Game Economy Designer

You don’t just simply play mobile games but also understand the economic models behind? Interested in working for a world class company in a fun and rewarding environment? You're in the right place because Gameloft Budapest is looking for a Game Economy Designer.

This is a position requiring a mix of strong economy and marketing knowledge with passion for analytical game design and the emerging free-to-play business model.

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 recommendation 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 design 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 and why. You are able to 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 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, then report suggestions for the game design or strategy accordingly.

Skills:

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

Requirements:

•  Degree in Economics, Business Management or BA, preferably specialized in Marketing, Market Research or Strategic direction
•  Fluent written and spoken English, concise writing skills
•  Mastery of Excel
•  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.

Advantages:

•  Previous experience in econometrics / data mining
•  Mastering of UI prototyping tools such as Flash
•  Experience in community managing, marketing or product manager
•  Previous experience as game designer, social designer or gambling designer
•  Advanced understanding of SQL and/or Python.