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Systems (Economy) Designer

Ander reimagines the employee experience. Our unique platform unifies people, producing cohesive teams and peers who bring out the best in each other. It promotes health, increases productivity, and lowers costs. We help employees thrive and companies prosper — helping your team live stronger. And play harder. And work smarter

We focus on how to best serve individual users by nurturing genuine connections, harmonizing work and life, and driving measurable behavior change. Our platform provides the tools and information to boost employee participation and simplify compliance—all without taxing your resources. A customizable ecosystem of learning, challenges, and rewards engages your employees in meaningful ways to help them to maximize their individual goals and outcomes.

 

As a Game Systems or Economy Designer, you understand how a game works as a service for its customers, and can project and influence how customers behave. You also provide constant data-driven recommendations on design, reward and award tuning and pricing. To do this pre-release, you’re able to design the virtual products a game will offer, define metrics that allow you to individually measure their impact on a given title, and work closely with the development team to see designs refined and metrics implemented. Once the game is launched, you’re able to analyze the collected data and report which are the performing/underperforming aspects of the game economic model, why, and provide solutions.

 

What we’re looking for

You are looking to get in on the ground floor of a well-funded startup with a proven leadership team. You have 3-5 or more years’ experience as a game systems or economy designer, focused on analytical game design and emerging business models with…

  • Passion for discovering and revealing the mix of gameplay and game design, understanding how to build needs and emotions into context.
  • Analytical and formal thinking, able to break problems down to key variables and identify relations between them.
  • Strong econometrics skills, able to model problems into quantitative systems and date, then draw and explain qualitative conclusions.
  • Statistic knowledge, able to formulate rations and indexes specific to selected gameplay, identifying specific weaknesses and strengths in its economy or interaction systems design.
  • Strong marketing knowledge, able to formulate adequate strategies to improve financial performance.
  • Experience in data driven development, working collaboratively with data scientists, especially understanding client/server architecture and data collecting pipeline and mining.
  • Experience working in highly collaborative and iterative team environment that includes external development partners.
  • Experience delivering across multiple platforms, whether digital (e.g. iOS, Android, web), traditional (e.g. books, installations, rides, haunted houses) and events.

What you’ll be doing

  • Create visionary demos and prototypes, which establish and drive experiences and interaction concepts from idea to scaled application.
  • Own the economy and underlying systems, with emphasis on sustainable player retention and progression, from pre-release to live operations.
  • Define and tune the game economy, including currency and resource progression, purchase behavior drivers and pricing.
  • Balancing virtual goods…whether for sale, as rewards or awards…identifying needs, relationships, life-cycle and streams of availability.
  • Regularly providing user feedback and stat/price point tuning to the development team based on play-testing, both during game development and post-release.
  • Analyzing the evolution of defined metrics to spot both, monetization bottlenecks and facilitators, and suggest game design improvements or enhance the customer experience accordingly.
  • Create and maintain the economy model using Excel, Google Sheets or other similar tools.
  • Analyze and report on economy performance and implement optimization activities
  • Work with Creative Director, Content and Production to guide implementation of new features and from a systems and economic perspective, explaining and illustrating how they’ll impact retention, engagement and monetization.
  • Adjust the economy to support new features, test pricing and econometric activities to optimize engagement and fun.
  • Collaborate with all stakeholders, whether client, community managers, sales, key account managers, operations, developers or others to obtain knowledge of the service requirements.
  • Work closely with internal and external development teams to craft systems and economy that people will play out in the real world.
  • Work closely with the internal Production, Art, Design, Engineering teams to deliver on an industry-defining engagement experience.
  • Create fun, AAA quality play through engaging experiences in the most open world there is – the real one.
  • Assist in scoping work and achieving milestones in an Agile environment.

 

What you’ll bring to the table

  • 3-5 or more years’ experience as a game Systems or Economy Designer, or economist in entertainment
    • Strong understanding of game economies and balance, statistics, virtual goods, pricing, payouts, rewards, awards and overall player motivations.
    • Strong analytical thinking skills, able to abstract and deconstruct complex systems and identify key inputs, relationships and levels that influence behaviors and throughputs.
    • Able to model problems into quantitative systems, anticipate downstream effects and draw actionable conclusions and then motivating others to join in.
    • Mastery of Excel and visualization tools such as Tableau.
    • Deep, up-to-date knowledge of the video game market, especially “free-to-play” whether on mobile phones, the web or other platforms.
    • Experience in econometrics and/or data mining
    • Experience working with many other digital-development disciplines and a team player, including with external development partners.
    • B.A. in Economics, Mathematics, Finance, Statistics, Computer Science, Engineering or other quantitative field, or related experience, especially in Marketing or Strategic Direction
  • An awareness of current trends in employee engagement, games, design and software development.
  • Knowledge of the software and applications involved in the creative process.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills.
  • A self-starting attitude and an open outlook, with resilience under pressure and against deadlines.
  • Ideally, also…
    • Experience manipulating, summarizing and analyzing large data sets
    • Passion for playing and making games and an excellent understanding of what makes them fun.
    • MMO, RPG system design experience or mobile game design
    • Entertainment industry experience in another discipline (game/social/gambling design, programming, art, production, audio, editing, directing, etc.). 

Required Application Materials

  • Resume and cover letter

  • Data analysis or gameplay portfolio or papers demonstrating relevant system and economic skills

  • Further econometrics or analysis tests may be required

 

We are committed to an inclusive and diverse work environment. Ander is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status or any legally protected status.

 

 

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