So, no, it wouldn’t contribute to inflation in any way. The only way it could contribute to inflation is if they gave out money that they didn’t have.

You know what, what about instead of depositing money and getting interest, players themselves can act as bankers/angels/venture capitalists for NPCs? You can go to the town, see which NPCs would like to borrow money, and what they will do with it. There might be feedback on that NPC, from players or maybe scripted feedback from other NPCs.

what the deal is though: say the NPC needs money to move cattle from one town to another. Not only can the Player loan him money, but this creates quest and activity opportunities: maybe the NPC needs help protecting his cattle, so the PC helps protect his investment. If the PC doesn’t, there’s an increased chance to lose his money. Each loan would come with an escort or protection quest, or maybe retrieve a rare item, with a greater chance to get his money with interest if the player decides to help.

Hmm it’s fun way to teach people how investing and risk work, while creating new content for them to play with.

If you allowed for games to support their own banks then you’re just injecting more currency into the already broken economy models of most MMOs

In my experience loaning money to other players has been very hit or miss. At this point I think I am out close to 500 gold on WOW. Mostly this is due to the people I have loaned money to quitting etc. so I don’t really consider it an integrity issue. And I have had many loans paid back, but the bad experiences have made me treat any “loans” as gifts instead so if I get paid back all the better, but if not I wasn’t really expecting anything back.

Back to my original point though, if you try and work around the above scenario by restricting what characters that have already taken out a loan can and can’t do it would hurt the game in general. (I.e. can’t delete char till debt is paid (then people would just leave dead alts lying around), tie the loan to the account instead of the char (no way to force pay back), automatically remove gold from defaulting chars (then the game is much more like a “job” and less like fun, players would start quitting when they log in and have zero gold))

I am not sure the gaming community is ready to accept restrictions on their play that setting up a viable banking system would require. I would much rather have no restrictions and things work the way they do now, even though that means no official loans, and no easy interest.