There is and there has been! Simply cycling it back in is certainly doable, and arguably already done (or approximated) - I'd argue it's more the local infrast

There is and there has been! Simply cycling it back in is certainly doable, and arguably already done (or approximated) - I'd argue it's more the local infrastructure deterioration/modeling that isn't (fully) simulated in EvE, for NPC infastructure. A couple of gamedev terms: - Cash faucets - sources of currency generation / magically introduced into the economy, functionally equivalent to the bank printing currency in the real world. - Cash sinks - places where currency is magically destroyed / taken out of the economy, functionally equivalent to the bank destroying old currency in the real world. If your cash faucets and sinks exactly balance each other out, you could look at it as the bank simply reinvesting the currency instead of creating and destroying an exactly equal amount - externally, the net effect is identical. Of course, this is rarely the case - both in games and in real life. For the currency to be "healthy" and serve a purpose in a player economy, you want to avoid faucets outnumbering sinks to the point that you have extremely inflation. E.g. in Diablo 2, one would barter in known rare items - gold is effectively worthless, there are few effective sinks to sink it into. (Games of course usually use an impossible number of magical faucets and sinks - the kind of centrally planned economy that would require a star trek style post-scarcity environment run by complete and utter LARPing fanatics to ever pull off, contrasted to our current real world where you maybe have a single state bank trying to carefully control inflation with a currency printing lever.) Returning to EvE online: They still have a bunch of magical zero-maintenance infrastructure in "high security" space, but they've also added a lot of player buildable infrastructure that generally needs fueling and defense. If you don't pay for a road's upkeep in real life, it starts to get a few potholes. If you don't pay to maintain and defend your player owned stations in EvE online (be it through your money or your material and your time), someone's going to blow it up or take it from you - for amusement, profit, or both. This is a much stronger deterioration of infrastructure than you generally see in real life. (I forget how much of this player buildable infrastructure predates this article, if any.)