A game designer’s job is now at least 25% about building the business model. If you don’t want to do that, you have no place designing online games.
(Source)
This is a very bold statement, and sounds like something that could have came out of my mouth. Left and right, we’re seeing the large AAA developers jumping into free-to-play, microtransactions and alternate business models – yet so often it feels like the biz model was tacked on at the last minute. This is something that is a critical part of the game’s success. You absolutely need to know what your game’s business model is while you are designing the systems and the mechanics of your game. You are simply setting yourself up to fail if you don’t know this early in the game’s development. Game designers have to have the market research skills to know what works and what doesn’t in the free to play space.
So true - and it's not just having a sense of the market, it's a thorough understanding of how (virtual) economies work that is required.