caryl shaw
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Interview: Ngmoco's We Rule after a year on the App Store
Ngmoco's We Rule has arguably changed the App Store since its release. Before We Rule, the App Store was generally based on a rather traditional gaming model -- developers released games for a price, and customers paid or didn't pay based on that price. But with We Rule, Ngmoco (as outlined by CEO Neil Young at last year's GDC) showed that freemium could really work on the App Store, and the ensuing shift led us away from more traditional games and further into the idea of games as a service -- games that took advantage of a large free audience to make money with microtransactions. Now, a year after release, Ngmoco says that We Rule is doing better than ever. It's reached 13 million downloads and has seen 13 billion minutes played over the past year. On a daily basis, 15 million bottles of mojo (the game's main microtransaction currency) are being spent, and while plenty of those are earned for free in the game, there's no question that We Rule has seen plenty of success. TUAW spoke with Caryl Shaw, an executive producer at the company, and she told us a little bit about who's spending all of those minutes in game, Ngmoco's responsibility around microtransactions, and the future of We Rule and Ngmoco's other properties.
SXSW 2009: That Doesn't Suck! Inspiring Creativity With Spore
Although Spore's ship date has come and gone, many people are still fervent about creating new creatures, vehicles, buildings, and more for the game, and they've chalked up over 86 million users creations and counting so far. This panel was about the the wealth user created content out there, and also served as a springboard for talking about the first full Spore expansion pack: Galactic Adventures. Caryl Shaw is a producer at Maxis, and she showed off the new expansion pack, and talked about the tools that Maxis and EA strive to give users so that they can create their own open-ended adventures, which is what Galactic Adventures promises to do. She tooled around inside the game for a bit, showing off the planet terraforming features and a combat-focused user created adventure. But what caught our eye most of all was the sheer amount of extremely creative user creations that just stagger the imagination.While Spore might have come out and disappointed some, this panel was enough to make us want to bust it out again when we get home and either get busy creating, or get busy exploring some of the jaw-dropping user content. Check out the highlights after the break.
Spore producer on reviews, depth, and LittleBigPlanet
We went into social mode at last week's official Spore launch party to chat with Caryl Shaw, producer of the enormously anticipated "everything sim." Specifically, we wanted to hear her thoughts on how the game's being received around the globe – especially in light of some unexpectedly low and mixed reviews.Shaw's of the opinion that the varied scores come as a result of several factors, not the least of which is its mish-mash of genres. "It's not really like a traditional game," she said. "Spore is just this magical creativity experiment." (She also hopes that it helps pave the way for more genre-bending experiences "magical creativity experiments.")
