How Animoca Brands Quantifies Design Decisions with Machinations
Animoca Brands is a global digital entertainment company, widely recognized for its significant contributions to the blockchain and gaming industries. The company specializes in developing and publishing a broad portfolio of products, including games, virtual worlds, and various blockchain-based applications.
The company actively emphasizes understanding player personas and intrinsic motivations. Through this user-centric approach, Animoca Brands tailors game mechanics and rewards to meet the diverse needs and preferences of different player types, ensuring that gamers enjoy engaging and fulfilling experiences.
At Animoca Brands, Mohamed AbdelKhalek focuses on system and economy design across a variety of projects – from the initial prototyping in pre-production through to the refining stages of production and the content delivery of live operations.
Mohamed’s responsibilities include the detailed work of balancing intrinsic player motivations with extrinsic rewards, ensuring that each game not only resonates with its intended audience but also provides a compelling and engaging experience.
The Challenge
Animoca Brands, with its venture into web3 gaming and a vast array of projects, sought a tool to efficiently model and simulate game economies and systems. The objective was to enhance game designs for greater player engagement and satisfaction, while also ensuring the financial viability of projects.
Machinations: The Strategic Solution
Animoca turned to Machinations, a tool uniquely suited for modeling and simulating game economies and systems. Mohamed AbdelKhalek, familiar with Machinations, played a crucial role in its adoption.
“Machinations allowed us to refine and optimize our game mechanics and economies with a level of precision we hadn’t achieved before.”
This balancing act requires a deep understanding of the player personas Animoca Brands targets across its varied portfolio, from web3 games to competitive and cooperative online multiplayer experiences across multiple genres.
Using Machinations to quantify design impacts and financial outcomes
Mohamed AbdelKhalek’s utilization of Machinations at Animoca Brands illustrates a meticulous approach to aligning game mechanics with player motivations and expectations, a process critical to ensuring game longevity and player engagement.
Delving into the specifics, Mohamed illustrates how Machinations is used at Animoca Brands:
“We’ve transitioned from using Machinations solely for granular game economy simulations presented in long form reports to also supporting our game teams with straightforward tasks, such as determining reward probabilities for specific daily challenges.”
By focusing on intrinsic motivations and setting up corresponding extrinsic rewards, Mohamed aims to fulfill the diverse fantasies of players, ensuring that the core loop of a game not only captivates but also scales effectively to maintain interest over time.
This approach emphasizes quick iteration and the ability to make informed decisions rapidly.
“Once you have lots of simulation data, you can begin to write a long report…But actually, we started to use Machinations for smaller design challenges and it’s been very useful for us.” Mohamed adds, highlighting the efficiency and practicality of Machinations in their workflow.
From pre-production to live Ops
In leveraging Machinations, Mohamed navigates the complexities of game development across different stages—pre-production, production, and live operations—each with its unique demands.
For instance, in pre-production, Machinations aids in prototyping by allowing for the exploration of various game economy scenarios and system interactions without the need for full development, speeding up the iteration process.
As games move into production and live operations, the focus shifts towards refining these systems and ensuring content delivery keeps pace with player expectations.
Here, Machinations plays a vital role in enabling rapid iterations and adjustments based on simulated outcomes, helping to avoid the product-market mismatches that can occur when a game’s mechanics fail to meet player needs
Boosting Design Confidence
Integrating Machinations has significantly affected Animoca Brands’ design and development processes.
“Machinations definitely gives validation and confidence to the rest of the development team once they see the simulation results”
Points out, Mohamed, illustrating the positive impact on the design team’s confidence and decision-making process. Moreover, Machinations has enabled Animoca Brands to rapidly adapt and refine designs.
Mohamed also highlights the transformative impact of Machinations in providing validation and bolstering the confidence of game designers at Animoca Brands.
By leveraging the tool’s simulation capabilities, the team can thoroughly understand the financial implications of various design decisions, allowing them to quantify the cost differences and potential revenue impacts of these choices over time. This insight is particularly crucial in the web3 space, where the economic dynamics can significantly influence the overall success of a project.
