College Ultimate Team -Game Economist
ROLE
2025
YEAR
GENRE
Sports Simulation
PLATFORMS
Xbox and Playstation
DESCRIPTION
College Football 26 is a competitive sports simulation game, where you step onto the gridiron to build, manage, and lead your ultimate collegiate powerhouse. Through deep roster-building mechanics and dynamic live-service programs, you must strategically optimize your lineup to dominate the competitive meta and earn top-tier rewards.
REWARDS & ENGAGEMENT
My Role: As an Economy Designer for CFB26 Ultimate Team, my philosophy was to align player effort with meaningful, data-driven progression to ensure every hour spent in-game felt actively rewarding.
Problem: In live-service sports games, players can quickly experience burnout if reward payouts feel unattainable or if different game modes cannibalize each other's player base. My challenge was to design a reward pacing structure that drove daily engagement across diverse modes without accelerating power creep or breaking the macroeconomic balance.
My Solution: I designed the reward architecture around statistical modeling and player behavior:
-
Mathematical Event Modeling: I built statistical probability models to map out exact player win-rates and outcomes for strict gauntlet-style formats (like 5-win and 10-win caps), ensuring the mathematical difficulty of reaching the grand prize perfectly matched its economic value.
-
Telemetry-Driven Pacing: By analyzing and aggregating complex user telemetry (while carefully isolating overlapping engagement data between Solo Seasons and H2H Events), I optimized reward distributions to incentivize healthy participation across the entire game ecosystem.
-
Cross-Mode Ecosystem Funnels: I designed and balanced the crossover reward structures between Road to the College Football Playoffs and Ultimate Team to drive game-wide engagement. By establishing compelling progression points that bridged distinct modes, I successfully funneled dedicated competitive players into the Ultimate Team economy, significantly boosting both daily active users and long-term retention.
Outcome: This rigorous approach to reward pacing created a highly satisfying gameplay loop where player time was consistently respected. By balancing the risk-to-reward ratio in competitive events and optimizing seasonal payouts, we sustained robust daily active user metrics and drove deep, long-term player retention.
PROGRAM & GAME MODE BALANCING
My Role: As an Economy Designer for CFB26 Ultimate Team, my goal was to give every program and game mode a distinct and compelling identity, ensuring the economy supported diverse and exciting player experiences.
Problem: If every mode offers the exact same progression loop, the gameplay quickly becomes monotonous. The challenge was to design unique structural hooks and tailored reward systems for different programs. Making each one feel like a fresh, worthwhile destination while still feeling like a football game, without accidentally breaking the broader game economy.
My Solution: I balanced the ecosystem by focusing on player progression and motivation:
-
Crafting Unique Program Identities: I designed tailored economic footprints for targeted live initiatives, such as a highly challenging Season 8 CPU solo event. By tuning the AI difficulty curve and offering exclusive high-value rewards , we created a distinct, high-stakes experience that successfully spiked both daily engagement and solo user spend.
-
Pacing Progression: To prevent seasonal ladders from feeling monotonous, I introduced dynamic reward spikes at key progression milestones. By strategically placing highly coveted items at the climax of a program's journey, I ensured the progression felt less like a passive grind and more like a satisfying, escalating build-up to a major reward.
-
Harmonizing the Player Journey: Instead of letting modes aggressively compete for the same player base, I structured the overarching economy to encourage a dynamic weekly routine. I balanced the pacing so players naturally flowed between Solo Seasons, H2H Events, and unique arcade modes, experiencing the full breadth of the game without feeling penalized for playing their favorite mode.
Outcome: This experience-first approach to balancing resulted in a complete Ultimate Team ecosystem. By ensuring each program had its own unique structural identity, we kept the daily loop exciting, minimized player burnout, and delivered a consistently rewarding journey across the entire game.
MONETIZATION & SPEND CONVERSION
My Role: As an Economy Designer for CFB26 Ultimate Team, my philosophy was to create a storefront that delivered high perceived value to the player while maximizing sustainable revenue through targeted offers.
Problem: In live-service economies, aggressive or poorly targeted monetization can lead to player fatigue and reduced LTV. My challenge was to design pack architecture and milestone offers that drove immediate spend conversion without alienating the player base or cannibalizing future program revenue.
My Solution: I designed the storefront strategy around rigorous A/B testing and behavioral economics:
-
Experimental Offer Design (A/B Testing): I engineered and executed groundbreaking A/B tests, such as high value packs vs high value bundles, which revoluzionized the way we design special offers. By isolating player purchasing preferences, this testing strategy directly drove a significant lift in spend conversion and fundamentally changed our storefront pricing model.
-
Spend Conversion Optimization: By closely analyzing the data from these controlled experiments, I tracked precise engagement and conversion metrics (like achieving benchmarks as high as a 30% increased conversion rate on select special offers) to refine our pricing and pack odds strategies.
-
Storefront Architecture & Operations: I strategically structured the store layout to prioritize high-value items, ensuring the absolute best offers were the first things players saw. This execution required deep, cross-functional collaboration with multiple departments to manage, verify, and position up to 50+ unique daily offers. By meticulously organizing the storefront and guaranteeing every item was perfectly priced and placed at scale, I created clear purchase paths that drove immediate revenue while maintaining a good player experience.
Outcome: This data-led approach resulted in a highly optimized storefront that balanced player satisfaction with business KPIs. By proving that targeted milestone offers directly drive revenue lift through clean A/B testing, we established a monetization strategy that successfully drove sustainable spend without compromising the long-term health of the game economy.
CUSTOM TOOLS & KPI ANALYSIS
My Role: As an Economy Designer for CFB26 Ultimate Team, my philosophy was to empower the design team by transforming massive, raw telemetry exports into clean, actionable insights that drive confident decision-making.
Problem: The design team needed to make fast data-backed decisions on the live economy, but analyzing KPIs and balancing the ecosystem often required tedious manual calculations. My challenge was to eliminate this friction by developing intuitive, automated tools that anyone on the team could use to model out outcomes instantly.
My Solution: I designed and deployed custom Google Sheets architecture to streamline our analytical workflow:
-
Custom Tool Development: I built proprietary calculators and balancing tools from scratch using advanced Google Sheets functions. These custom tools allowed the design team to simply input basic variables and instantly visualize the macroeconomic impact, advanced value calculations, and payout curves of new programs.
-
Workflow & Systems Optimization: I actively audited and overhauled our existing suite of design spreadsheets, transforming clunky, outdated trackers into more responsive, user-friendly dashboards that drastically reduced manual data entry time.
-
Actionable KPI Tracking: By routing our key performance indicators through these streamlined tools, I established clear, readable baselines. This made it effortless for the entire team to track engagement health, spend conversion, and overall ecosystem stability at a glance.
Outcome: This focus on custom tool development and process optimization fundamentally accelerated our live-ops workflow. By equipping the team with responsive, highly optimized Google Sheets tools, we eliminated hours of manual data crunching, allowing us to focus entirely on creative, data-driven game design and responsive KPI management.