随着社交游戏和休闲游戏的大量涌现，开发商要让自己的游戏从众多竞争对手中脱颖而出，就很有必要挖掘一些非同寻常的题材。这类游戏与《FarmVille》或《Diner Dash》这种广受欢迎的游戏有所不同，它们的目标用户一般都很有针对性，比如Facebook游戏《My Vineyard》锁定的是美食鉴赏家、红酒爱好者，而《巧克力大亨》（Chocolatier）及其两个续集版本、《巧克力大亨之设计变革》（Chocolatier: Decadence By Design）针对的就是巧克力迷。

这类游戏为什么要走这种非主流路线？

位于美国亚利桑那州的开发商Big Splash Games公司CEO迈克尔·桑顿·怀曼（Michael Thornton Wyman）表示，“找准目标用户的兴趣点很关键”。怀曼相信他们找到了《巧克利大亨》的卖点，并希望尽快推出一款主要针对度假游轮发烧友的新游戏《爱的游轮》（Love Ahoy!）。

怀曼称公司在2007年推出《巧克力大亨》后，社交游戏领域刮起了一阵巧克力热潮，除了原先的目标用户，其他热爱美食的群体也对这款游戏产生了浓厚的兴趣。

Chocolatier:Decadence By Design

《爱的游轮》主要针对25至55岁的女性玩家，这些用户可以在度假游轮的航行中，尽览异国港口的风光，同时为他人制造一些浪漫的邂逅。玩家在游戏中要扮演游轮红娘的角色，必须找出彼此有意的男女乘客，为他们牵线搭桥制造浪漫氛围。在这款游戏中，玩家的表现是否出色，主要看她成功速配了多少对情侣。

与之相似的是由圣地亚哥Metaplace公司开发的《My Vineyard》，据该公司创始人及总裁拉夫·科斯特（Raph Koster）所称，这款游戏借鉴了Facebook上的小岛农场模拟游戏《Island Life》的一些开发经验。

他表示，“这两者仍然属于农场游戏，我们并不想彻底改造社交游戏模式，但在《My Vineyard》中我们还是取得了一些创新突破。我们的格言是“开发下一代社交游戏”（Next-Generation Social Games），我们想通过这款游戏看看用户能否接受它的难度，并对游戏机制进行了改良，还添加了一点叙事内容。”

《My Vineyard》的游戏内容涵盖整个红酒制造过程，所以玩家的任务不光是种葡萄，还得跺葡萄，把可酿酒的葡萄装到桶里，对它们进行归类整理。

科斯特表示，“为了吸引红酒爱好者，我们不光采用农场模式，还引进了整套红酒酿造工序。因为它是一款社交游戏，所以玩家可以聚在一起共品红酒，他们还可以自由发挥创意装饰自己的葡萄庄园。”

他认为《My Vineyard》的游戏开发与数年前的AAA级游戏一样，开发商可以在已经获得成功的游戏机制中添加新主题，扩展游戏风格，“如果你已经创建了一个出色的第一人称射击游戏机制，那也可以将它运用于科幻主题、虚幻主题等不同类型的游戏开发。就拿农场类游戏与第一人称射击游戏举个例子，你可以在农场游戏中增加一些社交元素，装饰元素和多人玩法模式，这些混搭元素可以增加游戏的内涵。”

科斯特表示公司的发展目标是创造更丰富、更好看、针对性更强的游戏，这也正是他们推出酿酒类游戏的原因，“用户可能还没玩过这类游戏，但这种游戏与他们自身的爱好有关，所以他们应该会很感兴趣。”

my vineyard

不过并非所有的开发商都认为“小众市场更好”，休闲游戏工作室Merscom联合创始人劳埃德·梅尼克（Lloyd Melnick）表示，在四月份被Playdom收购之前，Merscom一直是面向大众用户开发游戏。

现任Playdom国际运营总经理的梅尼克表示，“当时真是一个千载难逢的发展时期，那时候我们主要为Lifetime Channel、NBC Universal、National Geographic、Sea World和Purina等大牌公司开发游戏，利润极其可观。我们本来也可以继续顺着这条路一直走下去，但我们认为新兴的社交游戏可以为公司提供更多机遇，所以就选择并入Playdom，从十月份开始停止了休闲游戏开发，全力转战社交游戏这个新领域。”

Merscom之前的休闲游戏用户主要是35至55岁的女性玩家，梅尼克认为社交游戏是一个“更大众化的市场”。光是《FarmVille》的玩家就有8000万（游戏邦注：此为2010年6月前的数据），但休闲游戏却无法创造如此成就。游戏活跃用户人数好比是电视黄金时段的收视率，《FarmVille》的游戏玩家已经堪比《美国偶像》总决赛的观众人数。

梅尼克认为，社交游戏不能局限于小众用户，它的用户范围应该比休闲游戏，甚至是针对16至25岁男性玩家的硬核游戏更大、更广泛。

他的另一个感触是，社交游戏的开发过程更复杂，不像休闲游戏那样，只需要创建游戏、测试游戏、发布游戏，然后就可以开发下一个项目。

他表示，“开发过程只是社交游戏项目中的一个小环节而已，除此之外你还得利用病毒式传播手段，鼓励用户与好友分享这款游戏，最重要的是让好友接受游戏邀请。开发商不但要为玩家创造良好的游戏体验，还要不断优化产品，这样才能让用户心甘情愿地为游戏掏钱……从许多大众市场营销的书中可以看出，这个过程就好像是经营一家商场，你得具备诺德斯特姆公司（Nordstrom）或布卢明代尔百货公司（Bloomingdale）一样优秀的商业手腕才行。实际上，Playdom的成员中就有一位来自Abercrombie & Fitch（游戏邦注：美国本土第一休闲品牌）的销售专家。”

梅尼克将社交游戏比作MMO游戏，认为它们都需要开发团队不断向同一款游戏添加新内容，诱使玩家继续花钱玩游戏，“你得投入大量时间和精力来创造这种黏性，这也正是Playdom为什么需要400名以上的员工，为什么要并购其他公司的原因。”

Playdom的CEO约翰·普莱曾（John Pleasants）之前曾表示，收购Merscom是因为看中了该工作室“16年的第三方游戏开发经验”，认为这一点有助于他们的社交游戏业务发展，“我们认为Merscom的品牌游戏开发经验很重要，同时也相信随着社交游戏的日趋成熟，那些融入流行文化元素和大众品牌的游戏，必将比其他社交游戏更有市场。”

Playdom在去年5月与ESPN签署了一份合作协议，共同推出社交游戏《ESPNUville》，面向Facebook、MySpace、Bebo、Tagged和Hi5等多个社交网站推出多款著名运动类游戏。

尽管Playdom采用的是大众市场策略，Metaplace推崇小众市场路线，他们在不同的战术都取得了不俗的成就，但Big Splash Games的CEO怀曼还是要奉劝各位开发商多留神，一定要“找准游戏的定位，这样才有可能胜人一筹。”

怀曼还表示，休闲游戏市场的竞争非常激烈，开发商得亮出一些创意来吸引用户眼球，让他们自觉为游戏掏腰包，“当我们有了《巧克力大亨》这个点子的时候，就一直在找可以吸引大量用户注意力的元素，希望他们至少可以试试这款游戏。事实证明，不光是这一小撮巧克力爱好者对这款游戏很着迷，就连一些美食爱好者也加入了这一阵营……有人爱巧克力，也有人对红酒感兴趣，但我认为巧克力游戏更有吸引力……”

虽然《FarmVille》仍是Facebook上最抢手的游戏（游戏邦注：这是《CityVille》登台前的情况），但怀曼却预言，“社交游戏的创新不会再局限于农场类游戏。我无法预测社交游戏的下一站会是什么，只知道开发商还有大量的发展机遇。目前我所了解的多数社交游戏其实都不能算特别出色，农场类游戏很有趣，但我并不认为这种游戏最贴近玩家的心理需求。”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Targeted Focus, Broad Audience?

As the popularity of social and casual games continues to rise, differentiating yourself from your competitors via careful targeting — and exploring themes that are nontraditional for games –might provide an advantage.

Instead of creating games that appeal to a broader population — for instance, one that that’s highly generalized, like the wildly popular FarmVille or Diner Dash — they seem to be targeting, say, connoisseurs of specific foods, like wine lovers in the Facebook game My Vineyard or chocolate aficionados in Chocolatier and its two sequels, the latest being Chocolatier: Decadence By Design.

What’s going on here? What could possibly be the strategy behind going after such nontraditional thematic niches?

“It’s all about finding the sweet spot within the target audience,” says Michael Thornton Wyman, CEO of Tucson, AZ-based developer Big Splash Games.

Previously, Wyman believes he and his partners found the “sweet spot” with Chocolatier, and hopes a brand new game scheduled to be released “soon” — Love Ahoy! — will appeal to the rapidly growing number of vacation cruisers.

“When we came out with Chocolatier in 2007,” Wyman recalls, “it seemed to us that chocolate was experiencing an explosive interest — not just among our target gaming audience but among people who care about food in general.

“In our new game, we’re coupling what we perceive to be a huge interest in vacation cruising along with a romantic angle and the allure of traveling to exotic ports that we think will appeal to our 25 to 55-year-old female audience.”

Gamers will take on the role of the cruise director whose job it will be to discover the hidden interests of passengers and then match them up to create romance. In this Love Boat-like scenario, success is measured by how good you are at hooking up couples.

Similarly, Raph Koster says he applied some of what he learned from building his Facebook “island farming” sim — Island Life — when he created My Vineyard. Koster is founder and president of San Diego-based Metaplace.

“Both titles are still farming games — we’re not trying to reinvent social games altogether,” he explains. “But we did try pushing some boundaries with My Vineyard — after all, our company motto is ‘Next-Generation Social Games’ — trying to see what kind of complexity people would accept in this space, changing up the mechanics, adding a bit of narrative, and so on.”

Metaplace’s goal was to focus on the entire experience of making wine, so instead of the game being all about just farming the grapes, Koster says they added steps like stomping on the grapes, choosing what sort of materials to barrel them in, and blending the different varieties.

“In order to appeal to wine lovers, we paid attention to the actual process of wine-making rather than sticking slavishly to the established farming model,” he says. “And because it’s a social game, players can get together for wine-tasting parties and there’s a fairly significant level of user creativity in that the vineyards can be decorated and built out.”

Koster likens the process of creating games like My Vineyard to what he says occurred years ago in the triple-A game market when developers pushed proven mechanics into new themes and expanded genres.

“Once you had your first perfect first-person-shooter mechanic, it became apparent that you could apply it to different time periods in history, to science fiction themes, to fantasy themes, and so on,” he explains. “That’s the same thing that’s going on here. If you compare farming to first-person shooters, you can now take farming and add social elements and decorating elements and multi-player elements. A bit of genre hybridization is going on and the games are getting a bit broader as that happens.”

The goal, he says, is to produce games that are richer, nicer-looking, and targeted at verticals that are as yet unexplored. Which, he says, was exactly the reason for creating a game about wine — “that’s an area where there are users who may not have played that sort of a game before but may be interested in doing so because it lines up perfectly with one of their hobbies.”

Koster admits that his Metaplace team still considers itself to be learning the ropes on the social game space but is optimistic that they are on the right path. “We’ve only been in social games for about four or five months now,” he says.

But not every developer subscribes to the “narrow is better” philosophy. When Chapel Hill, NC-based developer Merscom was creating casual games, it was for a very targeted audience, says co-founder Lloyd Melnick. However, prior to his company being acquired by Mountain View, CA-based developer Playdom in April, the decision was made to go in a different direction and create social games for a much wider audience.

“It was a very scary time for us,” admits Melnick, who is now general manager of Playdom’s international operations. “We were leaving a business where we were extremely profitable — making ‘branded’ casual games for not only the Lifetime Channel but for NBC Universal, National Geographic, Sea World, and Purina.

“We could have continued in that space forever, but we saw social gaming taking off and, to be perfectly frank, we saw a lot more opportunities for our company to be acquired if we moved to social. So we put a full stop on casual games in October and stepped entirely into social which was brand new to us.”

While Merscom had built its casual games for the generally accepted 35-to-55 female demographics, Melnick says that social games are “much more mass market. There [were] 80 million people playing FarmVille, for example, which means it clearly doesn’t have the same segmentation that exists in the casual space. It’s much more like prime TV time; there are as many people playing FarmVille as watched the American Idol finale.

“You can’t go after audiences like that by going after very targeted niches. Your audience is much more massive and your demographic — which differs with each game — will be much broader than with casual or even in the core space where everything is made for 16-25-year-old guys.”

Melnick is finding social game development to be far more complex than creating casual games when his team built a game, tested it, published it, and they moved on to the next project.

“Creating the social game is just a small element of the process,” he says. “You also need to create the viral hooks so that people send it to their friends and, just as importantly, their friends accept it. Not only do you want them to have a great game experience but you need to optimize it so that they’ll want to spend more and more money on it.

“We’ve read multiple books about mass-market merchandising since what you’re doing is, in effect, creating a store, which means you need the same skills as a Nordstrom or a Bloomingdale’s. In fact, Playdom has a merchandising expert who comes from Abercrombie & Fitch.”

He likens social games to MMOs — they require the development team to remain onboard and constantly provide additional content to incentivize players to keep returning and reaching for their credit cards.

“You’ve got to create that persistence which takes quite a bit of investment in time and manpower,” says Melnick. “That’s why Playdom has over 400 people now and it’s one of the reasons why the company is so acquisitive.”

Indeed, CEO John Pleasants has been quoted as saying that one of the reasons Playdom bought Merscom was that it intends to use its “16 years of third-party branded game experience” and apply it to the social gaming space.

“We believe that brands matter and that, over time, as the social gaming industry matures, games which incorporate content from popular culture and widely respected brands will garner larger market share than those without it.”

Last month, Playdom announced an agreement with ESPN to release a FarmVille-like game called “ESPNUville” as well as other branded sports games for several social networks, including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Tagged, and Hi5.

But while Playdom is applying mass-market merchandising theory to its games and Metaplace is appealing to niche audiences, Big Splash Games’ Wyman advises developers to be more concerned with “finding that sweet spot that will raise your game above all the noise.”

The casual game marketplace is so crowded that, he suggests, developers need to come up with a theme that will grab peoples’ attention and convince them to take out their credit card and use it.

“When we came up with the concept for Chocolatier, he recalls, “we were looking for that hook that would enchant a large segment of the audience and prompt them to at least give us a try. There has been kind of an explosive interest in chocolate recently, not just among a small segment of the population but among people who care about food in general.

“People are passionate about chocolate. Yes, there are wine connoisseurs out there — but I think a game about chocolate has a much broader appeal. If you’re going after a segment of the gaming population, it needs to be a broad segment.”

While FarmVille is currently the most popular application on Facebook, Wyman foresees what he calls “a whole new opening up of social game themes that go way beyond farming.”

“I’m not even going to try to predict what they might be,” he says. “But there are incredible opportunities for developers in social games. So far, I don’t think many are particularly compelling, at least not the ones I’ve experienced. I mean, farms are interesting, but I don’t know that’s the theme that will prove to be the most near and dear to gamers’ hearts.” （source:gamasutra）