When freemium games started being successful in the late 2000s, the industry began to search for new job roles. Roles that are focussed on understanding data on in-game player behavior. New jobs like business performance manager, data scientist, data analyst and business intelligence manager were created. Initially, there were no tools and standards, but as the industry matured, so did the practices. Now there is a relatively standardized understanding of what it means to be a producer versus a business performance manager versus a data scientist, as well as what good use of in-game data looks like.

I believe in the next few years we will see a similar development for game economy designer jobs: ‘analytical game designers’ who work with simulations and support lead designers in iterating on the key game systems.

Article written by Pietro Guardascione, Senior Director of Envelope Design, King

The unique problems of freemium mobile game mechanics

Building successful freemium games includes a very special type of challenge: creating systems that engage players for years and that allow for very deep monetization. All the revenue of a freemium game comes from the slow trickle of small in-game purchases made by a small fraction of the playerbase. This makes it necessary for freemium games to retain players for a long time and avoid putting too low a cap on how much spenders can pay.

In order to achieve a long lifetime, freemium games are built so that players can set strong (short-, medium-, and long-term) goals for themselves. They are then tuned to gradually provide players with a sense of “progression” towards these goals for an experience that can last for years. This generally translates into a need for a lot of “content,” be it new levels, new items, or generally new “things” to get in the game. Now, since most spend in freemium games comes from players who want to accelerate their progression, and since as we said it is important to avoid putting a low cap on how much spenders can spend, this need for “content” is multiplied.

The solution to this type of problem often cannot just be “create more content.” Production of good quality “content” can be both expensive and time-consuming, and that has to be factored in the cost of maintaining a live game. In the case of mobile games, developers also need to keep in mind that there are device limitations in terms of loading times and even disk space in case they want to support old devices.

This pressure on “content” makes freemium system building one of the most difficult and interesting challenges in game development.

Review a game economy early

It is important to look at this “content” dynamic explicitly and in detail before launching a game. There have been a few examples of beautiful, innovative, IP-powered games that have burst into players’ attention (and into the Top Downloads and Top Grossing charts), only to then disappear just a few months later. Not having enough progression or spending depth impeded these titles from becoming new runaway successes.

Furthermore, work on those systems is also best done early in the development process. Mobile games have become big production efforts, with teams of dozens of people. Once a game team becomes that big, two things hinder fast or successful pivots:

• Lead designers become very busy with day-to-day work, which makes it hard for them to take a step back and focus on tasks as big as changing key game systems.
• Since changing key game systems means changing somewhat the “nature” of a game, it is hard to do that more than once or twice before losing the faith of the team or the key game stakeholders.

The problem with reviewing game systems

The issue with trying to review game systems early in the development process is that freemium game systems are both very complicated and abstract. Game system reviews typically happen via conversations and presentations, and sometimes with some high-level prototypes, but those tools are not fit to describe and analyze “content” problems in-depth. Different people are likely to interpret the same presentation or the same words in different ways, and without looking into this in detail, there is the risk of moving to production games lacking a solid plan.

Enter the economy designers

Game economy designers at King are “analytical game designers” who look at games as machines and partner with the lead designer on a game title to transform a vision and a desired player experience into mechanics and parameters. They build simulations of the game mechanics and find answers to questions like, “How long will players need to complete a game?” or “How deep can monetization be in this game?”

Having a game economy designer working in a game team early in the development process allows for the game team to iterate much faster on game systems, months before having these systems implemented in game. A game can then move in production with confidence that enough “content” will be available to allow for years of play and for enough monetization depth.

RPG example

For example, in order to accelerate our iterations on the development of a gear system in an RPG, one of our economy designers developed a small simulator in Python (our preferred language for economy design).

The tool encoded all the mechanics related to the gear system (item drops, gear progression, gacha system). A designer could interact with it and simulate the progression in the game without going through the core mechanics of the gameplay.

This allowed exploring the long-term state of players in a matter of minutes, rather than days or weeks. The project could therefore quickly iterate on different variations on the design of the gear system and eliminate solutions that would have given a poor long-term player experience.

Casual game economies

Simulation is a valuable tool for casual games as well. In one of our latest casual games, players receive many of their rewards through (non-purchasable) mystery boxes. The inherent randomness in the boxes combined with variable progression speeds, skill levels, and play frequencies of players makes it hard to calculate how many rewards players get and when they get them.

In a game as big as a popular casual game, giving a bad experience to “a small percentage of players” could mean impacting millions, so having more control over the player experience becomes very valuable.

Using actual player data to simulate players’ journeys allows us to see how some game logic decisions impact player experience and content pacing, thus allowing for faster iterations before in-market tests.

Simulating players’ journeys allows us to see how game logic decisions impact player experience.

Game economy designers become increasingly important

The mobile gaming industry is still developing. The level of innovation to become a top title is as high as ever before, high quality is a minimum requirement and time to market is critical. To respond to these demands, gaming companies are trying to multiply their attempts at making successful games and are increasing the size of the teams once the games move to production. The more these trends will continue, the stronger the need will be to validate project investments early on, and the more there will be a need for game economy designers.

The discipline is young, with tools and practices still to be discovered, but the potential value to be created in this space is great, and I am convinced that we will have more and more A simulation specialists in this role.

If you’re interested in working with King on Economy design, take a look at their jobs board here.

By Pietro Guardascione, Senior Director of Envelope Design, King
Originally posted on Gamasutra

This is a Guest Post written by Will Wilson

I have $100 worth of Goflam. I’m going to give it to you for just $2! That’s an amazing price, right? Well, no, because you – I would hope – have attached no worth to whatever a Goflam is. It doesn’t matter how much I cut the price of one – you’re not going to buy something that means nothing, because if it means nothing, it’s worth nothing. Everything that exists in your game, from the beautifully animated assets to the clever stat balancing you spent months putting together, holds literally zero value to a player when they first start the app.

To create that value you’ll have to ensure your economy loops and design, not to mention the UX and UI, help to accentuate and create the value in the player’s heads as quickly and painlessly as possible.

There are four main components to help that along:

• Utility
• Exclusivity
• Familiarity
• Uniqueness.

Ensuring that all items satisfy at least one (preferably more) of these core components is the solid foundation that underpins great economy and systems design.

#1 Utility

The most basic way of creating value is Utility. This doesn’t just mean that an item is useful because it does x, but also creating the understanding of what, how and why the item is used. How to establish that cause/effect baseline to items and currencies, then, should be the number one question for designers as early as when the first economic flows. Merely showing a number going up as a consequence of an action can work with certain groups of players (there is a reason why Clicker games have a fanbase), but it’s far more effective to show a state change – an undesirable outcome is now a desirable outcome.

A great example of this is deployed by CSR Racing (1 and 2)’s FTUE, which deliberately forces the player to lose a race prior to introducing the concept of upgrades to them. This is not accidental – by teaching the player that this action (upgrading) results in an alternative conclusion (a loss is now a win), they instinctively link the benefits of upgrading to overcoming difficulty in the game.

CSR Racing takes a massive risk in failing the player as part of the FTUE. But it also effectively teaches the value of upgrades well beyond a simple textbox

But that’s a simple core loop demonstration – what about something more complex like an RPG with a rune or gear system? Again, it’s about ensuring that communication of why and how you can create a strong character or item is as clearly demonstrated as possible. This doesn’t mean putting tutorials and question marks everywhere for the player to tap, though. In fact, some of the best examples of helping players to see the value in items use the player-base itself to promote them. Summoner’s War, for instance uses a player-run forum for every character that let’s people quickly see who or what they need, as well as – most importantly – what runes and other latter systems they should aim to get for the character to make them even better. Contextualising the value of potentially complicated games systems for other players.

Summoners War has a full tutorial for its systems, but also has a one-button access to user-created builds and strategies for every monster you find. Because these are from ‘real’ people (aka. not the developers), they come across as much more genuine (because, well, they are!)

There is one last consideration when it comes to establishing utility – does usage of the item change over time? Ensuring that something can be always used and help the player, no matter how far they may be in the game, is vital for creating a well-rounded economy. Take FIFA Ultimate Team’s Squad Builder mode – what good is a Bronze tier player after the initial few hours of gameplay, when the player has a full squad or three filled to the brim with Gold (and even rarer) players?

Instead of letting these cards clog up the inventory, the player is given the opportunity to ‘trash’ sets of cards (for example, a Bronze League 2 team) for either limited edition or higher-tier players, thus ensuring that even when they have a core team, there is still a desire to collect more from all rarities in order to advance their squad.

 

By ensuring the weaker cards are always able to be used in a way that furthers the goal of the player, FIFA’s Ultimate team creates demand on what otherwise would be ‘undesirable’ players. It also manages to create a clever and compelling puzzle game in the process.

The more traditional way of ensuring commons and ‘poor’ cards or items are still useful is the classic ‘feeder’ mechanic employed by classics like Puzzles & Dragons, but while it does make sense on paper, the exponential nature of XP requirements devalues these items over time and eventually results in them losing their value.

Hearthstone takes a more basic approach to useless cards, allowing players to ‘dust’ them to gain a universal currency for creating any other card in the game

#2 Exclusivity

So you’ve established how useful that item is and the player has a good grasp on why they should care about obtaining it. Now to establish its relative worth in the game, and the key lever for that is Exclusivity.

This exclusivity is established via the taps and sinks in the economy – if the former is greater than the latter the item is of low value, and visa versa when you want to create something of high value. Ultimately the more of said item that ends up sitting the player’s inventory, the harder it is to convince them that they need more. This is a particular problem with Hard Currency, and the reason why a number of games, like Marvel: Strike Force, seem to have almost limitless ways to spend it.

Almost every screen in Marvel: Strike Force has at least one, usually more, ways of spending Hard Currency, reducing the risk of ‘hoarding’ and devaluing the currency in the process.

Exclusivity can be established in other ways, too. A limited time-frame or limited run of an item or character creates an artificial demand that can be completely disconnected from the utility of said item, although in these instances the item must have something else about it to generate value (a time-limited opportunity to earn an item that can be earned normally via gameplay is not going to suddenly make it more valuable).

It’s also worth considering the effort the player must make to activating either the taps or sinks of that item in the first place. Hearthstone‘s Dust, for instance, is earned at a painfully slow rate, which in turn helps reinforce the value of the Legendary cards by allowing the player to put an estimate of how much time it would take to obtain them, even if – on a paper loop – these cards can simply be obtained through gameplay.

#3 Familiarity

One benefit licensed games have is that their items often come with value attached to them – the characters, locations, and other elements are things fans of the franchises are already familiar with. A great example of this is Daryl in The Walking Dead: No-Man’s Land or Darth Vader in Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. Both are used as powerful retention devices, earned via gameplay (in the case of Vader, this is the only way he can be earned).

Daryl in Walking Dead: No Man’s Land is used as a compelling D7 retention device for fans of the show. If you’re a fan of The Walking Dead, you have to have him…

…meanwhile, Galaxy of Heroes uses the iconic Darth Vader as their long-term achievement reward. If you’re an original trilogy Star Wars fan, you have to have him.

Even when it comes to non-licensed titles, though, do not underestimate the power of pre-existing biases when it comes to how players see value. In Best Fiends Forever we switched from collecting and spending ‘mites’ (the original game’s currency) to coins prior to launch, simply because getting coins ‘felt’ better internally, and testers had an immediate understanding of why they want more of the item. In another unrelated title we switched out from the fictionally more relevant ‘plasma’ as our hard currency, purely because testers were left utterly confused as to what it was. Despite Diamonds not making any sense in that game’s world, it solved the problem immediately.

Coins and other items with real-world value connotations are instantly more compelling to collect. Don’t pass up on opportunities to leverage existing biases when it comes to creating a sense of value.

#4 Uniqueness

In multiplayer or social-focused games, standing out from the crowd is one of the most compelling motivators for obtaining an item. But even when contact with other players is primarily limited to 30 seconds in a lobby (as with current chart-topper Fortnite), the main goal for players beyond winning is obtaining unique and cool cosmetic items to show off, whether as part of a retention-focused soft subscription or as one-off purchases in-store.

While cosmetic rewards may not influence the mechanics of gameplay, they most certainly do have an effect on how someone feels when playing the game and how they’re seen by others. A unique skin can make you feel special, while a generic skin everyone is walking around in feels terrible.

The amount of time you actually see others’ skins may be all of 30 seconds in the lobby and a split second in-game, but that’s plenty of time to show off my limited-time purchase-only Raven skin (complete with Electro-shuffle emote) to this non-paying player.

In fact, Fornite goes one step beyond most other games with a cosmetic economy by stopping the player from having control over how they look entirely until they have at least one unlocked or purchased skin. This lack of choice coupled with the lack of uniqueness or exclusivity is a powerful driver to persuade them to purchase V-Bucks for the in-game store, and gives the cosmetics even more value than other similar titles.

Fortnite goes one step further than other cosmetic-based economies by not allowing the player to select their character unless they own a skin, thereby depriving them both of choice and style if they don’t pay

In Summary

So when drawing out the taps/sinks economy flow, be sure to sit down and write up the thought process of the player when it comes to valuing the parts of the loop.

Utility: Why is said item or currency now important to the player and how can that value be clearly shown and demonstrated?

Exclusivity: Are the taps and sinks of this currency balanced? Do players have an abundance or a shortage of this currency most of the time?

Familiarity: Are the currencies and items using established mental models for players? Or are you fighting against what might be familiar to players?

Uniqueness: Are there items which are more exclusive to players? Are players able to show off this exclusivity?

By answering these questions when designing the game economy, you can more easily identify what players will want to purchase when it comes to your monetisation design and what goals players are likely to set for themselves outside of tutorials and challenges.