据游戏邦了解近几年来，社交游戏领域发展迅速。在过去的12个月中，许多早期的社交游戏公司迅速扩展近五倍。排名Facebook社交网站前20名的应用也清一色是游戏。其中3%到5%的游戏玩家愿意在游戏中消费现实货币。

是否觉得社交游戏领域很好混？现在的社交游戏市场如此广泛，发展如此快速，收益如此丰厚。那，怎样才能在社交游戏领域分一杯羹呢？

尽管Zynga被大众定义为游戏公司，田行智却不认同这一观念。他认为Zynga和亚马逊，谷歌一样同属于网络公司的范畴。而对于网络公司，最重要的三大基准就是：范围，粘性和收益：范围——用户数量；粘性——保留的用户数量；收益——钱。

田行智在演讲中表示，社交游戏开发的关键在于游戏发布之后，社交游戏公司仍要注重对游戏功能和内容的不断更新和管理。以FarmVille为例，该游戏在发布之初仅有最基本的游戏几项功能，但现在该游戏的功能增加了10倍有余。每周，Zynga公司都会推出新的游戏更新。

对于规模相对较小的社交游戏，很多人认为其游戏寿命仅有2到3个月。田行智并不完全赞同这一看法。的确，社交游戏在没有进行更新的情况下寿命仅有2到3个月，也正因此，开发公司要不断地添加新游戏内容和功能。

社交游戏的三大基础

在演讲中，田行智提出了Zynga开发游戏的的三大基础元素：

第一是“游戏”，游戏就是对玩家的各种行为进行奖励的活动

第二是“投资”，在游戏过程中，玩家都付出了时间投入。

第三是“表达”，人们总是自我表达，人们希望与他人分享自己的行为及成就。

另外，真实的朋友也是社交游戏的重要组成部分。当然，这里的“朋友”并不是指真正意义上的好朋友，而是指现实生活中彼此认识的人。

Zynga

社会资本的重要性

社会资本是社交游戏的核心里面，它能激励玩家们一起游戏。譬如我送给了你一份礼物，你是否也会回赠给我？这样用户之间就产生了社会资本。玩家在游戏中有付出就会有回报，另外玩家拥有的社会资本越高，获得的回报也就越丰厚。因此，用户都希望在社交游戏中累计自己的社会资本。

测试和准则

虽然身处社交游戏领域也了解社交游戏的基本运作，然而开发社交游戏并不能一意孤行，必须遵循一定的准则。在开发社交游戏中，我们的目标是要让玩家觉得有趣，同时还要取得商业上的胜利。并不是开发团队觉得好的东西玩家就一定都会喜欢。

游戏并不是孤高自赏的艺术，而是一种工艺品。因此，社交游戏的开发需要有用户的支持。社交游戏开发团队要了解用户的喜好和需求，了解造成社交游戏表现下滑的因素，这样才能开发出高品质的社交游戏。

创意为开发社交游戏知道方向，但如何继续这一方向，以何种速度千金等问题都需要依照一定的准则。

开发成功的社交功能

什么是社交功能？社交功能其实非常简单。当我们提及社交功能时，要注意社交游戏面向的其实并不是游戏玩家，而是非游戏玩家。这就是社交游戏的现状。

成功的社交功能应该包含三种要素，如果社交游戏并不符合其中的任一条，该款社交游戏很难取得商业上的实质成功。这三大要素分别是：1，获得更多用户；2，以产生盈利为目标；3，关注一对一或一对多的病毒式传播渠道。

譬如，在Mafia Wars中，我们花费了大量时间拟写故事，拟写文本，但这些工作其实并不利于实现以上3个要素。因此这些付出并没有提高我们的用户范围，游戏粘性或游戏收益。不论我们在故事设计上如何出彩都对盈利没有影响。然而，FarmVille团队采用的小型，简单的抽奖系统却大大地提高了游戏粘性。

“胡萝卜加大棒”

为了吸引更多的玩家，社交游戏开发商必须奖励和惩罚双管齐下。社交游戏公司要提供玩家正面和负面的双向驱动。缺少了任何一种都会导致游戏开发的失败。FarmVille的收获机制就是一种正面影响。玩家只要在游戏中辛勤耕耘，永远都会有收获，这也正是种植类游戏的精髓所在。

在此，田行智表示这些规律可普遍运用于各种社交游戏，同时惩罚必须比奖励更严厉。

社交游戏团队

在关于社交游戏开发团队发面，田行智首先强调了合作的重要性。产品经理要负责分析和了解游戏功能效果。游戏设计师是游戏经验老手，他们能设计出各种游戏机制。而开发者的主要工作是出主义，出计划。这三者必须有效合作，共同前进。

游戏开发团队必须密切合作，为用户提供流畅的游戏体验。从概念时期开始，开发团队就必须展开合作。

然而，在游戏开发之初，准则对决定游戏开发创意是否正确至关重要。如果有3种不同的创意，开发团队可以将3中创意都投入游戏中。而在游戏运营过程中，开发与运营其实密切相连。以FarmVille或Mafia Wars为例，开发公司都必须不断更新新功能。因此，游戏开发团队也发展的越来越庞大。

Zynga是否可以立足中国市场？

很多人认为“先行者”优势对于占领社交游戏领域至关重要。Zynga虽然在美国拥有巨大的优势，然而在中国大陆，Zynga尚未发布任何游戏。然而，田行智却不认为“先行者优势”至关重要，反之，他认为质量才是胜负的关键。

现在社交游戏市场中各种抄袭类游戏层出不穷。但真正的关键在于资深的发展，令自己在广大的社交游戏领域中脱颖而出。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Zynga Beijing general manager Andy Tian delivered a confident Chinese-language speech to a packed hall at GDC China 2010 in Shanghai on Sunday, outlining the core tenets of the company’s development philosophies.

Though fluent in English, Tian, who manages the studio, decided to speak in Chinese to better communicate with the local GDC audience at the Social Games Summit that his talk was part of.

“Social games, at present, is kind of the fastest growing genre,” said Tian. “In the past 12 months, the earliest social game companies have expanded more than five times. The top 20 apps on the Facebook platform are games. Three to five percent of the users will pay, so this is really nice.”

“It sounds easy, right? The market is so big and growing so fast and bringing so much revenue. How do I get me some of that? How can we get a piece of pie for ourselves?” Tian asked the eager crowd.

Though Zynga is widely perceived as a game company, Tian challenged that perception. “The foundation should be based on the web. Zynga, along with Amazon and Google, we’re all web-based companies. We consider ourselves a web-based company. In a web-based company, there are three metrics that are really important. Reach, retention, and revenue. This is the core of any web-based business.”

- Reach – how many users you reach
- Retention – how many stay with you
- Revenue – “Of course, this means money.”

“The key is that we can monitor it realtime and use it to make a decision,” said Tian, before launching into a discussion of the industry-standard metrics that Zynga measures, such as split-testing.

“The biggest part of game development is after launch. In May 2009, the features of FarmVille were really elementary, but the total number of features has grown 10 times by today. Every week we will push to update our content.”

Tian said that he often gets asked if the company churns through users in just a few months, with many assuming that “social games are really small and the life cycle is only two to three months.” He doesn’t agree that’s necessarily the case, however. “Of course if you don’t update it, the life cycle can only last two to three months. So in any of our games we are constantly updating and adding new features.”

“This is really simple — in any social game, the life cycle has to be constantly expanded. So this is what we do, but what do the users like and why do they play our games?”

The Three Pillars

Tian outlined Zynga’s three pillars — the three crucial elements of its games. “The first is play. What is the game? It is a set of actions which have clear rewards for the users.”

The second is “Invest.” Said Tian, “People have to invest their time in the game to blend with other users.” Finally, “Express. The users want to express themselves — what did they do, what kind of achievements did they make in the game, so they can tell people they are cool. This is key.”

And of course, he added, “Social gaming means your real friends. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is really good friends, but you know who they are.”

The Importance of Social Capital

Tian’s then turned his emphasis to the concept of Social Capital — a crucial one in his view. “It is a core concept of the social game. It can promote users to play together — because it looks like I’m having fun. When I am playing a game, I can tell others in a certain way that I am having fun.

“Also you can say, I gave you a gift, can you give me one back? So you have a little social obligation. If I help you, my social capital will grow — because I gave people some help, that will return to me… And also I think that you will like this too. If I play a lot of games, I can recommend to a lot of people… And of course the fourth is I will kick your ass. My level is really advanced and I can show it off.”

“The higher your social capital is the higher you are in the social group. And the higher your social capital the more profit we can get from you,” said Tian. “Everybody wants to accumulate more social capital in a social game.”

And social games have a strength over MMOs — a hugely popular genre in China. “In anonymous MMOs, they also have social capital, but in real-name based capital games, it is stronger because I can meet a lot of friends. If I give something to a friend, during daily life I can also ask him to return something to me, so this kind of social capital is stronger.”

Said Tian, “You should think about how your users can obtain more social capital, they will pay. And they will not pay by themselves, but pay with friends.”

Testing and Metrics

“We are all in this industry and we know we can all have great inspiration and develop new exciting features. And of course I am the boss, so if I want everybody to do it just because I think it’s good, a lot of the times, we will meet failure,” said Tian. “Without tracking, we cannot learn.”

When it comes to metrics, Tian believes they’re absolutely essential to developing social games — and should drive their creative direction.

“We are not developing ‘cool’ features — we know we’re developing relevant features. We want to make sure that a lot of people think something is fun, but we also want to achieve commercial success, not something the development team thinks is cool,” he said. “This tells you what players really like. Because they may not like the same thing you like.”

Said Tian, “The game industry is not art, it’s a craft.” He continued, “So we need the user support. We need to know what the users really like and we have to know what is the root cause for declines in performance. A good designer asks metrics good questions. We have to know how to drive better performance. The best course is not always intuitive.”

Creative intuition gives you a direction to follow, he said, “but how you are actually going to do it and follow a path and what should be the speed you should implement something all have to be based on metrics.”

He did a quick experiment showing four color variations for a link and asking the audience to pick which would be most successful. Purple got the least votes, but he revealed that it was the most successful color — 799 clicks versus 278 for red, the least successful.

“To where you put your logo and icons, how fast you put forward incentives and prizes, really matters. They have a lot to do with retention and revenue.”

Developing Successful Social Features

“What is a social feature? Social features are really simple. We are not actually facing the gamers, we’re facing the non-gamers. So that’s the reality in social games.”

Addressing the audience, Tian said, “There’s nobody here who is our target, so we’re targeting non-gamers, that’s the key. So we have to think of a new approach.”

“A good social feature should align with one of the three key metrics. If you do not increase at least one of the metrics, you will know that you are not increasing your commercial success. It should be increased at gaining more users. It should be aimed at revenue generation. And thirdly you need to pay attention to virality — one-to-one and one-to-many.”

For example, in Mafia Wars, “we spent a lot of time putting in a boss fight. Including writing stories, writing tests… But it doesn’t drive any metrics, and we spent a lot of effort on that. We kept it in the game but we can’t do much with it. The efforts did not increase our reach, retention, nor revenue. No matter how good we do it, it doesn’t help our business.”

However, in FarmVille the team implemented a small, simple lottery that awards the player coins randomly. This has been huge for retention. “Some people just have a very shallow understanding [of games]. It’s a game to laugh at. If it’s an easy game people will repeatedly come back, and on an easy platform [like Facebook] people can just play it on and on and on.”

Carrot and Stick

When it comes to engagement for your users, “you need to have both a stick and a carrot,” said Tian.

“A stick to punch the user is not what I mean. You need to give the user a positive or negative drive. [If] you let them feel that they don’t have to do it… You failed, actually. But if the user will feel there are no benefits reaped, that’s also a failure.”

The harvest mechanic in FarmVille is a positive stick, Tian said. “If you offer negative sticks the game will shrink. If I really play industriously I will gain lots of benefits. That’s why people play. That is the rule of a farmland game.”

Said Tian, “These rules are universal and can be applied to other social games. The stick should be bigger than the carrot.”

The Social Game Team

Tian touched on how Zynga sets up its teams. “You really need cooperation from the very beginning. The product manager is responsible for analysis and also features spec — they mainly come from the consumer web. Game designers are game veterans. They are the hardcores of game design. Our game designers are really big guys in the game industry. He really can create game systems with mechanics. The producer’s job is to gain ideas and to plan. The three should cooperate from day one and continuously work together.”

When asked about working together as a team, said Tian, “It has to be integrated in all aspects. You should not designate one person who’s responsible for web, one who’s responsible for games. It should be integrated on all levels of work.”

“You should enable your user to get the experience without any barrier. From the concept stage to the feature [development] stage, you need to integrate everybody [on the team] together,” he said.

But even early on, metrics are key to discerning whose ideas are right. “There is no ‘before the metrics’ — it’s are you set up to listen to it? If we have three ideas, we can try all three ideas in the game.”

And when it comes to running the game, development is aligned with operations, he said. “Product and operations are together — they cannot be separated. You cannot say that that a product department should only focus on products.”

“For example in FarmVille and Mafia Wars, the key is that you need to constantly launch new features. Every week we will update new features… So the team is getting bigger and bigger. So this is a big investment. Because the number of the users is getting bigger and bigger they are asking for new content. There is no shortcut for this. You need to constantly invest,” said Tian.

Can Zynga Win in China?

Tian dismissed the idea that the “first mover advantage” is truly necessary for winning in the social games space. While Zynga has a huge advantage in the U.S., in mainland China, it has not launched any games yet. “The first mover advantage in the game industry is not that big. It’s about quality.”

And while there are plenty of clones of its games in all markets, “The key thing is are you improving? Constantly improving beyond what exists in the market — that’s the key,” said Tian. （Source：Gamasutra）