GAME ECONOMY DESIGNER

As a Game Economy Designer, your responsibility is to understand how a game works as a service for its customers and how the customers behave in it, identifying and developing the purchase drivers in the game economy context, and providing constant data-driven recommendations on design, tuning, and pricing in order to improve game financial performance.

To do this, pre-release, you are able to design the virtual products a game will offer, define metrics that allow you to individually measure their impact in a given title, and work closely with the development team to see those designs refined and metrics implemented.

Once the game is launched, you are able to analyze the collected data and report which are the performing/underperforming aspects of the game economic model, why, and provide solutions to Gameloft management.

Your day-to-day duties include:

• Defining the virtual products and their statistics with the development team, and understanding how each of them contributes to the game dynamics.
• Identifying the potential sale drivers for the different product categories in the game economy, defining the key points of exposure for those drivers.
• Balancing the needs for those virtual products, their relation, life cycle, and their streams of availability.
• Managing pricing to create specific price point roles, implementing selling strategies for higher price points.
• Regularly providing user feedback and stat/price point tuning to the development team based on play-testing, both during game development and post-release.
• Analyzing the evolution of the metrics you defined to spot both monetization bottlenecks and facilitators, then reporting suggestions for the game design or strategy accordingly.
• This is a position requiring a mix of strong economy and marketing knowledge with a passion for analytical game design and the emerging free-to-play business model.

Job Requirements:

Strong sensitivity to gameplay and game design, understanding how to build needs and emotions in the context of a game.
Strong analytical and formal thinking, able to break problems down into their key variables and identify the relations between them.
Strong econometrics skills, able to model problems into quantitative systems, and draw qualitative conclusions out of quantitative data.
Statistical knowledge, able to formulate ratios and indexes specific to each game, identifying specific weaknesses and strengths in its economy design.
Strong marketing knowledge, able to formulate adequate selling strategies to improve financial performance.
Understanding of client/server architecture and data collecting pipeline and mining.

Requirements:

Graduate degree in Economics or BA, preferably specialized in Marketing or Strategic direction.
Fluent written and spoken English, concise writing skills.
Mastery of Excel.
Advanced understanding of SQL.
Deep, up-to-date knowledge of the free-to-play market, both web-based and on smartphones.
Passion for games on all existing formats: board games, card games, sports, paper RPGs, gambling, all genres of video games with special focus on MMOs and competitive games.

Pluses:

Previous experience in econometrics/data mining.
Mastering of UI prototyping tools such as Flash.
Experience in community managing, marketing, or product management.
Previous experience as a game designer, social designer, or gambling designer.