Reclaiming My Soul: Why I Quit Making F2P Social Games

[Music] um so uh I'm Carol Shaw I'm going to talk today uh about reclaiming my soul and it's really about why it's a very personal talk it's not a real production talk there's not going to be a lot of like specific information you probably won't need to take any notes during this talk um but it's about why I after uh working in freet to-play Mobile social games for about four years decided to stop doing that and go back to work in AAA games uh so I want to be really clear about what this talk is not about uh I'm not going to talk about how trashy and crappy freeto playay games are um I don't actually think that all of them are trashy or crappy um and it's definitely not a statement that uh people should stop making them and and abandon it as a as a genre um I think there's a lot of really talented people out there that are trying to make good versions of this style of game um I met a lot of them in my time in that genre and working in that genre so you know

it's definitely not that um inapp purchasing just a little background inapp purchasing launched in October of 2009 I started working in Mobile freeto playay in February of 2010 so not too long after that uh I worked on a game my first game was We Rule we'll talk a little bit more about that and it launched on the iPad 1 uh when that went live on April 3rd of 2010 so about as far back as you could be making free toplay games cuz it's a super young genre um I've been doing it so that's why I have a little bit of experience felt like this was a good talk to give uh you know oops back back back there uh you know but I also want to be clear this isn't a you know puppy how cute puppies and kittens and how awesome the free play genre is I have a lot of complaints about it uh and I'm going to get into those I have a lot of things that you know just kept me up at night they were things that I questioned about whether this was the kind of game I wanted to be making uh so this is definitely not how much I loved my time

making that typee of game and and uh and really you know uh why did I decide to stop making them um that's a big part of what this Talk's going to be about um and a lot of it was cuz it was keeping me up at night like I was sitting uh laying in bed awake and wondering uh if the types of things that I was doing in the games I was creating were actually good experiences for my customers excuse me the industry was very good to me the working in that genre was really good I got to work on for a lot of great companies uh and I got to you know make some money and I got to learn a lot of new things all the time um but I just you know I developed some concerns so um Laura Lyn when she talks about uh you know stopping making social games and moving into different genres she had a pivot point she had a feature somebody asked her to make that she felt specifically she can point to that one feature and say that's when she decided

to stop doing that type of game for me it was more of a slow burn um took about maybe 15 months or so of really asking myself questions and trying to determine uh what I wanted to do next um and this is a great example of why free-to-play social mobile games is not necessarily the right place for me right now um it isn't specifically about this game but I am the wrong demographic for this game and if I had stayed doing free to-play mobile games I would have had to play this game and I would have had to play it for hours I would have had to study it I would have had to spend a lot of time thinking about how did they monetize they made a lot of money and they're still making money from this game I mean glue had their quarterly call last week and this game you know made 54% of their revenue their second game is Deer Hunter also a game I'm not a great demographic for um but I mean it's it's phenomenal but it's also I felt disingenuous because I don't want to play this game I didn't want to spend my spare time you know thinking about

Kim Kardashian just wasn't for me I know there's probably a lot of people that play it and enjoy it and I wish them I wish them well um but again you know I would have been bored by it I I didn't want to feel as though you know I was giving my time to something and I probably would have had to pay money towards it as well to you know get a good idea of what what the opportunities for monetization were and it was more it would have been a study of business and not really a study of game design um so you know I wanted to stop playing games I wanted to start playing games again and stop studying them I wanted to do things like go to different tracks so for the last couple of years for all the gdcs I've gone to the business and marketing uh talks and some of the production talks but these are the uh icons for the community the production and the design tracks and these were the kinds of talks I really wanted to start going to again I didn't have a lot of reason to go to a lot of these talks when I was um doing freetop playay games because I'm an executive producer and my job is actually to think about how to make money in those types of games so you know now I I get to go

back and kind of go back to my roots and and think about the things that I'm passionate about in game development so in my uh uh talk description I said I would talk about five things that I found to be frustrating about the free-to-play uh genre this is easily the number one thing I found uh to be very very frustrating for me uh minimum viable product is uh it's a a Lean Startup it came from The Lean Startup it's a the vers of the product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort um Eric Reese is the founder of The Lean Startup movement and I think that this is actually a really great way to make software and to me it wasn't a great way to make games I didn't want to turn out any more games that I felt were incomplete on launch day I wanted to get to a point where it was a you know it could be uh reviewed by uh critic and and they could actually

analyze it and the critic wasn't going like but there's got to be more and I know in six months it'll actually be a full game um so for me I wanted to move from the idea that there's you know this circle in The Lean Startup movement where you have ideas and you build and you code and you measure and you get data back and you learn and you kind of keep iterating on that process all the time and they're all fairly equal in in importance you know for me I wanted it to look more like this I wanted to spend a little bit more time on The Upfront side and a little bit less time looking at data and understanding how to monetize and how to you know extend the retention of the game so I wanted to focus on you know in the future I want to be focusing much more on ideas and and uh and writing good solid games like I want to put out not buggy games a lot of the social mobile games are you know I play them and I'm like oh my god did they QA this because I just don't see it um and I don't want to do that I want to QA my games and and turn out a high quality product um so this is a sort of

embarrassing part of the free-to-play uh genre is fast follows and clones and sometimes outright P piracy it's a sign I should drink some water so uh this is H something this is again it ranks as one of those things that kept me up at night I didn't want to be contributing to part of the industry that felt like it was um cheating my fellow developers out of their creativity so you know like oops boom ah so uh you know all of these games are variations on you know this game Clash of Clans which was in fact A variation of Backyard Monsters from Facebook um the supercell guys are awesome I think they made a very high quality game they've actually been pretty nice and given credit where credit was due to Backyard Monsters on Facebook the disclaimer is I worked on Backyard Monsters for mobile so uh I was very well aware of what it was

like to be making a copy of another game because in a lot of ways Backyard Monsters was chasing Clash of Clans even though Backyard Monsters had actually come first but on Facebook um so for me it was this really interesting experience of knowing that Clash of Clans was number one in the boards nobody else was beating it but we were going to try and make a game based on the background of the game and see if we could you know beat Clash of Clans at their own game uh it wasn't successful it wasn't a successful game and it was pulled down and it was um the last free-to-play title I worked on um and I you know I I learned a lot from it I had a great team again this is like not about the people that make the games but it's about the kind of games that are getting made this is the even seedier underbelly of fast follows and clones all three of these games have just pretty much been outright cloned uh Dream Heights from Zinga they did you know the Tiny Tower guys did a great great thing you can go

search for it online that's a you know frame by frame of how um Dream Heights looked so much like Tiny Tower and played so much like Tiny Tower um I play a lot of Threes I think it's an awesome game and I was sad to see that 2048 which came out afterwards and was very very similar to it uh you know just really stomped it where people just thought 2048 was the original game uh and I wanted those developers who did threes to actually get uh you know credit for their work um but really you know maybe spry Fox was the one that you know really pissed me off the most and made me just question the people that I was working with in the industry and you know there was a lawsuit I think it was settled I don't know the details about how that happened but I mean that was a really frustrating moment cuz I love Triple Town and I I've given money to that game and I want it to be successful I want those I want spr Fox to keep making games um so I don't want other companies to come in and you know kind of Stomp Them by stealing their ideas uh and that you know if if there's any one thing that just frustrated me

and kept me up that was probably one of the big ones this slide all right so like I said I'm a producer and producers think about money um so who knows what this quote is from nobody really Star Trek Avid home uh but uh well Scotty said it to Kirk when there was the Wales um but uh you know for me I had to think a lot about Wales because I had to think about how to make money and uh you know for the purposes of this talk I'm going to use every play came out with a report a couple weeks ago uh where they defined whales as people who spend $50 or more per month in a game um and the important part of the statistic for me was that they make up less than 1% of the customer base but they represent 29% of the revenue um you know that's not something I felt like I wanted to work with like that means as somebody who's trying to create a business I need to focus because it's 29% of my Revenue

it's almost a third of my Revenue that I need to be you know considering those those players and understanding their motivations and trying to to move them in the direction that I want to go and kind of watch that direction and I didn't want to do that I didn't want to ignore 99% of my customers so that I could pay attention to this 1% so that I could get make sure that 30% of the revenue didn't go away keep having to unscrew it that of so you know for me this was uh you know a real eye openening experience I want to be able to make games that are going to look out at the whole audience and understand who they are and be able to cater to all of them and try and give everybody a really delightful great experience but when you're working on free to-play games and you have to focus on your whales that can be a huge challenge also extremely challenging is user acquisition and discoverability um I don't think either of these problems have been solved yet I think there a lot

there's lots of companies and there's been a lot of businesses created to try and solve both of these problems but you know they're not solved I still think you know random games can show up and apple might think they're awesome and feature them and there doesn't seem to be any you know specific way to make that happen for yourself like I worked for really big developers and sometimes we get featured and sometimes we wouldn't and then last week some friends of mine that are like four small indie game developers their game got featured and it was awesome I was super happy for them but I have no idea how that happens so you can't really plan for that and user acquisition is very expensive um so this is a a slide from fxu it's a little bit old so it's from September um but uh you know if the average price is between $150 and $2 for a loyal user and that's somebody who's going to log in at least three times to your game that's a very high cost that you're paying to try and get those customers to see your game there are I think like 300,000 games in the App store right now so getting seen

is really hard so user acquisition becomes really important and because no one's really nailed how that works you have to think a lot about this and to me that wasn't my core competency like it's not what I've spent my career understanding and learning how to do I like to make games and I like to think about mechanics and game features and how to do production and get products out the door and make them high quality this this is not that um thinking about user acquisition was so far out of my realm and having to learn about that it just wasn't fun for me and I appreciate that it's fun for some people but it really wasn't fun for me and I didn't really want to spend a lot more time doing it I didn't really want to spend a lot more time thinking about the alphabet soup of acronyms um so when I worked at inoko uh every morning I would get up and I would pour my coffee and then I would sit down and I would start looking and filling out a chart with all of these numbers uh to understand like how my overnights were how my weeklys were and again you know I didn't come in the morning and schedule a brainstorm I

didn't come in in the morning and talk to my art director and see you know what was the newest art for the next content pack release I sat down and looked at these numbers and you know that just stopped being fun for me like originally I think it was kind of fun and then it became not so fun all right probably the biggest and most important thing uh for me about the freet to-play market and thinking about uh you know what I want to do better um I don't want to use analytics to drive addictive behavior um I think it's kind of one of the bins of the industry is that we are able to do things like use AB testing so I love this one and the key word in this is trying to AB test your way to a magical product um and it's the magical product that I'm after but you know it is impossible I think to use AB testing or multi- true multivariat testing to try and get to that point of that magical product it will take you forever I think that there's a use for ab Tes testing and a use for multivariant testing but it's

really about how you're going to educate Your Design um it's never going to solve your problems it's only going to help you point out where there are problems I don't think that's how the industry uses it I think there's an overreliance on this type of testing that can blind an organization to the fundamental uh shortcomings in their products um and to me that's you know that's a that's not good like that's not something I want to be a part of I wanted to see the forest not just the trees this is what I like to use data for so sorry this slide's a little washed out but this is a um level distribution slide from We Rule and to me when we pulled this data and it came along with a lot of additional data about what actually was happening at these specific levels but you can tell that there's like a huge peak of people that are stuck at level 39 this was when we had the levels go up to 50 eventually they went up to 80 um and this was a you know a pretty important thing we looked at this we compared it with you know when we thought people were turning out of the game and we actually used this to modify the

game to make it hopefully more fun for players we didn't actually even look at how it impacted Revenue like I have no idea um if the people at level 39 actually paid their way if this was a pay wall that they paid their way out of cuz we just didn't look at it for that um and I'm happy that we didn't look at it for that because I want to think in terms of how to solve these problems for what the customer is experiencing and you know could we have made more money off of that maybe um but again you know know I didn't want to use the data for that I wanted to use it to help make a more delightful experience for my customers um I work at Telltale Games now uh we make episodic narrative games like The Walking Dead uh we're working on a Game of Thrones Game as well which is very exciting um but with Telltale we specifically don't use any data to drive addictive behavior at the company um this is uh an example of the choices screen that you see at the have anybody played a Telltale Game yeah oh good

awesome so at the end of the game you see the choices screen and while the designers and while the producers can look at this and kind of understand the branches and where people went down the game path what we really hope it does is tell the player hey there's this other way you could have played the game maybe you want to go back and play it that way too a lot of other people maybe tried a different path than you um we're premium games we don't make any money if they replay our game it doesn't matter to us all it matters is we think that they're going to enjoy the experience if they replay it and kind of go down another branching path it also helps us build community which is something I've always been passionate about is having Community built around games and this is a great way to start conversations on the boards because people will come in and say like oh I didn't choose this path like what was your experience doing that and it just sort of Fosters like conversation and interesting um explorations of what the game can be if you play it a

different way another thing I really like is uh is achievements so I've been playing a lot of two dots which is a free-to-play puzzle game it's probably my favorite free-to-play game and I've given the money so I've monetized in that game um I think it's a great game I recommend that you go check it out and uh have fun with it you can totally play it without spending any money or you can spend a little money and get some cool uh powerups and stuff no game is ever going to be made or broken on whether you include achievements with your game like it's just a fact it's not going to make a a a good game better uh and it's not going to make a bad game worse it's just a a thing that you can include that some of your customers will enjoy I think it's a fun way to introduce humor uh where even if your game doesn't have humor you can make humorous achievements that people can talk about and again this is another way that you can foster Community um and you know it forms another bond between you and your customer and it forms a bond between the players so on this one I I didn't take a screenshot but you can flip over to the

other players uh Tab and sort of see what your friends have been doing so you can connect on Facebook in this game um and they also do a nice thing where you uh when you're leveling up in the game you see your friends sort of like Candy Crush does but again this for me is a great way to use data because what it does is it motivates the player to have more fun and that's really what I want to spend my time using data with and I don't want to spend as much time using my data to figure out how to monetize my customers in fact if I didn't have to to use the word monetize ever again I'd be pretty happy um also I I think that this may be the last time I publicly have to use the word funnel uh I never want to use that term again either and uh I think that you know I understand why they exist and I understand why people people chase them down but again I don't want to put my customers in a funnel so this is a slide I did a few years ago for a talk I gave about how awesome data was and how you should use it to manage your funnels and um monetize your customers uh and I've

circled a couple of things it's really hard to read I'll post my slides up later but these are the things that I take with me uh going forward as the important pieces of data that I would like to continue using I'm super curious about engagement like where do my customers turn out of my game like where are the problem points that I want to try and resolve that's something I'll always want to understand um I think user segmentation is pretty interesting like who are my customers who's playing my game and I actually am a huge huge fan of player relations like again I like building Community but I also feel like you should build a good customer service organization particularly if you're doing some sort of free-to-play game but really for any type of game so that kind of leads me to what I've learned and what I will take with me some of the data points that I um I review are things that I'll take with me but some of the other learnings I have are really around things like demographics um in the four years that I was working on free-to-play mobile games I saw the demographics shift pretty radically like a lot more people play

games than used to play before and a lot more different types of people play games that did before and going back to work on you know a series like The Walking Dead or or Game of Thrones you know that might be something that you would not consider that lots of different types of people would play but a lot of people watch The Game of Thrones and I expect that there's going to be a lot of people across different age groups and across the genders that are going to play this game I um you know particularly have enjoyed seeing more women playing games and I think that that's something I'm going to always keep in mind and make sure that developers are continuing to push in that direction as well this is one of the greatest transitions our time periods our our our industry has gone through another big piece for me has been uh looking at the how games are sold so I do a lot of online work I'm an online producer primarily uh I think about how to connect users to each other and connect them to my games um but I also think about how to sell them and distri sell games and distribute them uh the the shift between digital and

physical Goods has been pretty radical Through The Years this is uh it's kind of hard to read it's from between 2010 and 2013 um and so it's you know it's getting to be where there's more digital sales than there are physical sales um and I think that'll continue I don't think physical games are necessarily going to go away I'm definitely not like of that camp but I do feel like digital distribution is a huge opportunity to get to more customers and I think mobile has driven that a lot and that's something that you you know particularly when I went to Telltale I thought was interesting cuz they do primarily digital distribution throughout the season and then when the season's over they create a physical disc that they also distribute so it's kind of The Best of Both Worlds for me and and probably the last thing um that I will take with me uh so this is a funny uh it says hopeful parents at the bottom they're watching their child pay video games and thinking about his bright future as a video game uh player of mostly Super Mario I think and uh you know for me I wanted to think about what

my career path was I mean I'm you know I've been in the industry for over 10 years before that I did stuff on the web and online industry for another six years so I've been doing Tech since like 95 I think so you know I'm always thinking about what's next and and how to decide what I wanted to do decide what I want to do next excuse me when I first started um looking at video game companies I looked at the games that I loved and that I wanted to play more of the Sims and Sim City were the first games that I played uh that I stayed up all night playing so sorry little dry this morning so for me you know going to Maxis and working on games like Sim City 4 and The Sims 2 and Spore were Nob brainers like I felt very passionate about those games I loved the creative aspect I love the community aspect it was a really easy decision for me to go there cuz it was my passion it was very easy for me to follow my passion and

then I went and worked on a bunch of these free-to-play games so there's up tops the enim Moko games and the kick side game at the bottom and I didn't ever feel the same kind of passion what I did feel was this excitement and this just general um Wonder at all of the new information that was always coming my way it's a great and vibrant new industry and with that brings a lot of interesting new learnings but I never felt all that passionate it was like that Kim Kardashian game like I just didn't want to play it I didn't leave work and want to go home and play my own games and when I started looking around for companies to join I realized I was playing a lot of The Wolf Among Us um which I am again like it was kind of a weird game I'm not a big fables comic book fan I'm actually not a big Comics person hopefully that won't get me thrown out of the games industry um but I loved The Wolf Among Us I just thought it was a really an interesting game it had some interesting characters in it I love seeing the branching story lines and then when Game of Thrones was announced I a huge nerd about the Game of Thrones books I've been reading them

for years and years before the show came out so it was kind of a no-brainer for me to kind of go and apply there and one of the great things about it is I feel like I'm following my passion again I feel like you know if there's one thing I will take away from my time doing freeto playay it's that I didn't feel passionate about it and I really wanted to feel that way I think when you do game development you got to love what you're doing or it's just not going to be genuine so uh we are oh wow I am forced seconds short of 25 minutes it's amazing um we have to get out of this room there's another talk in here at 12:05 I'm going to go hang out in the wrapup room it's in 505 if you want to come talk to me thanks very [Applause] much

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