2010年的社交游戏领域掀起了一场“淘金热”。热门社交游戏FarmVille创下高达8000万的月活跃用户记录（游戏邦注：以上为2010年5月数据）。另外据游戏邦了解，知名视频游戏公司Electronic Arts 在2009年底以3亿美元收购了社交游戏工作室Playfish。这一巨额收购金引起了业内人士的广泛关注。然而蓬勃发展的Facebook平台似乎已经被众多开发热门社交游戏的大型开发公司所“占领”——小型独立游戏开发工作室举步为艰。

下文中Gamasutra例举三家游戏开发工作室，看看他们是如何立足于世界最大的社交网站平台Facebook。

设立陷阱

许多大型游戏开发商一般不屑围绕设陷阱捉老鼠这一主题开发一款Facebook游戏。然而正是以此为主题，安大略HitGrab公司开发的Facebook游戏MouseHunt取得了巨大的成功。在此之前，HitGrab公司主要从事网络营销业务，其中的一次生意往来促使其接触了Facebook社交网站。

Mouse-Hunt

以下HitGrab公司创办者Joel Auge与我们分享其创业过程：

“最初，我们的一位客户需要开发一款Facebook应用。尽管并无该方面的经验，但我们仍承接了这份工作。在这一过程中，我们意识到自己无法成为优秀的客户服务公司，但也正是这个机会令我们喜欢上了Facebook社交网站平台。之后我们公司便决定开发自己的产品。

然而在开发了一款“彻底失败”的结婚登记应用之后，我们决定转而开发游戏应用，尽管当时我们团队中并没有任何成员曾有过此类经验。

之后有一天，（执行开发者）Brain从梦中醒来，突发奇想了一款老鼠陷阱游戏。该款游戏十分简单，玩家使用诱饵设立陷阱，离开，之后返回查看成果。但我们认为这一创意十分有趣便决定以此为主题进行游戏开发。在短短的两周内我们完成了该游戏的紧急测试版，并面向40位好友进行游戏测试。令人难以置信的是该款游戏获得了好友们的广泛好评。因此我们决定成立一家游戏公司，并继续开发成就了如今MouseHunt的增长。

事实上，当时我们并没有十分理智地进行游戏开发。虽然团队中所有成员都热衷于游戏，但我们仅仅是游戏玩家，没有任何游戏开发经验。因此在开发MouseHunt的过程中，我们只是根据平台的要求和限制进行游戏开发。坦白说，我们在游戏趣味性等方面遇到了重重障碍，但也正因此我们奇思妙想了许多当时的Facebook游戏没有实行的新创意。最终，MouseHunt从众多以农场，餐厅管理或黑手党为主题的Facebook游戏中脱颖而出。

目前，MouseHunt游戏约有50万月活跃用户（游戏邦注：以上为2010年5月数据），这一数据足以支撑HitGrab公司立足与Facebook社交网站。虽然HitGrab的用户基础并没有十分庞大，但其成功在于通过互动培养了十分活跃的玩家群体。

每周五，HitGrab的开发者们都会与玩家聊天谈论新游戏内容。很多HitGrab游戏的死忠玩家加入了聊天之中，并将其内容介绍给其他游戏玩家。通过这一方式，HitGrab工作室省下了很多宣传功夫，同时与玩家培养出了一种团体感。

然而在MouseHunt取得成功之后，HitGrab的第二款Facebook游戏MythMonger并没有获得预期的反响，月活跃用户不足5万人。对此，Auge认为是由于开发团队没有吸取MouseHunt的开发经验。“与简单的MouseHunt不同，MythMonger的游戏体验比较复杂，然而我们却没有将一些在MouseHunt中摒弃的功能重新融入MythMonger中。”

对此，Auge表示“有很多的原因造成了MythMonger的失败。现在我们会认真听取用户的反馈，并希望尽快开发一款更好的游戏。我认为MythMonger的失败与我们的经验缺乏也有一定的关系。毕竟社交游戏领域中也不乏许多拥有丰富手机或平台游戏开发经验的专业人士。我们公司将坚持继续学习。”

在不足中成长

据游戏邦了解，与HitGrab的发展过程恰恰相反，开发了Ninja和My Town的游戏工作室Broken Bulb的第一款不温不火，而之后发布的第二款游戏才获得玩家的好评。然而，与HitGrab相同的是，Broken Bulb公司一开始也不是游戏公司，主要开发社交网站内容，Flash插件及小玩具等。之后该公司决定全力开发游戏便出售了旗下所有产品，全情投入游戏开发。然而，Facebook却不是Broken Bulb游戏工作室的首选平台。

My-Town

对此，Broken Bulb总裁Jason Moore解释道“一开始我们开发的Ninja Warz只面向Twitter社交网站，这是因为当时Twitter正处于全盛时期，我们希望及早进入Twitter，避开其它公司进军Facebook新社交平台的激烈竞争。然而之后由于Twitter没有提供任何支持开发者的病毒式传播渠道，我们决定转而进军Facebook。很几乎是立竿见影，我们便目睹了两款平台的不同之处：在社交网站Twitter中，我们游戏一天的注册用户仅有40人，而在Facebook平台则有上千人。因此我们之后便专注于Facebook平台，开发适于Facebook平台的游戏。

通过Ninjas Warz，我们大致了解Facebook社交网站的的优缺点，并以此开发了另一款游戏My Town。该款游戏十分依赖病毒式传播渠道，当然同时也十分注重游戏体验的开发。

我们开发My Town的方式可谓是与往常相反：我们先决定需要的游戏功能，然后再以此为中心开发游戏，也正是这种模式造就了My Town的成功。

目前，My Town拥有近300万月活跃用户（游戏邦注：以上为2010年5月数据），并开创了新种类Facebook游戏：城市建设类游戏。对此，Moore表示My Town取得成功的关键在于其新颖性和独特性。“克隆一款成功的游戏十分简单，但原创一款成功的游戏却很难。然而难上加难的是开创新的游戏种类。“我认为Broken Bulb是一家注重原创性和用户的游戏开发工作室。我们可以模仿FarmVille，但我们不愿意这么做就是因为我们想开发新种类游戏，以满足玩家对新颖和不同的需求。”

然而，尽管拥有大量用户基础是件可喜的成就，Moore相信还有更重要的原因影响Broken Bulb成为真正成功的Facebook游戏开发公司，那便是游戏粘性。Moore认为游戏粘性是衡量游戏品质的最重要指标。一款游戏中能提高玩家游戏粘性的元素莫过于游戏体验本身。玩家不会轻易放弃好玩的游戏；反之如果游戏不好玩，即使通过病毒式传播获得了大量的玩家，他们也会很快厌倦最后离开游戏。

Moore建议广大游戏开发商进行自省：加入除去游戏中的所有病毒式传播方式，人们是否还会乐在其中？请铭记，游戏体验才是吸引玩家的最基本因素。

不确定性

近年来，Facebook社交网站显著增长的用户基础为小型社交游戏开发商提供了发展机会，然而却无法保证其取得成功。关于这点，前GameLayers公司首席执行官Hustin Hall深有感触。

“最初，我们公司在火狐工具栏上开发了一款大型多人网络游戏The Nethernet。该游戏也可称为PMOG（passive multiplayer online game）。然而遗憾的是，PMOG/The Nethernet并没有很好地实现盈利，同时该款游戏的用户对用户增长也较弱。随着公司资金逐渐消耗，我们便开始寻找商机。当时我们看中了Facebook上社交RPG游戏的流量及增长趋势。”

2009年末，GameLayer发布了两款Facebook游戏：Dictator Wars和Super Cute Zoo。然而由于GameLayer公司的资金和时间问题，该两款仅支撑了数月。

Super Cute Zoo

对此，Hall遗憾地表示“该两款游戏都十分有趣，但很遗憾无法无法及时盈利维持公司运营。运营网络游戏就需要承担责任，玩家总是有各种疑问，建议和功能要求，同时长期运行的游戏也会出现各种错误和漏洞。然而公司却没有资金雇佣员工对游戏进行维护和更新，最终我们只要关闭游戏。另外当时公司的时间十分紧迫。2007年至2008年集资的200万美元正在逐渐耗尽。我们期望尽快实现Dictator Wars和Super Cute Zoo的增长，但最终其增长速度无法赶上我们的预期。”

Hall认为广大开发者所面临的共同挑战在于很难跟上Facebook的变化脚步。以Super Cute Zoo为例，该款游戏发布之初，便有玩家觉得游戏过时。“社交RPG游戏是一种拥有稳固货币化潜能的游戏种类，然而自2009年10月起，Facebook开始盛行画面更鲜艳，互动性更强的Flash游戏。因此，以‘收集动物建造动物园’为主题的简单文本菜单游戏Super Cute Zoo便无法吸引玩家的兴趣。”

建议

与其他平台相同，在Facebook社交网站取得成功也需要几大关键因素。首先，游戏开发商必须为游戏的成长提供充足的时间及资金支持，同时也要主要游戏体验的品质。然而当问及对独立Facebook游戏开发商有何建议时，三位社交游戏业内人士均发表了十分有趣的看法。

首先，HitGrab的Auge强调“速度”，一旦动作不够敏捷就有可能为大型游戏公司制造可趁之机。同时，Auge建议独立游戏开发商避开核心游戏玩家，面向小群体用户。这些用户同样可是实现优良的货币化效果。

GameLayer的Hall也赞同这一观点，他建议小型游戏开发商聘用少量员工开发以小群体为目标的Facebook游戏，与玩家群体进行互动交流，这样一来便有机会在Facebook社交网站上成就一番事业。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

There’s currently a gold rush in the social gaming space. FarmVille has over 80 million monthly active users (MAU) and, late last year, Electronic Arts purchased Playfish for $300 million. Those types of numbers make people take notice. But on a platform like Facebook, which seems to be dominated by a few big games and even fewer big developers, creating a popular game can seem like a daunting task — especially for smaller, independent studios.

Gamasutra sat down with three different developers to learn just how you can be successful on the world’s biggest social network, even if your name isn’t Zynga or Playfish.

Setting the Trap

If you were to pitch a game where the gameplay revolved around setting a trap and waiting for mice to come, chances are most publishers wouldn’t bite.

But it was with just such a game that Ontario-based HitGrab Labs was able to achieve its biggest success: MouseHunt. After getting started doing online marketing, HitGrab eventually made the shift to Facebook development.

“We took on a job where one of our clients… wanted a Facebook application,” says HitGrab owner Joel Auge. “So we told them we could do it, though we’d never done it before, and just fell in love with the platform. We did that and we realized very quickly that we weren’t really great customer service people. But we really liked the platform. So we decided, ‘Why don’t we do our own thing?’”

After creating a wedding registry application that Auge says “failed miserably,” the studio made the shift to game development in spite of the fact that no one on the team had any game development experience.

“[Executive producer] Brian [Freeman] woke up one day from a dream and he was like ‘Yeah, mouse traps. We should have people create their mouse traps ’cause you really just set the bait and then you leave and you come back,’ and we were like ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’” Auge says.

“So we decided to build a game around it. It took us like two weeks to drum up a quick beta, launched it to 40 friends, and their reactions were, like, unbelievable. They were freaking out they loved the game and we decided, ‘Let’s just be a gaming company.’ And MouseHunt’s growing to this day, actually.

“From a marketing perspective we kind of knew that we had to build a business first, which helped us a lot, to be honest. We didn’t really know what we were doing game wise. I mean, we’ve all played games. We all have game consoles at home. So all of us play games. You know, our generation does. As far as designers, we really just tailored the gameplay around the platform… To be honest, a lot of the obstacles that we were facing, on scaling and making it interesting, those were things that provided us with new opportunities to come up with new ideas that really haven’t been used much on the platform at all.”

MouseHunt

And Auge says that these “new ideas” are what allowed MouseHunt to become a success. On a platform that’s dominated by genre games — farming, restaurant management, mafia, etc. — something like MouseHunt is able to stand out.

“To this day, if you were to tell people a mouse game on a social platform is going to do well, they’d probably laugh at you,” he explains. “But to be honest I think it’s really protected us to a certain degree. What we really tried to focus on was stuff that takes too much time really for the big guys to think about.”

This has allowed MouseHunt to garner nearly half a million MAU, enough for HitGrab to survive solely off of Facebook development. And while those numbers may not sound all that impressive, the key to HitGrab’s success has been in cultivating a very active audience, something it’s been able to achieve via constant interaction with fans.

Every Friday the developers hold a chat with the community where they discuss the game and talk about upcoming content. The die-hard fans who participate in these chats then spread the word to the rest of the community, saving the studio from having to do much in the way of promotion.

“They do a lot of the work for us,” Auge says “We take care of them and they take care of us. For instance, we’ll have a feature that we’ll introduce in our Feedback Friday — we’ll talk about a new area that’ll be released next week, and unless you were in that video chat you wouldn’t have any idea. So those users then go to the forums and tell all of their friends about these new things that the developers from HitGrab are doing. And that whole process breeds a sense of community.”

But despite the success of MouseHunt, HitGrab’s second release, MythMonger, hasn’t quite caught on the same way, with under 50,000 MAU. According to Auge, this has been a result of not learning from their experience with MouseHunt.

“We didn’t really learn the lessons we needed to learn severely enough at the time to implement those lessons from MouseHunt,” he says. “For instance, MythMonger is complex. MouseHunt is uber-simple. And that’s something we should have taken away from MouseHunt, but we didn’t really apply it to MythMonger.

“There are probably too many ideas that made it into MythMonger… But we’re listening to the audience now and we’re hoping to deliver a better product very shortly. To be honest, it probably comes from a lack of game development experience. A lot of the guys in our field have been doing games for years, on mobile or on consoles, and already have an understanding of all these things. But we’re still learning as a company and we’re probably never going to stop learning.”

Learning From Your Mistakes

In contrast, Broken Bulb Studios, the developer behind Ninja Warz and My Town, did the opposite: releasing a mildly successful first game, followed by a much more popular second release. But, like HitGrab, the studio didn’t start out as a game developer. After years creating social network content and Flash widgets and toys, Broken Bulb decided to make the move to gaming just nine months ago, selling off all of its assets so it could be 100 percent devoted to game development. However, Facebook wasn’t the studio’s first choice.

“We originally built Ninja Warz solely for Twitter,” Broken Bulb president Jason Moore explains. “When we started building it it was during the heyday of the Twitter rise, and we wanted get in early and bypass much of the competition on Facebook by trying our hat at more of a new platform.

indiePub Games

“When it turned out that platform just didn’t have the viral channels to really support a developer community, we decided to port it and change it for Facebook and immediately you could see the difference: we went from 40 sign-ups a day to several thousand sign-ups a day just by switching platforms. So we are on Facebook and developing for Facebook because its the most successful platform, as a developer, to get users.”

With Ninja Warz, the studio was able to learn the ins and outs of the platform, and took advantage of that knowledge with the release of My Town. “A lot of it was due to the viral channels — and we, at our studio, we are really into user experience,” says Moore.

“Basically, from Ninja Warz we learned what are all the viral channels, or all the communication channels, that Facebook allowed. And once we got intimately familiar with those, what we were able to do when conceiving My Town was decide how can we use every channel that they offer, but in an organic way that is seamless through the gameplay, instead of just tacking things on,” Moore says.

“So we actually ended up building My Town kind of backwards. We decided all the features we wanted to use and integrate seamlessly, and then we built a game around that. That was one of the successful models that helped us build My Town.”

Ninja Warz

The game currently has over three million MAU and helped create a new genre on the platform: the town creation sim, which has already spawned several clones. But while players may be looking for new experiences when it comes to Facebook games, the trick is, Moore says, convincing the developers.

“I think that a lot of the success that we’ve had early on was because it was new and different,” he explains. “Where it’s a tough sell is to the developers. It’s an easy thing to say ‘OK, this app is successful, let’s just clone that app and I will have a successful app.’ It’s much scarier to developers to say let’s create something new, [to say]. ‘Let’s create a genre.’”

Says Moore, “We consider ourselves a very original, very user-focused game studio. And so we didn’t want to just put out a clone. We could’ve made a FarmVille clone, but instead we wanted to make a new genre and I think that the users are clamoring for new and different. The problem, and the reason why the top games don’t show that, is solely because there isn’t new and creative good quality games coming out in new genres as often as there are clones and copycats.”

And while having a large player base is obviously good, Moore believes that there is another factor that is much more important to being a successful Facebook developer.

“I think that retention of users is the number one most important metric on any of our games, and that is the number that we try and aim for the most. The only thing that’s going to retain players at all is gameplay. If it’s a good game users will continue to play. And if it’s not, if you’ve got great viral channels you can get users, but if the game is not entertaining and genuinely fun and built for the user, they will tire and bore of it,” says Moore.

“If you’re building a game to be a stand-alone, quality game: take all viral stuff out, would people play this game and enjoy it for an entire month? That’s the question you have to ask yourself and I think that most of the games, and most of the developers, hinge so much on the marketing and the virality side that it really takes away from their gameplay. So we make sure that our gameplay stands on its own,” he says. “The dedicated fan base is the buying fan base.”

Not a Sure Thing

Of course, while the massive user base and continual growth of Facebook means there is a lot of opportunity for smaller developers, it is in no way a guarantee of success. This is something that Justin Hall, former CEO of the now-defunct GameLayers, knows firsthand.

“We built the first MMO in a Firefox toolbar, The Nethernet, also known as PMOG,” or passive multiplayer online game, says Hall. “PMOG/The Nethernet did not monetize well, and it didn’t have strong user-to-user growth. So, as our studio funds dwindled, we looked around and said, ‘Where can we make games that make money?’ We had social game building expertise, and we’d built RPGs before, so seeing the traffic and growth on social RPGs on Facebook attracted us to that platform.”

Game Advertising Online

In late 2009, GameLayers released two different games on the platform: Dictator Wars and Super Cute Zoo. But both games only lasted a matter of months, with the studio experiencing issues with two of the most important resources for a small developer — time and money.

“Both games were fun to make and fun to play,” Hall says. “But they were not on track to make immediate profit or keep our company open.

“Running an online game is a commitment. Players have questions, suggestions, feature-requests, and things break as people use them. We couldn’t pay our staff to keep evolving our titles, so we decided to take these games down rather than offer continually diminishing service.

“We didn’t have a lot of time either; we raised $2 million in 2007 and 2008 and it was steadily diminishing. For both Dictator Wars and Super Cute Zoo, we launched the minimum viable game and planned to evolve them based on usage. So we improved our invitation rate and growth potential and improved the game experience. But the growth we were hoping for didn’t come fast enough.”

A major problem for developers, Hall says, is that Facebook is changing so quickly that it can be hard to keep up. In the case of Super Cute Zoo, this meant that by the time the game was released, it already felt dated to players.

“Social RPGs are a timeless game form with solid monetization potential, but by October 2009 the big stars of Facebook gaming were all Flash-based titles with more polish and interactivity. With Super Cute Zoo, we offered players a chance to ‘collect animals and build your zoo!’ — a game that looked mostly like text and menus, not point and click.

“With tens of millions of people playing FarmVille by late 2009, player expectations had changed, and the female animal-loving market we targeted was excited elsewhere. Facebook as a game platform changes rapidly, like month by month.”
Some Words of Wisdom

Clearly, like any other platform, there are a number of factors that determine whether or not a game will end up being successful on Facebook. Having ample time and funding to let your game grow is important, as is the overall quality of the experience.

But, when asked what advice he’d give potential indie Facebook developers, HitGrab’s Auge had one very specific instruction: “I would say hurry, because there’s just a tremendous sense that the big guys are coming into the space. I would say, if you’re a small indie guy, go after a core audience, be okay about the niche product. Those users will likely pay your bills.”

GameLayers’ Hall agrees, though his advice is naturally wary — he thinks that making it big will be a huge challenge. “I think small developers can definitely carve out a niche,” says Hall. “If you want a small lifestyle business that supports you and one to three people making games, and making some money from that, and working with your player community, you can have a rich, rewarding social game experience on Facebook.

“You need to be very agile, very fast, and thick-skinned… There’s huge potential to design a game that works well within the Facebook network, and it has to be about social interactions between players. So that’s an exciting challenge. Small developers who want more than a lifestyle business, where you’re growing a games company and supporting payroll and moving out beyond a group of friends, that is a bigger challenge: you have to keep up with some very smart, very fast-moving competitors.” （Source：Gamasutra）