Game Economy Design: How to ensure player satisfaction and commitment, with Oscar Clark

[Music] [Applause] hello folks how are we doing U pleased to see you all here this is the third in our series of um game monetization and design uh master classes and the last in the particular series um obviously we want to see how um this has gone down for you guys and see if it works out um and also as you may know we have these Hands-On workshops that follow so the Hands-On Workshop that follows this will be in two uh will be on the 18th of September so if you want to get some kind of Applied uh understanding of what the techniques we're trying to talk about then obviously that would be a great thing for you to go for uh I'll talk a bit more about that later um so without further Ado I'm going to assume that you guys already know how to use zoom so that hopefully means that you know how to raise your hand that you know how to do the chat and you to set

up a Q&A but just to show that everyone can hear me so I can get some feedback can I get as many people as possible to press the hands up please can you press up press to raise hands fantastic I see Bradley you're you're waving there um I got a whole bunch of of um hands raised thank you very much that's great I know you can hear me that's that's superb so without further Ado because there's so much to go through I'm going to uh uh kick off and start talking about what we're trying to do today so uh let me just move this uh down a little bit so right uh so I'm Oscar I am um the CEO of fundamental games I'm a consultant I'm also contributing editor here at Pocket Gamer so I get to talk about a whole bunch of things uh related to making games and working in the industry so I absolutely love it um I've been in game since 1998 uh I was involved in one of the very very earliest online gaming services called wire playay which is run

by British Telecom uh I ran through the mobile operators um platform which was the most successful in terms of java mobile games back in the ughs um and I was also home architect on PlayStation home and I've been an evangelist for a bunch of organizations including things like uh Nvidia and um uh Unity um so done a whole bunch of stuff uh most of what I do right now is help people with Consulting in terms of game design monetization and of course live Ops today we are going to focus on one of the areas where I think it's the hardest to get good information about and that is how to build balanced game economies uh there's a lot of people who talk about game design a lot of people talk about um monetization but I find it very difficult to find some really good sources in terms of economy design so I'm going to share my experience and bear in mind that I think this is a field that is still evolving this is a field where there's lots of um lack of

of of of sharing and I'm hoping that I'm I'm doing uh the right thing by encouraging us all to talk more about how we get best practice in making great games feel even more fun because we create the dynamic uh equilibrium in them so let's start off with uh should be able to get me to uh if you it should be possible to make me uh the spot like for everybody how about now does that work better for you great perfect so what is a game economy now that's a very big question because I'm going to touch on the economy in the sense of commercial side but that's not what this is it is absolutely pivotal to understanding your monetization design without question but the game economy for me is the underlying mechanics the underlying system thinking the flow of the game the

ins the outs or as I like to call it the syns and sources in the process it is what keeps people playing and the momentum the mathematical largely momentum behind the process of play and our job as designers is to keep that maintained now if any of you have ever played with board game design fantastic you're going to get a lot of these principles anyway most of where I got my understanding how to do this came from you know Decades of being an amateur board game designer before I ever joined the professional um video games industry uh I used to tour around various game shows showing uh board games that i' designed and really to be honest that's a lot of the lessons I learned doing that process is what allowed me to be able to do uh this as a um professional process in terms of helping people designing their games so when I say a balanced you know dynamic equilibrium

the point about this is that if it's static if there is not a continual need to adjust constantly the optimization you will not have a successful game economy games are not static games are systems games are processes flows and we need to understand that the pressures the flows the Dynamics the the idealism what we're looking forward to why we do the next thing why we feel fear of missing out all of these things are processes and they are Dynamic and they tie back into the same thing I've talked about at each of the other um sessions the opening Gambit is why do we play we play because we want that sense of uh competence I want to feel good at something I want that sense of control the ability to escape from my everyday routine and I still believe uh that games are separate entirely separate from anything to do with earning

I think it's an important factor of what makes the difference between a game and a gambling experience that we know this does not have an impact on our real lives um and now don't there's lots of debate that we could have about that but that's not for this conversation if you want to have a chat with me about that some other time I'm very happy to talk about the philosophy of this area um completion is another important psychological value ad that we gain through playing games I want to think I did something it completed I got a payoff I got a a a response that completion process is amazing and particularly when you start doing that in the sense of gathering achievements unlocking trophies uh collecting those completion processes a deeply psychological factors and social capital is Again part of that process so we're going to remember that's at the heart of this and these are items that are constantly in flow if you want people to stay playing your game not just creating

something which has a start a middle and an end you want to be able to let them look at what's over the next Hill and that similarly goes into why people play again I talked about this in the last two webinars we need that anticipation that fear of missing out the sense of social capital and the abnegation the thing that we can choose as players but you can't make me do as a designer all you know this is the thing that saves us from um you know kind of bad patterns if we do this correctly which is providing space for players to make their own choice and I'm I'm an advocate of creating ethical designed ethical experiences because the more that you do that the more people trust you the longer they want to keep playing and the longer people keep playing has a direct correlation to the willingness for them to spend so I think that you know we've got to look at this kind of ethical mindset not as a com romise but actually

a value so getting our game economy design balanced but with a dynamism which means that we have to maintain it like spinning plates like um uh kind of balancing on a on a on a on a a an unbalanced table those things we're constantly moving to keep our place that is what keeps us engaged so let's talk about the next part of it which is understanding the player life cycle and it's important to think about tapping into that player life cycle because we're not constantly in the same need State and our need States will change if you don't accept and understand that your players's behavior is going to change over time how can you have that dynamic equilibrium you need to know where they are in the Life Stage the life cycle of playing your game whether that's at this point where they're downloading and they just need to know if this is something they're going to play as they go through on boarding how do we stop losing them and catch them so they stay engaged and

then how we retain them so we can then build them up to the level hopefully we get to the point where they become fans of what we're doing so moving swiftly on let's talk about power and progression so this is where we start talking about things specific to the game economy you know power is our ability to improve through the game that we need that sense of improvement and progression but what does power mean and how do we create an understanding of Designing power curves at its very simplest level we have essentially um you know money oh yeah oh I seem to have lost a slide I've gone too far this is the slide I was after we have time we have uh effort uh and basically you know as we spend our XP our experience we increase our abilities uh we can take less time and we gain more experience from killing more rats and basically everything is basically

just a big of rat as we go through playing the game now obviously I'm reducing to the Absurd a little bit and of course there's other layers so we have earned uh rewards from killing our rats that often takes the form of money I decide I need a better equipment I spend my money on a sword again this is the EB and flow of the experience and as I carry on playing I'm looking at optimization through play and what is optim ization well I need to decide you know am I going to be looking at kind of like fighting balls it takes three seconds to kill a ball I get five experience from killing a ball but I get uh 0.5 worth of goods if I kill a spider I get less experience but I get 1.5 worth of goods so now I've got to decide do I go for killing more spiders or do I go for killing more BS I'm am I am I prioritizing as a player my progression in terms of experience my progressing my

acquisition which in turn allows me to improve the rate of of obtaining new items and therefore by extension more XP Ching my way through the game so these are the kinds of things we're talking about this is what the basic kind of fundamentals of a game economy are all about um moving on from that we can look at the kinds of types of of things that we want in a game uh and so we've got the subsistence factors again if you were here in the pr previous I think both of the previous ones but definitely the first one we did we talked about the four types of good subsistence so things I need or I can't play shortcuts things that improve my play uh things like social goods so cosmetic items things I'm using to show off can even be gifts and strategy Goods things which introduce new modes of play or new styles of play that hopefully also improve everybody's experiences joining not just myself so getting that right

really matters so understanding the the forms is useful but we also have to understand the types and the types can in come in the form again we dealt with this previously consumables things I I have a health potion I use the potion it's gone that's a good example of a subsistence item I need health or I can't play I have a potion I use it it's consumed but then things like capacity take factors so how many health potions can I hold gener s also take a factor how many health potions do I get because I've hired an alchemist in my castle but there's also the other kind of good that I'm looking forward to our aspirational goods and again all of these types and forms have play a part in understanding the dynamic nature in your game finally in this kind of Trio of things that we've covered before but we're going to apply differently here we have uh the forms of exchange we have grind so things we do play we have

resources that can be currencies but it could those currencies can be hard or soft so they can be earned through play or they can be purchased or some combination they can also be flavored a resource can be flavored so gold is used to buy equipment food is used to upgrade uh characters um uh goods are used to upgrade uh trading relationships or whatever else it might be so specific specialized use of things can be very very important we can also have anchors what's an anchor an anchor is specifically a usually a resource of some kind a currency resource but one which can only be obtained through play this is what's going to save your life as an economy designer this has saved me so many times because if you pay attention to the Anchor Goods the things that can be locked into in your economy design and focus on

making sure that these work then the additional items that that can be obtained elsewhere become a lot easier to manage you can make mistakes in the extra fluff that flavors your players experience provided you've got the anchors right the things that you can only obtain through play right and a slightly different take on it but ratchets are effectively limits or conditions we place upon an exchange I cannot use a level 14 sword unless I'm level 14 I can't upgrade my town hall unless I've upgraded all of my other buildings in my town to level seven before I can upgrade my town hall to level eight so thinking about those kind of ratchets those kind of lockin again provide you with another safety net as an economy designer

because it means that you can focus on a smaller number of variables and still flavor the game in all of the exciting narrative things that make players feel good and special but you've got the basics working so that's kind of a really important thing uh I'm going to recommend um uh a couple of uh GDC talks because I think these are worth checking out and I learned a lot from paying attention to these the first one was um exibit so Dylan Mayo uh who is the designer I think at the or was at the time I don't he still is I think he still is designer at the Pokemon company um he did a fantastic talk talking about a card based progression he used Hearthstone as his example showing how a level seven card is more than the sum of its parts we're going to talk a little bit about that in a second um so have a think about you know look at the way card games operate again this is the kind of language if you haven't got experience to collectible card game methods or board game methods you will start to struggle when you think about

designing video game economy systems they are really good shortcuts to help you understand the process and help you mentally think through the application of rigorous logic against something where it's all about the playful process of a player hope that make sense so let's talk about these these kind of like applications so these come down to a certain Factor so um I'll move myself around a bit because let trouble with um slides I always end up in the wrong place um so the first factor of any variable that we can have as a shortcut or a power up or or or a subsistence good is we can have linear impact that means that it has an impact on one vector could be damage could be shooting it could be rate of fire it could be uh respawn it could be any number of things a linear thing that happens now just so you know I'm not a huge fan of linear only things I'm a big fan of using scissor paper Stone so a fire sword plus

one fire sword is still good against a plus whatever water sword you know it's still going to or is it the around you know you you work out what how your system works but thinking about Flavor having a factor as well as the number means that more things have more value for longer again useful thing to think about but linear progression absolutely important next up we have the exchange cost the actual cost so if I'm going to place a card that's going to summon a monster that's level three it's going to cost me three Mana as an exchange I take Mana if I'm going to um upgrade my sword from plus three fire to plus4 fire then I need to have the blueprint I need to have the fire gems I need to have all these other things Each of which will have an exchange cost only when I've gathered all of the items together can I

then go to the forge and then I exchange with time to do the process oh and I have a ratchet associated with that because I have to have a high enough uh crafting skill for me to be able to implement that change and I have to have a high enough level to use that weapon at all so that's why exchange matters that's why ratcheting matters um you also got to think about opportunity costs one of my favorite examples is like shotguns versus machine guns if you think about a shotgun you've got a loading time you've got an Aiming time you've got a firing time you've got a recoil time you've got a process of reloading you do massive amounts of damage during the shot but there's these buffers these opportunity costs with another type of uh attack or or action that would affect the play process so they may have the same damage per second but the opportunity cost if you miss the opportunity cost if you you know

opportunity benefit if you hit the reload time you amount of ammo that you have in the magazine all of those things are factors compare that with a machine gun where I've effectively got a line of fire as long as I'm holding down the trigger I don't have to worry so much about getting the aim right at the at the initial period if I have a different type of opportunity cost all of these are factors in our thinking when we're looking at how we understand the balance of a game so moving on um the other thing I think is worth bearing in mind is progression shouldn't be flat what does that mean so obviously during the early stages we're starting to develop our character we need to get a sense of absolute Delight the bar the payoff the reward the value versus the cost and effort The Exchange that we're doing needs to feel exciting it needs to feel dramatically powerful but over time as

that progression changes as our power curve as our Improvement scale uh changes we should see that start to level off but equally we should start to get to the point where the effort is now greater than the expected benefit we're already in momentum we' got to do more and more so we know that it's tougher and tougher and then other benefits come out of it of course because we still have have some improvement but again this is not necessarily an ideal curve it's here to illustrate the thinking your game will have its own unique understanding of what power looks like so the strength of your skills your weapons how high you can jump how fast you can move the exchange rate of certain Goods at scale the rate in which you can build new buildings and the effect and benefit that gives your units once you've done that this applies to any kind of game you have to find out

the best way to apply it to your game but you still come down to how does power work power shouldn't be a straight line power has to be something which grows immediately rapidly to give it a level of excitement but the tapers off otherwise you get to the point where power becomes overbearing and it becomes unbalance hence why we need to have this kind ofis curve style well this is my opinion this is my view this is how I approach things other people will have their own approaches and thoughts but this is how I look at it I'm going to give you one other thing to think about when you're looking at Power and exchange rates uh I've talked about this before but the hot dog economics is something I'm absolutely boted with as an idea so think about when you get hot dogs you get eight buns sorry you get you get six buns and eight uh hot dogs okay so um you got six buns

you run out of buns you still got two hot dogs hot dogs are quite valuable items I might as well get some more buns I get more buns I get six more buns I've now got four unused buns well I might as well get some more hot dogs so this deliberately imbalanced process is designed specifically to create more purchase of hot dog buns and hot dog uh sausages now you could call that exploitative but uh I don't think what in the way we're trying to apply it that's not the case this is a metaphor because we need that sense of imbalance if I do bit of this bit of that bit of that I want to seek that balance and someone will remind me but it's something like 30y old um uh hot dogs and where you get an even balance of packs but the point is not that the point is encouraging people to feel that they're constantly having to compensate but it's one of the most enjoyable moments of a game like Fallout 7 6 for me I would go into a mission but only

once I'd got the equipment to have the right food the right uh stim packs the ammo um make sure my equipment was fully fixed and only then go and do the next mission and then of course I would take damage and so on and so forth and then I'd go and do the Gathering process in order to get the rest of the materials I need to get myself back up to being Optimum that was most of the fun for me in playing something like Fallout 76 I spent more time that nice relaxed day building up my capacity to be ready before I went into the intensity of the mission so we can look at this hot dog economics as a really powerful way to think um I'm going to tell you another guy who I recommend uh looking at this is a Floren um from um uh woer I think it was it wug anyway the game Jelly Splash um uh he uses a expletive in this process I think you'll

guess what that word is very quickly uh but to be honest it's one of the most influential talks I've ever seen on um thinking about uh game economies and particularly around the difficulty curve and the F moment absolutely changed my mind so I think it's worth crediting these guys because I think you know we should credit people into you know understanding why we do these things Nick just made a comment the beauty of the hot dog concept is an extra article could potentially be contained with a different cost so you can use it yeah exactly you can use it to add a choice or push another system absolutely right particularly where you use foreshadowing where that process introduces a new thing a new item I'm particularly a fan of using ad based rewards to let you try new things and you introduce new Concepts uh but that's specifically for mobile games of course okay so let's talk a little bit about what Floren was talking about um oops he got too far first thing is I want to understand

frustration now frustration is not a bad thing frustration is absolutely massive absolutely massive because if we do not get to the point where we feel frustrated we don't get to the point where we go a then there is no Challenge and we get bored if there's no challenge this if we go back to Chi Saha we look at the way the balance between frustration and boredom we want to create that flow state that flow state does not exist if frustration can't happen so we need to think about that but remember I talked about doing that against the life cycle of the player so we're going to show you in a bit a graph give you an illustration and Floren does a fantastic job to show that uh and what he calls the fu moment um so frustration and relief two pivotal things where it has to be challenging got if you don't fail if you don't use fail early if you don't establish that you can fail if you

can't put the player into the mindset that they could have failed and they didn't you're not going to make them feel good about what they did so that plus foreshadowing showing what's happening what's coming again massively important but it comes down to understanding how we make sure we convey that there is actual meaningful choice for the player getting that meaning Choice built into the experience is absolutely critical and you know fundamentally retention doesn't happen if players don't feel they've had meaningful choices in my opinion now you could argue with Idol games you could argue with the Monopoly go style games but I think they are making some level of choice um but I think it's a slightly different role I mean I have I have views on those games um you can't knock them from their their revenue model point of view um I think there some really they satisfy very specific set of

needs but I think they are a different case than most other games that's why I still think it's important to think about meaningful Choice okay let's talk about balancing difficulty versus rewards so you want to introduce that kind of if you look at that line got two lines here got reward versus difficulty but that reward line could equally say um your player skill it could equally say um a number so if you get look at the point in four there is a big gap between my starting level and my starting capacity my the rewards I'm going to get from completing this action and the difficulty in that process that Gap matters because you're introducing to me straight away that there is challenge to doing this that then immediately afterwards you can see it comes under the line and it stays on on the line for the action after that that's giving me time to feel

competent I have frustration I learn my technique I get my tech I eventually beat that damn level and that is the thing that we call the fu moment because you've done it you know what I'm talking about here you've played those games and that darn level will not finish I can't get past I just had it a lot when because I'm starting this practic it's a little bit emphasized for me when I play very fast action games and the number number of times I had to retry jumping across onto walls up um paths reaching out with my grappling playing Star uh Jedi Survivor sorry uh Jedi survivors was I loved the game but oh my goodness me the number of moments I swore at the screen absolutely ridiculous but I didn't stop I both loved and hated the game and that intensity of emotion only happens if we get this Fu moment and I argue that it is critical to designing your

game economy because if you don't know that the vector not just the static numbers but the vector of your player's experience you cannot get the difficulty right which means you can't get the power curves right which means the player experience will not be sticky you will not have created that Dynamic experience this is not just a case of making sure the rewards the level the XP uh the uh character of um skill changes it's not just a simple case of let's get them right no you have to think about what players actually do how can you show them over the hill this challenge is coming go got to get ready for and there's a whole bunch of of techniques that go with that as well you know there's a Nintendo method I'll talk about in a second uh Floren had a fantastic equation which is really interesting so he he basically identified a way to calculate this mathematically I'm a massive fan of this approach I don't do it often enough to be entirely honest

but if you look at the number of attempts at something and the number of near WIS now this is the hard part how do you define a near win if that number is less than 10 you're probably about right if it's too high you'll find that uh you know it's just too frustrating um if you sorry sorry if you find it's too loose it's too low it's too difficult so you know find find the right number for you you'll work it out um again just to show this is not just arbitrary stuff this is something we can actually put math to um so the Nintendo method I think a lot of people will know this already um essentially the Nintendo meth and I'm probably paraphrasing it way in in different ways you introduce a concept you let people confirm that they can do it that's normally not hugely difficult you then introduce a challenge you make it difficult you now your opponent is more difficult uh you so you you you introduce the concept you let them

Master it you introduce the challenge that makes it more difficult you make them fail you let them show them the failure is possible and then you reframe the problem where they have to apply the same lesson but in a different way again this is really callede to puzzle game design where you introduce systems and then you effectively pervert those systems in order to get people to think about different ways of applying them getting that right is absolutely key and then only then introduce the next concept what we often find is you want to get all of your on boarding out the way in the first time is your experience and you say do this do that and you mandate them do those things I think that's a terrible way to get people on board but what's it got to do with the game economies well we can't design the systems right if we're not thinking about this stuff at the base level we have to know how that works what we're going to get as rewards what we're going

to get as progression how we're improving the players's experience we need to know the thinks and sources of how they're going to get that progression so what I'm basically saying is that a game a game economy like the game itself is a story it's not just a fixed thing it is a it is a vector in its own right and we have to build the awareness interest desire action repeat in that flow as much as we have with any other aspect of the game hopefully that all makes sense if anyone has any questions on that please shout and again if you think you got questions you know steaming up but they might distract the flow don't worry put it in the Q&A we'll do it at the end um okay now we're going to move on to the next section so we've talked a lot about power progression difficulty so how do we actually map some of that stuff how do we actually think about putting that into a form

where we can actually make some sense of what's going on in the game and what it comes down to is we basically have to start thinking about the gaming as a system system thinking I think is one of the key skills and frankly I wish they taught system thinking in schools we have a little trick that we use in recruitment we get people to show us the system of how they make toast what is the process of making toast I know it sounds DED but trust me it tells you so much about how someone thinks when you get them to map out the process of making toast now in this experience here very simp very simple kind of flow I'm just trying to sort of get you thinking about it we've got the player so their character their levels their experience their skills their equipment that kind of thing we've got the activity in the game we've got their progression and we got rewards and offers okay so they're the things the Stables stable points in the game there is a source for items that affect those

items uh there's going to be an effort for that Source there's going to be a supply you know restricted Supply scarcity is an important factor there may also be offers so this is generally purchasable items um you've got things like optimization so actions that we can take to optimize the rate in which we can gain items from a source typically it's affecting the effort over time over level for example and scarcity I mentioned is an important factor so what does that deliver well those sources deliver resources some of which can be anchors some of which can be factors related to ratchets fantastic and then when we've got those items and again like I said before they can be hard currencies soft currencies there can be flavored currencies it can be experience points and then we sync them and there's an exchange rate and that that exchange rate affects our players abilities attributes equipment Etc it affects how we can then act in the

game it affects our progression through the game and it allows us to unlock those rewards and offers so again thinking about the sync as the supply and the sour sorry the the source as the supply and the sync is the demand hopefully that makes some sense so what am I going to do with that there there's a couple of techniques I can talk about three techniques and then give you an example of the one I tend to use so technique number one is if you may have seen this if involved in the previous um uh engagement retention design I'm a big fan of this very simplified model of syn consult so I've got my player my action my progression I've chucked in a seasonal event I've chucked in rewards and offers of separate items but basically I'm going to put an item in so I might have an action I put time in my time allows me to get experience points fantastic I then have my experience points and I put my experience points into progressions I sync it into progression and then I get

my um level up uh as a result or I might get a reward as a result of the progression I might get a reward as a result of the action uh I might put time into the seasonal event I might get seasonal specific rewards and experience or currencies I then sync those into rewards and offers are they those rewards and offers give me items I can use to upgrade my um player so I can sync those into my player to upgrade that and then that provides me with improved levels etc etc I can even get other short-term consumable things like shortcuts powerups uh those kind of things that then improve my ability to play speed up my process and therefore I can sync them into the action column and to get more of that experience in rewards so this is a very easy it's actually kind of basically Double Entry bookkeeping where do you get something from put it in the column where do you get it out put it in a column just lets you see what's going on in the game very quickly and what's important is also you

get a sense of how frequently those things can work through and getting that frequency to work through is really important now remember what I said before though we got to think about this in terms of our subsistence good our short our shortcuts our social goods and our uh strategy Goods these are factors that are going to be effective so we can flavor the ins and outs the sinks and sources using this we can also Al go further we can again use the types so is it consumable is it capacity is it a generator is it an aspiration good something I own so again it allows us to think how we can create these models to track what's going on in the game and be able to understand the flow as well as that we can think about the the different forms of exchange again grind versus resource versus an vers now some of this is actually kind of Incorporated by the very fact I've separated rewards and but again it's still useful to

track um so what does that leave us with that leaves us with a model like this um so here I've got uh cosmetic items which I sync into my player my player now has that item I have upgrades that lets me upgrade my equipment my character Etc I then have health that I can regain it's it's because of having a character rest gives me health I then spend my health through playing the game uh I also invest time in play the game and I can invest powerups that I've obtained through uh I've just realized I can't see where the powerups are on the thing but you would typically have your powerups come from your rewards uh or various other things like that um I've got XP that I get as a result of of doing the action that XP is sunk into progression uh that progression goes into a progression variable which feeds into rewards uh and then again that allows me to unlock things like new roles upgrades and so on and so forth um again this is I've done this in a very

abstract way U if you're involved in the interactive we're going to go through this in detail you're going to pick a game we're going to identify how you break down and see where the syns and sources are and the joy of this is you can then apply numbers and metrics to them rate of drop you can apply things like um attributed value player value versus underlying core value again it allows you to do a whole bunch of things you can then think about things like ad view I VIP and again how do you restrict the scarcity of supply and use the tools available to do that uh you'll notice I've got like flags on most of the Post-it notes so I've got a burger to represent consumable I've got an anchor to represent an anchor good uh and also color code of the card so I can see health is a subsistence good uh purple is a social good you can see the kind of way I would do it now I've got a map I can actually see the economy of the game where things are going in and coming out I can see if I got too many s es and too few syncs if I haven't got a sync for

something like for example I've got no Source on this one for powerups so I need to work out where the PowerUp source is well it's probably be coming from our Rewards or it could potentially come as uh as um bundles that is an offer that we can make available to be purchased to be exchanged for being a VIP member for um spending money on iip or watching ads which again effectively is a Time sync hopefully that will make sense so Alternatives ways or where you can take this next um so I I tend to take this into a spreadsheet and work that out Brute Force but there's a methodology called the Monte Carlo simulation I don't tend to do this because it's a little bit far on Excel for what I need for most the games it's a little bit over for me because I'm tending to come in as an advisor for teams trying to fix roken games more often than not um but the model is still very useful again as I said you you need

to know what the sinks and sources are you need to know their likely drop rate you need to know what their uh potential value is and then you need to apply that and let the simulation work through where the bottlenecks might be in the way people might play through the game I've done this very manually like as I say Brute Force for a number of game economies um you basically got to be very aware of uh extreme optimization and also reverse to the mean you know so basically if you just do averages all the time you're not going to get a true picture but you get a good picture of the base of your experience you've also got to experiment with the edge cases where people put all of their effort into one aspect or another and see how quickly that breaks the game again this is where anchors and ratchets can save the day because an anchor and Ratchet can prevent someone diving deep just to get as much gold as possible I don't care how much you gold you've got if you haven't got the the blueprints you can't

buy upgraded equipment and you have to have played the you have to know how far you got through the game therefore I know what your power progression looks like therefore I know what your difficulty progression looks like the anchor allows me to track it hopefully that makes sense and similarly the ratchet ratchet same principle so that's another one there there are some other tools out there um so if you look at um machination uh I'm a big fan of machination in fact I've uh cheeky snuck in a little Affinity Affinity Affinity code uh there's a 5% uh offer if anyone goes down there um what I find really useful about this is I can again take out my map uh and then start building in some of those configs and see dynamically live how that operates again very useful tool over cool for some games really interesting for others can get very deep in others but I'm genuinely a fan definitely worth checking out machinations and other tools like that but there's a lot you can do in Excel there's a lot you can do in other tools but it's amazing how far

you can get just by doing that mapping process and as I say the key thing here if you can understand this map you can then work through the rest of your economy you can start setting prices but then what's the important thing as much modeling as you might do what matters is data getting the data right is key you need to understand how you can use your data for for forecasting you can use it for testing you can use it for performance and as I always say when you're doing game economy design make sure all of the config settings for what the values and payoffs and drop offs each of the items could be put it on the server so every time you run the test you don't need a new build in order to adjust your settings make a bet your bet will be wrong tinker tinker tinker until it feels right what's interesting is

generally an actually balanced economy never feels right it always feels either nerfed or overpowered in some angle and often you need that continual suck that draw off of the balance so you're constantly having to adjust and put more time effort and sometimes if you haven't got the time and effort the money in order to keep the balance ticking over if there is no net draw no net sync why would anyone ever spend any money in your game so it's essential for Designing game monetization now hopefully that's been useful and interesting got you thinking um now the best value you're going to get is if you then go back if you haven't already go check out the recordings we did for monetization design and go check out the recording we did for engagement and retention design those things tie very neatly with this

thinking and also we're going to be doing this Workshop where whilst I've been talking very abstractly you're going to get to actually apply these this thinking to a game now we we'll work on that process um and um essentially we'll take you through the step by step so you can get a clear idea of how do you make sure that you can map your game to that process uh I will answer the question uh the um the links are all on Pocket Gamer I will make sure I find those in fact Katherine um I think you're still there um if you don't mind would you mind digging out the um the links to the uh the recordings if we haven't got it by the time we've answered any other questions then they are on YouTube Somewhere I believe um I just go get the links for them I'll share them I share them on our my my uh Discord group um for the game

teams that we talk to uh but also I'll be posting them out um yeah to various platforms like UK industry slack and stuff like that um if you're part of level up or if you're part of the video game um uh vgi group uh I also try to make sure I make them available there as well um so um we will get you that those links uh and go now in the meantime um obviously we rush through that pretty quickly there's a lot of knowledge and information in that um so let's um let's see if we've got question got a question here could I give another example or be past example of the hot dog economics Concept in the game so an example of this I mean the best one for me is if you look at um um something like Clash of Clans I mean there's or or actually no better yet let's look at something like Clash Royale those kind of games where we are going to get a bunch of cards that we're going to be able to uh apply um I think it was Clash Royale that did this I I

sometimes get confused about which games I saw which technique but let's the abstract technique would be this I have to collect a bunch of level three cards I collect four of them I then burn them cut into a one level four card so I'm constantly needing more cards of a type in order to get the next type of card another example in fact probably a better example in some ways because that that example should the burning the sinking side um another example would be um in order for me to be able to uh unlock I will go with a clash clans example I need to unlock my my um Town Hall in order to unlock my town hall to level eight my Mana uh Vault my Mana mine my gold vault my gold mine my uh Barracks or whatever the other building I forget it's been a long time since I played have all got to be leveled up to level seven so I'm

constantly having to move things up uh in order to be able to then unlock the next one um those are the sorts of things that I would I would be thinking about so another example might be um ammunition uh so I'm I'm trying to um I use Fallout 76 as an example there so I need to make sure I've got enough ammunition to carry but I've got a capacity to how much I can carry any one time I need to use different resource types to be able to get that you know to create that ammunition or to source that Ammunition by finding or making it I need to make a factory maybe in in some examples that's more Fallout 4 than is Fallout 76 I'm a bit Fallout obsessed I apologies if you're not into it um then so you constantly have to get more ammo you're constantly having to get more uh improvements to your armor repair reping your armor repairing your weapons because they can get damaged over use uh

so you constant to craft which takes time out of the combat process which is actually relief perfect then I go and do my mission I fight in that mission I'm using up the ammo I'm taking damage to my equipment I'm taking damage to my weapons but I'm gaining experience points so I'm constantly having to shift between getting more stuff using up more stuff that happen happens best because each item has a level of capacity to how good is good how full it is so a fully equipped armor is full when I take damage it's it um reduces uh and then I have to repair it back up to full um and of course the risk in this is if I go to High a level I take too much damage I lose all of my armor it's now completely broken I'm now at risk of of of losing my character as a direct result I me

obviously you recover but you know I'm uh does that give you Anonymous attendee does that give you enough of a a respon enough of an idea I'm hope that that does uh right so any other questions actually I've got the engagement retention design uh link I'm going to put here this is the engagement retention one um and yeah I was trying to find the other one I know it's there somewhere I think cather's gonna find the other one okay um any more EG any more questions folks see G you're looking into Monti simulation yeah definitely worth looking into um main reason I don't do it is because I end up having to do this stuff um quite late yeah I just posted it in chat above literally above you shun um

if anyone wants to reach out to me directly um then you can find me on Oscar fundamental. games or I'm on Twitter and various other places at a aanus that's at a that's weird oh I know why I turn it to host and panelists apologies my bad it should have gone to everyone I didn't pay attention to that bit cool so um as I as I mentioned before oh here we go how do you design PVP based game economy or progression system exactly the same way as you would deal with um PVE but you don't need to have a PVE to be able to do it you're looking at the power so remember we talked about power curves and difficulty levels so the variable here the anchors here are going to be having some form of matchmaking variable I would suggest this is how I would look at it um so if

you're looking at um um so there are a couple of issues with any PVP one is critical mass the other one is being able to do good matchmaking and for me good matchmaking ELO style rating systems are quite useful uh but you don't always have the luxury of exact matching based on different people's different skills and different roles different people have different IP you know stability uh you know connection stability um and and various other factors but let's ignore that for now you still want to be able to match people into a category of players or you're going down the route where you're you're balancing through team so there are various ways of doing that kind of balancing um you can also do rubber banding if you do it in play um uh if you don't know what rubber banding is it's a method for particularly came around for things like Mario Kart but can use the same model where essentially you do aim assist and damage uh improvements to allow people

to catch up or they have a fighting chance there's a risk with that because if you do it too overtly or if you make it too easy you undermine the skill factor of the player and the skill factor is absolutely critical but it means that your matchmaking approach has to be Rock Solid so the way I would deal with it is that S curve model of unlocking access to Ability is the really key thing in so the next the next weapon you want to make people feel they're getting the next best weapon but there's a risk if you go too far it becomes increasingly impossible for low-level players to play with high level players now I actually have a prefer preferred method for this which I saw um James um um Port p p um anyway um a whole bunch of folks have done this in in things like Call of Duty versus other

things but the first time it ever existed was in Quake mod called weapon of choice in weapon of choice if I killed you with the you know if I killed you with the rocket launcher I'd lose access to the rocket launcher until you killed me again somehow and it would carry on like that so if I kept losing if I kept killing you and you kept losing I would lose access to more and more weapons until I was down to an Axe and you still had access to the rocket launcher that was the most fun I've ever had being a rubbish player against some of the top 10 UK players and I could shoot rockets at them and they could only hit me with axes it was terrifying but brilliant at the same time so like I say there are different ways of handling it but again it's about understanding the progression and difficulty and then applying that with that scurve progression level so that you're you're minimizing that syn Source cost so that you're getting the best balance for the player does that make sense yeah Josh let me know if you think

that makes sense um and B if he doesn't that's fine we we can carry on talking about that as well because I think there's a whole bunch of nuance around that as I say two ways looking in it um but we are there right so let's have a look um so Josh sorry Jude rather uh we should now have the links to the um videos uh in the chat chat so please shout if you if you're having any trouble finding that uh brilliant thanks Josh really appreciate it um next up um Anonymous attende is asking would what would you say is the most vital role in on boarding from an economy Des point of view um for me it's make the player feel they can fail they need to feel powerful but they also need to see where they're going if they stay playing not just for days but weeks months even years so there's these

three things you know I need to feel powerful or why am I playing I need to know I can fail and my choices are meaningful I need to know that are going to be ongoing things that are going to make me want to keep playing you can't get people to stay playing unless you communicate those things every single time I've tried to do that that's been the biggest challenge to get those three things and do you know you know what can see it you create a funnel analysis you look at the flow and you make sure those three things are there but the reason why those SC things also work is because the prog the foreshadowing part is the our ability to look at the long-term economy and we need to see how the player can make their own path with the sinks and the sources so they can build up that process to get to that not end stage but that um maintenance state that optimization state by doing that we can you know we

can map that in terms of drop rates in terms of a value proposition again value can be a number of different forms but thinking about drop rates and value is going to allow you to see what optimization looks like and again that s shape that sharp growth leveling off balancing out so we still get a perception of progression even if the actual Net score doesn't change that much that's the that's the sweet spot but there's also some fantastic techniques you can do to reset I'm not saying going down the pillars of Eternity where we reset the whole ecosystem every three months that's a bit Overkill I I love that it exists as an option don't get me wrong absolutely love that exists but it's it's a complicated process I'm much more thinking like a like a soap opera how do we introduce a new thing how can we

twist and pervert it how can we then challenge you on it how can we make you master those things so um Nick you were asking me to just repeat the three things so the first thing was I need to feel powerful for the first time user experience the second time second thing is I need to feel I can fail and um the third thing is I need to have foreshadowing of why I'm keep coming back because if I don't have that foreshadowing I won't have that effective uh result hopefully that answer the question did that oh oh sorry yeah U yes sorry yeah very very good point Nick makes a fantastic point I missed R his his question I thought it was a question you're actually saying the key thing is to repeat that as you add new items absolutely make me feel good make me feel challenged show me there are more things to get absolutely key absolutely key and

repeating that throughout the game that keeps the game fresh and and that's the beauty of seasonal events we can have a themed activity my favorite seasonal event was done by a game called Art of War Legion when I did some consultancy for those guys I said to them you made a massive mistake but you hit on something really powerful what they did is they created an event which was to kill cus everybody contributed to killing cus cus had a finite amount of hit points that meant cus was set in order to have about I don't know 24 hours 3 days worth of hit points so it take three days to kill it if everybody played to the most and they then they even capped how often you could fight cus to once every think eight hours I think it was uh the net result was it was so so exciting that everybody killed cus within the first 24 hours wasting the whole experience but had they done this so divided each uh player into one of three factions like Pokemon go does red yellow

green and add up how much damage the people in that faction do to cus in total he doesn't run out of pit points over time he runs out of pit points in the session giving a finite into that session and keeps coming back until the end of the month at the end of the month you tell them which faction won you give a whole bunch of rewards to that faction so anyone even for curus once gets these bonus rewards fors part of that process and then you set up a challenge that makes it harder for that team to win the second time and a new monster giving the rest of the party chance to do it again that's a an example of a a a very simple way of thinking about the economy differently rather than a finite amount of hit points ever have an infinite amount of hit points but a finite per session and count up how much damage was done it's a very different way of calculating the process the Josh is asking how do I feel about web 3 games um so uh I I designed one of

the very first uh web three games um the first one that was ever approved by Apple a game called um Ry Clash it didn't do very well that's life you know we we had a bunch of problems the uh run out of money before we could actually finish the the economy design so we never got round to finishing the process sadly the games industry full of that my career is full of that um the key thing though is uh what we did in designing that token system was we built in scarcity into the tokens we built in so anyone could use the tokens with any game not just our game we actually used blockchain in that process as a design that could not be done better as a database every single design I have seen since is better as a database every single one uh there is one exception possibly sandbox uh in

fact there there are's I'm being a bit unfair I'm being a bit unfair there are a handful of very good folks the animoca guys um SE um sandbox um they they are doing a great job especially because they're they're focusing on the in sandbox's case they're focusing on the creation of an asset and effectively attributing you value for the work that you've contributed that I think solid but unfortunately ever since I did that work the only people have ever approached me about blockchain have either been Crooks or uh basically Tech Bros who have no understanding of what makes game play gaml and this is the thing I said right at the beginning difference between a game and other systems play to earn gambling and a lot of blockchain games is a game is separate from your real life if you have something which you own that you can resell that changes your relationship with the game it changes the nature of the game

and to date I have never seen a gamified thing be as effective as a game so my view is very open to the technology there's some really smart stuff uh I've done a lot of thinking about how to use it well I'd like to think I did a good job of that um but the reality is there are very few actual use cases that could not be done better with the database so Josh is Contin saying guess the question he has is essentially with a real difference between say the DMM in RuneScape with price pulls running on top yeah I mean this is a bar this is where the these are the edge cases that become very difficult so um having a separate section for example um Nitro Nation I think it was called the racing game by the guys that did um drag racer anyway um uh czy mobile U Estonian team

very very lovely team they added a uh essentially betting on your race mode of play for the subset of players who went into that mode they had a great time it's fantastic not sure how long it lasted in terms of Revenue it didn't last hugely long time but it was a good example um prize PS is another interesting one it's again depends on how they're structured the real issue comes down to cashing out one of the issues with Cashing Out by the way if you want me to go into a deep deep detail about my experience looking at how to do this stuff particularly around setting up gambling Services which I have done would never do again but I learned so much I'm glad I did it know your customer know your customer this is the one thing actually I gained from working with gambling people I learned so much about know your customer and the security that goes with that and the consumer care that's necessary particularly when you're dealing with vulnerable people and actually there's a lot of lessons that we in games can learn from that I don't think we've got

the same risks and issues don't get me wrong so we can learn from it so price polls can be really valid validation but you need to be very careful particularly around the I think it was still the 2006 act it may have changed may have been updated since then but there's lots of very specific rules and legislation and I think the legislative exposure where someone can cash out with prize pools uh and in particular you know where there's play to earn there are some very challenging aspects to that now one example of play to ear uh are things where like something like antidote or play test Cloud where you're being paid to play test something completely different subject completely different experience I'm a huge fan of of that kind of approach but in that case every player is going into test a game they know is not finished that's really interesting they're not there to play they are there there to work at testing but they behave as players so again I think keeping a

separation between play and work can be very powerful so when it comes down to economy design I tend to avoid doing price pools uh where it's cash out and uh pay to earn I just don't think they're adding enough value compared to the legislation and responsibility costs that they then require upon you and to a certain extent I would say the same thing about blockchain the backlash in the industry from consumers is real um particularly because of the malpractice by some people where they have tokenized assets they don't own at the expense of people who generated that material in breach of copyright and essentially all they're really offering is a URL which could be replaced easily making you lose the thing you've spent money on so until someone has some sort of more appropriate structure for doing that I'm a little bit sort

of I'm I'm sitting here with an open mind but I have concerns I have questions let's say that I've got questions so Josh I don't know if that answered your question I hope it did um we are past time I'm very aware um we have a whole bunch of people still here thank you very much for staying with us uh I'm very happy to keep uh hanging on answering questions but I will give people a chance to head out um thank you very much for taking part in this um if you if you found it interesting please don't forget that there is a special offer because you turned up because you stayed here there is a code web 3 if you go and and sign up to the the handson so basically the stuff we've been talking to but where you get to do it and you get me to help you work through the process and thinking so that you know how to do it yourself apply the web SC and you'll get an extra 10% off which means if if you put sign up by Friday you get that 10% off the £150 not the full price 300

which comes into a effect after Friday so go out there sign up now take part in this and you join me where we work with together in teams and we work through the process so you get to do this stuff and learn how to do it yourself and how you can apply it in your own games cool okay thank you very much folks see those of you I go I'll see you in two weeks uh and again um please feel free to shout out and thanks Katherine putting the link to the event bright in there if anyone wants to talk to me at any point you've got me uh I'm easy to find uh I am um Oscar fundamental. games I'm acius on various social posts and I will see Teo I will definitely see you in Helsinki looking forward to that uh and again guys thank you very much for attending I hope you found it useful sounds like a lot of you got a lot of value on it I'm very pleased about that as I say this is something that's really hard to find other sources of information I'm actually going to be hopefully writing a book for focal press

on the topic and again any feedback you guys are willing to share with me I'd be very grateful for as well on that note I think we're done thank you very much all have a good evening [Music]