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Comment by skurry | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen Rain Man? Remember that control room from which the casino executive monitors what's going on on the casino floor? That dashboard is your virtual control room. To me, the "free-to-play" social gaming industry appears to be eerily similar to the gambling industry. You even use the same terminology ("whales"). And the gambling industry has always been a little shady, trying to squeeze as much money as they can out of people who can't really afford it. Maybe that's why it appears creepy to some of us?

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That is a good point. And actually I didn't know we used the same terms!

I'm obviously aware of what goes on in the industry and its similarities to gambling are something I think about a lot. But as an analyst, I feel like I have a lot of power in helping to create games that are fun and engaging, plus learning how to drive a product to be successful. I don't think of it as a spam machine or a front for taking money from the poor.

Maybe the business model needs to be changed. If its virtual currency that makes it creepy, then maybe switching to a fixed-cost product is something the industry as a whole needs to move to. We're still in the infancy here in learning how to harness mobile devices to make better products.

The fact that your job exists is kind of the creepy part. Games that are just made for fun don't have teams of analysts trying to optimize games in order to modify player behavior. That said, your comments have been pretty interesting. How did you get the job in the first place?

Well, analysts aren't exactly new. Do a search for business analyst and you'll see lots of jobs posted at hundreds of companies. The difference is that mobile game companies deal with extraordinary amounts of data so they actually need people who not only have statistics knowledge, but programming knowledge as well. So I don't think its creepy (obviously), I just think this industry is so new that a) people are unfamiliar with the role and b) the business model is (apparently) controversial and in constant flux.

I came from a web company. I was a data analyst there too. But I really wanted to work in the mobile industry and figure out how to deliver insights on a completely new platform also at massive scale as well.

I have worked in mobile e-commerce analytics but on the engineering side. It seemed like the analysts we had usually had a business background but I was always too busy to ask them how they got into it.

It's weird that you think that "traditional" (whatever that means) games don't have analysts looking at player behaviour: in the games industry we call them "game designers" or "producers". Some game designers do some creative work but there is a lot of metrics-driven design in most games.

>We're still in the infancy here in learning how to harness mobile devices to make better products.

What this unpacks to: Let's make some money before people realise what's up.

How exactly do you know they can't afford it?

Fair enough, that part was a little hyperbolic. What I meant to say is that these people may not be aware of how much they spend overall, because it's in such small increments. I can't prove it, but I think if Zynga would offer their games for a monthly fee, even the players that regularly spend more than that amount would quit, or not subscribe in the first place. Somehow some people are much more comfortable spending $1 twenty times than $10 once.

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