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CityVille发布12天,月活跃用户突破2600万

发布时间:2010-12-16 10:43:53 Tags:,,,

最近,Zynga公司发布的新款社交游戏CityVille成为有史以来发展最为迅速的游戏。对此,一位Zynga公司执行官表示CityVille的成功并不是偶然,Zynga公司一直致力于将该款新游戏拓宽面向更多的Facebook用户。

自12月2日闪亮登场后,CityVille在短短12天的时间内月活跃用户激增至2600万。其中本周二的新增用户高达450万人,突破了此前所有社交游戏的记录。据Appdata数据显示,CityVille在过去的一周玩家人数猛增2490万。目前,CityVille的首轮增长势头已经超越了当年的FarmVille。

cityville

cityville

对此,Zynga负责CityVille的副总裁Mark Skaggs认为CityVille的快速发展令人回想起了当年的FarmVille,Zynga公司成员正投入大量精力保持这一发展速度。

CityVille的发布对于正急于证明开发热门游戏能力的Zynga公司而言十分重要。此前,Zynga公司旗下游戏的用户数量波动巨大。在这种情况下如果Zynga可以再次发布一款热门游戏就能挽回流失的用户,同时稳固其在社交游戏领域的领先地位。

据AppData数据显示,Zynga旗下各款游戏总计的月活跃用户有2亿2200万。然而就在两个月前,这一数据仅为1亿9800万,这与今年春季最高峰时期的2亿6000万相比仍然相差甚远。这主要是由于今年春季,Facebook社交网站关闭了部分热门游戏的病毒式传播渠道。

据游戏邦了解,成立于2007年的Zynga公司已经成为全球规模最大的社交游戏公司之一,拥有员工1300多人。投资公司Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers的传奇投资商John Doerr也表示投资zynga是他做出的最明智决定。现在,Zynga公司是Facebook社交网站规模最大的应用开发商。据估计,zynga公司的估值超过50亿美元,甚至超越了老牌视频游戏发行公司Electronic Arts。

最近,zynga公司希望通过向其他平台拓展吸引更多的游戏用户,譬如将旗下社交游戏移植到各种非Facebook网站,或翻译成其他语言版本。然而,对Zynga公司而言促进用户增长最有效的措施莫过于发布新款游戏CityVille。

Skaggs告诉我们,新游戏CityVille的开发团队成立于今年春天,此前95%的开发人员并没有从事过游戏开发。开发团队中有些是新加入Zynga公司的业内老手,而像Skaggs这样曾经有过游戏开发经验的仅仅是少数。刚开始,开发人员主要是将zynga旗下其他游戏的一些成功机制融入于新游戏之中,如奖励,抽奖等。之后就开始要侧重于针对市场游戏的趣味性游戏机制。最终,一款只需几分钟游戏时间的城市建设类社交游戏诞生了!

目前,CityVille的日活跃用户为1150万。这一指数在游戏发布的前5天仅仅是缓慢上升,而后迅速猛增。对此,Skaggs并没有透露如何实现这一增长,但他表示在游戏开发的同时就在其中融入了一定的病毒式宣传方式,并同时开启了跨游戏和广告等宣传活动。

此前,Zynga的多款游戏用户数量也呈现飙升趋势。今夏FrontierVille发布之后不久月活跃用户就高达3050万人。然而,Zynga最热门的社交游戏FarmVille在今年夏天达到最高峰的8300万后,目前月活跃用户仅为5530万。

从表面上看,zynga的新游戏CityVille十分类似于SimCity。在CityVille中,玩家负责管理一个城市,建设各种住宅,商店,马路等。朋友可以到访玩家城市中的各种场所帮助促进城市的兴盛,而玩家也可以朋友的城市中进行各种活动。由此可看见,CityVille比起原创的Simcity更具社交性。

据游戏邦了解,Facebook社交网站也有其局限性,Facebook游戏中无法采用复杂的3D动画。虽然CityVille中提供了一些新奇有趣的游戏体验,然而我们很难明确区分这是否是一款原创类游戏,毕竟Facebook社交网站中已经出现了各种城市建设类游戏,譬如Digital Chocolate的Millionaire City系列,Playdom的Social City等。现在CityVille的出现无疑令这些游戏失色不少,但为了证明CityVille并不只是昙花一现,Zynga游戏设计师们苦思冥想各种方式提高玩家的游戏参与度。游戏要有吸引力才能提高玩家的忠诚度,才能从中盈利。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,转载请注明来源:游戏邦)

Zynga’s CityVille has become the fastest-growing game in history. And based on an interview with a key Zynga executive, that isn’t an accident. The company has all but figured out how to turn its game launches into a science, and that helps them spread to increasingly large audiences on Facebook.

The city simulation game has drawn in more than 26 million users since it debuted on Dec. 2. In just 12 days, the Facebook game has broken all previous records, adding 4.5 million users on Tuesday alone. In the past seven days, the game has added 24.9 million users, according to market researcher AppData. For Zynga, that’s important because the San Francisco company often sees big fluctuations in its player base as fickle gamers move on from one game to the next. CityVille has surpassed the initial growth wave that FarmVille, Zynga’s biggest game, saw in 2009.

“This feels fun,” said Mark Skaggs, the Zynga vice president in charge of CityVille. “It’s like reliving the fun and excitement of the FarmVille launch. We are buzzing with energy about how to keep it going.”

CityVille comes at an important time for Zynga, which is trying to show that it can keep churning out hit after hit, by following a recipe that focuses on watching its gamers closely and tweaking games so that there are no barriers for adoption. If Zynga can keep turning out the hits, it can replace lost gamers and keep a commanding lead in social games industry. According to AppData, Zynga has more than 222 million monthly active users (those who play in a month). Just a couple of weeks ago, Zynga had only 198 million users, which is far below its peak from the spring, when it had more than 260 million users. Zynga lost a lot of users because Facebook shut down some of the most popular game communications (which were viewed by non-gamers as spam).

Founded in 2007, Zynga has become one of the largest gaming companies in the world, with more than 1,300 employees. Legendary investor John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers said Zynga was easily the best investment that his firm has ever made. The social networking game maker is already the largest app developer on Facebook. And some recent valuations show that Zynga is actually valued above $5 billion, larger than Electronic Arts, one of the largest video game publishers in the world.

Zynga is trying to regain its numbers of users by expanding to other platforms such as mobile games in Japan. It is also expanding its social games to non-Facebook web sites and translating its games into other languages. The company has been buying about a company a month to get more talented game developers. But the No. 1 thing it has to do to keep growing is to commission new games like CityVille.

Skaggs said that the CityVille team was formed from scratch in the spring and that 95 percent of the people had never worked on a game before. There were a few game industry veterans who were new to Zynga, and a few crusty Zynga veterans like Skaggs, who previously developed games for Electronic Arts. The team started with established play practices that had been successful in other Zynga games, such as picking up rewards, or loot, upon achieving something. Then it focused on what would be fun to do in a city game. The result is a lightweight city simulation that can be played in a matter of minutes — but which players feel compelled to return to on a daily basis.

CityVille has 11.5 million daily active users — that’s the number that play during one day. The new game went through a slow climb in its first five days and then suddenly took off exponentially. Skaggs didn’t disclose exactly what Zynga did to make that happen. But he said the company has an established process for game launches where it turns on features that make the game more viral. It also opens up its cross-promotion and advertising spigots as well.

Other Zynga titles have taken off fast as well. FrontierVille saw a rocket ride this summer before settling at around 30.5 million monthly active users. FarmVille hit 83 million monthly active users this spring and is now at 55.3 million. Skaggs said that FarmVille had a tougher start because the development team itself had to watch the computing infrastructure and make sure that the growing load wasn’t too much for the servers. That meant that nobody slept. Now Zynga has a team dedicated to managing the load.

On the surface, the game resembles SimCity. You run a town, building homes and stores and roads. Your friends can help your town thrive by visiting your stores and working as staff in your city hall. You can also set up franchises of your own in the towns of other players. In that sense, CityVille is far more social than the original SimCity titles. Skaggs said the vision was to create a game that felt like you were actually controlling a city in real time.

But everyone knows Facebook has its limitations. The game does not reproduce the kind of sophisticated 3D graphics animations that disc-based games such As SimCity can do.

And while CityVille has some interesting new game play, you can’t really say that it is original. There’s a whole genre of city games on Facebook, including Digital Chocolate’s Millionaire City and its sequels. Playdom’s Social City was also a hit at one point. But CityVille has already eclipsed those titles. Now it has to prove that it’s not just a fad. Zynga’s game designers are hard at work on increasing engagement, or the amount of time that users spend with a game. If a game is more engaging, it can generate more audience loyalty and eventually lead to better revenues. Zynga games are free for users to play but they generate money when users pay real money for virtual goods.

Zynga had previously said that the game took off faster in a single day than all of its previous games, getting 290,000 users in its first 24 hours. Zynga also launched the game in multiple languages at the outset so that it could grow in multiple regions at once. The game was almost ready to go on Nov. 16, when Zynga briefed the press about the game. But Skaggs said the company held back the launch because it needed to fix bugs and polish it. The team had released the game to all Zynga employees, who discovered things that the team had to fix before moving forward. That delayed the game a couple of weeks. By Dec. 2, at 1:22 am, Zynga opened up the game and the staff drank champagne.

Since the launch, Zynga has made some significant changes to the balance of the game and released a lot of new items and buildings. There have been a couple of small outages, but nothing major that has interrupted the addition of new players. (Source : Venturebeat)


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