Ah, the stock market. Who doesn't love to buy stocks when they're cheap, sell them when they're more expensive for an easy profit, and rake in a fortune after a few months? Well, the reality isn't nearly as simple, as there's a lot of skill required and sometimes the market will just crash and potentially put your empire in jeopardy, but what if we could have something fun based on that?
Enter the stock market game genre. In each one of these, you buy stocks cheap and sell them for a profit. Sometimes events happen which may change up what stocks are hot. You can also have an advisor who tells you how the market works and what stocks they suggest investing in.
As it turns out, the stock market fad started to erode, the Wall Street crash of 1987 and the crash of the Nikkei average of 1990 in Japan with the "Lost Decade" to follow happened, and the genre wouldn't be so hot anymore since the belief that stocks are easy money crumbled. What's worse is that the games were too complex and aesthetically boring for children, while adults would eventually prefer games with more adult material (often involving Fanservice or Gorn).
Full-on games based on the stock market are a Forgotten Trope outside of nostalgic throwbacks, but minigames based on them still show up occasionally, especially in the Idle Game genre.
Games which fully focus on it:
- The Firm
- First Million
- Inside Trader The Authentic Stock Treading Game
- The Money Game
- Money Market
- Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator
- Stock Market Game
- Stonks 9800 Stock Market Simulator
- Stockpile
- Trader Of The Night
- Wall Street Kid
Minigames:
- The 18XX series of board games are about creating a train company in the 1800s, including selling shares of that company on the stock market and buying shares in the companies of other players.
- Animal Crossing emulates the stock market with the Stalk Market. Every Sunday you can buy turnips from Joan/Daisy Mae, which can be sold for fluctuating prices depending on the day and what town you're currently in. Turnips do start to rot after a week, so you only have a limited time to cash in before they go to waste.
- Anti-Idle: The Game: The Lolmarket lets you buy gems for Green Coins and sell them for a profit. Getting a high enough profit allows for higher quantities of the same gem.
- Cookie Clicker introduces a rather complex Stock Market minigame with its Bank buildings, where you can buy and sell building-themed resource stocks with cookies, getting an office to increase the capacity of stocks you can have, stockbroker grandmas to lower extra overhead costs, and cookie loans.
- Cruelty Squad has an incredibly volatile stock market where you can buy and sell stocks (as well as body parts and fish) for money. There are certain stocks that will jump up or crash after completing specific missions.
- Cyberpunk 2077: "Stock Market and News System" mod adds a fully-functioning stock market system to the game.
- In Final Fantasy XIV, the Island Sanctuary has a pseudo-stock market in which you can gather materials to produce items to ship back to the mainland in exchange for cowries. The supply and demand of these manufactured items fluctuates based on hidden patterns every week, both of which greatly affect potential payouts. This encourages players to gather lots of materials and carefully plan what items to make on a given day to maximize profits.
- Grand Theft Auto V has an in-game stock market, which becomes the focus of some of Franklin Clinton's missions under Lester Crest, where assassinating certain businessmen allows certain investments to become profitable later on. In addition, helping a random encounter stockbroker bound for Liberty City will also give any of the three protagonists a chance to make a good investment in their stocks not long after dropping him off at the airport.
- Kittens Game has the Blackcoin market, where you can trade relics for Blackcoin with a fluctuating exchange rate.
- Jones in the Fast Lane: The Bank lets you see the Broker. In there, you can buy one of six stocks (T-Bills, Gold, Silver, Pork Bellies, Blue Chip Stocks, Penny Stocks) to sell for a potential profit on a later week.
- Neopets has a stock market where you can buy stock in in-universe companies and hopefully make profit.
- Planet Life uses a highly simplistic variation of a stock market in Chapter 2 where you can use Stardust to buy Ghosts, for you to sell later for more Stardust than you bought once prices go up, and vice versa.
- The Prestreestuck: There's a minigame in the Skaia layer where you buy stocks and sell them for boondollars, which is needed to progress the main game. Their price can't go below 3.
- Railroad Tycoon has a small stock market used to claim ownership of other railroads, with later installments allowing the player to short other railroad's stock.
- Star Trek Online has the dilithium exchange, where refined dilithium, a commonly used in-game currency, can be traded to other players for Zen, the currency used in microtransactions. The exchange rate fluctuates based on how much of each currency is in the system at any given time, up to a cap of 500 dil to 1 Zen.
- StreetPass Mii Plaza features the Market Crashers / StreetPass Trader game as DLC. Here, the player must buy or sell stock as it randomly rises or falls. By utilizing the StreetPass functionality, one can obtain Miis to help in predicting whether the value will rise or fall.
- Tangerine Tycoon gives five stocks to buy from, which move between ~25 and ~100 as a simply buy-low sell-high system.
- Universal Paperclips has a stock market, but all the player can do is deposit or withdraw money - all the actual trades are made by the AI. Spending "Yomi" allows you to make the engine smarter, improving its profitability. It becomes obsolete, though, once you Mind Control the entire world and progress to stage two of the game.
- War Inc includes a stock market to buy and sell stock, which can be disabled to let investments be handled automatically. If you manage to purchase 51% of stocks of a company, you become an owner and gain a benefit related to that type of company.
- X3: Albion Prelude has in-game stock exchanges based on commodities prices in a given system. Their primary function seems to be an easy way for the player to rapidly acquire stupid amounts of money by manipulating the market to crash and then skyrocket: the prices are based on how much of a given good is physically present, meaning you can bottom the market just by flying a freighter with a full cargo hold of said good into the system.
