Basic Income, Better Living Through Video Games.

If we assume as given we'll eventually live in a society with a UBI (all eligible citizens receive an Unconditional Basic Income, enough to cover their food, clothing and shelter), then the most pressing question is: How should we roll it out?

Years of making Video Games suggest two quick answers:

The easy way is by lottery. Suppose Gary is a winner in the monthly UBI Lottery! Congrats Gary! Gary no longer has to deal with our mess of confusing taxation and welfare regulations. He wins a much simplified UBI and a flat tax. Of course, any change can be scary and difficult, so Gary also has the option to just stick with the old system if he wants.

More interesting is the notion of a Dual Currency. It's a little bit like enrolling in the food stamp program, where he's issued with tokens that can be exchanged for food items at a 1-1 ratio. In a food stamp program, those tokens would normally expire after a set period of time.

Food stamps are really old. Like, 1930's America old. We live in a digital world, so lets make those tokens work more like an energy mechanic in Candy Crush or League of Legends. Those tokens now accrue *continuously* rather than appearing all at once on a Thursday. We'll cap Gary's balance at a maximum of 1 months worth of tokens. Any balance more than 2 weeks of tokens would also have a penalty applied.

Finally pricing. Staples like bread, milk, laundry detergent and cleaning supplies will have a heavily discounted price when purchased using tokens. Healthy options like fruit and vegetables too. Fast food and chocolates might have a premium pricing attached. Lets make it easier for Gary to make good decisions.

Analytics

If you happen to live in a certain North European Country, in the wee hours of this morning, ScooterBoy went live!!

That's right, you can now download ScooterBoy, for free!!  (with certain geographical restrictions.)

"But why can't I download it??!" I hear you ask.

Well, you see, it works like this :

We want to make the best release possible in the largest market.

 ➡  The best way to do that is to use feedback from real live customers to improve the game.

 ➡  Where best to get those customers? Yes! From a certain Northern European Country!

Analytics

Now our analytics takes over.  How many downloads will we get? How long will players play? Which level and characters do they play the most? How quickly do they earn currency? What's their favorite IAP (In-App Purchase). What does our retention look like? Where does the game crash?

We can turn all these questions into metrics, then apply those metrics to our game.

We will compare our numbers to our expectations, and then see which numbers we want to improve.

What If?

The next step is to play the "What-if" game.  For example, suppose we make the decision we want to increase player retention:

• What if we had more characters?
• What if we had more levels?
• What if the game were harder? easier?
• What if we gave a bonus for playing every day?
• What if we had daily challenges?
• What if we highlight the leaderboard?

Soft Launch

Exciting times for ScooterBoy!  And lots of geek-out points writing queries in SQL to try and turn a mountain of data into usable information.

We can't wait to make ScooterBoy even bigger and release in more markets!

...watch this space...