Kongregate is a leading game developer focused on building engaging experiences in breakout game genres. Our mobile games, including collectible card game Animation Throwdown, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Madness, and the wild west themed Idle Frontier, have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times!

With 15 years of history, Kongregate started out small and has grown into a thriving business with over 80 employees across the nation in three main offices: Portland, Chicago, & San Diego. We are a dedicated and efficient team that enjoys making games as much as playing them. We measure our efforts through results rather than hours worked, and value the importance of a work-life/family balance on top of offering competitive pay and benefits.

Our San Diego team is working on building new and innovative variations on the idle and RPG genres, exploring exciting opportunities with top tier IPs, and working with external teams to experiment on variations of our core game mechanics.

As a Game Economy Designer, you will collaborate with our product management team to gather product requirements and in-game data to help you make optimal choices for the game. You’ll get to manage system and economy design for certain games developed and operated by our San Diego studio. This role will also be responsible for managing components of the production process as part of their daily duties.

You always follow up and enjoy working within a fast-paced, team-oriented environment. Seeing your new designs in action excites you! You are the game numbers’ advocate and you have a keen eye for the business and player implications, continually striving to strike a balance between the two. You keep playing your games obsessively, looking for points of improvement.

Responsibilities:

Define virtual goods and products and their statistics with the development team, being conscious about how each change affects game dynamics.
Balance virtual goods and products identifying needs, relationships, life-cycle and streams of availability.
Manage pricing specifying price point roles and implementing selling strategies for key player and spender types.
Analyze the evolution of defined metrics to spot bottlenecks and facilitators and come up with improvement suggestions and / or opportunities.
System design, building the main progression and economy systems ensuring the game’s long term viability and maximizing player experience.
Recommend rewards and monetization game features to create an economic system that fulfills player needs
Create and manage economy design documentation and tools including spreadsheets. Communicate requirements to engineering and QA.
Regularly play both our games and the competition to stay current with market trends, identify opportunities, and continuously find ways to improve our games.
Report and share benchmarks, best practices and findings to key stakeholders.
Become a game advocate while keeping the business in mind.

Diving into economy spreadsheets and designing interesting new user experiences and features is your bread and butter. As a game economy designer, you feel comfortable taking ownership as needed, how to put an emphasis on collaborative development and are skilled at explaining the reason why certain actions must be taken.

You Have:

3 years of relevant work experience in the free-to-play games industry required, including 2 or more years of experience as a game economy designer in a free-to-play environment.
Proficiency with Excel and Google spreadsheets. Proficiency with SQL and/or Python is a plus.
A knack for wireframing. Able to quickly mock up design concepts and flows via standard tools.
Knowledge of the free-to-play market, top performers, best practices, and common systems across genres.
Passion for games at all levels and formats.
Familiar with the top idle and RPG games in the market, their strengths and how to bring innovation to the genre.
Sensitivity to gameplay and design, understanding how to build needs and emotions in the context of a game.
Analytical skills and ability to to break down complex problems into their key variables and identify the relations between them.
Econometric skills and statistical knowledge. Able to model problems into quantitative systems and formulate ratios and indexes specific to each game, identifying weaknesses and strengths in its economy design.
Passion for polished products and user experiences.
Experience managing priorities across different teams and projects.
A proactive, tenacious, can-do attitude.

Perks

401K Plan with Company Match
Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life and long term disability insurance
Ample vacation days, PTO, and Paid Family Leave
Company wide events, game nights, happy hours and more (all of which are currently virtual)!
Build awesome games with premier IP holders.

Kongregate is a remote first company! Our goal is to find & hire the best - no matter where you live. We have physical locations in Portland, Chicago, & San Diego if you’d like to work in an office environment when it’s safe to return to offices.

Due to the on-going pandemic, Kongregate is operating as a remote company until further notice. All interviews will be conducted via phone and video calls.

Kongregate is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.