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Pretty sure Candy Crush has such a team of PhD's though. Not all games, but the big games definitely do.

You can read about it here from their own page:

https://careers.king.com/kingdom-news/data-at-king/

> That experiment is typical of how we learn from data at King. We have about 150 people working in data roles, out of a total workforce of 2,000. They come from a range of backgrounds. Many are from the games industry, of course, but we also bring in lots of recruits straight from university.

> These people will have just done their masters or PhD in a wide range of disciplines. Many of our team studied statistics, physics or computer science but we also have people who came from theoretical biology because work on DNA sequencing in that field has produced a lot of data-sophisticated people. Others are behavioural psychologists or behavioural economists.

Now in the specific example they choose to highlight they saw that making the game less frustrating made people spend more money. However if making the game more frustrating turned out to make more money since users bought more powerups then they absolutely would do it.



None of that requires any special knowledge of the brains dopamine response




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