---
title: "Game Economy Designer"
description: "Designs and tunes the currencies, rewards, prices and progression pacing in video games, especially free-to-play and live service titles."
canonical: "https://nuecareer.com/careers/game-economy-designer"
last-updated: "2026-10-09T10:57:55.138Z"
---

# Game Economy Designer

**Category:** Computer and Mathematical · **SOC code:** 15-1255 · **O\*NET-SOC code:** 15-1255.01

Designs and tunes the currencies, rewards, prices and progression pacing in video games, especially free-to-play and live service titles.

Also advertised as: Economy Designer; Monetization Designer; Live Economy Designer; Virtual Economy Designer.

## At a glance

- **Median annual wage:** $104,000 (BLS OEWS, May 2025)
- **Median hourly wage:** $50.00/hr
- **Wage range (10th–90th percentile):** $53,750 to $201,550, with the middle half between $73,290 and $158,820
- **Total US employment:** 113,330
- **Typical entry education:** Bachelor's
- **Preparation required:** Medium preparation — O\*NET rates this "Job Zone Four: Considerable Preparation Needed"
- **Projected growth:** +6.0% over 2025–2035 (BLS EP, 2025–2035)
- **Annual job openings:** 8,300 openings a year
- **AI-resilience score:** 19/100 — a NueCareer heuristic over O\*NET work activities and context, not a BLS or O\*NET figure

## Pay

National wage distribution, BLS OEWS, May 2025, across 113,330 US jobs.

| Percentile | Annual wage |
| --- | --- |
| 10th | $53,750 |
| 25th | $73,290 |
| 50th (median) | $104,000 |
| 75th | $158,820 |
| 90th | $201,550 |
| Mean (average) | $117,490 |

### Pay by state

The 15 highest-paying states, by median annual wage. The cost-of-living-adjusted column divides the state median by that state's BEA Regional Price Parity, so the columns answer different questions: the first is what the job pays there, the second is what that pay buys there.

| State | Median annual wage | Cost-of-living adjusted | Employment |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| CA | $136,110 | $122,932 | 27,090 |
| WA | $130,480 | $121,929 | 11,580 |
| NY | $120,990 | $112,110 | 16,560 |
| MA | $113,540 | $107,359 | 2,740 |
| NH | $111,150 | $106,706 | 430 |
| DC | $107,650 | $97,952 | 480 |
| RI | $105,990 | $103,627 | 240 |
| PA | $104,160 | $106,752 | 2,820 |
| GA | $103,810 | $107,806 | 2,800 |
| TX | $102,650 | $105,763 | 5,910 |
| OR | $102,220 | $98,896 | 1,230 |
| UT | $99,990 | $101,139 | 1,060 |
| AZ | $98,070 | $97,411 | 810 |
| NC | $97,990 | $103,884 | 3,400 |
| MD | $96,760 | $92,188 | 1,310 |

33 more states with published wage data are omitted here. The full table for all 48 states is at https://nuecareer.com/careers/game-economy-designer/salary-by-state, or as JSON at https://nuecareer.com/api/v1/careers/game-economy-designer.

## Outlook

BLS projects employment to move from 132,700 in the 2025–2035 base year to 140,800 by the end of the cycle — a gain of 8,000 jobs, or +6.0%. Faster than average: 6.0% against 3.5% projected for all occupations over the same cycle. About 8,300 openings a year are expected on average, counting openings from growth as well as from workers leaving the occupation permanently. Source: BLS EP, 2025–2035.

## How to get in

- **Typical entry education:** Bachelor's degree (BLS Employment Projections).
- **Preparation level:** Medium preparation — O\*NET's preparation band for this occupation is "Job Zone Four: Considerable Preparation Needed".
- **Related work experience typically required:** None.
- **Typical on-the-job training:** None.

### Education people in this job actually hold

O\*NET surveys incumbents, so this distribution describes who is in the job today and can differ from the BLS entry requirement above.

| Education level | Share of workers |
| --- | --- |
| Bachelor's Degree | 55.0% |
| High School Diploma or the equivalent (such as a GED) | 15.0% |
| Less than a High School Diploma | 10.0% |
| Some College Courses | 10.0% |
| Associate's Degree or other 2-year degree | 10.0% |

## What the work involves

- Model currency sources and sinks across the game
- Set prices, drop rates and reward values
- Design progression pacing for battle passes and events
- Analyze player telemetry to detect inflation and exploits
- Run and evaluate A/B tests on economy changes
- Document economy rules for designers and engineers
- Review store and reward designs for fairness and compliance

## Skills and knowledge

### Essential skills

- Active Listening — importance 3.9 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Reading Comprehension — importance 3.8 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Critical Thinking — importance 3.8 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Active Learning — importance 3.5 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Writing — importance 3.3 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Speaking — importance 3.1 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Monitoring — importance 3.1 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Mathematics — importance 2.9 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale

### Transferable skills

These are the skills that carry into other occupations, and they drive the related-occupation and career-change rankings on this site.

- Programming — importance 4.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Complex Problem Solving — importance 3.6 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Judgment and Decision Making — importance 3.6 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Systems Analysis — importance 3.4 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Time Management — importance 3.4 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Systems Evaluation — importance 3.3 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Coordination — importance 3.1 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Social Perceptiveness — importance 3.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale

### Knowledge areas

- Design — importance 4.3 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Computers and Electronics — importance 4.2 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Communications and Media — importance 3.5 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Mathematics — importance 3.3 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Psychology — importance 3.3 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- English Language — importance 3.3 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale

### Abilities

- Fluency of Ideas — importance 4.1 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Written Comprehension — importance 4.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Originality — importance 4.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Near Vision — importance 4.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Oral Comprehension — importance 3.9 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Written Expression — importance 3.9 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale

## Who it suits

O\*NET rates every occupation on the six Holland (RIASEC) interest areas, on a 1–7 scale. This occupation's strongest areas are Artistic (A), Investigative (I), Conventional (C).

| Interest area | Score (1–7) |
| --- | --- |
| A — Artistic | 5.87 |
| I — Investigative | 4.82 |
| C — Conventional | 4.43 |
| E — Enterprising | 4.30 |
| R — Realistic | 2.77 |
| S — Social | 2.30 |

### Personality fit

These scores are **derived by NueCareer**, not published by any government agency: they are cosine similarities between a personality type's trait profile and this occupation's O\*NET interest and work-style ratings, expressed 0–100. Treat them as a starting point for exploration, not as evidence that a type belongs in a job.

| Type | Fit score (0–100) |
| --- | --- |
| INTP | 77.3 |
| INTJ | 74.3 |
| ENTP | 71.2 |
| INFP | 68.4 |
| INFJ | 64.9 |

Best-fitting types: INTP, INTJ.

## Related occupations

O\*NET's primary related occupations, in its own ranked order.

- [Video Game Designer](https://nuecareer.com/careers/video-game-designer) — median $104,000
- [Web Designer](https://nuecareer.com/careers/web-designer) — median $104,000
- [Special Effects Artist and Animator](https://nuecareer.com/careers/special-effects-artist-and-animator) — median $102,030
- [Graphic Designer](https://nuecareer.com/careers/graphic-designer) — median $62,960
- [Web Developer](https://nuecareer.com/careers/web-developer) — median $92,650
- [Computer Programmer](https://nuecareer.com/careers/computer-programmer) — median $100,390
- [Film and Video Editor](https://nuecareer.com/careers/film-and-video-editor) — median $75,420
- [Software Developer](https://nuecareer.com/careers/software-developer) — median $135,980
- [Producer and Director](https://nuecareer.com/careers/producer-and-director) — median $90,360
- [Computer Hardware Engineer](https://nuecareer.com/careers/computer-hardware-engineer) — median $161,740

## Sources

- **O\*NET** — O\*NET 31.0 Database, August 2026. https://www.onetcenter.org/database.html
- **BLS OEWS** — BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. https://www.bls.gov/oes/
- **BLS EP** — BLS Employment Projections, Table 1.2, 2025–2035. https://www.bls.gov/emp/
- **BEA RPP** — BEA Regional Price Parities by State, 2024. https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-parities-state-and-metro-area

---

This bank includes information from the O\*NET 31.0 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). O\*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. NueCareer has transformed the data by joining it to BLS wage and projection data and deriving facet, personality-fit and AI-resilience scores. BLS and BEA data are public domain (17 U.S.C. §105).

O\*NET content is used under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). How these figures are sourced and derived: https://nuecareer.com/careers/methodology

JSON representation of this page: https://nuecareer.com/api/v1/careers/game-economy-designer