Panel: Tools & Techniques for Game Economy Analysis & Optimisation

anyway let's move on so i am delighted that i've got the uh the fabulous joseph kim who's going to come and talk to us uh for those of you don't know obviously uh well joseph is at lolita games but also has a lot of work with the deconstructor fun folks um and we've got with us as well a whole well we've got nick and that's who's gonna join us as well so joseph how are you doing hey oh see joseph he's coming i'm sure hey there we go how are we doing man doing all right good stuff right so in that case i will hand over to you and let you introduce your panel all right great hey welcome everybody welcome to pocket gamer connects digital number seven i am joe kim your moderator for this panel uh ceo of leela games and also making a new free-to-play shooter game out of india if anyone is interested feel free to reach out to me and also author of gamemakers.substance.com

newsletter anyway today we are speaking about tools and techniques for game economy analysis definitely in my opinion an area that should get a lot more attention and can oftentimes be the difference between success and failure for many free-to-play games on our panel today we have three great speakers so i thought we could first start with afsar ahmad asar could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about gameberry labs absolutely hi guys uh uh i am afsaar ahmad and i'm co-founder of gameberry labs we make board games dice based board games and specifically we are known for ludo star and purchasing star both these games have a combined daily active user base of 6 million and these games are mostly played around south america saudi arabia all the middle eastern countries and india as well great and next we have alvaro gilabad uh business development director for tick tock avvarla do you want to tell us a little bit more about yourself

that is correct um i am alvaro i'm directing the west north of europe for pango the olymps network powered by tick-tock ads and we are one of the strongest networks in apac we're also working at the moment in russia and the middle east and very soon coming out to many other markets so watch out great and finally we have nick murray the head of games for carrie first hey i'm nick um as joe said i'm head of games for carry first which is the biggest publisher focused on the african market um so working with both developers and publishers to find additional sources of revenue on the continent with our own payment platform etc i'm also a consultant alongside that working on mostly products live ops monetization and fun things like game economy which we're going to talk about great so maybe we could just dive right in and i thought we could first

open with this question about how do you sort of what are common techniques to model an initial game economy so before the game is live you've got a specific type of game and you you have a feeling about how the economy should work but could you guys speak to how you would approach the this initial modeling before the live data and maybe starting with you offshore yeah so a lot of time it depends on the game genre as well specifically if i talk about board games genre uh ludo party and in these games they have a very high dependency on a on a very softer currency to to exchange between people so so it completely depends on a game genre and then particularly if i talk about they've attempted a lot of games and when we start building our game economy one of the things that we actually study thoroughly is going through each of the games in that particular genre what the other games are doing as such as a company and what they're trying to create in terms of an experience and

then we would try to replicate it through our scripts probability and try to mix it up and try to understand okay what is exactly that that you can expect when players are actually playing your game so i would say more or less it is dependent on understanding the competitors and specifically running through scripts and at the beginning from our end okay uh nick so yeah as afsan mentioned like a good starting point for this is to consider your competitors in the market like who's doing this really well um as the previous speaker actually alluded to as well it's not a good idea to necessarily just copy one for one um but rather use it as a starting point um knowing that if you go 500 away from that starting point you might end up in trouble um i think understanding the depth of your economy is really really key for for any game genre that you're going to work with so a lot of games start with the intention of

saying okay we're going to monetize through iaps but then maybe the game design doesn't actually give players enough to spend on so in those cases just sanity checking your game design first is a really really crucial step thinking about how different levels of spend over different time periods would impact the game that they're playing so compare a player who spends one dollar a month to a player who spends 200 a month and think about how that's going to affect like the gameplay how that's gonna actually influence the experience of these players is there enough for them to keep this interesting um i still have from i think it's from about five years ago there's a kind of kotaku article that stuck in my head about a triple a pc console game that started dabbling in iaps and the writer purchased a hundred dollars of currency and there wasn't a hundred dollars worth of stuff to buy in the game so there are a lot of tales like that

where clearly there is a mismatch between how an economy is designed and the depth that it can actually offer um i mean i can talk for hours on like things like rpgs and casual and puzzle games and how to differentiate but i think the main points would be always consider player progression um so for a game like an rpg like consider how you want a player power curve to look over time and then actually try and retrofit your economy so that you are ensuring that players are regularly going to be feeling progress um if you know that you're going to be introducing i don't know new heroes in a marvel game or something like that then it's important for players to not feel like okay this is yet another uh goal a million miles away from me i should always feel like i am close or on the route on the way to actually achieving goals by leveling up my power overall um

and then yeah in like puzzle games and stuff it's more about i think making sure that there's like nothing kind of hard blocking your progress through difficulty balancing and then taking into account estimated failure rates as well as like the price of currencies and power-ups to overcome those obstacles always as i said making sure that there is a route for players to not get stuck um because it's a very quick way for players to leave and find another game that was easier got it and um before we jump over to al alvaro there was a question that was kind of coming in about you know tracking sources and seeing specifically but maybe we i can ask a follow-up question in terms of like when you are doing this initial modeling of the game economy what are specific things that you would model whether it's you know rp curve or the you know the monetization depth and how you would do that but um so i'll come back and ask you uh off sorry and nick about that but alvaro kind of going to you and given

your background as far as you know where you come from and having greater depth on the ad side wondering if you could answer the same question but also give us some additional depth with respect to you know how would you model or balance an economy based on upon ads as well as iep to be honest i kind of agree with both absar and nick i think you know especially for brand new indie developers it's good to have a reference it's good to do some market research and understand which kind of category your game fits in what other people have done where the mistakes have been and and kind of try to learn from those already there's a lot of i mean it's not a huge uh and a very old industry but there's still a lot of stuff that it's been done already so i think it's good that brand new indie developers learn from from the experience that other people have because there's been already some uh good success and failure cases so it's good that people know already what's happened

um and i do agree a lot with nick that there is a lot to do with depth uh in terms of where the user can go and how far they can go he obviously has taken it into the nav purchases path but there's also a lot of users who might be appealed to your game and they might not have you know their resources the economical resources to go that far either but they still want to play the game so i think it's also good to have a backup plan and design uh another path for these users to still make you money without spending their actual money in the real world and still go further because it might not be as much as you know in terms of in-app purchases my maybe is a 10 maybe it's a 20 or 30 percent of those users that actually could potentially make you money and they you know again talking about retention if you don't design a path for these users they will eventually realize the game is

not made for them so they will just leave the game and you might be missing out all this money that you could potentially be making with that uh versus in-app purchases so i think it will be it could be good to you know have from the very start um a backup design where you could target these users that maybe i don't know because of the willingness or maybe because of their actual money power they can't go further in the game without ads and you need that and you want to keep them because at the end of the day you know it's user that they do like your game in most of the cases are users that come into your game organically they like the idea they like the concept um and it's users that you could potentially have as loyal users just if you have the right way to keep them in so i i agree with nick that it's good to have um you know a really good path for users that could actually spend the money in but i also think that you could be good

to not um you know leave behind all those users even if it's just a small percentage of users that could potentially also make you a good amount of revenue uh if you have the right path for them um also i must say those users even if they can't make the money because they usually stay in the game because it's usually a highly engaged game uh the engagement is paid very well by advertisers you can make probably as much money on ads but um as much as you can make on a purchase with the users that can actually spend the money in the game so i don't think it's it's um good to underestimate the value of these users and i think it could be good to take them into account from the very start of the game design right and alvaro for maybe some of the folks in the audience who are kind of sitting behind their their spreadsheet model and about to like you know try to model this out like what are like what are some of the

key things that you would try to model whether it's you know a retention model against a projected arpdal you know sort of number of you know views and contribution in terms of rewarded versus interstitial versus like what are some of the things that you would put into a model to design you know sort of how it would monetize in the economy so um i think you have mentioned some of the factors already so uh the formats are definitely something that you need to test and consider uh not all the games uh need all the formats not all the games are suitable for all the formats the actual um placements the place where you the place where you put the ads and i mean as it's called is very important uh you need to know exactly where to put and you don't have to disrupt the user even if it's a user that knows that will have to face the ads because they won't pay for it for the game you try to make the ads as organic as possible to make sure that you make it comfortable for the user to face them

um you also need to make sure that your reward in the case of a reward the user as much or as little as possible yeah both ways you know it's dangerous if you put too much value or too little value you put too little value obviously the user won't continue watching the ads but if you put too much value then the speed of the user going through the the user flow of the game will go too fast and then the retention could get damaged so it's very important to test as well how much value you give to the ad not just how many ads um but i think it's a balance between the ad frequency and the value of the ads or how much you think the the ads are valued in the game again this is a trial and error thing you need to keep testing and making sure that your game adjusts as much as possible uh considering things like uh the ltv and obviously the the retention of the user okay and now i'm sorry nick kind of going

back to the follow-up question so whether it's like sources and sinks model based upon progression or you know checking for economic depth or kind of the your your model for average wallet size of pairs or things like that could you speak to like in this initial model what are some of the things that you would look at or some of the things that you guys would want to model sure so i think the first place that i start when i'm thinking about any like economy design is time um like players time is the most valuable resource they have even more so than their money at this point at least and it really needs to be like a significant part of how you plan your economy um it's one of the reasons i talk about progression so much because i feel like when a player spends time they need to feel like that time is being rewarded at regular intervals and that manifests itself as progression

um the way that i would show this particularly within sources and sinks and like i think the question was around kind of how to understand how to balance these um basically on a live game one of the things that i'd like to try and pull is data for um like cumulative kind of soft currency um by player level or by time versus the sinks and the type like actually how big those sinks can be um it's a very good and quick way of just showing um like if a player has either got far too much currency for a given point in game or nowhere near enough like there will be an interplay between the two ideally there will be levels where a player will level up and on their level up they don't have enough to unlock the next thing that's great that's perfect but they shouldn't also be at zero of ten thousand they should be maybe at five thousand of ten thousand

so that they have this encouragement and this goal in front of them um so i think the way that to really focus on sources and sinks is just to do that is to really think about what is the like the income going to be what are the sinks available to the player um and it's something that can be very easily optimized after launch as well um the only other thing i would mention as well is if you do it after launch preferably get the modal number for this so look at where most of your players are at uh averages can be misleading in this case okay one of the techniques uses that i have found it really useful is trying to convert your currencies or your currencies especially in in a very simplified manner so let's say even if you have a hard currency you have let's say five types of currency or items in the game and you want to balance these items or currencies together a good easier way to do that would be

trying to convert them into a form which is not interchangeable in terms of players can do it but it kind of helps you in thinking in terms of uh expenditures for example time like nick mentioned mentioned time so your hard currency you can convert them as a time and your soft currencies also you can start to convert treat them as a time and your time will be the single unit that will be accused across your game and you try to whenever you're going to try to see the balance you see what is happening with with that particular master currency i would say and it will be a little bit difficult to balance it out but if you have a master currency approach it kind of helps a lot in doing a lot of things here and there okay great and maybe before we move on to the next question alvaro i i know one of the in speaking to offshore's uh comment about exchange i thought we could actually also talk about kind of

this common problem when we talk about iep based games versus ad based games and in games that are heavily iep monetized and when you don't when when you also introduce ads from an economy perspective when you think about the value exchange between your you know your let's say rewarded video ad to hard currency like how do you think about that or how would you model that to ensure that you are optimizing your your overall you know ltv or revenue i think there's ways nowadays to target uh paying to non-paying users obviously it's hard to guess and to assess the percentage and the amount amount of users that are not going to be paying for your game uh before the launch of the game but i think it would be safe to have a path for these users that are not keen or can't actually pay for for you know the features in the game uh to have a path i think that's i think that's the key point having somehow a sideway

on a second path for these users to to find a way to move forward in the game um there's no bad users or good users obviously there's the more they pay the better but not everyone can pay it's it's real life no everyone has the same power of purchase so um i think it's it's kind of bad to underestimate users that can't just you know give the credit uh you know the credit card details and just make a purchase i think there's ways there's a lot of resources at the moment uh to still make a lot of money especially when it comes to rpg games you can make as much as money as much money as you can make on a direct purchase through ads you don't have to expose paying users to ads that's also something that i need to make make clear there's ways to make sure that you only trigger the ads to the users that can't

afford it and i'm sure that these users over 50 of these users there's been studies about this uh are not going to be offended if you show them an ad because they are aware of it they know that somehow they have to support the game and they need to uh show ways of uh appreciation let's put it that way so um as long as you have the ways in a very again non-intrusive way uh the user will appreciate it and they will move forward and as as a matter of fact i can tell you the ecbms that you can get uh of an ad shown to a user in a game that is mostly in a purchases base is as high as the actual value that a whale can pay in the game okay and maybe now moving on to let's say a game is live and we're trying to check the health of the overall game economy and wondering if you guys could speak to

you then what does that look like from a monitoring analytics dashboarding perspective like what are the key things that you'd be looking for to check on the health of your economy what does that look like and maybe starting with you offsite yeah so in terms of looking at economy so let's say i generally preferred median over averages like nick said uh and apart from the median i looked deeply into 90th percentile and 99th percentile because that's the real loyal players that you have in the game so you have to look at them and try to understand what is going on in their lifespan rather than just looking at the median media numbers as such so 99th and 98th percentile is kind of pretty tricky and then you'll see a lot of things happening over there which will bother you rather than looking at median as such so i really like that particular number especially okay yeah so

i mean you've got all your standard kpis of you know retention monetization etc which are still critical right like they can still give an indication of the health of your economy as well like a poorly retaining game can be a result of the economy um and likewise with monetization um so the things that i would add to that though would be looking at things like graphs of player level or progress over time so where a level isn't relevant use some kind of proxy like player power and generally look out in those four where they plateau so if a player is stuck at the same point for too long um aside from that like if you are doing the sinks and sources thing make sure to track currency gain on level up so like what currency a player has on their level up and then what new sinks are introduced as we mentioned earlier um if you are also looking to run live

ops and do kind of quite often item sales and that kind of thing then item balances and saturation reports are also a useful thing to have and i mean i i don't think i need to be on everything um i think it's largely a question of common sense right if you know your gacha is an integral part of the metagame then make sure to track the currency that's going into it and the value coming out of it um and then think about how does that change by player type how does it change by day of activity for that player on day 0 versus day 60. so it's really just about thinking through the problems and thinking through the systems that are integral to your game and just trying to understand all right what's going into that system what's coming out of it does that look about reasonable and most of the time honestly you're playing your game enough uh as a designer or as a product manager working on it that you should already have a gut feeling about the things that aren't quite right

okay alvaro i cannot be more uh in line with nick i think he's pretty much it like i mean if you work close with your game design team your product team you should know already beforehand you know from the text tech tests to the soft launch what could potentially be the flaws of the game so i think at that stage you already should you know maybe make a post and understand where you could potentially fix things uh but i don't think i can add that more to what nick just said i think it's it's a matter of understanding your product understanding the specific you know environment of this particular game understanding what could potentially go wrong and trying to find the fix before it happened it's a problem you need to be you know up front you need to be two steps before the user faces the problem just make sure that

the user does not face it uh testing uh trying things playing i think that's it to be honest okay and maybe i could just throw open this question to anyone who wants to answer but i thought another good question to ask is more from an organizational workflow perspective right and so like you have a live operating game and in terms of who's watching the economy and how does that workflow work is there you know the interplay between whether it's a pm to a producer to a systems designer to the ceo for a smaller company like how does this generally or how would you guys recommend that the economy be monitored and then actions taken to actually execute in optimization against the economy and just throwing it open to anyone who wants to jump in on this question i i can take it up uh to start with in our case uh

i think product managers and game designers both are kind of constantly monitoring uh from an organization point of view i think a lot of times people don't either don't have visibility uh in terms of let's say these kind of dashboards or they are just not driven towards checking it out so i think that is more critical piece where you you make sure that the team is driven towards checking it out on a daily basis whether it is making any changes or not it is it is important that it becomes the baseline becomes inside your head and you know absolutely in and out that this is the baseline that we are going and especially in our case uh what we have is 11 pages of kpi metrics that are we ask everybody to track on a daily basis that you should go one by one first thing in the morning so that you know what is happening in the game on a day-to-day basis and a lot of times we discover cheats hacks just from these metrics and we know exactly what is happening in the

game the moment we see a dip or a spike in those graphs any other comments yeah so i mean i i think the responsibility piece is a really big thing like i've mentioned um and it is a collaborative effort right so everybody who is involved in these different features and the producer product manager um and expanding to roles like customer support and community as well everybody should be capable of highlighting in their department where they have identified that there could be an issue maybe a player has mentioned it maybe an analyst happens to have come across something but ideally again you have the tracking in place and everybody on the same page and make it someone's responsibility have somebody be the person who reports on economy and how the economy health is on ideally at least a weekly basis um

yeah that's pretty much it okay and then i thought we could also also talk about let's say you know in in terms of the type of analysis that's done once a problem is identified so let's say revenue drops or we're seeing you know vip dow drop or just kind of wallet turnover you know kind of you know decrease or increase like how what what happens from there are there are there any specific types of analysis or techniques that you guys would recommend to like look look at uh look at a problem that somebody discovers and try to address those problems and i'll yeah throwing it open to anybody here i mean quite often when you have identified a problem um there are a lot of theories swirling around as to what that could be and it's just a question of basically like a detective if you're feeling romantic about it

going like one by one through the list and i think one of the main places to start if it's a problem with spending which quite often it is because that's that tends to be the first place you see it retention tends to be a bit more of a stable metric um you would look at something like what are your act what are your spenders up to like how do your spend buckets evolve over time what did that group of players spend last month compared to this month or last week compared to this week have there been any game changes in between um what are the liveops events looking like maybe they've been too generous um backing that up again with things like saturation i remember at one company i worked at we took over a game and uh that game had been performing extremely well so the company i was working for bought it and before they bought it that company basically had a fire sale and the economy was pretty nuked by the time we got there

so everybody just had stacks and stacks of resources and spend instantly dropped it took a while to understand exactly what had happened because we didn't have all the data but these things are very easy to find if you are tracking saturation over time if you're keeping an eye on your spend buckets okay i think that's true i think it's all about user experience and also but there's all the factors that should be included you should know where the drop is not just about the user in terms of on average but also the country there's a lot of seasonality going on it could be christmas in the us or it could be chinese new year you know in february you need to understand that maybe the drop happens because there was actually a peak the month before or the weeks before you need to see the whole background around the user and why the drop happened it's not just an average again you need to you need to go beyond and understand the demographics and uh the background of the user that might have experienced this drop so

it's not always blaming the game sometimes it could be the game but there's always some other you know actual cultural and geographical factors to be included in this drop so yeah it's good to have a a wide open view on what's going on right and one of the questions that did come in did ask about tools and so that that's essentially this next question which i wanted to ask you about and so whether it's you know i know a lot of people work inside of an excel spreadsheet but as far as other tools whether it's you know building python models or using kind of external third-party tools like machinations wondering if you guys could speak to what what do you guys use and are you guys seeing anything new out there as far as tools and using these tools for different types of analysis who's starting with you officer what do you guys use yeah so in our case we most of the time we are making use of the spreadsheet itself but

i specifically want to talk about uh one particular game which which was uh pretty interesting for us because uh because i've i in my past i've worked in some of the games which had a lot of narrative inside it a lot of conflict going on and everything was interlinked between each other so while doing that particular game i had a very first-hand experience of dealing with a huge amount of conflict together and it becomes a nightmare to edit that conflict to test out it is nightmare for pm it is night film or qa and producer every single guy in the team right uh and especially for developers because they feel that the bug is in the code but it's sometime in the config so uh so at the beginning what we did before getting into a lot of complex things we just started building the tool first because we knew that okay even if we are testing this game to a small bit we need to have a basic tool which will be more like a web

website for internal usage where we will just create configs and interlink the conflicts between each other and that particular tool was such a bliss for us because we were able to do a lot of error checking right at the beginning of downloading those configs we were able to run script on these script on these conflicts very easily and try to get how the games economy has changed as a player let's say if you are assuming the player journey how the journey of the player has has changed so that was one of the like extremely remarkable experience for us because we we built that tool right from the very beginning it was basic html website with on node.js and that's what we were trying to do it's pretty easy to build and i think if you can build something like that at the beginning of your game you should definitely do that right now it's just spreadsheet other than that it just spreads it for us right now yeah i think

um most of my experience is largely in excel these days um like i have tried out a couple of third-party tools but i feel like quite often they can be too generic when you have something very specific and when your mechanics need to be the way that you have designed them so generally excel provides the most flexibility and also a way to kind of workshop different configurations and things like a b tests at least just to plan them and then ideally for like i think the visualization side of things that we mentioned earlier which is pretty critical in understanding where your economy is going um preferably i use tableau um for like the actual kind of graph and dashboard creation um in an ideal world hooked up to your own sql database i know that's not possible for everybody um and i'm sure there are some decent third-party options in between which i'm

not going to comment on because i don't know which is best so okay and i think we've got about three more minutes left so maybe i could just end with a final question before opening it up to q a which is is for our audience if you guys could name like some of the more common problems or mistakes that you have found as far as game economy modeling or the optimization of a game economy i'd be great to hear from you guys what you guys think and again maybe starting actually why don't we start with you alvaro i think um back to obviously my field of expertise the main problem is this big myth that there is among especially midcore game developers that adding ads to your game it kills the game uh adding ads the wrong way kills the game that is the actual truth uh but if you are smart and you know how to place the games that it's that is definitely

um a good way to to deal with every side of your game economy um planning ahead of every possibility you know the game might work really well even just with in-app purchases at the very beginning uh but at some point of the maturity of the game at the sunset of the game you might still need if you want to still squeeze as much as possible the game economy you might need ads be prepared for it i think that's the key be ready for it uh know where you can have a backup plan and and be prepared for every option that's that's it and testing testing is key testing testing as much as possible okay nick yeah so actually on on the ads point um one thing that i do with uh every company i work with is check the like the actual the value of the ads um for the company and the value of the ads for the player very often um if you translate the value

of what you're giving away to dollars and compare against the actual money you're going to receive for that ad you're probably quite a long way off i have seen ads that give away up to like two dollars worth of value um in hard currency when in reality you're going to be receiving a fraction of that um so that kind of thing really has an impact on undermining your iaps and i think that's exactly what alvaro is talking to about incorrect implementation um so apart from that um another thing to always check as an easy one is make sure your pricing structure is correct in your key markets um so when you go to buy a bundle of gems or whatever like the more expensive bundles should give more hard currency per dollar or per euro or whatever currency you're looking at like it's very straightforward but very often there are one or two values that seem wrong so you know you might be actually giving

worse value in your 100 euro price point then you're 50 euro one and that makes zero sense there are occasionally people obviously doing price anchoring experiments and that's fine but most games don't really attempt it there so it's just a good sanity check okay outside yeah i think one one thing as a game designers a lot of this time we do a mistake is being too taught too too tight in terms of our economy uh i think we should remember to create a roller coaster ride for the players so sometime give them some of the currencies loosely so that they they feel that experience of being on top of the roller coaster costa ride and then suddenly when they have experience that they would feel a little slowness and then suddenly you give them again a boost of things so i would say you should try to create that roller coaster ride with your economy and try to be more not

be too taught about it that okay this is going to affect the whole whole thing try and experiment and test it out okay all right guys so i think we're going to shift over to q a if you have any questions feel free to put them into the i guess there's a q a chat but uh yeah there's a q a button there so uh lots of stuff we can talk through lots of questions being asked i was going to check something in um something uh zionist works for me glenn uh talks about the the thanos fallacy as he describes it um people attempting to balance everything perfectly um which we think is a mistake in itself in particular i'm a massive fan of uh the book by dan early um um yeah predictable particularly irrational yeah that's a great great book there's a section in there about hot dog economics uh you know the idea that you get six hot dogs you get uh sorry eight hot dogs six buns

that deliberate imbalance is that something that you guys look at doing when you're looking at building the economy your game are you are you only looking for balance or are you actually looking to try and chuck in a bit of imbalance in the process just know what you think about that i feel like it's easier to start with just looking for balance actually um like i think imbalance is a great thing as you mentioned and after i mentioned it as well having this kind of more roller coaster effect um is a great thing and it's not like okay this new sink costs me 50 gems i have 49 i need one more gem and then i'm going to level up and i'm going to have one more gem than i need that's not interesting like there needs to be this push and pull against the game um but i think that can be done through kind of more straightforward balancing and then adding the more kind of irrational or the like the more unpredictable side of things i think is makes for great a b testing actually um it's really like the time to experiment

and try out these kind of things because like there are some behaviors that humans have which uh as as mentioned in that book are seem absolutely crazy on the outside like the whole field of behavioral economics around it um but uh it's best to test a few and find out which one works best because the one you have in mind might not be the one that works for other people right now sorry i was just going to say oscar what one advantage of imbalance is the ability to actually help balance your economy in case something goes awry right and so that's why like gotchas always have dual input currencies right because if you go too far you can all you can tighten one relative to the other for example so but you cannot have it for that actually um so like sorry i was just gonna say you can also use live ops for that um so live ops is a great way of balancing your economy if you think it's a little bit broken in different areas of the game um particularly if you think about like

the gap between big spenders and small then maybe you actually develop events which are appealing for big spenders but actually push the smaller spenders up further in rankings as well give them a few more rewards so there's a lot you can do with live ops after the fact yeah the thing i was going to add though is that really just thinking about it as a journey rather than a simple kind of um uh seesaw and i think was it you ever talked about that earlier i think that to me is really the crux of when i'm looking at a game is i'm looking for like anchor currencies which i mean the things that i have to play to get that i don't necessarily you know can't necessarily buy i can't sort of ignore the game and just get all the currencies and i find that sort of thinking of of the flow of the player as important as the balance itself i i do get where you're coming from we've had this conversation i'm sure multiple times uh and nick did an amazing master class uh for us a little while ago um but moving forward

in terms of that system-like thinking though i mean interesting particularly as far as i'll be just know what you think in terms of like some of these system thinking tools i mean we've seen things like loopy and machinations are they useful or is actually basically let's just stick with spreadsheets and trellos and data coming from a raw source does any of that appeal i think i think imagination i think there's lots of you know scenarios that you need to build up i just think it's more of a trial and error um as long as you're quick enough to spot the problem that you should be fine it's a matter of keeping the user scene at the end of the day the retention is key so um i don't think you have to be imagine every single possible scenario of a problem before the game is going into the market it's more about preparing for the worst case scenario or the few worst possible case scenarios and be ready for those

yeah it is a scary thing i think there are so many things i remember the number of mistakes i've made designing economies i worked on a first person shooter location game with blockchain you can imagine the different elements yet okay but my problem was i tried to consolidate every possible element of the journey complete mistake um and if i i did she tried to use machinations but again i spent so much time trying to learn how to use it that i didn't actually balance the game so so i was like you were gonna say something there as well weren't you yeah i was saying like it's pretty useful in terms of machination the a lot of game designers have started using it because some of some of the people no matter what you do people are scared of uh learning new things like in general especially if you talk about script a lot of game designers are not comfortable learning scripts and building complex systems out of it and i think imagination works really well over there i think it's something worth spending time on i feel

yeah i mean i think finding as a designer i'm finding a good source of you know insight of what other people do for balance i find very difficult and i'm really looking forward to brenda romero's book which hopefully comes out later this year because at least there'll be something on the topic that i can feel that i'm not just making up as i go along what do you guys do to sort of give yourself like an insight or kind of views or help you question your own approaches to balancing the games i mean it'd be interesting to see i mean nick you've done a lot of talks on this subject yeah i mean or inspiration i think generally just other people like talk to other game designers ask them about the games that they've played recently that have felt good um like i think the feeling of a game is very much kind of correlated with how the economy works and a lot of the time just someone saying to me oh yeah i checked out this game the other day i thought it was really good like can help inspire how you

define for example the beginning of the funnel like how the tutorial works like how currencies are distributed there how currencies are introduced there as well um there is actually a gaming economy designer of another company who reached out to me the other day on linkedin just asking me a specific question about like a new game economy and we had a chat about it and you know gaming is a collaborative industry so like i think talking to other people is your best bet anyone else want to pick up on that jojo and what i mean you talk to so many people on your podcasts and your various uh you know documents you produce and obviously making these games i mean what's what's the thing that's influencing your thinking in terms of balance and design and economy i mean i i think the for for me i mean it's just really understanding this the systems well right and then trying to have a strong hypothesis around what are the variables that are going to drive the

system and then what are the expected you know uh what what are the expected outputs from the system and then you know i i think when when you're first modeling that behavior i think that's the hard part but then once you go live i i think the for for me it's like tying the model to the specific outputs that you expect and impact to the game and then trying to then you know whether it's through you know root cause analysis or other types of analysis try to determine how to optimize the the system and the model that you have against that system that makes sense that makes sense alvaro do you have any any thoughts on that what's inspiring you and driving your thinking i do think that we're very lucky the gaming industry is a very friendly one i think it's good to talk to other peers to understand where the problems have been already in similar cases i think experience is the key here so if

you've got someone that you can talk to that have been you know facing similar situations with similar games it's it's a very good start point uh other than that obviously any market research or your own testing experience are the best solutions that you can have for a start hundred percent any last comment that's why no okay uh so i mean there is one last question i know i'm running over time but i think this is such a good one particularly because i mentioned blockchain earlier and that has all sorts of problems i don't this this question isn't about blockchain but it has a related connection namely what do you think about marketplaces that trade game currencies is that a positive for us as making games or is it the worst nightmare for a game designer anyone who wants to just just give me a quick answer you know yeah great or disaster nick because i think someone said about piracy the other day it's neither good

nor bad it's a bit of both and it's probably not as bad as you think that's fair that's fair joe potential for disaster especially with bots so be careful that's all i'm saying exactly um i'm just gonna stick to what nick just said there's no right or wrong it's just the way it's done if it's not messy i think it could be a very interesting challenge so exactly and an asphalt do you agree with us all do you think it's a disaster if if you can stay away from boards i think you can manage a lot of things you you can see a lot of interesting things happening if you can just stay away from what that sounds good yes stay away from bots and gold farms that was the thing that used to get us back in the day um anyway enough said guys that was amazing really appreciate you and this is one of the uh the areas that i i've been doing for years and i always feel like a rank amateur i always feel like a beginner every time i start it uh i i don't do too bad but uh i i the more we have conversation like this the better it be for all of us i'm

sure thank you very much guys thank you thanks thank you and joey thanks very much for hosting that awesome you