Report: Anonymous dev decries the state of F2P game design

- An anonymous free-to-play game producer makes a public plea for people to stunt the spread of F2P titles by buying premium mobile games.

There's an interesting editorial published over on TouchArcade today from an anonymous author who claims to be a long-time game producer fed up with the state of free-to-play game development.

What's intriguing isn't that the author is angry about the mechanics of monetizing F2P games -- developers have been having spirited debates about the merits/evils of F2P for years -- but the stories they recount about watching their development process change under pressure to collect more and more data from players in order to make more appealing, profitable games.

"If you are a whale, we take Facebook stalking to a whole new level. You spend enough money, we will friend you. Not officially, but with a fake account," write the anonymous developer, verified by TouchArcade. "Once you let us in, we have the keys to the kingdom. We will use everything to figure out how to sell to you. I remember we had a whale in one game that loved American Football despite living in Saudi Arabia. We built several custom virtual items in both his favorite team colors and their opponents, just to sell to this one guy. You better believe he bought them. And these are just vanity items. We will flat out adjust a game to make it behave just like it did last time the person bought IAP. Was a level too hard? Well now they are all that same difficulty."

The author goes on like this for a while, noting that while they remember collecting rudimentary data on how many people were playing their game by watching how many times per day the online JSON file containing the game's level data was accessed, user data collection is now so thorough and wide-ranging that another department handles it and no developer can make sense of it.

"Every day we collect a ton of data. I don’t even know the size of what we collect anymore, we have entire divisions to instrument and analyze the data," they write. "Every time you play a free to play game, you just build this giant online database of who you are, who your friends are and what you like and don’t like. This data is sold, bought and traded between large companies I have worked for. You want to put a stop to this? Stop playing free games. Buy a game for 4.99 or 9.99. We don’t want to be making games like this, and we don’t want another meeting about retention, cohorts or churn."

For more, check out the full editorial over on TouchArcade.