Choosing your major

Choose a double Econ/Psych major under the B.A. or B.Sc. schedules, or a Psych major with an econ minor, add in some courses in marketing after finding the ones that have some rigour. Go heavy on stats where you can. And then you can do this.

As a Marketing Insight Analyst, your responsibility is to understand how a game works as a service for its customers and how the customers behave in it, identifying and developing the purchase drivers in the game economy context, and providing recommendations based on player psychology (that can be backed up by statistics data) on design, tuning and pricing in order to improve game financial performance.

To do this, pre-release, you will direct the design of virtual products and have input on the features and methods a game uses to drive the desired purchase flow with tempting choices, based on basic psychological studies.
You will need to work with the GMM to measure the impact of updates/design changes in a given title, and work closely with the development team and the Game Economy Designer to refine the design.

Your job will be focused on both Game Evolution updates and new Creations.

...

Skills:


• Strong sensitivity to gameplay and game design, understanding how to build needs and emotions in the context of a game. 
• Strong analytical and formal thinking, able to break problems down in their key variables and identify the relations between them. 
• Strong econometrics skills, able to model problems into quantitative systems, and draw qualitative conclusions out of quantitative data
• Statistic knowledge, able to formulate ratios and indexes specific to each game, identifying specific weaknesses and strengths in its economy design. 
• Strong marketing knowledge, able to formulate adequate selling strategies to improve the financial performance.

Requirements :


• Graduate degree in Psychology or BA, preferably specialized in Marketing or Strategic direction.
• Fluent written and spoken English, concise writing skills. 
• Mastery of Excel. 
• Deep, up-to-date knowledge of the free-to-play market, both web-based and on smartphones. 
• Passion for games on all existing formats: board games, card games, sports, paper RPGs, gambling, all genres of videogames with special focus on MMOs and competitive games. 

While marketing is turning into a data-driven science blending econometrics and psychology, New Zealand's marketing majors are not particularly quantitative. So Gameloft has more particular requirements.

@WillTaylorNZ tells me they'd also had an ad up for a game economy designer. But what do economists know about games anyway? Ahem...