Disclaimer: I am a retired player who quit years ago. Also the discussion kind of drifted away from the original topic which was a universe without market makers. Please forgive me if my gameplay experience is 4 years out of date.
There are many issues but the biggest two issues are as follows:
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Close the loop on the monetary system: New players require money from existing players. Quitting players need to have their money drained away and distributed back to everyone else.
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Add consumption: Production always requires consumption as a purpose. Either the developers add artificial consumers like NPCs who can spend their salary on the consumer market or the players themselves become the consumers.
There is no way around these two issues.
The first one is actually not that big of a deal, there are so many ways to fix it that the devs can do whatever, but my favorite was this one: You charge a liquidity fee on both positive and negative balances to the issuing institution (government or bank). Whenever new money is created, you write down the creditor and debtor and create both the positive and negative balance. Eventually the positive balance disappears and this also gets rid of the negative balance. When a player quits the payments are routed to pay off the negative balances (which no longer grow) first. Might be difficult to implement though so I would leave this up to the devs what their favorite is. Basically this is a modified Bancor style arrangement.
The second one is probably impossible to do for the devs because building a realistic consumer simulation takes a lot of time and economic expertise, is easy to get wrong and has the risk of the simulation not being fun to play against. Like my idea would be to build a Fisher market on every planet for the consumer side and this opens a can of worms because you dont want to have the NPCs be able to save money and you also need a labor market to start paying the NPCs. The labor market is kinda hard-ish to balance because you basically bring in a huge amount of politics in here. If there are more workers than jobs the salary collapses or you need to invent unemployment benefits (who is gonna pay that). If there are not enough workers I think its fine though because they will just spend the exploding salary back into the economy although its possible there could be a salary price spiral.
Also even the basics themselves are kind of crazy. The Fisher market is tough because it opens a big question. Basically you give each worker a salary based on the labor market (ignore it for now). The players put their consumer goods on the markets like a commodity exchange. The NPCs then try to spend their full budget based on their utility curves for a given commodity, prioritizing the ones they prefer most. What if there are not enough consumer goods? The price of consumer goods goes through the roof to capture the full expenditures but this is a contradiction with player set prices! So now the NPCs have savings which we didnt want them to have. Maybe the NPCs can put up their own bids on the consumer markets.
I didn’t even talk about how the salaries would be set… Well in this case we could say that the players set their own salary bid, the NPCs then choose the highest salary first. This leads to the unemployment issue.
Now onto the least realistic option: The devs add utility to items directly. Lets be honest, youre playing the game because you want to build a business so expanding your business is the own goal in this recursive self contradiction. You guys are playing capitalism for fun while real world capitalism is wayyy less fun. Ultimately you kind of have to let go of the idea that building the business is the core reason to play the game if you want the players to be the consumers. The devs have to add things that do not have anything to do with business building whatsoever. Paraphrased you want to build a block building game where building the nicest castle or space station requires you to gather materials from the environment and the thing you build gives you street cred. Back when I played the street cred was how many bases you own but as you heard from me thats self referential or circular reasoning.
I’m sure the devs can figure out the theory and the algorithms but you have to compare the simplicity of the market makers vs whatever box of pandora you’re opening up. It a cost of development vs paying user base growth argument. They need to keep the lights on after all.
So if someone could step up and make like a simplified fan game using the same commodities but with a functioning consumer market that would be nice and maybe the devs can learn from that.
Also I’m sorry if I got something wrong. I’m not sure how much I even remember about the game but I do know that I liked it.
