Economy Designer

Job Overview

Join the team to help shape an unannounced Merge 2 game from the ground up. This is a senior, hands-on design role for someone with proven economy design experience in successful merge games. You will own the economic and systemic foundations that connect core merging, progression, events, monetization, and long-term engagement. You will partner with creative leadership and a multidisciplinary team to build an economy that feels intuitive to players, performs against product goals, and can evolve confidently through development and live operation.

Your Role and Responsibilities

• Economy Ownership: Act as the principal owner and champion of economy design, setting a high bar for systemic clarity, player value, and commercial sustainability.
• Full Lifecycle Management: Own the design, modeling, balancing, and ongoing health of the game economy across the full player lifecycle, from the first-session experience through long-term progression and live events.
• Merge 2 System Definition: Define the core Merge 2 economy including merge chains, generators, energy and action loops, currencies, rewards, inventories, orders, unlocks, progression gates, and the relationships between them.
• Progression and Pacing: Design progression systems and content pacing that create clear short-, mid-, and long-term goals while preserving meaningful player choice and satisfying merge moments.
• Modeling and Forecasting: Build and maintain economy models, simulations, and tools that forecast progression, currency flows, resource pressure, feature impact, and balancing changes.
• Resource Management: Establish healthy sources and sinks for currencies and resources, ensuring the economy is understandable, resilient, and appropriately tuned for both engaged and paying players.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Creative, Product, Data, Design, Art, Engineering, and UX to translate the game vision into coherent systems, features, and player experiences.
• Meta and Monetization Design: Design and balance meta, social, event, and monetization systems that support retention, engagement, and revenue without compromising player trust or the core merge experience.
• Data-Driven Analysis: Use quantitative analysis, player research, playtests, and qualitative feedback to identify opportunities, diagnose issues, and make clear, evidence-led recommendations.
• Review and Leadership: Lead economy reviews and communicate complex system behavior, trade-offs, and decisions clearly to senior stakeholders and the wider game team.
• Standards and Mentorship: Set standards for economy craft, documentation, and review practices; mentor other designers and contribute to the broader design community.

Skills and Qualifications

• Merge Game Expertise: Demonstrable, hands-on experience designing and balancing economies for merge games. Experience on Merge 2 titles is strongly preferred, with a clear understanding of generators, merge chains, board pressure, energy loops, order systems, and progression pacing.
• Proven Track Record: A record of owning or materially shaping economies on games in development and live operation, ideally in free-to-play mobile games with meaningful scale.
• Systemic Understanding: Deep understanding of how merge-game economy decisions affect player motivation, retention, session frequency, monetization, content cadence, and the perceived fairness of the game.
• Analytical Capability: Strong analytical capability and confidence building spreadsheet models, simulations, and practical tools to test assumptions and communicate outcomes.
• Data Utilization: Experience using product data and experimentation to balance systems, assess feature performance, and improve player journeys.
• Systems Thinking: Excellent systems thinking; ability to connect individual mechanics into a coherent whole, anticipate second-order effects, and simplify complexity for players and teammates.
• Communication: Strong design judgment, written communication, and presentation skills, with the ability to create clear specifications and align varied senior perspectives.
• Collaborative Leadership: A collaborative leadership style. Comfortable working across disciplines, giving constructive feedback, and creating momentum in an evolving development environment.
• Enthusiasm: Genuine enthusiasm for free-to-play games, merge games, and the craft of building player-first economies.

Nice to Have

• Experience taking a merge game from concept or soft launch through live operation.
• Experience with economy telemetry, SQL, BI tools, or scripting used to investigate player behavior and validate economy hypotheses.
• Experience designing live events, offers, segmentation strategies, or content frameworks for a merge title.
• Experience mentoring designers or leading economy design across multiple features or teams.

Company and Culture

King is a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world, part of Microsoft. With a mission of Making the World Playful, the company has over 20 years of experience delivering iconic games like the Candy Crush franchise and Farm Heroes Saga.

• Our Passion: Making great games is challenging, but we focus on being Seriously Playful. We experiment, learn, and adapt continuously to shape the industry.
• Teamwork: We play as a team, helping each other have an impact on a massive scale.
• Global Presence: Locations include Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Malta.