Gangstar Vegas

Timeline: 2013 to 2015

Platform: Mobile (iOS and Android)

The Game: The Gangstar franchise can be thought as "GTA for mobile". Vegas was launched as premium game, and the initial stat of its economy was thought exclusively to be a one-time campaign play, much like an "old school" console title.

When I joined the team a few months after launch, my mission was to prepare this title to go free-to-play, which required major changes to its economic systems. With Gameloft's Ukraine studio, I game designed changes and new features to turn around business for this game. The shift was a major boost to its sustainability as a Live Ops product, and the title was still profitable 10 years later.

My Contributions:

• Designed new Bundle Pack and VIP systems that  improved the IAP revenue per DAU by up to 38%, and the IAP revenue per paying user by up to 48%;
• Worked with the development team to tune and prepare the game to transition between the Premium model to free-to-play;
• Revamped all the economy balancing methods and spreadsheets in order to have a mode consistent way to price and assign Lottery chances on new items during Live Ops.
• Game economy re-design, successfully moving a premium-first, pay-to-download game into a free-to-play model;
• Game economy balancing: the reward curve and a new loot crate system required major re-haul of the balancing spreadsheets;
• Modeled an economic simulation in Excel, which projected the resource utilization and progression of a typical player across a full year of sessions.
• Data analysis: as I needed data about specific interactions of our players, cohorted by progression milestones such as XP level, I leaned in my past experience with programming and databases to query and extract insights from our BI database. Used Python with Pandas, Statsmodel and Sublime Text.