cormack12
Gold Member
Source: https://aftermath.site/f2p-economy-live-service-explained
Bruce: I'm a game designer with a Master's degree, and have worked at Activision, EA, a bunch of mobile games companies and a handful of start-ups and independent studios. For the last decade I've been working on mobile free-to-play projects in a variety of capacities.
B: My actual day-to-day is highly variable, based on what stage of development the project is in.
When I was on the character collector, I was often bouncing between:
- Working with a feature team and a client to spec, develop, and test a new gameplay feature.
- Helping the mission team dial in the tuning on our endgame content. This was incredibly important, because if it's too hard nobody can beat it and people lapse/quit the game, while if it's too easy, you're not motivating people to invest in newly released characters or gear.
- Supporting other designers with their features, often by focusing on technical or economy-linked topics (like skill-based matchmaking and reward scaling).
- Planning future economy updates (via modelling and spreadsheets).
- Checking in on the state of our current economy via dashboards and custom Business Intelligence reports, and checking in with the LiveOps and Design teams about actions I wanted to take based on those reports.
B: Game systems and the economies which support them are inextricably intertwined, and there's a tendency for people to believe that you can both shoot from the hip (i.e., build an economy by feel, rather than simulating and planning the experience) and also constantly keep expanding economies and resource sinks endlessly. Neither is true, especially in live service games. If you want an economy or game system to be healthy over the course of years, you need a plan in place, and a clear understanding of how adjusting different knobs will impact the game, both in qualitative and quantitative terms.
To put it another way: Your live service game isn't necessarily healthy just because you have lots of players and you're making money right now. If you don't have a plausible, multi-pronged plan for how you're going to keep things from going sour in three months, six months, or a year or more, you're basically gambling with the livelihood of everyone on your team. How are you keeping your current players engaged? How are you getting new players? How are you accelerating those players into the endgame, or making endgame players want to play with them even if your new players aren't endgame-ready? If you're selling stuff to players, what's going to make them want to keep buying it?
Not all of these questions are purely systems- or economy-driven, but you need good answers to them if you want a game to last. And you're not going to have good answers without economy specialists who are focused on where your game is, where it's headed, and are empowered to propose solutions to problems that haven't happened yet (but are inevitably going to happen based on experience and modelling)
Bruce: I'm a game designer with a Master's degree, and have worked at Activision, EA, a bunch of mobile games companies and a handful of start-ups and independent studios. For the last decade I've been working on mobile free-to-play projects in a variety of capacities.
B: My actual day-to-day is highly variable, based on what stage of development the project is in.
When I was on the character collector, I was often bouncing between:
- Working with a feature team and a client to spec, develop, and test a new gameplay feature.
- Helping the mission team dial in the tuning on our endgame content. This was incredibly important, because if it's too hard nobody can beat it and people lapse/quit the game, while if it's too easy, you're not motivating people to invest in newly released characters or gear.
- Supporting other designers with their features, often by focusing on technical or economy-linked topics (like skill-based matchmaking and reward scaling).
- Planning future economy updates (via modelling and spreadsheets).
- Checking in on the state of our current economy via dashboards and custom Business Intelligence reports, and checking in with the LiveOps and Design teams about actions I wanted to take based on those reports.
B: Game systems and the economies which support them are inextricably intertwined, and there's a tendency for people to believe that you can both shoot from the hip (i.e., build an economy by feel, rather than simulating and planning the experience) and also constantly keep expanding economies and resource sinks endlessly. Neither is true, especially in live service games. If you want an economy or game system to be healthy over the course of years, you need a plan in place, and a clear understanding of how adjusting different knobs will impact the game, both in qualitative and quantitative terms.
To put it another way: Your live service game isn't necessarily healthy just because you have lots of players and you're making money right now. If you don't have a plausible, multi-pronged plan for how you're going to keep things from going sour in three months, six months, or a year or more, you're basically gambling with the livelihood of everyone on your team. How are you keeping your current players engaged? How are you getting new players? How are you accelerating those players into the endgame, or making endgame players want to play with them even if your new players aren't endgame-ready? If you're selling stuff to players, what's going to make them want to keep buying it?
Not all of these questions are purely systems- or economy-driven, but you need good answers to them if you want a game to last. And you're not going to have good answers without economy specialists who are focused on where your game is, where it's headed, and are empowered to propose solutions to problems that haven't happened yet (but are inevitably going to happen based on experience and modelling)
