Seasoned developer Caryl Shaw tells why she quit making free-to-play games

When it comes to free-to-play games, Caryl Shaw has been there, done that. And the veteran game developer said she has had enough for now.

Shaw, who formerly worked on free-to-play titles for several game companies, plans to give a talk entitled, “Reclaiming My Soul: Why I Quit Making F2P Social Games” at the Game Developers Conference Next conference in Los Angeles in November. In an interview with GamesBeat, she said she’ll talk about her career shift from traditional games to mobile free-to-play social games and then back to her current position as an executive producer making high-quality titles at developer Telltale Games.

It’s not clear yet how much of a tell-all her half-hour talk will be as Shaw said she hasn’t written it yet. But her abstract is clear that she began questioning the ethical decisions that developers face with free-to-play games, where players play for free and pay real money for virtual goods. Most new mobile games coming out are free-to-play, and virtual goods are a foundation of the $17 billion mobile-game business. While monetization of mobile games is held up as a model for making money, Shaw is one of many people who are having second thoughts about free-to-play.

“At the beginning, you could try anything,” Shaw said. “Then, you had to think about moving your customers in specific directions. That felt less like game development and more like psychology. I had to question whether that was the type of game I wanted to be working on.”

Shaw learned about free-to-play while working on a Facebook game for Electronic Arts, where she spent a lot of time creating traditional games in the Maxis division.

After that, she took a job producing games at Ngmoco in 2010. She stayed on as the company transitioned from paid mobile games to free-to-play, and she left after DeNA acquired the company for $400 million in 2011. Then she joined social gaming firm Kixeye, where she spent a year working on the mobile free-to-play version of Backyard Monsters. After shipping that game, she left and did some consulting. Now she is producing games at Telltale, the San Rafael, Calif.-based maker of The Walking Dead episodic series.

During that fast-paced career, she learned about metrics, monetization, and the difficulties with getting players to stick around long enough so that they started buying things. When free-to-play works well, you start with a very large number of players who are filtered down to a small group that willingly pays. That’s called a monetization funnel.

“I want to talk about the ethical concerns that I had,” she said. “Instead of just saying free-to-play games are the devil, I would like to think about how to make free-to-play games that doesn’t look at its main goal of putting customers through a funnel. I want to stop doing that. I want to create an experience that is truly joyful for a customer. Those are the questions that I started having.”

Above: Clash of Clans screen art

Image Credit: Supercell

Shaw isn’t lobbing grenades or just ranting to piss off her former employers. She aims to inspire attendees, provide a better understanding of traditional and new genres of games, as well as challenge developers to continually reflect on this evolving industry. She also said her talk is not focused on free-to-play massively multiplayer games or multiplayer online battle arena games like League of Legends.

In her description, Shaw wrote, “This talk will be one part inspiration, one part practical career advice, and one part reminder to never stop questioning how you think about and interact with the people who play your games.”

Shaw said she doesn’t have the answers just yet. She is working at Telltale, which makes premium paid games, because she likes the narrative games they make.

When asked for details, Shaw said that she views games like Clash of Clans as motivating more developers to optimize for the monetization funnel. It’s hard to push that title, which has been No. 1 or No. 2 in the mobile revenue charts for a couple of years, out of the top spot because its publisher, Supercell, has become so good at understanding player behavior and how to “optimize that behavior for revenue,” Shaw said.

But Shaw is concerned that some big spenders — dubbed whales — are being manipulated into spending more, whether they can afford it or not. Shaw played the game for a couple of years before she finally deleted it.

“After it came out, every game I worked on was about how to make a million dollars a day like Clash of Clans does,” Shaw said. “To me, that’s not about making a great game. That’s about making money.”

Shaw said she learned a lot about how to think about customers who wanted different things from a game. She thinks there’s a benefit to data analytics on users, but the best use of data is not about deciding which color button in a game will result in more monetization.

“There is a more unseemly side to it,” Shaw said. “I don’t hate free-to-play games or the business model. I want it to become more about the games and less about the free-to-play part.”

The GDC Next takes place Nov. 3-4 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.