Andrew Sheppard speaking at Casual Connect Seattle

2:00 PM -- Designing, Balancing, and Managing Virtual Economies
With economies of virtual items & currencies (aka "microtransactions") having been established as the revenue growth engine for online games with frightening speed, we're all wishing we'd paid a lot more attention in those college Economics & Statistics courses. Apparently, the visionaries who planned our Liberal Arts curriculum saw this coming, but we were too myopic (or perhaps too, um, hungover) to recognize it. Well, now we know, and so we really can use this panel of experts to help us put in context the questions we never thought we would ask, but nonetheless have started to. Questions like: If a 2% paying customer base is good and a 5% customer population is great, how do I take gameplay developed in an 'everybody pays' business model and make it profitable at the lower customer percentage? Millions of people are playing my Flash games, and no one's paying more than tip money - what's going on! How often should I be modifying prices on items? I have a huge surplus of unspent currency, is this bad? What do I do about it? How do I define and measure key economic indicators in my economy?
Panelists:

• Craig Sherman, CEO Gaia Online
• Andrew Sheppard, Executive Producer hi5 Networks
• Lisa Rutherford, VP of Strategy and Business Development Twofish