5 reasons a Game Economy Design Consultant can bring value to your team and project.
Game Economy is a huge, but often overlooked, part of a game’s success. This neglect often comes from the lack of experience in that domain and can lead to significant impacts on the game’s engagement and, by extension, revenues. For a majority of projects, from small independent to AAA studios, getting assistance from an experienced Game Economy Design consultant can bring a big return on investment.
Here are 5 reasons a Game Economy Design Consultant can bring value to your team and project:
They are experts in the field
In video game history, Free-To-Play games are relatively recent and other models, such as Blockchain/web3 games are even more so, and these models are always evolving. Few people managed to gain significant experience and be trailblazers for others by designing these economies. Economy Design consultants bring hard-to-find and costly-to-develop experiences from multiple projects and can share it with your team.
They come with fresh (but expert) eyes
Video game development is a work of passion. And love (and passion) makes us blind. A common error for video game studios is to keep a narrow vision on their product and on its flaws. This is aggravated by the abstract nature of Game Economy – it is even harder to notice errors that will make the game unsustainable or non engaging after weeks or months of play. A Game Economy consultant not only comes with an objective point of view, but he also has the experience to discern potential issues down the line that might escape most developers.
They know what is happening in the industry
A common strategy for game development studios is to copy or adapt the game economy of an existing, successful game to their product. While this strategy can work, the top, leading development studios are already working on their next titles, with even better/bolder/more adapted and engaging economies. Building based on what is existing now means by the time of release, your product might be dated. Consultants are aware of what is trending and not, and can help you innovate beyond the simple copy.
They can make things happen faster
Game Economy Design relies on building models and simulations, very specific skills that use (often) very limited tools. Learning both the skills and the mastery of the tools requires thousands of hours. A game economy consultant will have done dozens of models of gacha systems, battle pass, progression systems, sales bundles… And so, building the next can be done extremely efficiently, speeding up time-to-delivery and overall reducing cost over less experienced or less specialized game designers.
They have experienced failures and struggles
Consultants are often hired at a time of crisis, by studios that are failing to reach their goals or struggling to maintain their product. As such, they are not only exposed to success, to what works, they are also exposed to the struggles, challenges and problems and need to become very intimate with them and how to avoid them, to help their clients overcome them. Game Design Consultants not only bring the knowledge of What you should do and why, but also the extremely valuable What you should avoid, and what you should do instead.
