Valve is an undisputed leader in publishing and game development. However when they decided to link their in game economies together via Steam Trading they realised they had taken on more than they could deal with. That's when President and founder, Gabe Newell decided to send an email to Yanis Varoufakis, a leading voice in the eurozone and global debt crisis.

I’m the president of a videogame company (www.valvesoftware.com).

We are running into a bunch of problems as we scale up our virtual economies, and as we link economies together. Would you be interested in consulting with us?

I have been following your blog for a while… Here at my company we were discussing an issue of linking economies in two virtual environments (creating a shared currency), and wrestling with some of the thornier problems of balance of payments, when it occurred to me “this is Germany and Greece”, a thought that wouldn’t have occurred to me without having followed your blog. Rather than continuing to run an emulator of you in my head, I thought I’d check to see if we couldn’t get the real you interested in what we are doing.

Gabe Newell, Valve, Seattle, WA USA

The economist was so intrigued that he accepted Gabe's invitation to Valve headquarters. Once there he was introduced to the team and given a crash course in what they have created. That's when it dawned to him, "Soon, however, I realised that this bunch of people were not just weird but also wonderful and, to boot, that what they were describing, the digital community they had facilitated into existence, was an economist’s dream-come-true. Think of it: An economy where every action leaves a digital trail, every transaction is recorded; indeed, an economy where we do not need statistics since we have all the data! Within hours, an agreement was reached: I would become, in some capacity (that was to be hammered out later), Valve’s economist-in-residence."

[ source : http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/category/economics/ ]