Game Economy Designer

Gameloft
New York - United States
S: Competitive

Overview:

The Game Economic Designer requires a mix of strong economy and marketing knowledge with passion for analytical game design and the emerging free-to-play business model.

The Game Economy Designer is responsibility for how the game works as a service for its customers, how the customers behave in it, identify and develop the purchase drivers in the game economy context, and provide constant data-driven recommendation on design, tuning and pricing in order to improve the game's financial performance.

You will 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 design refined and metrics implemented.

Once the game is launched, you will analyze the collected data and reports which are the performing/underperforming aspects of the game's economic model, understand why, and provide solutions to Gameloft management.

You are the person that understands what users are doing in a game, why and how a game is making money, and the person we ask what to change so it makes even more money.

Responsibilities:

Define the virtual products and their statistics with the development team, and understand how each of them contributes to the game dynamics.
Indentify the potential sale drivers for the different product categories in the game economy, defining the key points of exposure for those drivers.
Balance the needs for those virtual products, their relation, life cycle, and their streams of availability.
Manage pricing as to create specific price point roles, implement selling strategies for higher price points.
Regularly provide user feedback and stat/price point tuning to development team based on play-testing, both during game development and post-release.
Analyze the evolution of the metrics you defined to spot monetization bottlenecks and facilitators. Report suggestions for the game design or strategy accordingly.

Qualifications:
Graduate degree in Economics or BA, preferably specialized in Marketing or Strategic Direction.
Expert knowledge 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 videogames with special focus on MMOs and competitive games.
Strong sensitivity to gameplay and game design. You must understand how to build needs and emotions in the context of a game.
Strong analytical and critical thinking,
Ability to break problems down in their key variables and identify the relations between them.
Strong econometrics skills
Ability to model problems into quantitative systems, and draw qualitative conclusions out of quantitative data.
Statistic knowledge to formulate ratios and indexes specific to each game, identify specific weaknesses and strengths in its economy design.
Strong marketing knowledge to formulate adequate selling strategies to improve the financial performance.
Understanding of client/server architecture and data collecting pipeline and mining

Pluses:
Previous experience in econometrics / data mining
Strong understanding 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

Benefits @ Gameloft
Work with some of the most talented and passionate people in the industry in one of the world's best city
Challenging and rewarding work
We pay the entire premium for Medical Dental and vision for employees
401K
Transit Chek
Free breakfast almost every morning
Over 20+ paid time off each year. Increases to 25+ after 3 years
We recognize 10 federal holidays
Flexible core hours
Free snacks
Game room

Job summary