游戏邦注：本文作者为游戏设计者Tadhg Kelly，他深入分析了Zynga近期推出的热门游戏《CityVille》大获成功的设计原理。全文分为上下两篇，以下为下篇内容。

游戏邦在上篇内容中已经提到，社交功能有助于提高游戏的曝光率，对开启“大门”新功能也很管用，是保证游戏用户留存率的关键。现在我们就来谈谈《CityVille》的三种社交活动：信息提示、任务建议、城市访问。

信息提示：

《CityVille》会让你邀请朋友加入游戏，分享最新的成就，或者请求朋友帮助完成任务。昨天我在玩这款游戏时，系统平均每10分钟就会弹出三个信息提示窗口，出现这种情况并不令人意外。《CityVille》的信息提示功能主要通过一些提问引导玩家深入体验游戏，这些问题主要有四种类型：

1.是否需要与朋友分享你所取得的成就？

2.是否需要向朋友寻求帮助？

3.是否愿意向好友赠送礼物？

4.是否回应好友的求助信息？

通常在以下几种情况发生时，游戏系统就会自动弹出这些信息提示内容：

*玩家升到更高级别的时候；

*玩家耗尽能量的时候；

*建筑完工但急需人手的时候；

*接到一桩需要好友协助的任务的时候。

还有一些信息提示只在特定情况下才会出现，频率并没有这么高。以下是我从《FrontierVille》中截取的图片，它的功能设置与《CityVille》相同。

这是一个交叉推广信息提示。玩家初次进入游戏界面时，信息提示的问题非常多，但当玩家升到第5级以上时，这些提示问题就会开始像例行公事一样很有规律。游戏中的其他信息提示内容还包括新手教程、任务指南、备忘录和游戏崩溃记录。

信息提示的作用在于，鼓励玩家多向好友推广自己的游戏，或直接向好友发送邀请信息。开发商在设置信息提示功能的时候必须严格遵守一些准则，要清楚如何操作才能让它物尽其用：信息提示的首要用途是邀请好友参与游戏，或与他人分享游戏。开发商不可滥用这种功能。

任务建议

任务建议就是系统中支持玩家与其他用户、Facebook好友进行互动的一些功能按钮、链接和标签等。最典型的例子是游戏界面下端的好友栏，如下图所示：

玩家通过点击这一栏中的好友头像，就可以实现访问对方城市、赠送礼物的操作。

任务建议内容还是以赠送礼物为主，大部分礼物是免费的（游戏邦注：比如说，玩家可以向好友赠送免费的能量值），通过系统的信息发布功能，对方就会知道自己收到了一份礼物。

这种功能可以让玩家之间实现互惠互利，如果玩家在《CityVille》中向对方赠送的礼物越多，就越有可能多快好省地推动游戏进程。总之，这是一个多赢的功能设置。

城市访问

《CityVille》最有意思的社交元素就是支持用户向其他玩家的城市申请经营执照，在对方的地盘中做买卖。只有对方批准了，你才能进入当地创业。如果对方同意了，你们双方都能从这种合作中获益。

对方可以通过收租创造又一个营收渠道，你们彼此都可以从你的建筑中获取更多金币和经验值。

另一种访问方式就是直接参与对方城市的日常活动，你路过时可以替好友收割庄稼或拾取物品，对方也可以让你帮助完成一些任务。

如下图所示，它就是接受好友帮助的一个提示。如果我回答“是”，这两个朋友的头像就可以自由出入我的城市，收割庄稼、创造更多东西。帮助好友完成任务会耗损一些能量，但同时却能赢取金币、XP值、威望值等奖励。

威望值相当于社交层面的“等级”（游戏邦注：参照下图，右边的红心代表玩家的威望值），威望在一些游戏活动中是一个二级的成就衡量标准，但它可以增加玩家的XP值和金币库存量。你的威望越高，你自己以及获得帮助的好友的XP值也就越多。

另外，玩家还可以发送成为邻居的请求，如果大家彼此相邻，就更容易互访对方的城市、赠送礼物。还有一些城市建设任务会要求玩家必须拥有一定数量的邻居，这样一来，邻居数量也就成了另一道升级门槛。

推广渠道

以上的这一系列社交活动的共同目的就是增加用户发布消息的机会。我在上篇内容中已经数次提到，发布功能可以鼓励玩家在Facebook在对《CityVille》进行口碑营销。发布功能只能简单地将玩家在游戏中所取得的成就告知好友，社交游戏要想争取更多眼球，还可以借助其他推广渠道。比如《CityVille》的以下四种操作设置：

1.用户墙信息发布

2.“翻墙”信息发布

3.信息通告功能

4.电子邮件

用户墙信息发布：它是最直接明了的社交手段，一般用户都会通过这种方式，告诉人们自己在游戏中获得的高分及相关成就。

开发商要巧用这种功能，也要注意遵遁一些特定的章法：游戏系统首先得明白无误地征求玩家意见，看他们是否愿意分享游戏活动，然后还得再次弹出一个Facebook对话框，请求玩家确认这一操作。只有经过这些步骤，才能将信息发布到用户墙上。

这种功能并不是很行得通，这一点并不令人意外。更何况Facebook最近又变更了相关政策，只允许在同一款游戏的玩家之间实现这种互动。因为Facebook上有许多非游戏用户对这类信息烦不胜烦，而且这款游戏的玩家未必会对另一款游戏的信息感兴趣，所以出现这种情况也就不难理解了。

“翻墙”信息发布：这里是指玩家跑到好友的用户墙上晒消息，这个渠道和前面的用户墙信息发布手段一样都已经被限制了，但比起前者仍具有一个优势，那就是它可以加深好友对这款游戏的印象。

《CityVille》的“翻墙”信息发布设置可以告知玩家当前有好友正在访问自己的城市。该好友在实现这一操作之前，也得发布相关的信息。如上图所示，我发布的消息主要与我个人有关，而不是单纯晒出自己的游戏成果。

信息通告功能：Facebook首次重新设计用户主界面时，还引进了一项新功能“信息通告”。该功能可以告知用户，哪些好友对你的资料更新发表了评论，在你的用户墙上留言，或者收藏了你的头像等活动。

包括Zynga在内的社交游戏开发商经常滥用信息通告功能，比如说《Mafia Wars》这款游戏，几乎每天都会给你发送消息，通过提供一些奖励等刺激手段，企图让你重返战局。但这种垃圾广告式的信息通告引起众多用户的不满，所以Facebook后来就禁止开发商使用这一功能。

但Facebook最近似乎又有所让步了，虽然还是不允许开发商通过信息通告渠道向玩家推销游戏，但并不禁止游戏用户向非游戏用户发送这类信息。

信息请求一直是Facebook的重要功能，现在并入信息通告服务后，已经比以前更加清晰可辩了。

电子邮件：对开发商来说，电子邮件在头一年中还是个可靠的推广渠道，可实际使用的人数非常少。许多玩家的电子邮箱一般仅用于处理个人私事，所以开发商就不能将用户电子邮箱视为垃圾广告投放站，而应该发送一些与玩家密切相关的互动信息。《CityVille》并不用电子邮件海投广告，而是向玩家发送请求信息，这种做法可以让邮件内容更具可读性。（不过从我个人来讲，我一定会让自己的Gmail邮箱将这类邮件统统过滤掉。）

权限

虽然Facebook上有一些条款限制了游戏的信息发布，但开发商还是可以通过一些延展性的权限找到突破口。如果开发商想向用户发送电子邮件，首先得询问用户意见，获得同意后才能实现这一操作；开发商要获取用户的社交活动信息也同样如此。还有一些可以为游戏加分的用户批准权限，比如用户如果同意系统自动优化用户墙信息发布功能，就可以将两个信息发布步骤压缩为一个。

要获得用户批准的权限有多种方式可以考虑。一些游戏通过植入一个迷你游戏，邀请玩家在游戏界面顶端的社交功能条中完成一些操作，赢取相关奖励。（如以下的《Pet Society》截图）

而《CityVille》等其他游戏则将希望获得的权限划分成若干个问题，在应用安装过程中弹出对话框让玩家进行选择。（详见下图）

像这种强制性手段可能会更管用，但如果你要求的权限太多，玩家可能就会退出安装过程。

自私自利的社交元素

自私性就是《CityVille》的社交属性。

该游戏的每项社交活动都离不开实际奖赏这种诱惑。如果你拜访了一个朋友，就可以得到一个奖励；向他们赠送免费的礼物，他们也会回赠同样的东西；你在对方的城市里开面包房，你们双方都可以从中获益；你帮人家收割庄稼，就可以获得更多威望值。

说到底这还是一种物质刺激手段。颇为讽刺的是，社交游戏并不完全具有社交性，这些游戏不会鼓励玩家进行更深层次的互动，因为这种互动对开发商毫无意义可言。

事实上，社交游戏的根基是娱乐性。这种社交化的娱乐是一种互惠原则的交易，以物质刺激实现双方互助，而不是出于慈悲才向对方伸以援手。虽然我们并不排除有些玩家确实是出于侠义心肠而向别人提供帮助，但需要指出的是，社交游戏是围绕功利性而设计，它不会去考虑这种情况。

写到这里，我想讨论以下两个问题：

1.盈利：《CityVille》的盈利模式如何运作？

2.评价：《CityVille》中哪些机制起到了作用？而哪些没有？

关键内容

没有人详细了解Zynga游戏的盈利情况，只能通过网上流传的二手信息或者道听途说的消息推测Zynga的盈利情况。虽然各方说法不一，但大家普遍认同的结果就是：Zynga的游戏收益巨大。

以下是一般社交游戏开发公司较为认同的收益情况：

*  MAU平均消费0.25美元，或DAU平均消费0.03美元。

*  付费玩家占每月活跃用户人数的1%至3%。

*  20%的用户在游戏过程中会有消费行为。

*  重金游戏玩家所占比例虽然不足玩家总数的0.1%，但他们消费水平明显更高（大于100美元）。

*  玩家购买的各种可见商品（礼品，虚拟圣诞树等）和不可见商品（游戏体验）的比重相当。

*  社交游戏与零售不同——每名用户的平均消费水平虽然较低，但长期积累的收益仍然十分可观。

虽然以上数据并不一定准确，但已足够说明游戏内置付费功能的巨大发展潜力，这与一款游戏的知名度和游戏黏性直接相关。游戏的知名度越高，运营寿命越长，所吸引的付费玩家也就越多，相应的重金游戏玩家也会更多。

当然，免费体验的社交游戏若想实现盈利，首先必须有商品。在《CityVille》中，玩家争相购买的商品便是游戏“钞票”（cash）。

“金币”“钞票”双轨制

与其他在线游戏一样，《CityVille》也通行两种不同的货币。在游戏中，玩家的各种活动以提高声誉，商品，经验，金币和钞票五大指标为中心目的。其中威望值和经验值主要用于提升社交和游戏等级。游戏虚拟货币“金币”（coins）和“钞票”（cash）都可以用来购买各种游戏道具。

那么，为什么《CityVille》要采用两种不同的货币呢？简单来说就是货币双轨制便于将高收入活动与低收入活动区别开来。因此，这一款货币逐渐贬值的同时可以确保另一款货币的价值不变。

早期的许多大型多人游戏中都面临着游戏货币贬值的难题，如果游戏从头至尾都采用单一货币就很容易发生这种情况。以游戏中价值100金币的魔法剑为例，对于刚进游戏赚钱不易的初级玩家而言，这把剑的价格太贵，但也可能是物有所值。但对许多老玩家来说，他们可是足足熬了数周甚至数月才弄到这把宝剑，如果搜集100枚金币购得宝剑是一项艰巨的任务，那他们就会因自己的成就产生满足感；但如果玩家不费吹灰之力就能获得这些金币，他们就会对金币失去兴趣。

这又会造成什么后果呢？

如果金币过于难赚而导致使玩家耗费大量精力去赚钱，他们的游戏积极性会急剧下降。反之，如果金币获取过程过于简单，玩家就会很快失去游戏动力。

为了应对这一难题，许多游戏开发商决定在游戏中同时通行两种货币。

对此，《CityVille》的设定如下：

玩家的大部分活动可以获得“易得货币”——金币，而高级活动则可以获得“难得货币”——钞票。

游戏中收获庄稼，收取建筑税收等各种日常活动都可以得到金币。玩家可以使用赚得的金币购买建筑，种植新作物，这也正是大部分初级玩家主要争取的游戏指标。然而当玩家等级达到10级之后，金币将不再是玩家关注的重点。而此时，“难赚货币”——钞票就会突显它的价值。在《CityVille》中，玩家只有在等级提升的同时才能获得“钞票”奖励。因此，“钞票”的面值很小，玩家必须谨慎使用。

一般来说，钞票主要用于完成关键任务。如上图所示，为了完成这一任务玩家可以选择向朋友要2个巧克力或者支付2张“钞票”。如果玩家觉得向朋友要求物品步骤太过麻烦就可以选择支付“钞票”避免社交尴尬。所以，《CityVille》的另一种货币“钞票”的主要用途是简化游戏进程，而不是购买道具。

另外，由于赚取“钞票”的过程较为困难，这也就刺激不少玩家选择使用现金购买“钞票”，实现《CityVille》游戏的盈利。

支付方式和定价

《CityVille》中有三种支付方式，第一种如下图所示：

玩家点击“Add Coin & Cash”按钮就会看到以下内容：

从上图我们可以看出，玩家可以在《CityVille》中购买“金币”和“钞票”，后者的价值明显高于前者。

《CityVille》的“钞票”礼包售价如下：

2美元可购买15张钞票

5美元可购买40张钞票

9美元可购买75张钞票

19美元可购买170张钞票

49美元可购买465张钞票

99美元可购买1000张钞票

一开始每张“钞票”的价值相当于0.13美元，而到最后每张“钞票”的价值仅为0.1美元。玩家一次性买的“钞票”越多也就越划算。

然而在所有的“钞票”礼包中，仅有极少数玩家选择了最后的99美元礼包。对此，定价心理学的说法是，一分钱一分货是用户的普遍消费心理，大多数人都会选择折衷路线，购买中间价位的商品。因此，最便宜的2美元礼包也很少人问津，相当一部分玩家都选择了9美元的“钞票”礼包。

比较令人意外的是，这个游戏系统居然没有999美元可购买12500张钞票的设置，虽然用户为这种选项付费的可能性微乎其微，但定价心理暗示会促使更多普通用户增加支出，从原来的9美元选项升级到19美元。

综合推广墙（Offer Walls）

综合推广墙就是面向玩家开放的一项支持交易折扣、会员注册或问卷调查活动的服务，玩家可以通过参加此类活动赢取一些虚拟货币。在18个月前，这种服务受到了社交游戏开发商的热捧，但最近却饱受诟病，舆论认为这种方式不过是延袭了消费勘察这种市场营销手段的做法（游戏邦注：消费勘察这种方式并不管用，它无法获取高质量的用户反馈信息）。

但真正令社交游戏的综合推广墙声名狼籍的却是《FarmVille》，据Techcrunch网站之前的调查发现，这款游戏的综合推广墙已经成为手机垃圾信息、邮件及不良广告的温床。

结果不少游戏都纷纷撤下了自己的综合推广墙，直到最近才以试探性的动作重新露脸，行事也远比原来更加规矩了。但据称这桩“垃圾信息门”事件发生之后，综合推广墙的作用也大大受到影响。与此同时，Facebook也开始强制包括Zynga在内的开发商采用Facebook Credits这种虚拟货币系统，作为游戏玩家的主要付费渠道。

虽然Facebook Credits的游戏交易抽成高达30%，而其他第三方计费解决方案仅抽成10%，但Facebook还是宣称自己的服务系统更可靠，更能促进游戏交易（据称确实如此）。另外要指出的是，Facebook Credits系统不带综合推广墙功能。

《CityVille》的游戏系统却仍然提供综合推广墙的服务，但只是作为一个可替换选项，不会强制用户使用。

它的综合推广墙就设置在“Earn City Cash”功能之后，如下图所示：

该综合推广墙由一家名为Tapjoy（原名为Offerpal）的第三方公司负责提供服务，其付费渠道正是Facebook Credits无法提供的选项，但它的主要功能还是进行市场调查，推广Netflix的订阅服务等内容。

这个系统对《CityVille》究竟有多大作用尚无定论，但比起简易好用的Facebook Credits，陈旧过时的综合推广墙很可能在游戏运行的中期阶段就被弃用。

充值卡

许多英国和美国（或海外）的超市都有出售可向Facebook社交游戏帐号充值的游戏卡，它为非信用卡用户、非手机付费用户创造了极大的便利。

这种卡的使用操作非常简单，只需要购得卡片，将卡上款项充入《CityVille》或Zynga的其他游戏帐号中，就能获得等额的钱款。

这是一种相对较新的付费方式，在Playdom首创之后，今年其他大型开发商也开始广泛采用这种付费方法，它确实更容易大范围普及，使用也更方便。

不过实在地说，充值卡对那些已经形成规模的公司来说，已经算是一个落伍的创新，毕竟这种卡会涉及到生产、运输和零售终端等各种运营环节，它的投入成本太高了。

总结

我在前文已经详细分析了《CityVille》的曝光率、留存率、开环效应、社交元素、互惠交易等设置，也谈到了它的盈利模式，现在的问题是，它还会一直这么受追捧吗？当然会。但Zynga的游戏仍然在一定的改进空间。

调整能量设置：它的能量机制有点过时。在早些时候的社交游戏中，能量是唯一可防止玩家过快耗竭精力的一个系统设置。《CityVille》虽然已经植入了许多计时器，但许多玩家耗尽能量时，却只能眼睁睁地看着自己的庄稼枯死在地里，这种设置对玩家来说其实过于苟严了。虽然它的主要用意是促使玩家购买更多能量，但可能只会让玩家产生消极情绪。所以我的建议就是，要么彻底抛弃这种能量设置，要么就把它设置得更有弹性，更宽容一点。

清除累赘功能：它根本不需要如此之多的付费方式，植入Tapjoy的服务尤其让人倒胃口。尽管仍然有不少人认为，在游戏运营的短期或中期内，这些额外的付费渠道多多少少能创造一点收益，但这些累赘的功能实际上只会造成更大的麻烦。它会降低这些功能原来的作用和价值，让一款产品变得呆板无趣。MySpace之前很赞，但沾上那些繁琐的点缀之后就走样了，雅虎也一样；另外这些多余的功能、服务一般都不会在设计上下功夫，因为它们的存在原本就是可有可无的。

增加自动化设置：《FarmVille》的庄稼收割、果实采集等手动操作设置运行得很顺畅，但如果切换到一个更大的游戏地盘（比如一座城市），这种全手动操作方式的劣势就非常明显了。《CityVille》的物品拾取、庄稼收割功能迟早得增加一些自动化设置，不然游戏规模扩大后，手动操作就玩不转了。也有可能得升到更高的级别才能拥有这种功能设置，但我目前还没有发现。

添加999美元付费选项：可以试试增加更高价的付费选项，看看玩家的平均消费情况有何变化。

调整“钞票”用途：如果这款游戏不需要用金钱交易来避免社交窘境，那就会更加理想。特别要指出的是，创建任务时系统总会要求玩家通过用户墙发布信息，或者支付一定费用，这就很容易让玩家产生反感情绪。游戏中的计时性、个人请求/邀请等设置都没问题，但强迫玩家将自己的游戏活动公之于众，或者付费搞定一些社交任务就真不是什么好主意了。

树立新的游戏风格：我认为Zynga该重新定位下一款游戏的风格了。之前的农场、扑克、黑帮、餐厅、城市和水族等游戏主题都还不错，但它们的风格其实都很普通。Zynga总是对别人亦步亦趋，在前人的基础上开发自己的游戏，而且他们的同质化游戏的问世也经常比别人慢几拍。比如《FarmVille》一直等到《FarmTown》登台数周后才亮相，对Zynga这种大型开发商来说这种模式并不可取。Zynga在模拟城市游戏这一环节上已经落后了，他们能有如此成就完全得益于现存的产业规模。

《CityVille》对其他开发商的启示

《CityVille》是Zynga这家社交游戏公司集中所有资源，全力开发的一部重量级的大作，几乎倾注了该公司下半年的全部心血。这款游戏很讨人喜欢、富有黏性，后端的技术也非常过硬，总之就是一款极具震撼力的游戏。

毫无疑问，许多开发商现在都只能投以嫉妒的眼光，困惑Zynga究竟是如何取得这一成就，甚至可能还有人试图如法炮制，推出另一款城市建设的模拟游戏。虽然这种做法极其失策，但我相信还是会有人这么做。

很显然，这款游戏的曝光率、开环设计等设置都很容易复制，但我还是要说句实话：除非你每年都有5000万美元的广告预算，有五款响当当的游戏可以交叉推广，不然你根本无法和Zynga相提并论。

Zynga目前在社交游戏领域的地位相当于科技行业的Facebook和谷歌，这些巨头都聚集了大量的拥趸，比其他竞争对手掌握了更多的资源。如果有一家社交游戏公司只投入30万美元开发一款廉价的游戏，就幻想成为下一个Zynga公司，那就纯粹是痴人说梦，好比是小型的初创企业声称自己将推出比Google更强大的搜索引擎一样只能沦为笑谈。

我认为社交游戏开发商要获得成功，不妨考虑以下的策略：

积极应对挑战：许多新游戏往往是开发商锐意进取的产物，《Treasure Madness》、《Farm Town》、《Restaurant City》、《Bejewelled Blitz》、《Happy Aquarium》等许多成功的游戏都属于这类创新作品。即使是Zynga这样的公司，刚起步时也不免向这类游戏取经，复制了它们的设计模式。如果你创造了一款风格独特的游戏，它的市场反应还不错，那么这种优势就有可能让你成就更大的事业。

投靠实力强大的买家：另一种选择就是，如果你开发了一款出色的游戏，Zynga或者其他大公司向你示好，那就不妨加入他们的团队。《YoVille》和《Warstorm》这两者的原始开发商就已经并入Zynga的旗下，它们的创始人和投资者也因此获得了更多保障。Zynga这种大型的独立开发商财力惊人，他们要收购什么团队可是不差钱的。

剑走偏锋路线：虽然Zynga正大肆扩张他们的社交游戏版图，但对那种小众市场的游戏并无多大兴趣。Facebook并不是这类游戏的最佳舞台，但如果你的游戏能够另辟蹊径，在一些特定用户中形成了气候，却也未尝不可。《vikings of Thule》这款游戏问世已经有些年头了，只有一小撮的死忠粉丝，虽然它不是什么大作，但对那些热爱游戏创作的小型团队来说，已经是十分理想的结果了。

选择正确的平台：你不一定非得赖在Facebook上不可，BigPoint不用靠这个平台也照样运营得很顺利。如果你的游戏没有投放到Facebook，但又使用了Facebook Connect之类的功能，可能就无法像Zynga一样在短时间内虏获大量的用户。但从另一角度来看，你却有可能因此掌握更多用户资源，你的玩家也不会因Facebook其他众多游戏的诱惑而轻易移情别恋。总之，这两种选择都有各自的好处。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Now let’s move on to the social features. I already touched on publishing as an example of how social features increase visibility, and how they are used for unlocking gates. But they also play a key part in building retention in the game.

There are three kinds of social activity in CityVille: prompts, suggestions and visitations.

Prompts

CityVille asks you to invite friends, share your latest accomplishment, or ask your friends to send help so that you can complete a task. In one ten minute session of CityVille that I played yesterday evening, the game prompted me with a question three times, and that is not unusual.

CityVille is constructed to routinely prompt users to take an action. The actions are in the form of a response to a question. Although there may appear to be many variations, there are actually only four types of question that it asks:

1.Would you like to tell your friends what you have done? (as in the image above)

2.Would you like to ask your friends for help?

3.Would you like to send a friend a gift?

4.Would you like to grant a friend’s request for help?

The game asks these questions mostly in relation to specific events. However because of the way that the game’s activities, timers and open loops work, those events happen very frequently. Here are some examples:

•When you attain a level

•When you run out of energy

•When you build a building that needs employees

•When you leave the game open in a browser window for five minutes

•When a particular task needs friends to complete

There are also prompts that it asks only at certain points during the game. The following image is from FrontierVille because I missed the chance to screen-grab the one that CityVille asked, but the same function is in CityVille:

This is a cross-promotion prompt. At the start of the game it asks a lot of these sorts of questions, but they tend to trail off into the more routine questions by the time you’ve reached level 5 or so. Other kinds of prompt include gameplay tutorials, guides, reminders and game crashes.

The purpose of a prompt is to get the player to either broadcast to all of their friends, or send a request directly to another friend. There are fairly stringent rules over prompts and how they can be used: They have to clearly ask the player to share or invite friends, for example. The reason is to prevent developer abuses. (See Channels below for more).

Suggestions

Suggestions are buttons, links and tabs in the game that remind the player that they can interact with other players or Facebook friends if they choose. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the friend bar at the bottom of the game:

This bar allows you to travel to your friends’ cities, and also to send them gifts. If you click on any of their images, you will see a Gift button.

Suggestions centre around giving gifts. Most of them are free to the giver (you can give someone energy without it costing any of yours), and they generate publishable stories that the player can share, to let the receiver know that they have received a gift.

The result is an attempt at generating reciprocity. The goal of the gift economy in CityVille is to make players realise that they can actually progress much faster in the game, at no cost, if they give as many gifts to each other as possible. An economy-of-favours emerges, and everyone wins.

Visitation

One of the most interesting social dynamics in the game is the ability to set up businesses in other players’ cities. It requires their approval of course, but the general idea is that you can apply to set up a franchise of one of your businesses, and this generates pellets for both of you:

Your friend can treat it as a rental opportunity and simply collect coins and experience points from it, like any other building. And you can visit it to do likewise.

Another kind of visit is the performing of game activity in another friend’s city. When you visit, you can harvest or collect on behalf of a friend, and they in turn can choose to accept your help:

This is an example of accepting help. If I choose to say yes, both of these friends’ images will move around my city, harvesting crops and generating resources. Helping friends out in this fashion costs the helper energy, but it also generates coins, XP and, most importantly, reputation points.

Reputation points are like a social form of level (represented by the heart icon on the right of this image). Reputation acts as a secondary requirement on some game activities, just like levelling does, but its primary purpose is to do with XP and coin generation. The more reputation you have, the more XP that someone who hires you will get, and the more you will get also.

In a similar vein, players can send requests to each other to become neighbors. Neighbors can more easily find and send gifts to each other. Also, some city buildings and tasks require that a player has a specific number of neighbors. Neighbors thus become another kind of gating mechanism.

Channels

The objective of all social activity in the game is to generate publishing actions. Publishing, as I’ve already mentioned several times in the article, is the act of getting the player to spread the word about CityVille out onto Facebook. Simple publishing is the act of broadcasting your game high scores onto the platform, but there are more sophisticated channels that can be better used to gather attention.

Specifically, CityVille wants players to generate one of these four kinds of action:

1.A Wall-publish

2.A Cross-Wall Publish

3.A Notification Request

4.An Email

Wall Publishing: Wall publishing is the most straightforward social action to understand. As I wrote in the first part of this article, wall publishing most commonly takes the form of high scores announcements, or high scores with incentives.

All wall publishing is governed by a specific policy to which a developer must adhere: A game must clearly ask the player whether they want to share a game activity, and then must proceed to a second Facebook screen (see above) that once again asks if the player wants to go ahead and publish this story to their wall. Only then will the story actually be published.

Unsurprisingly, this creates a lot of fall-off. Moreover, a recent change in the policy by Facebook has restricted the visibility of wall publishing such that only players who have already installed the game can see stories published from the game. This change was brought about because Facebook noticed that many of their non-gaming users really disliked these kinds of stories cluttering up their walls, while gaming users disliked stories from games that they were not already playing.

Cross-Wall Publishing: Cross-wall publishing, on other hand, is where the game publishes on a friend’s wall rather than your own. It has the same restrictions as regular wall publishing, but has the advantage that it generates a notification to the player who owns the wall (so they’re more likely to notice it).

CityVille uses cross-wall publishing to tell players when a friend has visited their town. The friend still has to choose to actually publish the story, but as you can see from the screen-grab above, the result is a game story that is more relevant to me than a general achievement publish would be.

Notification Requests: When Facebook introduced their first major redesign of users’ home pages from a narrow to a wide format, they included a feature called notifications. Notifications tell you if a friend has commented on a status update, posted on your wall, tagged you in a photo, or other similar activities.

Social game developers, including Zynga, abused notifications utterly. If you had ever installed Mafia Wars, for example, you would receive notifications from the game every day asking you to come back and play, offering bonuses, inducements and so on. Notification spam became a huge irritant for users, and so eventually Facebook turned off the channel for developers.

More recently, Facebook appear to have partially relented. While games are still not permitted to advertise directly to players through the notification channel, requests from players to other users are permitted (see above). This includes users who have not installed the game.

Requests have always been a feature of Facebook, but since they started appearing in the notification stream they have become much more visible than before.

Email: Last but not least, email from the game is a valid channel. Email has been available to developers for about a year, but it is often under-used. The hazard with email is that players often consider it to be more personal and private than, say, notifications. So the use of email needs to veer away from spam and more toward relevant communications. CityVille is currently using email as a way to spread requests, not for large scale advertising. This makes it more useful to read (Although on a personal note I think I will soon add a filter to my Gmail to junk those mails).

Permissions

Some of the restrictions around how you can publish, or when, can be overcome by extended permissions. In order to email players, for example, the developer must get their permission to do so first. In order for the developer to access their social graph information, likewise. Other permissions are more added-value types. Players can give you permission to automate the process of wall-publishing, for example, to reduce it to just one step rather than two.

There are several ways to ask for permission. Some games try to make a mini-game out of it by inviting players to complete several steps in a social bar at the top of the game to get a prize, like this (taken from Pet Society):

Others, like CityVille, bundle their permission question in as a part of the install question when the player first enters the application:

And some do both.

The mandatory method is more effective of course, although there is the possibility that if you ask too much of the player at installation then they might get put off.

Selfishly Social

To understand the social dynamics of CityVille, realise that they are selfish.

In each case, the dynamics exist to tantalise a player with a tangible reward. If you visit your friend, you get a prize. If you send them a free gift that costs you nothing, they might send you one back. If you set up a bakery in their town, you will both gain from that. If you harvest their crops for them, you will gain reputation points.

It’s all incentive-driven. One of the ironies around social games is that they aren’t particularly social. They don’t encourage deep social interaction because such interaction is useless to the developer. Social games are not trying to be connections or meaningful experiences for players. That is a wholly different kind of game, and not one that they can easily become given the environment in which these games are played.

Instead, they are built as amusements. Socialising in amusements is more akin to having spare Poker chips at the table that you give to someone else, and maybe they’ll give you some back later. It is reciprocal trade, assistance for incentive, not charity. While this does not preclude the possibility that some players will engage in acts of charity for personal reasons, the social dynamics are not created with that in mind.

They are built to work with self-interest.

For the final part of this article, there are two things that I want to cover:

1.Money: How does the financial model work?

2.Comments: What works in CityVille? What doesn’t?

The Bottom Line

Nobody knows exactly how much profit Zynga makes from their games. There is only guesswork, analysis of second hand information, anecdotal stories, correlations from other companies and data points around the web. The general consensus seems to be that the answer is: A Lot.

The most common executive-summary pieces of knowledge or social games go something like this:

•The average game makes $0.25 per MAU per month in revenue

•Another way of saying that is that the average game makes $0.03 per DAU per day

•Somewhere between 1% and 3% of users pay in any given month

•Somewhere around 20% of users of a game will pay once over the course of their lifetime of play

•A small (0.1% or less) percentage of users will become heavy users (the unfortunately named whales)

•Whales will spend a lot (> $100)

•Players will spend as much on intangibles (gifts, objects of status, virtual Christmas trees) as on tangibles (gameplay benefits).

•ARPU is low (lots of players never pay at all) but sustainable over the long term, unlike retail

Obviously this is all hazy. But it tells a story, and that story is that games-as-a-service is both a real opportunity, and one that is reliant on both visibility and retention (as already discussed in the first two parts of this article). The longer and louder a game booms, the more paying customers you will find. And the more whales you will find also.

This means that a social game needs something to sell. In CityVille’s case, that something is game cash.

A Tale of Two Currencies
CityVille, like many online games, has two virtual currencies. There are actually five different number quantities that the player earns (reputation, goods, experience points, coins and cash) but only the last two are currencies. Reputation and experience go toward accumulating social and game levels, while goods are for resupplying existing buildings. Game coins and game cash, on the other hand, are used to buy stuff.

So why have two currencies and not one? The simple answer is that a dual system allows Zynga to separate high revenue actions from low revenue actions more easily, so that one can spiral with inflation while leaving the other untouched.

In many early massive multiplayer games, inflation was a noticeable problem for game economies. What tended to happen in games with only one currency is that they either served the early part of the game, or the late part, but not both.

Suppose a game allowed a player to buy magic swords for 100 gold pieces. To an early-stage player that could either be really expensive or relatively good value, depending on how difficult or easy it was to earn 100 gold pieces. The problem is that the late-stage player already has been using those gold earning opportunities for weeks or months, which means that if 100 gold pieces is hard to earn then he is satisfied. If it’s easy to earn, however, he is falling down in gold.

So what?

So if gold is hard to earn, this creates a disincentive for new players to join, because it will take a long time for them to get anywhere. Conversely, if gold is easy to earn, then the early-stage player is happy, but the late-stage player has nothing to really aim for. So they will hit their maximum mastery quickly and then leave through boredom.

The solution, adopted by many games, is to have two currencies.

CityVille sets it thus: You have an easily-earned currency (coins) that you collect from most actions, and hard-to-earn currency (cash) for high value transactions.

You get coins for harvesting crops, collecting taxes from buildings, trading with your train, and some bonus actions. Coins are plentiful, and you use them to buy buildings, plant new crops and other day-to-day activities. They are perfect as a resource for the early-stage player to worry about, but by the time you reach level 10 or so the typical player will not worry about so much about coins any more.

Cash, on the other hand, is almost impossible to find. The game only awards you one point of cash every time you gain enough experience points to earn a level. This means that the denominations of cash are very small (you spend it in ones and twos) and you spend it quite carefully.

Many of the transactions associated with cash involve using it as a way to shortcut key tasks. In the example image above, I need to either ask two of my friends to send chocolate, or spend two of my hard-earned cash, to complete a mission. To ask for that chocolate, however, involves a publishing action on my Facebook wall.

What cash is essentially offering is trade-offs. Cash is an option that you can use to avoid social embarrassment or to skip forward in time. It is not generally used to purchase objects (although there are a few exceptions). Cash buys you progress, not stuff.

The other thing about cash is that the manner in which you earn it obscure. Because the cash only increases when you gain a level, it is easy to miss. It appears, on the surface at least, that the only real way to accumulate cash is to get out your credit card.

Payment and Pricing

There are three general routes to payment. The first is this button:

Simple to understand, the Add Coins & Cash button takes the player to this dialog:

Notice that Zynga are actually offering both coins and cash for sale. Cash is clearly the more prominent of the two, but it’s interesting given how easy it is to accumulate coins in the game. Perhaps it works, there’s no information to tell.

Also notice that the pricing is based on packs of cash, not an exchange. It is also US-style, where they add taxes on at the point of sale rather than including it in the price, as the EU does with VAT. Subbing 12% off the value of each (which is what the tax appears to be), what Zynga are actually charging for cash is:

•15 cash for $2

•40 cash for $5

•75 cash for $9

•170 cash for $19

•465 cash for $49

•1000 cash for $99

The top transaction values cash at $0.13 a piece. The bottom transaction values it at just under $0.10 however, with the rest forming a sliding scale clearly showing that more dollars spent is more advantageous.

In all likelihood, very few players actually buy that $99 pack. Pricing psychology often works in such a way that a very highly priced item helps to set the tone for the value of all other items (in consumers’ minds), leading them to choose the mid-range item. It is likely that the $2 pack is not the most popular for the same reason. It seems poor value, even though in reality it’s only marginally less so. Most players will likely transact at the $9 price, because that seems to be a good range.

The surprising thing about the pricing here is that there is no $999 pack offering 12,500 cash. It would probably get only a microscopic number of transactions, but it might move more average customers from $9 to $19.

Offer Walls

An offer is an available discount, membership or survey that the player can fill in, in exchange for which they receive some cash.

Offers were very popular among social game developers eighteen months ago, but they started to attracted heavy criticism for resurrecting the bad old days of lead-generation marketing (which had been tried and proved not to work well because it attracts poor quality leads).

What really caused a storm for offers was, however, ScamVille. Techcrunch ran a series of impassioned articles investigating exactly what was going on with FarmVille’s offer walls, and discovered that it was a hotbed of mobile phone scams, spam email sites and all the other sleaze that sits on the underbelly of the Internet.

This led to offer walls being pulled from a raft of games, and then returned slowly in a more controlled and managed fashion.

It also led (anecdotally) to a drop in their effectiveness. At the same time, Facebook began to push hard to get their major developers including Zynga to adopt Facebook Credits as their primary source of payment.

Although credits took a larger percentage for processing transactions than other vendors’ solutions did (30% as opposed to 10%), Facebook’s argument was that they would be more trusted, and so yield more transactions. (Again, anecdotally, this seems to be true). Facebook Credits do not include an offers wall.

CityVille still uses offer walls, but currently only as alternative payment providers:

The offer wall is located behind the Earn City Cash tab. And here’s what it displays:

The offer wall is provided by a third party company named Tapjoy (formerly Offerpal). Currently, it only contains alternative payment methods that the Facebook Credits system doesn’t cover well, but the typical use of such systems is to run surveys, offers and Netflix subscriptions. (It is also possible that those options are displayed in other geographical territories than the UK.)

Quite whether this system is really that effective for CityVille is debatable. It feels very much like a legacy system these days compares to the clean ease of use that Facebook Credits brings, and will probably end up being deprecated at some point in the medium future.

Payment Cards

Finally, there are payment cards. In many supermarkets across Britain and the US (and beyond), there are cards for sale that you can redeem for credit in social games on Facebook. These cards are targeted at consumers who might not have credit cards, similar to credit-based mobile phones.

They work pretty simply. You buy the card, redeem it in CityVille or one of Zynga’s other games, and you receive cash to that value.

Payment cards are a relatively recent innovation, first introduced by Playdom, and adopted by some of the other major developers this year. They are highly accessible, and their continued widespread availability would suggest that they are working.

To be fair though, payment cards are very much a late-stage innovation for companies that have already achieved considerable scale. They require production and shipping and more traditional bricks-and-mortar retail concerns like that, which is generally pretty expensive.

Final Comments

I’ve been through CityVille with a toothcomb and examined how the application is structured. I’ve talked about the importance of visibility, retention, open loops, social aspects, reciprocal trade and – now – the payoffs.

Will it stay popular? Undoubtedly so. But for all that success, however, there are some comments to be made on it, in terms of things that it could be doing better:

Energy: The energy mechanism is archaic. In the old days of social games, energy was really the only system that prevented players from burning through a game very quickly, but with CityVille already deploying many timers, it seems overly punishing on players to have them watch their crops die in the fields just for a lack of energy. The thinking here is clearly to get players to buy more energy, but that creates nothing but negative feelings. My suggestion here would be to either abandon energy altogether, or to significantly relax it in some fashion.

Cruft: The game does not need so many payment options. The Tapjoy inclusion in particular smacks very much of an unwillingness to clean house. While there are always metric arguments to be made for that extra percentage or two of revenue that may result from such things in the shorter or medium term, design cruft tends to obscure larger issues. The hazard of a metrics-only focus is that it tends to devalue cruft concerns, leading to a company’s products becoming formulaic and stale. MySpace was cool until it became overrun with cruft, and Yahoo likewise, and it’s hard to decide to be elegant in design because there is often be no immediate reward for doing so.

Automation: Harvesting and collection behaviours work very well in a game like FarmVille where they are natural, but the lack of automation for manual labour in larger play areas (such as a city will become) is a net negative. CityVille will need to include some degree of automation of collection and harvesting features eventually if the game is to scale its experience. Perhaps these options already exist at later levels, but if they do I have not seen them yet.

$999: The game should have a massively priced pack of cash. Just to see what happens.

Cash: It would be nicer if the game was not tying cash transactions to social embarrassment. In particular, creating tasks that are obliging either wall publishing or paying cash cannot instil anything other than a negative feeling toward the game. Time-skipping or individual requests/invites are ok, but forcing players to either out themselves in public or pay up is not the sort of thing that sits well with the charm and thauma that the game is aiming for.

Next Game: I think Zynga needs to strike out with its next game. Farms, poker, mafias, restaurants, cities and fish are all well and good, but they are also pretty run of the mill now. Zynga’s history has long been to wait for other companies to find trends and then to make their own versions, but the period of time that it is taking them to developing those versions is growing. FarmVille arrived into the market mere weeks after FarmTown, but that’s not a pattern on which Zynga can rely indefinitely. They are already late to the city-sim genre, and it’s only their existing scale that’s making that work for them. I wouldn’t want to base a 5-year strategy for the company on that sort of tactic because it is inherently unstable.

CityVille and You

CityVille is a genuinely interesting case of what happens when a social game developer that has all massive resources at its command puts its mind to the task of making a big game. It’s Zynga’s major effort for the latter half of this year, and it has to be said that the execution in all areas is mostly excellent. The game is charming, engaging, socially connected, technically extraordinary on the back end, and just very very impressive.

No doubt many developers are casting envious eyes upon it and asking how could they get in on some of that action, and will be spinning up their plans to make a city simulation as we speak. This is a massive mistake, but they’re going to do it anyway.

I was motivated to write it this article by what I consider to be was a lot of ignorance on the part of would-be developers as to what the levers of power in social gaming really are. Clearly there are many, from Metcalfe’s law effects on visibility, to open loop game design. Some of these you can easily clone, but let’s be honest: Unless you have $50m for advertising and five games to cross promote, you’re not going to really be able to play in the same pen as Zynga.

Zynga are in a position similar to Facebook and Google, where they have become such a dominant incumbent with so many invested users that they have created a buffer around themselves. Hearing a social game company talk about how they are going to spend $300k on development, making their own cheap knock-off games, and then become The Next Zynga is like listening to small startups convincing themselves that they just need to make a better search engine to take down Google.

These people are fooling themselves, and usually doing so with no-brainers. Instead, the secrets to success are:

Be Radical: Radically innovate a new kind of game. This is always an opportunity for those brave enough to try. Treasure Madness, Farm Town, Restaurant City, Bejewelled Blitz, Happy Aquarium and many others were all major innovations in their time, and even though Zynga has copied most of them, the original games didn’t just die off. If you make something radical, it can work really well and it may become a stepping stone to something bigger.

Get Bought: The next option is to build a great game and, if Zynga or someone else comes a-calling, join them. The original developers of YoVille and Warstorm were both acquired by Zynga, and their founders and investors have presumably done quite well out of it. Zynga, being huge and independent as they are, can afford to make acquisitions like this just to see what might happen.

Stay Small: While the Zynga strategy rewards the mainstream amusement-level engagement handsomely, it has no interest in niche ideas that are thought to only have a loyal but small audience. Facebook may not be the best venue in which to try such ideas, but deep engagement with games is possible if you approach it right. Vikings of Thule has been plugging away with a little card game for a couple of years and has a raft of loyal users who come back to play it regularly. It will never be a huge hit, but it’s perfect for a tiny team that just wants to make a game.

Be The Platform: You don’t have to be on Facebook. BigPoint aren’t, and it’s worked out very well for them. By not being on Facebook, but instead using Facebook Connect or similar features, you are likely to not get quite the hoard of users that a Zynga game can generate so quickly. On the other hand, you have much more ownership over the customer and they are in a less distractible state than when inside the Facebook interface. Both of these can be very strong advantages. They certainly have been for Moshi Monsters.

Final Final Comments

This brings an end to the article. I hope you have found it very engaging. The topics covered in this article touch on some of the foundations of what’s going into the What Games Are book. The book aims to discuss the subject of games in a grounded but broad way, encompassing not just social games, but casual, so-called hardcore, the motivations of game playing and the art of game creation.

It’s a fascinating subject to many of us, and I hope that you’ll choose to subscribe to my blog to hear more and discuss. Thanks for reading.（source:gamasutra）