1. Thanks for joining us Ashram! Can you share a bit about yourself, who you are and what you do?

Thanks, absolutely. My Name is Ash Kain, and I’m a producer, designer, and enthusiast in games. Most recently I served as Head of Games at Metaworld Entertainment, and I also design and publish tabletop RPGs through Promethium Books.

2. Talk us through your journey in gaming and how you came to found Promethium books!

Games have always been an important part of my life, representing much more than entertainment. Games are the human stories of our age and the myths of our zeitgeist. So, I’ve always known that I was going to make games, and ironically when I was young that manifest as crafting homebrews for dungeons and dragons. As my career progressed, I found that my live for videogames and TTRPGs needed further outlet. I had made so much material for my own games that some one eventually told me to just publish them already!

3. I couldn’t not ask for your thoughts on recent Unity announcements (and backtracks since!) How do you think the new pricing model, whether followed through on or not, will affect the gaming industry?

As a businessman I can’t understate that when you have a brand and community like Unity’s, you can get confused about what your real commodity is. I think Unity’s leadership though that with so many users, monetizing those users was a clever way to drive profits so I can almost understand, but it was tone def and a huge betrayal to the unity developer community. The real value is not in their platform’s footprint, but in their player data. I fear that pushing forward with a version of this new payment scheme could decimate the mid tier mobile and indi game market, and devastate the hyper casual market.

4. I wanted to talk to you about game economies. A survey we did of 100 product monetization managers showed the balancing game economies is their number one challenge. What advice do you have for weighting monetization?

The thing about economies that you only hear in boring papers about commodities and models for econ mathematics is that almost all economic principles and behaviours rest on the principle of scarcity, but in game economies, there is rarely any real scarcity. The result is almost always hyper inflation of soft and hard currencies. Titles like Eve showed just how powerful scarcity is, but also the results in terms of long form economies and the dangers of powerful spenders on scarcity limited economies in multiplayer games. When it comes to balancing an economy, my number 1 piece of advice is always to tie your value metrics to something with hard limits in the game, something that you can use as the value standard. That makes it easy to draw comparisons, understand LTV, and know what levers to push or pull to control you in game resource flow, sinks, and faucets.

5. What can our attendees expect to hear from you in Seattle?

Well, hopefully some insights on what I’ve learned form studying web3 and how that impacted game economics, some thoughts on product management for games in the next decade, and probably some bad jokes.

6. As a Seattle local, what restaurants, bars or attractions should our out of town attendees check out?

Grab dinner and a drink at the Daily Grill in downtown and you won’t be let down, and if you are in the mood for a late-night burger, Dick’s at 1am is a true Seattle experience.

7. Last question, a song plays every time you walk into a room. What song plays for you and why?

Haha, to be honest the Magus Battle theme from Chrono Trigger was my ringtone for more than 20 years. So now my friends all joke I’m about to appear when they hear that song, does that count?