is at the heart of pricing psychology, defined by researchers Kumar and Pandey (2016) as “a marketing or pricing strategy based on the theory that certain prices have psychological impacts on the consumers’ price perception, attitude, and their buying behaviour.”
While I didn’t realize it for months of gameplay, the game taught me more about pricing psychology than any classroom ever could. RollerCoaster Tycoon, by stripping away consumer sentiment and turning human (well, human-ish) behavior into data points, allowed me to ruthlessly test different strategies and become an in-game multi-billionaire in less than a year.
From Broke to Wealthy in a Year (At Least, in the Game)
Alas, I didn’t become a RCT billionaire overnight. When I first downloaded the game in December of 2024, I was in-game broke. I didn’t have much money, wasn’t earning much either, and my customers weren’t enjoying the park because I was still figuring it all out. At that point, $1,000 felt like a huge sum, and I was careful with every single expenditure. Over the weeks, I learned ways to charge more while still maintaining high levels of satisfaction. I was grateful that my electronic customers had a short memory, and my brand didn’t suffer permanent reputational damage from my early mistakes.
After a certain point, I learned to focus on reinvesting the profits I earned into updating my venues so I could charge more and more, all while keeping customers happy. It was fun to find the very top end of what my RCT patrons would pay without getting upset, and I realized that fairness or generosity didn’t equal profitability.
Once I became even more money-driven, I raised prices on everything to that expensive sweet spot. I also optimized my layouts to charge more (again) and ultimately grow my park through expansions and new venues. A thousand dollars started to feel minuscule, and before a recent round of huge upgrades, I had about $60 billion in my game’s bank account.
It was when I started getting really rich in the game that I reflected on those early days of stressing over a new $1,000 decoration or upgrade. Money’s value can change as you get richer or poorer, which I wrote about in December regarding influencers, and I didn’t realize the extent of that until I found my own wealth in RCT. That was just one of the many lessons it taught me about prosperity, pricing psychology, and understanding the behavior of real-life business overlords.
What the Game Taught Me About Pricing Psychology and Wealth
1. There’s a Disconnect Between Charging and Spending
In the game, I was adjusting prices to maximize profits. While I was considering the impact of price increases on buyers’ experience, I was mostly thinking about whether they would affect overall customer satisfaction metrics. I was happy to charge $20 for a lemonade as long as people were still happy, even if $20 is, in reality, astronomically high.
Even though I’m not a business owner in real life (maybe someday), there’s still no scenario in which I would think of customers as vessels through which I can make more money. My work as a User Experience Researcher, after all, involves empathetically listening to users’ experiences with a product or service and advocating for changes to improve them. The game showed me that sellers price items according to margins, whereas buyers consider prices along the lines of how much they’re willing to part with. This gap in priorities is where businesses make money; it’s also where businesses can either thrive or fail.
2. I Care Less About Complaints If Metrics Are Strong
In the game, there are two ways to gauge customer happiness: through speech bubbles (the text is either white or red, depending on if it’s positive or negative) and using a drop-down panel that measures satisfaction for fun, food, and hygiene. If the panel shows that people are overall satisfied, I will pay less attention to the negative feedback in the bubbles, even if their frequency increases. As I said, I focus on park profits, so individual complaints don’t matter to me as much.
I’ve noticed similar trends in the real world. Brands don’t – and can’t – optimize their services for everyone. Some companies may not even care about negative feedback as long as they’re making money. To grow a company into a wealthy one, a leader must filter out the noise and focus only on overall trends.
I experienced this even in my User Experience research. For example, let’s say I’m interviewing 10 people about a new online flow for checkout. There was usually one person in each sample who was super negative. When it came to creating my report, however, I would focus on the trends. If everyone had trouble with a button, I would include that, but if only one person did, I would omit it or put it in the appendix.
While in my real-life job, I was the one calculating the data, the game allowed me to be on the other side of the table – one where I leveraged that data and filtered out the noise to make business decisions.
3. The Value of a Dollar Becomes Flexible as Wealth Accumulates
As I kept playing the game over weeks and months, my valuation of a dollar changed drastically. When I first started, I was careful about how I spent every dollar. “Small” spending mistakes didn’t feel so small when I had only a few thousand in my account and earned revenue slowly.
Now that I’ve been playing for so long, though, I easily earn tens of millions of dollars every few hours, and upgrading a restaurant for $200 million doesn’t feel difficult. As the relative value of my game dollars changed, I anticipated it would change for the customer as well. Why shouldn’t they be ok with a $20 lemonade? I thought, even though a year ago I would’ve balked at charging them that much.
I know there’s a big difference between game customers and real customers, and it’s much easier to lose a sense of empathy when they’re pixels on a screen. Even though my digital patrons don’t even have brains with which to worry about inflation, some real-life businesses are losing touch with their consumers and their financial stressors, the way I did in the game. I now understand how that can happen: value isn’t fixed, and a dollar truly isn’t equal from one person to the next.
4. Optimization of the Park Comes at the Cost of Empathy
As I started earning more money and experimenting in the game, I became better at optimizing the park. I began to focus on profit per guest, efficiency, and flow. I changed what I could to improve satisfaction scores, but I stopped thinking as much about the customer experience. I learned that the color of the rides (whether harmonized or chaotic) or keeping sections of the park with a specific theme (for example, Christmas, Easter, or adventure) didn’t affect satisfaction scores, so I stopped worrying about that.
I became less empathetic with the guests: more analytical and focused, which is in direct opposition to how customers really shop, which is often emotional and impulsive. The game showed me that as a business owner, you are not experiencing your business the way your customers do. There’s an implicit gap in perception that can negatively impact not only the business but also how customers experience it.
Consumption Versus Control, and the Different Roles We Play
In the game, I own the business. I have complete control over nearly everything, from how I price things to how I decorate the park and when I make upgrades. I can play puppeteer and let my digital customers deal with the outcome. Outside of the game, I am a customer, too, and I perceive businesses’ decisions differently.
Experiencing both sides now, I’ve realized that our system of business is designed by people who think like my “game self,” not like my real self. There is a sense of detachment and narrow focus on optimization-at-all-costs that I feel with some companies. This is especially true of the massive ones (like eBay, which I wrote about recently) that don’t have as many opportunities to really hear customers’ issues and implement changes as nimbly as, say, a local coffee shop. (I’m writing this at a locally-owned café, so it’s on my mind.)
Like in my game, enterprises have an unbelievable amount of power in their pricing strategies. And like my digital customers, they expect us to cough up extra money so they can meet their financial goals. There is a canyon between how well some companies think they understand their customers and what customers’ experiences are truly like.
How the Game Drastically Shifted My Perspective as a Shopper
Now that I’ve had the opportunity to control pricing psychology firsthand, I think of prices differently. If I see a $52 “wool coat” (which is really 90% polyester) on Amazon, for example, I think about where each dollar goes and why it’s priced that way. How much of that goes to marketing? How much goes to the polyester supplier? How much goes into the CEO’s pocket? I’ve shifted slightly from an emotional reaction to prices to a more analytical and reflective one, though when I see prices for the same item go up for no reason, it will predictably make me upset.
I also consider how much of the decision to price something is about the costs of doing business versus what they think we’re willing to pay. In my game, if I can charge more, I will. That’s where the real shift in my thinking has happened: just because I understand pricing decisions and increases doesn’t mean I agree with them. For me, the price hikes only affect pixelated depictions of people; they do not affect real lives or real wallets.
What Lingers After Becoming Radicalized About Systems of Pricing
RollerCoaster Tycoon is a safe environment to experiment with running a business because there are no real-world consequences. All the same, it has been humbling to observe myself enacting price increases in pursuit of bigger profits. After all, how many times have I lamented firms for doing the same thing?
Through the game, I’ve learned about pricing psychology and strategy, but I’ve also grown to see the system for what it is. The uncomfortable decisions and processes that build wealth in companies are also the ones we loathe as consumers. Once you’ve been the one setting the prices, especially in an environment with zero constraints or oversight like RCT, it’s hard to see companies the same way again. It lifts the veil on what shapes business decisions and what enterprises choose to overlook.
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