Special Edition: The Ultimate Game Economy Discussion

Mastering Retention

The group discusses what a game economy is, and how it can be used to drive player engagement and content discovery in a game. They use a midcourt RPG game as an example to illustrate their points.

The conversation is about designing a game economy. The different aspects that should be considered include the currencies, the transaction systems, and the overall strategy. Scarcity can also be a factor in the economy.

▬ Contents of this video ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

0:00:00​ Introductions

0:05:25​ What is a game economy?

0:17:39​ What makes an economy fun?

0:28:04​ Pre-Production Boosts

1:01:50​ Player’s viewpoints

1:10:38​ Broken game economy

1:41:10​ Scaling currency

▬ Quotes ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

10:35​ “Essentially, the game economy it’s the entire management of value of the game. That includes scarcity, desire, time required to obtained things.” – Javier Barnes

13:30​ “The holy grail of monetization design is you want your player to spend money on your game and be so stoked by they who experience that they feel great about it and they want to tell their friends.” – Kaitlin Kincaid

1:02:50​ “It’s important to contrast the survey, which is the player’s perceptions, with in game activities, which is more of a hard data.” – Kaitlin Kincaid

1:32:04​ “Never underestimate the value of using LiveOps to test economy in general” – Hadrian Semroud

▬ Highlights ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

What I would advise is trying to keep the range of prices kind of relatively stable through the course of the game and make that even in the late game, a purchase of $10 can still make sense because you're following another strategy or something in order not to kill or to move away those players.

At the end of the game, higher ranges of prices are going to be more valuable for the monetization. But if you have a dolphin that can only spend $10 per month, and then once you are three months in the game, what you're asking is not $10.

And one of those things that we're using is having the player unlock better bundles as they progress through the game. So if you want if you want the $5 bundle for 2 million resources, you can get that at level five.

Is there a way to appropriately do that? Such that as players progress and things are more expensive in the game the price of currency kind of keeps on par with that.

So being able to change the price of things again, usually through live events, through some sort of special offer, can allow you to monetize the entire price demand curve and really optimize the amount of money you can get out of the same amount of work producing that hero, that asset in the first place.