Game Economist Cast
What does the new wave of open economies mean for monetization? Will negative externalities overcome cosmetics economies in the long run? What exactly does a game economist do?
Game Economist Cast is a roundtable discussion of the latest developments in mobile, HD, and crypto games through a bunch of people figuring it out using the economic tool kit.
Game Economist Cast
E23: Four Game Economists Walk into a Social Casino (w/Dr.Matt Melnyk)
Matthew Melnyk joins the crew to finally tell us what's social about social casinos. Eric discovers a genre outside of CCG roguelikes...Psych, this time, it's Cobalt Core. Chris bends the supply survey backward to explain progression windfalls, while Phil tries to connect the dots between leaderboards and auction systems.
Is that green tea? So this is not how you consume your tea. My wife got me a Stanley or this is her back-up, and a.
Speaker 2:Yamaha, you jumped on the Stanley train.
Speaker 1:I'm a Mr 64 ounce now.
Speaker 3:Big gulp of green tea.
Speaker 1:The behavioral stuff works.
Speaker 3:What behavioral stuff does the big gulp do?
Speaker 1:I think it's. You could argue about serving size. You consume more because marginal cost is less, because you don't have to refill.
Speaker 3:Let's start with utility. I don't understand what it even means.
Speaker 4:Everybody has some kind of utils in their head that they're calibrated.
Speaker 2:There's hardly anything that hasn't been used for money.
Speaker 3:In fact, there may be a fundamental problem in modeling when we want to model.
Speaker 1:Episode 23 of the Game Economist cast. The crew is back after negligently skipping a week, I would say. Duty calls are real jobs, but we are back in the saddle, and not only have we arrived ourselves, we have brought a guest with us. I am proud to present someone we've been trying to get on the cast for a really long time. Matt, welcome to the cast. Thanks for having me on. Do you mind telling us where you're working, who you are a little bit? You're obviously a Game Economist. Thank God we finally got one of those on. I know we've been lacking them.
Speaker 2:Well, no, I do. User acquisition and marketing. Yeah, I'm a Game Economist for a social casino recently acquired by Hard Rock Digital.
Speaker 4:Are you allowed to sit yeah?
Speaker 2:Right now the big guy is a Niferland casino in all shops now.
Speaker 1:We have been dying to talk about social casino, which I don't think anyone understood or cared to understand before melopoly go. And I say that for shame on us, because it's been like an enormous genre on mobile but not in HD, which is interesting. There isn't a lot of social casino, pc console.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I think it just lends itself to a more smaller experience or more isolated experience. You go and play slots with your friends. Uno was big on Xbox 360. Oh.
Speaker 4:I remember that that was way back in the day.
Speaker 1:That's interesting.
Speaker 4:You don't play casino, you don't play slots with your friends, but you would play Blackjack or poker or something with your friends. I'm curious why. Why is that the case? I just picture a bunch of lonely people in the gas station playing slots in Illinois.
Speaker 2:Are gas stations full of slots in Illinois? I don't know.
Speaker 4:They are. They just pass some local laws and now there's a slot machine in every corner.
Speaker 1:They have this in Europe quite a bit too. In Spain, if you go to a lot of bars, there's a slots machine, usually in the corner of these random mom and pop shops.
Speaker 2:Yeah, going to the non-communal experience of it all, it's just like with Blackjack. You could argue that what the person before you does could affect the part that you get. And there's strategy to discuss there, where most slot machines are a random number generator that outputs some amount of coins based on what you put in, and so there's not really much I can say, oh no, you should double your back because you're clueless on a hot streak. That's just gambler psychology for the most part. So can someone?
Speaker 3:explain the social aspect of social casino. I played a bit of Dicestreams and looked at Monopoly Go. It doesn't seem very social to me Like why do they call it social casino?
Speaker 2:You're not gambling with real money.
Speaker 3:Oh, but you're supposed to be gambling with real money.
Speaker 2:That's not very social and a lot of these games have also implemented like plan or team events where you get rewards for other people making progress or playing the game. So in our game we have plans that you guys team up and triggering certain events in the slots or new points, and where it's the most points each week Whichever team gets the most points it's a bigger prize, is that like a big part of the game, like a big draw and motivator for players?
Speaker 2:All right. Yeah, the plan has been a huge draw or huge motivator for playing, because it creates a very big peer pressure effect. I played a bit myself and some of the clients I have joined with people who didn't know that I was an internal user would set quotas or demand certain expectations of production from their players.
Speaker 1:That makes sense that they're monitoring. They're basically trying to solve the principal agent problem themselves. Yeah, to an extent.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I heard about Clash of Clans groups doing this, but yeah, I guess it makes sense. You've got 15 slots in your clan. You want to make sure every slot is being used optimally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you don't want people free riding, because the prize is shared between everybody. And you don't want to waste it on somebody who, when there could be someone else producing better for you.
Speaker 1:Do they have enforcement mechanics? How do they know who's producing and who's not?
Speaker 2:You can see how many points three people earned so far for the week, and then you can kick users out if they don't meet your standards. If you're a leader, Interesting.
Speaker 1:That makes a lot of sense to me. But before we dive into these things and talk more about what Matt's been up to and Matt's journey into this wild and wild, crazy world of games, let's talk about what we've been playing.
Speaker 3:Got a selection of good things on sale stranger.
Speaker 1:Matt, what have you been up to? What have you been playing? You can be mildly disappointed.
Speaker 2:I've been playing with this niche app called Never Letta Casino a bit on brand. I also have been playing a bit of Monopoly Go. I'm starting to lose a little bit of joy with it. They need to do something more interesting, because magic's starting to wear off and I'm hitting a wall with it.
Speaker 1:What is the magic? What is the magic, yeah, what is the magic that's wearing off?
Speaker 2:So like when I first started playing the game. It was getting the dollars to build go to the next stage, and then that just felt meaningless after a while. So that became like those bi-daily, every three-day missions go around the board, fill up the bars, get rewards for doing that, so they don't have any meta progression or it's not captivating enough.
Speaker 1:There's not enough. There's Ethan Levy, who was on Dig Instructor Fun, talking about Tower of Want and how you're trying to build layers on a Tower of Want. You're trying to build floors. I want this because I want this, because I want this. Yeah, and when I played Social Casino, it sounds like you guys just don't have a lot of floors.
Speaker 2:And the expression Monopoly Go is running out of things for the next one. Like they always have bars that you can fill up, but their major events have started to become repetitive and their daily stuff is just also starting to feel the same-ish. It's saving grace right now is that my three-year-old daughter enjoys playing it with me right now. She likes to watch the dice go. Start them young, get them gambling. There'll be no consequences to that whatsoever.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I played a bunch of a bit of Dice Dreams, which is another Social Casino game, I think, and it seemed to be all about the progression. It was almost like Cookie Clicker, except the progression was RNG-based instead of yeah, and because the core gameplay is hit the RNG button and then a series of things happen because of that yeah, and so I imagine these games are super heavy on that meta progression. Oh, you level up to unlock this thing that unlocks this new town, which unlocks a new type of dice you can roll, which you know, monopoly Go is definitely based on that.
Speaker 2:If you're talking about more general slot schemes and their meta or something like what Neverland has, you'd have the variety of machines there, so the different types of slot machines that you can play.
Speaker 3:And is the variety mostly thematic or mechanical, as well, yeah, like the features within the game.
Speaker 2:So some games have progressive jackpot, some games don't. Some games have a respin feature, some games have a free spin feature, some games will trigger a pick three event. So you can get variety in casual slots games vis-a-vis what's in the slot itself and that's an industry that has been running for a century now that you can just convert digitally to get real variety to go in there. So you can get lots of at least variety from that standpoint To users just find their slot, though, and they're just into it.
Speaker 1:There isn't. Is there real agency? So I guess, like I have a choice of slots. What is the economic model for a player choosing which slot they like the most? Wouldn't it just be like maximizing your expected payout? Is there more to it?
Speaker 2:Yes, there's a lot of gambos, logic going on there, which necessarily isn't the most real logic. Some social casino games will have these slots are hot, which might mean nothing, or might mean the opposite of what they mean. I don't know, I don't. And sometimes people will enter a game, spin three times and be like peace and then go to another game just because they're either not feeling it or so you really like. You know you do find that players will settle on the ones that they like every now and then, and then sometimes you can also have kind of game features guide them towards specific ones.
Speaker 2:In Neverland Casino Check it on the App Store now the Clam games really have 10 Clam games going at a time during the day. So out of the 150 plus games that we have, only 10 of them can earn points towards your client at a specific time. So there's a lot of meta around that about which one people feel earn Clam points better for them and how, if they want a bit higher, lower that longer. I believe it's spinning overnight, whatever. That's its own meta in itself where people go like, okay, with 10 games, I'm going to play this one a bunch for this stage. And since those 10 games don't stay the same, and sometimes we add a new games to it that can switch things up completely. So there you're, looking at point payout versus high volatility versus low point payout, and what do you want as a user at that point versus? Also, what do you think is a slot hot or is it slot cold? Is it robbing me?
Speaker 4:Do you play? Do you play for because it's a game, that it's a genre you enjoy playing, or are you playing it because it's your game, you're like?
Speaker 2:testing it out, trying to get. I am a bad gambler.
Speaker 2:I think all people are bad gamblers. So I don't think I would be playing social casino games if I wasn't employed in the industry itself. Especially some of them, some specifically I don't always enjoy the, the animation or graphics that just go into their, into their slots. They just feel very static or look at so from like a Slots experience. I don't enjoy them and then, as a person who is very bad at managing their balance, I would usually last very long in some of them.
Speaker 3:So what yeah, what non Casino games do you play on your free time?
Speaker 2:I used to play a lot more of Non-casino games only spare time, and then I had a kid and played dealing with a two-year-old drunk over. But when I'm playing now, that's not a casino game. Would be binding of Isaac, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:The new hot new gate that everyone's talking about. Classic. I can basically only play things on my switch because the TV is always occupied by somebody who isn't me, and Binding of Isaac has just been the gift the cubes I'm given man, the steam deck is built for you specifically, matt.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're gonna pick one up. I am.
Speaker 2:I am one paycheck away from just buying the bucket on that and Going in with it, because, yeah, I have a huge backlog. Always seem count as well.
Speaker 1:It's an incredibly impressive device. I got one back here and dummy wrong. It's like collecting dust next to my switch because the thing is it's just cumbersome to bring anywhere. But technically the thing is impressive. I put spider-man on it and it runs at a solid 30 frames. I was like shocked.
Speaker 4:I've been wanting to get something that's mobile but bigger than like my phone, because my big thing is I don't like to play on my PC, because I'm on my PC all day for work. It's great. I just finished like 10 hours sitting and staring at a screen. I'm gonna go like sit and stare at the same screen for the same you know times. I want something new. This is especially become relevant for like chess. Like I want an iPad or something I was gonna say, just get a tablet but then I feel stupid for getting a tablet.
Speaker 4:I have an iPhone 7. I don't think I should get a tablet before upgrade, before upgrading my phone.
Speaker 1:Tell me you don't work in mobile gaming without telling me you don't work in mobile gaming. But.
Speaker 3:I've been playing steam link actually on my iPad. It's just like a discount steam deck like I can for like turn-based strategy games. It works totally fine because you don't have to worry about latency or anything.
Speaker 4:Is it an emulator or something?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it plays the game on your computer and your computer streams it to your tablet. Oh, okay, and then you can mouse click just by tapping on the tablet cloud gaming. So local cloud gaming, wi-fi gaming.
Speaker 1:Wi-Fi 6 gaming. Eric, what are you been playing on that tablet?
Speaker 3:I'm been playing cobalt core on my computer stream to my tablet. It's uh, it's like another deck-billed or roguelike. It's slay the spire, but with spaceships I don't feel like, don't have too much to say about it. If you like slay the spire and you like FTL, you probably don't like it. It's not as deep as slay the spire. I feel like a lot of these work. When you're talking about binding of Isaac, I think a lot of the legacy ones get to the point where the richness of the mechanics and the relics and the variety of Combinations you can create is just so much deeper than any new one that comes out that, like the new one just feels really shallow.
Speaker 4:The old one.
Speaker 3:I definitely had that experience with this, comparing it to slay the spire, but this one.
Speaker 4:Eric, you should try out like a TCG deck builder, like something that you actually not TCG but CCG like you.
Speaker 4:You buy it, set it up there's. I don't know if I talked about on this podcast, but there's one called it's behind me so I just need to look at it and I was like I'm not gonna remember it and then I was like, oh, it's right there. That's probably one of the most popular kind of don't know if I would call it a roguelike, but it is a deck builder and there is some progression to it and there's a bunch of different versions. But I'd be curious what you thought about that, because you were just talking about depth and I feel like with slay the spire, because I was introduced to roguelike card games or deck builders through board games I feel like any video game version is just so smooth, simple, so not deep, and it's mostly because I don't have to around with the components and make sure that my life chips are like in a nice neat pile. I don't know, I should definitely check one of those out, probably a $30 game.
Speaker 3:Is there a digital version? I don't want to fuck around with life chips either.
Speaker 4:Let's see how is board gaming gonna win. My dream was always to start a board game podcast, but if the industry dies, we'll never be able to anyway.
Speaker 3:I do think there's one thing I want to point out, which is, like Steam has all these features that I feel like nobody uses. Like they've got this streaming thing we can stream the games to your, like mobile devices. They've got like remote flight, where one person can boot up a game and simulate, like stream the multiplayer game to other people To simulate couch co-op, and only one person needs to copy the game, and I feel I don't hear about anyone ever using these features because because valve has always been a research firm that does things for their Own shits and giggles.
Speaker 1:Remember big picture mode? That was hot for a while. Remember steam OS? They were gonna have all these Linux boxes. You have the standalone Linux boxes. They signed up some PC manufacturers to even go that far and, to be fair, some of these technologies did propel forward the Steam deck. If you end up buying it can actually boot Linux by default. It actually just runs Linux like you can go into the steam deck and you can say reboot as Linux and it just gives you a desktop. So you can have a laptop with you. That's on the steam deck, that's native. That doesn't require any additional Kit and Kaboodle and then you can run steam on the desktop.
Speaker 4:What's so weird is I'm not a hundred, I don't really know if Alves business as well, but like they don't make their money from that experimentation, though, don't they just make their money from three games? Yep, and the steam face seems weird, like it's.
Speaker 3:I think the hypothesis is, if you make the whole all these features to steam is a better marketplace, people will stay to steam instead of Gog or whatever, because you can remote play with a friend.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they got the platform right. Like Crouching I'm a.
Speaker 4:I'm boycotting steam because they don't like.
Speaker 1:What three games hey well, there's some web three games that have started to show up there. Oh really, yeah, I'm actually curious which one.
Speaker 3:I thought they had a hard no, and that's what I thought.
Speaker 4:If you had NFTs, you were like so everyone's starting to go.
Speaker 1:I was the one I actually consulted with them digital collection game. Jesus, they don't have web three built into them, but you can put it. You can put a skew on the store. That's web three. There's like an MMO I worked on recently because that would be.
Speaker 4:That's the big thing, I think, holding back the industry. But three, I'm gonna try this cobalt game related related closely to the roguelike conversation.
Speaker 1:I've been playing a game that I actually consulted on a really long time ago called cipher, from a studio in Vietnam which has been an absolute blast work on. It is right now on mobile. It is a dungeon crawler action RPG with web three and they are going to do a PC skew and a console skew, I believe in the future, but right now they're focusing on the mobile skew. It's been getting a lot of attention. I Surprise, surprise, the token is up, but this is a real product. There's actually a real product behind this, and what we were trying to solve in this game was something that I think has really Dogged a lot of roguelikes that have tried to have live service components, which is how do you connect the in-round progression that roguelikes have to monetization, which can be super challenging, and particularly when you layer on a dungeon crawler element, so that to me there's been a huge space in between, let's say, diablo and, let's say, another roguelike slay the spire? How do you drop the connective tissue between having this consistent out-of-round progression where you're getting higher and higher gear score With roguelikes, which are always about theory crafting in the moment, and the solution we came to in Cypher, which you can play right now, is that each of your pieces of gear have Cards, or what we call boosts, in the game. Logic and what happens is when you're playing through the game, when you get to those Hades style rooms and you clear room and you have a choice of which abilities you would like to use, those abilities are actually drawn from your deck randomly. You get a choice of three abilities that are drawn from that deck. So when you've attached all pieces of gear to your character, you've actually formed a deck and a lot of the deck Modification from doing the traditional things you would in a squad RPG or in an action RPG Rerolling stats essentially is rerolling cards, and sometimes a particular piece of gear will have a particular card associated with it and some gear slots might represent three cards and other gear slots might represent two cards.
Speaker 1:There is a mana system as well, but you can't actually gain mana in game. You get a flat amount of mana with each choice. So there's a lot of control over the in-round economy. But to me it's been one of the first real attempts to connect some of these roguelike elements with some out-of-round Progression directly. I've been having a blast. I think the team did really well and it's still early, but I look forward to them killing it and Vietnam's on the rise. I call it turkey 2.0, turkey. Turkey is already on the rise itself after dream games, but I think Vietnam might be the next game development hotspot. That's awesome.
Speaker 3:I've always been going on about how roguelikes someone needs to crack monetization roguelikes. Yeah, I'm pretty excited to check it out. I worry that the logical end state is to make the most consistent, efficient deck that always gives you the same perks, right, just like how magic players just you get 60 cards, let's just make it draw these three cards over and over. Super done to check it out.
Speaker 1:The thing I keep going back to as I've gotten back into Marvel snap against my own will, is the lane system has stuck out to me as one of that game's core innovations. The whole point of roguelikes is, I would argue, theory crafting. And especially CCG's is like theory crafting. So taking a giving set of cards and saying, okay, what is the theory I can craft with the set of tools I've been given, how creative can I get? And it can be rather boring if you have the same deck over and over again. You're just playing the same note and roguelikes are like you have to think on the fly. That's why drafting, I would argue, so peeling especially to this group in particular.
Speaker 1:And I think what I really came around to with lanes and in Marvel snap is how they basically have forced that on everyone.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna really aggressive in interesting way. So remember, in Marvel snap there are lanes and you place cards into those lanes and those lanes all have abilities and the first three turns, each n plus one turn, they'll flip one of the lanes. The lanes have such like deep effects on how the game is played that the entire game becomes about you solving how the lanes resolution mechanic interfaces with your deck, so one of the lanes might be that cards that cost one have plus five power or Exchange hands with your opponent, or you draw cards from your opponent's deck, or the game is seven turns instead of six turns and like how beautiful that mechanic is and I don't think we've really Betted or imbued the lesson of how beautiful that is and how it keeps the game fresh and how it keeps every game fresh because you're interfacing your cards with those lanes in a new way every single time and so the theory crafting always feels fresh, if that makes sense.
Speaker 4:Phil, can you repeat what the car, the card mechanic in cipher? So you've got these like characters. It's not an extraction shooter, right? It's like a. It's an AIPG, okay. Okay, like Hades. It's very similar to Hades, but so how does the card mechanic work? The cards are the like the NFT part, that's like the web three part so each.
Speaker 1:So in a traditional action RPG like Diablo, you have different pieces of gear that are associated with different parts of your character, so, like a head slot, legs, arms and that's the case here as well and you'll earn and equip those out of rounds to your character. Each of those gear slots in and of itself has what it's called Boosts, but are essentially cards associated with it. So the head slot, I believe, has two cards that are associated with it, and so each head slot, or each gear that goes on the head, will have two different cards with it. Now you can sometimes recraft those cards, you can upgrade them. There's a lot of shenanigans that goes on in terms of the progressive elements, but that's how your deck is formed. It's the collection of all the cards that are associated with your piece.
Speaker 4:So the combat system is a card game the combat system is real-time action.
Speaker 1:So you're going into the game, you're shooting up a bunch of enemies, like you would in Hades or you like you would in Diablo, and then you you've cleared a room, very much similar to the Hades model, and After you've cleared that room, you get a choice of abilities, very similar to a rope, like you get three abilities you can choose from, and those three abilities are Randomly drawn from your deck.
Speaker 4:Okay, oh, okay. So you're trying to build a deck. That's interesting. So how big are the decks? I'm so two pieces per so ten cards.
Speaker 1:No, I think it's closer to 20. I forget that. I forget the top of my head.
Speaker 4:But that's interesting. So are the cards. Like the? I'm trying to figure out the. Like the web three side. It sounds like an interesting game in its own right, but people always that and I asked this to people when I'm learning about a new game it's okay, that's cool. Like, why web three? Like, why did you block five blockchain of hi this? What's the point?
Speaker 1:I don't know if you have the answer to that so Diablo proved that I think there's a secondary market that's available. When you go back and you look at Diablo 3 story, it's usually like the caution that web three likes to throw it. Everyone is like, hey, diablo failed. And when you go back and you look at the story, it's did Diablo 3 actually fail when they had a secondary marketplace? Was it is actually bad, as people said it was, and you never really have gotten an answer.
Speaker 1:When you look at the mainstream press articles and every Time I've tried to I've worked with someone who's been on that Diablo team that launched the Diablo 3 marketplace I've always tried to pin them down and try to understand what actually happened. And for those that are unfamiliar, diablo 3 launched with a real money auction house. At one point they eventually shut it down and when you go back and you look at the GDC talk they gave about why they launched the marketplace, succeeded in solving all the problems they want it to solve. For instance, they didn't want any black market sales of accounts. That was very popular in Diablo. So someone get to the maximum level and they would sell their account and their password on a secondary marketplace, which was really sketchy. People are getting scammed. They didn't really like that.
Speaker 1:I have a blog post somewhere about this, but you go through that GDC talk and all the things that they were trying to solve with the marketplace solved all those problems. The issue was the same issues we've seen in web 3, which is people mine a bunch of different items they sell on the marketplace. They can drive price down. I don't think they had a lot of good gating of saying this item goes for this person or you have to be level 60 to use this. That's something that requires a lot of management and especially when you have the ability to earn real-world money, like botting, becomes an enormous issue and you've got to figure out how you want to solve that. And, chris, you and I were talking about this earlier this week. As a KYC your customer, you're going to do identity verification, but there's a lot that goes on there.
Speaker 4:And you can imagine a scenario where you don't even need, like it could just be real players. But if you're talking about every person needs, like these 20 items that don't have any durability, like everybody's eventually gonna get to their study state, which is why I've always found like a single player RPG to be like an awkward. An awkward use case. Obviously, you're gonna have gyms, you're gonna have different like items that are burnt up, but one of the only item so far that doesn't get burnt like in Star Atlas, that doesn't get destroyed over time, is the ship, and Eventually we want ships to be destroyed and that's honestly that's like our primary way that we keep this market really well lubricated Is. There's just always churn, resources are constantly being burned through. So, yeah, that's a really interesting story still so long-run problem for Cypher.
Speaker 1:I think the thing that you find in a lot of these kind of diablo like games is that collection is key. Players love collecting, they love different pieces of gear, they love nerding out about their different builds, and so I think there's a wide variety of demands, and I think that makes trading Really useful for players, makes it fun, because there's RNG as well, and so you have almost a random distribution of loot, and so that isn't probably the most optimal Equilibria, and so you can achieve a more optimal if you allow players to trade.
Speaker 4:I talked to a company actually this was a while ago, but it's like consultancy for them and one of the things that they they wanted was like this, like unique gear, like oh, it's gonna, it's gonna look cool, and the thing that I emphasized with them was like, just have lots and lots of variety and you need a reason for different people to Need different stuff, because this stuff is gonna be distributed randomly and you don't want it to be the case that Joe gets everything he wants when he's getting this random loot drop. So, yeah, it's totally agree with that. I think it could, I think it can. You could still have a Fluorishing market, just purely because of the collector's aspect. Should we skip me, since we're going a little long? Yeah, I don't know, because I haven't really been playing anything more chess for me. Yeah, it's okay, I'm addicted to chess, chad check checkmate.
Speaker 1:There's gotta be. Puns involves mad. You're on the cast. We're so happy to have you here. Before we dig into more social casino stuff, because we're all biting Chomping at the bit, we'd love to hear a little bit more about how you got involved in the mess of the game industry, because you used to be a sane individual who was doing a PhD in economics. What went wrong?
Speaker 2:I was a sane individual. I was doing a PhD in economics, so those two don't make terrible mistake. I was goal sick of it and decided I wanted to do something different. And then I made the mistake of a breathing. So that didn't help either, and the pay scale a PhD candidate is not really aligned with trying to raise a child in Toronto. So I just kind of threw a bunch of resumes out there and suddenly got accepted being a game economist at a small 50-person start company that was had a relatively stable product going at the time.
Speaker 1:What were you doing? Well, let me tell me blab. Yeah. What were you doing your dissertation on? Tell us about your field.
Speaker 2:So give it as a micro economist, so duh duh, the better one, micro or micro.
Speaker 1:We don't let macro on here.
Speaker 2:I was a labor as was applied. Yeah, part.
Speaker 4:Nice.
Speaker 2:So was I. So I was doing a bit of work on marriage matching, so two-dimensional matching, and using cognitive and non-cognitive skill measures, matching along those lines up the workplace and at home, and put the trade off between the two of them to Try to explain the distribution in the marriage and place market. So there is it. What did you find Cognitive skill? What did you find? Nothing good enough to get done in a quick enough manner.
Speaker 4:So is it like substitutes and compliments? If you ask, that's they?
Speaker 2:compliment on both lines. At home, your cognitive and non-cognitive skills are agreeable with each other, but in the labor market, only really managers need to have the social skills in order to manage their workers. If you're below a certain threshold, you're just a employee, and if you're above a certain one you become a manager. But then, when it came to the marriage market, they're substitutes, as you could make up for one coming with the other interesting.
Speaker 4:So it's like hyper effective people are less likely to get married because they don't have any gaps that need to be filled and they're like suite of skills that might be kind of like the next main point.
Speaker 2:I never quite got working well enough to explain things as well as my supervisor would have liked.
Speaker 4:So what's the seminal model for that? Like the Becker model.
Speaker 2:I was using something that my supervisor was trying to push at the time, which again probably why I didn't quite go as well as I would have liked. Yeah, and so there's that, and then another chapter was gonna be super depressing, not? Games related at all but involved childhood sexual assault and the long-term implications of that dude which PhD.
Speaker 4:It was a heavy dissertation.
Speaker 2:It was. None of the stuff was really like fun about that and so that didn't help either. Like the gold press there's too, because I chose, maybe, a topic. There's a little bit too heavy there.
Speaker 3:Hey, surprise, that's a micro econ topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah it's the impact. I looked at such positive things such as like test scores and wage impacts down the line.
Speaker 4:Everything's a micro topic here. I really everything yeah.
Speaker 1:Freakonomics. We wrote the book man.
Speaker 1:So, they're talking about. I do have a question for both you and for Chris a very closely labor economics and very close to the social casino. So the thing that's always I spend maybe too much time thinking about is the backward bending supply curve in labor econ. So at some point you just get so much per unit of output you start outputting less because, hey, I've earned the wage I need to earn, which is very strange. Yes, it's true. Like supply curves don't always need to slope upwards. Demand curves do, but supply curves don't. So I was thinking about it in the context of social casino. Because you can have windfalls, right, you can have unexpected increases and well, do we see backward bending supply curves in games? So if you have an unexpected increase in, well, in a social casino game, you get a big jackpot. Did people play less of the theory, right, that we would expect them to play less if they have a jackpot? Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen.
Speaker 4:That doesn't real money right. This is just because that'd be like, if I don't know, I was playing chess, for example, and I like got an awesome checkmate, I don't know like it's more like you're winning than anything else. The backward bending supply curve is more so about it's more so, more so about the marginal benefit, right, the marginal wage like each additional hour as opposed to a fixed amount of income. I never really got super into labor supply curves. I did a teeny bit of work on like gender pay gaps, and you do start to talk about that in the gender pay gap literature.
Speaker 1:So let me rephrase the question then. So let's assume we're thinking about just games in general and we're thinking about, like, hard currency. Assume that's a currency that buys a bunch of other currencies and games. Let's assume I gave players in these games infinite amounts of hard currency, or let's say 10 million dollars worth of hard currency. We'd expect them to play less because of that 10 million units of hard currency, right? Or do we think that is an improper application of this theory?
Speaker 2:So it depends on I think there's what is the impact of keeping them all that currency is. I like it when people make purchases because it creates an investment within the game. So if you're giving them 10 million dollars in hard currency and they don't need to make a purchase, then you're gonna have probably increased drop off because there's no stakes for them at all.
Speaker 4:But at the same time, they got all this currency the same thing, all currency, so marketing super happy. Interesting. It's once they burn through all the content. That it's like what happens if you reduce costs to zero of playing the game and I don't know like you get through all the content and then, when you give up, the whole point of making things cost money is to Spread it out as long as possible.
Speaker 1:So you would predict short run increases in engagement, but long run decreases in engagement because they've they'll extinguish the content faster me, or I think that's right.
Speaker 2:I think so, yeah, I think you might even see a decrease in short run too, because I said there's a lower sense of investment from the player side, because none of this matters at 10 billion currency and I just blew like a million.
Speaker 4:Phil, I do think, like you could probably just, you could probably just use the direct analogy. You don't even need to say like a windfall, you could just say what happens if you're playing an MMO and all of a sudden the XP per second goes up to 30%. Like the amount of effort you have to put in order to get to level 100 is less. So I agree with you, there is a backward bending, because I think that's maybe what you're getting at and I definitely think so. Backward bending spike her for, like XP or progression in games.
Speaker 1:Isn't that kind of necessarily, isn't that kind of? What this, the backward bending supply curve, represents is like you've reached the end game.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think that's the key distinction between real life and a video game. Right, there's a finite quantity of Stuff in any video game and there's an infinite quantity of stuff in a real video game Like. The reason it's so hard to make like a balanced video game is because life is probably not Invalent or not super in balance. It just doesn't feel like that because it's so fucking slow, like who knows what the like long-term looks like. Like maybe we run out of copper before we run out of hydrogen or something like that, and in a video game that would happen because people are like super speed, because nobody wants to play a boring, slow video game. The first place you worked at, how much you worked there, and then what made you go to the next thing.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, I'm still or fortunately, oh, that is the same place. It's the same place. You guys were acquired, that's awesome, we got bought out yeah.
Speaker 4:Oh, that's sweet.
Speaker 2:It was a interesting year building up, that I can say, to say the least.
Speaker 3:And what kind of games you? You said never lands, never like Peter Pan.
Speaker 2:It's. That's mostly like I wasn't there for the setup of all that stuff. That was that's how I came into the. That was their lead product when I entered the uh, but like a forest.
Speaker 2:Magical the other can't see. They used to have real money Sweepstakes that engaged or helped with user retention, where you play through a little journey, which was a bunch of games with specific challenges involved in them, and you get coins that would get you a key. They'll let you unlock a chest in Neverland. They would let you get a ticket to spin a wheel where you get real cash prizes. How's that?
Speaker 1:for a tower of one motherfucker.
Speaker 4:But that's not your game, right? No, that was our game. Oh really, Okay.
Speaker 2:So so I thought you said social meant there was no money there you, so you have to make sure that no money is associated with paying to win the money, so you can have sweepstakes in there all you want all day long. One of the benefits to joining hard rock is we get to engage in their various Unity, which is their reward system promotions, and those are tied to something that, hopefully, for a legal standpoint, never involves the players having to spend money in order to get entries into.
Speaker 4:That's interesting, so I always forget the law here. Sweepstakes are okay, but you can't pay into a sweepstake right, correct and you should usually have.
Speaker 2:You should require an option, so you can just be like so how does the monetization work?
Speaker 4:Because clearly I'm assuming the retention mechanic. Here is the sweepstake.
Speaker 2:So sweepstakes was one of the retention plans. Like I said, I had nothing to do with the sweepstakes but always had strong competitive and thus retention component to it. But there's people who wait for the next sweepstakes come along, they play through our journey that we hoped covered enough of the legal guidelines at the time, that there is no no reason to think that there be any sort of upset from the various places where we offered it?
Speaker 2:we didn't offer it in some locations because of the legal requirements around those states or parts of the world.
Speaker 3:You Joined as a game economist fresh out of your grad school program. What parts of the game did you work on? Were you involved in? Like the tuning of the slots and the rewards, or more on the like macro level?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I was more of an outsider slots. To me, the slots have historically just been a black box Coins go in, coins go out. Maybe if I was trying to design a specific feature within the game, I would learn a bit more about this, that slot for that specific feature. So, but for the most part I was more focused on either meta game design, as I call it, or I call Everything but the slots themselves and the gameplay around designing and balancing that stuff and then making sure we're making enough revenue to meet.
Speaker 4:So what is the, what's the primary spending mechanic here? If your spending is not linked to the earning thing, how do you convince people to spend money and how do you stay legally compliant?
Speaker 2:So, for the sweepstakes, how is it not the journey that they go through, which is they play like they go through a set of Different missions on each slot machine? Those were all designed around missions, with an expected number spins in order to complete it.
Speaker 2:So, everyone had the same number expected spins in order to get to the next token. That would then unlock them the chance to spin the wheel. So the actual progress was relatively independent of how high you bet, but you could see people try to min max at that. So if the trigger event to finish the mission was like spin a free spin, some people would keep their bet and a nice high level and just plays a normal would, and other people just drop their bet down to a Minimal and then wait for that trigger event to come and then get the next mission and you rely on more on making money off of group A versus the people of group B.
Speaker 2:So that's that that usually kept it very legal from a standpoint of the being spin based, number spin based as opposed to total bet and thus coin sink based and when our customers monetized, when do they like?
Speaker 4:at what stage of the process Do they get extra spins like I'm thinking of, like match three, where you get like bonus lives and stuff like this Well, so it was lots it's.
Speaker 2:You have a coin now, so you got to empty that coin balance in order to, in order for us to make money off of you. Some other games also have outhouses. I don't know if you've heard of those. There's heard of them. Okay any mechanic that you can see in another game and casual slots have tried to like just where.
Speaker 2:I'm in there and make it so. There's card collection, there's battle passes. There's I said there's the journey, which is the other games called quests, where you try to progress through a stage of different challenges. There's tournaments, where they're the last 10, 15 minutes, depending on what you're at, and whoever makes the most coin. It's an extra bonus on top of that. So there's all this out of game events that either you try to monetize players off of or Try to get them to continue to engage.
Speaker 4:I have one last question before before these guys jump in. So I'm really curious what the ARPU looks like for these types of games compared to traditional games. Imagine, since there's like a higher payoff or potential payoff, like ARPU would be Significantly, potentially significantly higher than like a cat, like a hyper casual game.
Speaker 2:Yeah, usually our food is on the higher end. Had Received cold-called emails or like like to get your ARPU up over at this and I'm like I don't think I've ever seen it that low. Okay, yeah, those next to the whales, they get very dedicated. Look at some people and they make purchases. I'm like you don't need to make a purchase, but good on you.
Speaker 3:I hear the UA costs are extremely high as well, like the CPIs or whatever. Yeah, and definitely hasn't gotten better.
Speaker 2:Luckily during the last year before our acquisition we didn't do a lot of UA, so I went really privy to all the complications that went into that.
Speaker 4:Why is that? Why is CPI so much higher?
Speaker 1:The revenue side and the cost, it's a very efficient market. If a user for $3, how much should you bid for them?
Speaker 4:Yeah, but it's still mobile gaming, so it shouldn't be. Why would it be so much more difficult to?
Speaker 1:It's very easy to arbitrage to zero to get MB equal to MC. This was almost a near perfect market a couple years. Oh, it's purely from competition.
Speaker 4:Yes, purely through, okay, Okay.
Speaker 1:I thought if I had a bit more time I was gonna create a list of potential slot games or real slot game names and I can tell you, if you make up a slots name, your slots company now, and the slot game probably or exists within the app store there was actually a great artist technique a piece a while back where someone was trying to take slots and this was before Gen AI and I'll see if I can find a link to it in the show notes but they literally just submitted the same slot scheme with a different skin and they did 10,000 versions of these and try to see how they monetize, which I thought was a really smart mechanic, really smart way to do this. Is anything wrong with that strategy? All the big Guys are doing so? I don't think so. Just varying, varying levels of, I think, deep integration. This was a very basic slots mechanic.
Speaker 1:It's like which thematic the best? Like a Barack Obama one? I'm shit it was a Barack Obama was like a duck one.
Speaker 3:You can I gotta?
Speaker 1:fucking find this for you guys it's. I've referenced this article so many times and it came out. The article was like a decade ago. It was an artist technique. I really remember.
Speaker 2:I distinctly remember but like you go to slots, like you go to the app store to come one of the big slots in there, I think the con see what else that company has produced. If you download any of those other games that are also slots, you'll find the exact same slot machines within it. All that looks different is like the code of paint over and maybe some of the features that makes a lot of sense to me.
Speaker 1:That's very similar in hypercasual things, yes, yes, but we don't need to throw shade at hypercasual here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good.
Speaker 1:It's basically a marketing game for hypercasual. It's fine. A core mechanic new paint, unlock demos that you wouldn't otherwise be able to unlock. The CPI shifts are crazy for making something more female-oriented or make some More male-oriented totally makes sense why slots would do this. So I've had another theory about why slots is high as high LTV. It's actually about spend velocity, or the rate at which you can spend currency. So when I think about a game like candy crush, it takes a lot of time for you to sink out the boosters that you would have or the extra moves, because it's correlated with engagement. So I only have an opportunity to use extra moves when I get to the end of a level, and so, naturally, is a correlation between how many end of levels will have and how much I spend. Or is there a social casino? Right, you can. You're constrained by exactly, and it's social casino. I can blow $100 worth of in-app purchase in a couple spins, right? Do you think that's the? Is that a fair explanation of some of the LTV? Is velocity different to?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, definitely if you're comparing against a little to match three game, both match three game. Like I said, you're always constrained by that need to use when in slots it's if you want to use it, if you want to make those big numbers bigger, make that higher.
Speaker 1:And a few months ago we raised our Mac that set and Helped a bit, because so there was a rule that there was a limit on IP skews you could have. I think it was like a hundred dollar IP skew at one point and they've increased that limit sense and they've increased the total amount of IP skews that you can have. Does it make sense to have a $200 or $300 or $1,000 hard currency skew?
Speaker 2:People know. I will say because that happened recently. We actually I played around with a bit last summer where I capped some of the purchase skews for some player, for some groups of players, especially because some of our very high value players like people. It's been then. You want to think we're complaining that the deal prices were too high. They're getting a better deal and they're probably on. I agree it's been in the last. It seemed like they became more aware of the price once you brought it over that cap and then some players got upset. Well, the devil is like oh, I want I don't have better lesson getting over a trillion coins in a bundle and so there's, like there's.
Speaker 4:Is it a purely like behavioral, like anchor point or something, or is there like a mechanical reason why they want to be above that?
Speaker 2:No, I think it's just a college, I think it's just a psychology thing. I don't know. It's the three dollar coffee that I purchased and 10 dollar coffee I might notice.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so I'm surprised, honestly, given what you work, obviously like I also worked in labor and I'm into new games, but it sounds like the perfect person for this would be like a behavioral economist or like an experimental economist, like fresh out of their PhD, who's just read up on all the latest like failure, price anchoring and stuff.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, like that person probably do a slightly better job. They credit.
Speaker 4:No, that's not what I'm saying, I've, it's just interesting. So, do you like, do you find yourself studying, like the more behavioral, like econ stuff, or do you just do you do any studying, do you?
Speaker 2:read papers. I tried to read papers when I can, but I don't have a lot of spare time. I don't mean as much as I'd like, but I'm every now and then. I try to pull up a paper here and there about now.
Speaker 1:Who plays social casino games? What is the demographic of someone who plays show casino? We're talking this at the top of our Eric and I were here. We'll play social casino older people for sure.
Speaker 2:I've seen enough play tests where they couldn't find it. It's button in the top right to close the damn window simple, you know I just wait.
Speaker 1:That seems to align with what in Vegas too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, excuse a little bit female, but it's 60, 40, a little bit more, probably right-lending. Who knows where they get their money.
Speaker 3:One thing I've noticed is there's some of these social casino games that are slots themed like it's three wheels spinning Do, do, do, do, do, do you know, get the payout. And some of them, like monopoly go, are Like not slots theme, they're like using other themes. It's the same underlying is the same thing. Yeah, I imagine like those probably hit different demographics, right Like I imagine the older players.
Speaker 2:Like the physical slots simulation so even I haven't done a lot of work on like. Even within our game we have different types of slots and can't rise them a bit. And the gamblers do like the more mechanical, older feeling slots, where the casual players like the more cartoon or action, anymore Flashy stuff, more monopoly go looking stuff. So you you probably see slightly demographics between those two, even though it's functionally very much the same thing with a different kind of paint.
Speaker 3:Are you seeing a shift in the genre of like people moving more towards the like non traditional slots?
Speaker 2:Not really, because those, like the biggest spenders are always gonna be the more traditional gamblers by some measure. So the people who are spending money and staying around the long distance are always gonna lean towards those small things. But the new stuff's always exciting for this little moment.
Speaker 4:So are. Are people like moving from physical casinos to online casinos? And then the other question I have is are you worried about, is that industry worried about this aging population? Is the average age increasing, median age increasing? Or is it just that as I turn from 39 to 40 or 49 to 50? I become it like a social casino gambler, like how's that? I?
Speaker 2:don't know if you're morning and you're just like Spin by, go hit the casino. It's happened to me. They are worried about as much as apparently they're buying right like they're buying into it. But you also see, like I said, real casinos, real slots. I'm showing up in app stores where they can and draft kings and those other real betting other aspects of the casino Starting to show up where they can on the mobile. Yeah, hard rock bets just launched in Florida last December.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I wanted to get your take on sports betting later. Sports.
Speaker 2:I don't know if I have a deep well of knowledge there.
Speaker 1:But all of this cast you don't need to be probably just hot takes math.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, just 90% of the time we just talked about shit we don't know anything about and we just we get hate mail.
Speaker 2:No, I don't think they they overlap as much as everyone wants them to overlap. I think you get a hardcore, casual slots player. They're probably playing at home, waiting for the kids, are waiting for their husband, or just trying to kill a few hours or maybe doing whatever it is that the game offers them they enjoy, whereas the people who have Time and dedication to go to to really play this loss. We'll probably still want to go to the casino to an extent and bet a lot more money in the process. So, while there is probably a bit of overlap there, I think the biggest value that probably from the cross-pollination that's starting to rise in those two is probably just from a marketing standpoint, where you can let them know constantly that you can go stay in a hard rock hotel or some other branded hotel that's associated with your app.
Speaker 4:So you were bought by like hard rock. The same people who do hard rock cafe do the the gaming as well. This gaming company.
Speaker 2:Yes, so hard rock cafe is a subsidiary of hard rock International, which is a hotel and casino company. Nowadays they own the mirage.
Speaker 1:I believe, I assume it's one account system so they can have consistent tracking across entire experience.
Speaker 2:They do have a loyalty system that's attached to it at the players name level. That's been something that we've been implementing within our past few months. So if you are a regular hand rock casino player, you can earn some loyalty points through playing with her app and possibly win a hotel stay. The other apps they previously have all been on contracts. Well, there is still that mechanism there. It's been a little bit less connected and part of our acquisition has tried to be been to bring as much of it as we can.
Speaker 1:All within the house who don't work in such a casino, would like to know, or should know. Now I'm getting the poppery section.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of people will probably think the social casino, the game is playing those lots and I would say that's probably about 30% of the game. If I'm gonna be hot, what's like that brings people in and that brings a specific group of people in, but 7% of what you're playing is around the slots games. Well, there's those daily missions, those card collections, those triggering Tokens that led you play a mini game, all those other Caucho events that bring players in and make them compete or chase some sort of white yeah, yeah, I remember seeing like a.
Speaker 3:Some of these casino slots are like very much the visual Spectacle or it's like you're trying to progress a story. I remember like machine zone. Gabe posted a tweet where it was like a Whitney Houston slot machine and, as you a crude points, it would show like a virtual concert in front of you. Or, like I've seen like resonant evil slot machines in Japan when as you play, like the story is progressing on screen about some zombie Adventure and the players could essentially have a memory card where they would save their state and when they would come back to the machine it would pick up where they left off. Crazy, right.
Speaker 2:So much not about the slots, but like the progression the slots enables and that's not talking about the scale of casual slots, from like simulation to just Hyper cat or casual. There's a slot games where it's like you pay dollar for dollar and then you get what you would all almost in relative cash value back. But over the years it's become more arcadey and now it's paid dollar and you get ten trillion dollars and then you can win up to ten quadrillion dollar process in one spin and it's become it's like a race to these cartoonishly big numbers, like the idle flickers games have where you start to invent.
Speaker 4:And those balances go down over time, right, that's the idea there in flux. But when they lose? So how does somebody? How does? I'm sorry apologies for my naivety here, but how does somebody with ten trillion dollars ever have to monitor, have to spend money?
Speaker 2:They've got like infinite money that you always give them the option to At a rate that'll allow them to make that go away. I see okay, or you create secondary currencies. We're that the spend within the game somewhere else.
Speaker 1:There's one more thing I find really, I think, almost under reported about not they go and I've wanted to publish a piece on this which is their frequent use of the leaderboards and how important leaderboards are. Not only that, there's like time limited leaderboards, so you need to be rank x, y and z by the time the event ends to get reward, and the reason I find that so compelling is it essentially creates an option For those spots because there's very little agency and how you optimize your roles. There's a little bit, but by and large, it's pretty much random, and so the question is how much do you want to bid for the first rank? And of course, it's based on what the other person is willing to bid. Right, so you could have the one hour laughs and it's okay.
Speaker 1:You're sitting there, you're looking at the leaderboard, you're looking at your dice balance, you're trying to say, okay, how many dice do I want to spend to get slot number one? And do I think the person who's ahead of me in that rank Are they going to increase the amount of roles that they're willing to spend for this event as well? And then, how many roles do I get when the event ends? You can run a cost-benefit analysis on the auction. Yeah, I'm team. I've become very team leaderboard. It was all pay no team.
Speaker 2:Like I said, there's those casual slots games to your home. You'll be playing whatever slot game you're playing and also it'll be like you've entered Tournament for whatever reason and all of a sudden you're ranking it. I was just playing the slots for a different reason and now I'm beating against people and Monopoly has those by twice every two days Events that that can be very compelling and a very good way for people to think that they're earning Whatever they need by either progressing or by playing up those bars. I think that way they always have kind of those two kind of like systems going at the same time. They're either giving you something or really beyond leaderboard. I think it's very, very interesting on their end.
Speaker 2:And then they have those like bigger, longer events the pay to the Platinco machine that pops up. That's the one they're doing right now, I think. Or the or the dig up space blasts, find the elements within the dirt, but you got a complete games or compete in that leaderboard to get the things to do. That. Those are all games that aren't directly involved in the game, but we'll hire you to play in order to keep progressing in them, and those are crazy.
Speaker 1:I'll say keep fresh or competitive, but you're mentioning that it's really about. It's really about things around pulling the slot machine. There's probably something to the slot machine, but it's a lot of those social elements You're talking about. That was one of my key takeaways. It's a lot about collecting things. Why hasn't Vegas incorporated more of these elements? Why not real-world slots? Because I go to Vegas and they have loyalty cards that I can insert. But where's the social there? Where's the meta progression elements? Where are those things that seem to be so compelling?
Speaker 2:You haven't been enough to one of free night at the hotel that you're saying. Apparently you don't set a machine long enough to get free drinks like it's out there, but more quiet like and You're already there.
Speaker 2:So you're in a sense of captive audience and they work hard to make you more of a captive audience, whereas within the social casino, within the apps, if I lose progress or or my urge in one game, I can always bounce over to another game. That's very similar in offering the same things and help out my team there. Underground discount system of.
Speaker 4:Casinos.
Speaker 2:Vegas. Yeah you don't have a card, then you're not a huge dude, we got to go to Vegas, chris dice one of these years, go to dice it's always in Las Vegas.
Speaker 1:Our guest today has been Matthew. Should I call you dr Malik? Okay?
Speaker 4:No, don't be doctor. He despises it much, like most people with a PhD or like where can we find out more about you Should be?
Speaker 1:we should have your links. We link out to your LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:Sure you can boost my LinkedIn, I'll get a bunch of hopefully wonderful requests.
Speaker 1:Oh, they're coming.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, you find me on LinkedIn. You can find my my company's product in the app store and casino never land casino, my hard rock, except no substitutes.
Speaker 1:It was great to have you, man. Let's go with that there. You're spending the time.
Speaker 2:Thanks for only took about three months.
Speaker 4:A little bit of little bit of my fault, a little bit of everybody's fault.
Speaker 1:So the pipeline's hot now your part of history, man. Yeah, but I got a lot of unfortunately.
Speaker 2:Thanks, for having me do talk soon. Hey, take care.
Speaker 3:We should teach this to our children. Economics is major, major major.
Speaker 4:Everyone has to major in economics, number one for personal survival. Economics is major.
