游戏邦注：本文作者是iPhone游戏《100大盗》（100 Rogues）开发者Keith Burgun，他在文中回顾了《100大盗》这款深受喜爱、质量超群的游戏在App Store的一些失败的市场营销经历，并依此总结出了相关教训。

我们团队是在2008年12月开始打造《100大盗》这个iPhone游戏项目，但一直到2010年5月才正式发行了游戏。当时媒体都在报道iPhone游戏的淘金热，而我们也正想通过出色的游戏争取更多用户，所以就全力以赴推出了这款游戏。

《100大盗》项目起源

我们原先的游戏开发理念很奇怪，就是将这游戏打造成“《POWDER》的翻版”。这里要先做个名词解释，《POWDER》是一款已移植到多个平台上的盗贼风格游戏，而所谓盗贼风格游戏就是一种与盗贼主题相关的游戏，它在电脑游戏界已经盛行了30多年之久（在1980年问世的《Rogue》可以算是“盗贼风格”游戏的开山之作）。

这类游戏和《暗黑破坏神》（Diablo）一样都采用硬核游戏模式，它们的共同特征就是提供高分值，采用随机性地图、回合制的格斗方式等。

但在我们确定它的售价之后，这款游戏就开始走上了与《POWDER》截然不同的路线，最明显的差异在于游戏的外观——我们的游戏采用全动画的像素图，提供基本分值，可打开和关闭的插入片段，以及一个详细的用户界面。

虽然我们原本想让它成为像《POWDER》和许多PC盗贼一样风格粗犷的游戏，但最终还是认为它在视觉和感觉上应该更接近于一款任天堂或PlyaStation游戏。

《100大盗》的游戏设置采用了技巧树方式（游戏邦注：这一点与《暗黑破坏神2》相同），在玩法上非常重视策略——多数咒语只有在使用得当的情况下才会灵验。当时我深受《不可思议的迷宫：风来之西林》（Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer）以及《军团要塞2》（Team Fortress 2）等游戏的启发，想创建尽量简单的游戏道具系统。

所以在这款游戏中，所有道具的作用各不相同，每件道具都有自己的特长，它的功能不可替代。这种设置也与传统盗贼游戏《POWDER》形成了鲜明对比，这些都是因游戏定价而产生的变化。

《100大盗》与多数商业游戏的区别在于，它的主旨并非要求用户完成任务，而是提高他们在游戏中的技能。在这一点上，它和老式的电子游戏《Galaga》或竞技类游戏《Chess》较为相似，我们非常在乎游戏能否将这种理念传达给用户。

曝光率很成问题

我们让游戏与众不同的策略之一，就是摒弃高大全的“英雄”形象，将玩家在游戏中的角色等级定义为社会反叛者——命中注定失败的落后分子。这一设置出乎意料地管用，原先预想的那些关于游戏“难度太大”的用户抱怨并没有出现。

这款游戏在玩家中颇受好评，在我们所知的评论网站上至少获得了四颗星的评价（游戏邦注：早期有用户抱怨游戏缺乏稳定性，但该问题解决后，也就鲜有用户表示不满了。）

虽然我们在2008年就开工了，但一直到2009年末或2010年初才真正弄清了这款游戏的状况。另外需要说明的是，我们除了积极关注游戏论坛和借助口碑营销之外，并没有为它制定完整的市场营销策略。

《100大盗》这种游击战式的市场营销活动经历很让人沮丧，尽管我们倾注心血开发了更新版本，极为用心地制作了推广材料（游戏邦注：如相关视频片段、游戏大赛、游戏插图或博客贴子等），但它的销售情况仍然很不乐观。

当更新版本上线时，这款游戏的销量增长了十倍，一切看起来都很美好，但第二天销量就下滑了50%以上，第三天的情况仍然如此，两三天后我们发现游戏销量又返回了原点。

游戏销售最强劲的时期就是我们登上应用商店“最近更新游戏”排行榜前列的那一天，这种情况证明苹果App Store确实只眷顾名列前茅的游戏（随便一提，开发者最好不要像我们团队一样频繁地更新游戏补丁，因为苹果两周后才会通过应用审核，等到苹果批准发布游戏更新版本时，我们已经又推出了新的补丁）。我们只有在游戏更新版本上线的那一天，才能获得一点可怜的曝光率。

开发成本太大

尽管只有排在前列的游戏才有望在App Store中大获成功，许多开发商都在大打价格战的说法已广为流传，但当时我仍然相信质量过硬的游戏可能不需要担心这个问题。后来我才明白，如果想按照传统方式在App Store上做生意，你就会发现这个平台的生存环境其实真的很恶劣。我现在的想法就是，这可能不是App Store的过错，毕竟世界每天都在变化，谁也无法掌握这种局面。

现在我认为，出现问题的原因很简单，那就是游戏定价。虽然《100大盗》对许多玩家和评论者来说，是一个创新突破，但如果从游戏开发、团队、市场营销和项目规划等层面来看，就会发现它其实是一款非常传统的游戏。它是一群开发人员，以传统方式创造的产物，采用了一个设计文档，大量的像素图，从游戏开发到一轮又一轮的玩法测试，总共历时18个月。

极少有iPhone游戏经历如此漫长的开发周期，但对传统电脑游戏而言，这种开发过程却是再正常不过了。

自从电脑游戏产业诞生的那一天开始，这类游戏的开发模式便是如此，大家都投入大量时间完成游戏的开发、润色、测试等工作，在游戏发行后等待它创造收益。

我们在开发《100大盗》时也抱有同样的想法，并希望以前人的方式彻底完善整款游戏。但正如前文所言，这世界变化太快，这种方式已经明显跟不上时代的步伐。

也许有人想知道，我们究竟是如何为这款游戏提供后续服务、推出内容补丁，这些操作对游戏销售究竟有无益处。首先需要说明的是，我们一共为它推出了两次重大的内容补丁更新，外加每月推出的两次小型补丁和内容更新。其中一项重要的补丁就是“Hell update”（2.0版本），它为用户免费添加了一个完整的游戏新世界。

更新版本受冷遇

我们并不只是简单地为游戏添加新关卡，“Hell update”可是一个全新的世界，它的怪兽类型、方格设置、音乐甚至是道具都是完全不同的，这等于我们需要创造游戏最初版本的30%以上的新内容。也就意味着我们要创建与地狱主题有关的新怪兽、新音乐、地狱动画方格，以及一些来自其他世界的怪兽和新道具，这几乎是一项吃力不讨好的大工程，因为我们并没有对这些新内容收费。

我们原先认为用户会对这些新内容产生热情反应，但实际上并非如此。部分原因是，许多地狱主题的内容都是刚刚出炉，有些玩家不知道如何操作。我只是希望用户从中察觉，我们团队真的非常非常在乎游戏质量，我们很重视玩家的感受，但并不清楚用户是否获得了这种信息。

我想用户可能并不知道我们在这款游戏上下了多大功夫，不过也有可能是我们在他们并不关心的内容上浪费了太多精力。可见一开始就要找准重心，将内容恰当地展现给用户这一点非常关键。

这款游戏的第二项重大补丁是游戏内置付费功能——一个名为Skellyman Scoundrel的新型玩家等级。这款游戏设置了许多玩家等级，它们不但可以体现玩家角色的威力或弱点，还决定了该角色所采用的招牌动作，除此之外，它们还能完成多种不同的任务。

除了提供所有的自定义动画形象，我们还要平衡各个角色的威力，加上推广镜头和插入片段的艺术设计，这也确实是一个庞大的工作，所以我们就针对Scoundrel内容收费99美分，并将游戏售价下调至1.99美元。因为我们的推广和补丁更新，这款游戏的销售情况大为好转，但仅隔数天又跌回了原点。

游击式市场营销经历

我们也尝试了一些竞赛活动和其他形式的市场营销策略，总共举办了三场竞赛活动，但只有一场真正产生了影响力。其中一场是“音乐混录大赛”，我们提供大量奖品，鼓励用户提交关于游戏原声带的混录音乐作品。

这场活动可以说是失败而终，仅有一名用户给我发送了一首与游戏原声带毫无瓜葛的原创歌曲。后来我们又举办了一场没有任何奖品的视频截图大赛，这种做法似乎惹恼了一些用户，他们很是不屑，“谁愿意免费为你们作宣传？”

最后，我们办了一场“怪兽设计大赛”，这次活动异常成功。我们收到了来自四面八方的作品，不但许多孩子积极回应（有个孩子想出了狂犬机器狼的怪兽创意），甚至还得到了专业漫画家的热情参与（其中的一个获奖作品是拿着拖把的人身牛头怪物Jani-Taur）。我们为获胜者提供的奖励就是将其设计的怪兽形象植入游戏中。

总结在App Store的失败教训

我们的游戏已经问世六个月了，由此我已经可以清晰地判断，我们的运营策略很缺乏商业思维。这其中有许多人为的错误，不可否认我们在市场营销和游戏定价上确实栽了不少跟头。但无论如何，我从中总结出的一些经验和教训，应该可以更好地指导将来的项目开发工作。

1.如果游戏没有强大的知名度，最好将它设置为免费下载。当下的前100强iPhone游戏中，大约有70款游戏都有品牌连襟的优势。一般的iPhone游戏玩家都不愿意冒“交学费”的风险，所以他们不会轻易尝试自己闻所未闻的游戏。

用户只有在免费的情况下，才会去试玩那些非著名品牌的游戏，因为他们不需要花钱，就可以知道这款游戏是否值得一玩，或者它是否正合自己的喜好。

另外我认为，游戏内置付费功能是开发者的最佳创收方式之一。除此之外，要确保游戏含有相对新颖的创意，否则就很可能白费功夫。

2.尽量将iPhone游戏的开发成本控制在3万美元以内。如果要让游戏创造利润，就不能不重视这一点。《100大盗》决非失败的iPhone游戏，因为它至少广受业界好评，在iPhone游戏网站上的口碑也很不错。这款游戏发行到现在已有6个月时间，我们对团队的未来仍然很乐观，但就是难以取得收支平衡。

另外需要注意的是，“低成本”并不一定等同于“差劲”。有些用户的卫生间边上可能还挂着装载《俄罗斯方块》的原始掌上游戏机Game Boy，《俄罗斯方块》采用的是32千字节的单色图像，它的游戏设计却仍然不失水准。强大的游戏设计并不一定需要投入巨资，它需要的可能只是一些出色的游戏理念。

3.找准添加内容的重点。只要市场营销策略得当，你的游戏内置付费功能也可以仅有一款道具而已。免费派送额外添加内容，当然可以向粉丝传递积极的信息，但得确保它们正是人们所期待，并且能够准确把握的内容。

那种“你付我钱，我就让你瞧瞧游戏内容”的年代已经一去不复返了，这倒是个好现象。市场营销策略可以决定一款游戏的成败，这一点我已经反复强调了好几年。一款游戏可以很糟糕、无趣，但只要GameStop当中有人替它说话，它就有可能一鸣惊人（我曾在那里工作过一段时间，亲眼目睹这种情况接二连三地出现）。

如果玩家可以免费玩遍所有游戏，优质游戏就有希望通过口碑传播登上销售排行榜的顶峰。App Store的确是打头阵的游戏最为吃香的平台，但如果开发商都涌向了“免费应用”领域，相信这个领域的游戏应该也会呈现百花齐放的局面。

开发商要如何创收？答案：游戏内置付费功能。Zynga的估值已经超过了EA，该公司最著名的游戏之一就是《FarmVille》（你的游戏是不是和《FarmVille》一样出众？最好表现和它一样优秀，这样才会有更多胜算。）

不一定要在游戏中嵌入广告。因为玩家讨厌广告，而且这种方式的创收能力也很有限（我们试过这个方案，证明它并不管用），而且内置广告经常会影响游戏的视觉设计。

尽量为玩家提供一个强大、稳定、完整，可让他们持续体验的游戏。然后向他们展示一些可刺激购买欲、价格公道的东西，玩家如果真喜欢你的游戏，就会心甘情愿地打开钱包。

希望我在此分享的经历对各位开发商的市场营销活动有所帮助，但我要强调的是：这种市场营销策略的变化，对所有开发商和玩家都有好处。唯一与此无关的应该是在游戏开发前期投入大笔钱，然后静等收获回报的投资者。

在所有的艺术行业当中，投资者与内容制造商的关系其实都很紧张，但这种形势正在发生变化，我们如果想获得成功，就只能与他们保持联系。最后我想说，现在真是游戏开发者的美好时代！（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Marketing On The App Store: The Cautionary Tale Of 100 Rogues

[When an iPhone project begins in 2008 and launches in 2010, that's a huge challenge -- and 100 Rogues developer Keith Burgun here describes the bumps in the road that the well-liked, high-quality game has hit on its long slow journey towards release and profitability.]

In December of 2008, my team and I began working on our iPhone game, 100 Rogues, which wouldn’t get released until May of 2010. A widely reported iPhone gold rush combined with our desire to get a great game out to as many people as possible seemed like a great match, and so we charged into development full-force.

The Genesis of 100 Rogues

Strangely enough, the concept for our game, initially, was to “make a POWDER clone”. For those who don’t know, POWDER is a roguelike game that’s been widely ported to a ton of platforms. For those who don’t know what a roguelike game is, it’s a genre of computer game that’s been very active for 30 years (they’re named “roguelikes” after the game that started it all back in 1980, titled Rogue.)

Imagine turn-based Diablo on Hardcore mode with high scores — randomly-generated maps, turn based combat, and crushing difficulty usually are hallmarks of the genre.

Due to the fact that we chose our price point first, we ended up expanding out in a lot of ways that took us completely off the POWDER track. Probably the most striking difference is in presentation — our game is pure fully-animated pixel art, with an original score, opening and closing cutscenes, and a detailed user interface.

Though we had originally planned for it to be un-animated and rough, like POWDER and many PC roguelikes, we eventually decided that the should look and feel like a Super Nintendo or PlayStation release.

Gameplay-wise, 100 Rogues has a skill tree (similar to Diablo II’s) and is highly tactical — most of the spells are not too helpful unless applied at just the right moment. I was also heavily inspired by the boiled-down simplicity of Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer and even games like Team Fortress 2, and I tried to make the items system be as simple as possible.

So, no two items do the same thing; each item has its own specific role and doesn’t step on any others. This again stands in stark contrast, I think, to the design of POWDER, which is much more of a conventional roguelike game. Again, most these changes were largely sparked by the price-point — which is very relevant to my overall point here.

Unlike so many commercial games of today, 100 Rogues is not about completion; it’s about improving your skills at the game. It follows more closely with an old arcade game like Galaga or a competitive game like Chess than it does Final Fantasy. A huge concern of ours was to make sure this element of the game was exorbitantly clear to our players.

The Challenge of Visibility

Our approach to making this clear was to dispel the “hero” image of the player classes, and paint them as societal rejects — losers who seem as destined to fail as they actually are. To our surprise, this seemed to have worked; the expected complaints about the game being “too hard” simply because people couldn’t complete it

never came.

The game was also very well received by all who formally reviewed it, getting at least four out of five stars from every publication we’re aware of (to be fair, there were early complaints about the stability of the game, but this was addressed early on).

Though we started in 2008, we didn’t really understand what the game would be until somewhere in late 2009 or early 2010. Furthermore, we lacked an overall gameplan for marketing the game, beyond simply being active on forums and word of mouth.

The experience of trying to guerrilla-market 100 Rogues was, and continues to be, frustrating. The story goes something like this. Sales are sucking. We work our asses off on a significant update and on promotional materials (be they a video, a contest, an illustration, or just a blog post).

The update goes live, sales increase ten-fold, and everything is great, until we notice that on Day 2 after the update, our sales have reduced by 50 percent or more.

Same with the next day, and after two or three days, we’re back to square one.

It feels like the only times we have good sales are when we are at the top of the “What’s New” app store page, because of a patch. This speaks to the aforementioned

top-heaviness of the App Store (by the way, it isn’t possible to release patches any more frequently than our team does; Apple takes about two weeks to put one out, and we usually have another patch ready to go by the time they do). We only get any visibility when we’re in the “What’s New” section due to a patch.

Pricing and the New World

Rumors about App Store top-heaviness and prices racing to the bottom began to surface, but I thought “Well, an exceptional game might be an exceptional case!” I’ve learned since then that for someone trying to get by the old-fashioned way, the App Store is every bit as rough a place as you’ve heard. What I’m pondering now is… Maybe that’s not the App Store’s fault. The world is changing in a way that is beyond anyone’s control.

The way I see it now, the problem was simple: pricing. While our game was a break in tradition for most players and critics, when it comes to the game’s development, team, marketing, and planning, 100 Rogues is very much a traditional affair. It was a bunch of guys getting together and making a game the old fashioned way: a design doc, a ton of pixel art, and waves of iterative gameplay testing over the course 18 months.

Very few iPhone games have taken anywhere near this amount of time, but for traditional computer games this was a pretty normal development schedule.

Since the dawn of the computer games industry, the model has been the same: spend all the time that you need (or all the time you can afford to spend) completing the game and making it shine, and then release it and hope that the sales roll in.

That’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to be like our heroes, and we walked in their footsteps all the way to our completion. Unfortunately, as so have noticed, the world is changing dramatically, and this model may prove less and less feasible as time goes on.

With that in mind, some may be wondering how we’re supporting a game with balance and content patches — and how that affects sales post-release. We have released two massive patches to the game, as well as about two patches a month for smaller fixes and additions. One patch was the “Hell update” (Version 2.0), which added an entirely new world to the game, for free.

Falling into Hell

More than simply adding more levels to the game, a world in 100 Rogues is a really big deal. Worlds in 100 Rogues dictate monster type, tile set, music and even item drops, so making a new world basically means generating about 30 percent more content than we had at launch. This means tons of new Hell-themed monsters, several new songs, and a new animated Hell tile set, as well as several more monsters for other worlds and new items. Basically, it was almost like an “expansion pack”, and we gave it away for free.

We expected a lot more of a response from this than we got. Part of the reason was that most of the Hell content was late-game, and so maybe not all of our players even got to it. Really, I had just hoped that this would show our fan base that we really, really care about the game and about our players, but I’m not sure that the message got through.

I guess it just wasn’t clear to people how hard we worked on it — or perhaps we worked too hard on stuff that people don’t care about as much as we thought they did. Prioritizing and properly presenting your content is of utmost importance.

The second massive patch released our first in-app purchase — a new playable class called the Skellyman Scoundrel. Now, classes in this game are huge in terms of gameplay; they totally dictate not just your strengths and weaknesses, but also the actions that you can take. They’re also huge in terms of how much work they take to create.

Between all the custom character animations and balancing all of the abilities, as well as promotional shots and cutscene artwork, it really adds up. So we charged 99 cents for the Scoundrel, and dropped the price of the game down to $1.99. As with all of our promotions and patches, the sales spiked, only to settle back down to very low numbers after just a few days.

The Ups and Downs of Guerilla Marketing

We also attempted several contests and other forms of guerilla marketing. I think at this point we’ve had about three contests, only one of which has actually gone anywhere. One was a “remix contest”; people could submit their remixes of our soundtrack and were offered lots of prizes.

That one went nowhere at all; only one person responded by sending me a totally original song that had nothing to do with our soundtrack. Then we had a Screenshot contest that offered no prize at all, which seemed to anger some people, who said “it sounds like you just want us to do your marketing for you”.

Finally, we had the “Design-A-Monster” contest, and I cannot tell you how much of a smashing success this was. We had dozens of submissions from all sorts of people,

ranging from young children (one child submitted a monster idea called the Psychotic Robotic Wolf) to professional comic book artists (one of which won with his submission, the Jani-Taur, a Minotaur with a mop). It was a real blast and people seemed to have a lot of fun with it. Our prize for the winning submission was simply that we’d implement the monster into the game (which we still have to do for the Jani-Taur).

App Store Lessons Learned

Now that our game has been out for six months, it has finally become clear to me that our plan was not economically viable. There were human errors involved and I’m not going to say we didn’t make some mistakes with marketing and pricing, but there are a few lessons I learned that I’ll be taking with me on my future projects.

1. If you do not have a big IP behind your game, give your game away for free. Out of the top 100 paid iPhone games right now, something like 70 of them have very fancy-pants licenses. This is extremely important to the average iPhone gamer, who really is just trying to avoid getting screwed. This is their motivation for gravitating towards stuff they’ve heard of; they feel that it is reliable.

Customers are more willing to experiment and try out your non-fancy-pants-IP game, but only if it’s free. Players don’t have to invest money to see if the game is well made and/or something that they’d enjoy.

Reasonable, fair in-app purchases (IAP) are a much better way for you to make money. This is all, of course, assuming your game is a relatively new idea; but if it isn’t, then why are you making it?

2. Try not to spend more than $30K on your iPhone game. That is, assuming you care about making any profit on the game. 100 Rogues is by no means a “failure” of an iPhone game — again, it was well-received by the critics, had good press on iPhone gaming sites, etc. We’re six months in, and we still are very optimistic about our future, but we haven’t come close to making ends meet.

Also keep in mind that “small scope” does not mean “bad.” Some of you probably still have a Tetris-loaded original Game Boy next to your toilet. Tetris is 32 kilobytes of monochrome graphics and some kick-ass game design. Great game design doesn’t cost tens of thousands of dollars; it just requires some understanding and care — take advantage of that!

3. Prioritize additional content. You can probably sell one single item as an IAP if you market it properly. Giving extra content away for free is great and can send a really great message to your fans, but you have to make sure that what you’re giving away will be something that people really appreciate and understand.

The days of, “Hey, you give me a bunch of money and I’ll let you see if you’d like my game” are over, and that’s a good thing. I’ve complained for years about how marketing has been the only thing that seems to matter for a games’ success… a game could be horribly broken and boring, but if it has a standee at GameStop, it’ll be a hit (I worked there for awhile and saw this happen first-hand many a-time).

If players can freely access all games, then word of mouth about the quality of the game will be far more effective in bringing the good stuff to the top. The App store is extremely top heavy, we all know this, but if developers all start to target the “Free Apps” section, I think that section would be a lot looser and a lot more well-rounded.

How do you make money? In-app purchases. Zynga is worth more than EA and their game is FarmVille. (Is your game as good as Farmville? It had better be at least that good, or else why are you bothering making such a terrible, terrible game?)

Don’t bother putting ads in your game. Players hate it, it makes no money (we tried it, believe me), and it ruins what little art direction you can afford to create and then fit on that little screen.

Give players a great, solid, complete game that they can play forever — for free. Then dangle totally awesome stuff in their face that you know they’re dying to use for a fair price. Players will actually want to give you money if they really like your game.

Hopefully the experiences I’ve shared here will be of use to other developers in trying to market their games. Remember: this change in the way the market works is good for all developers and all gamers. The only people it’s not good for are the investors — the people whose only role it is to put up tons of money up front in the hopes of getting some back.

As I’m sure you’re aware, the relationship between these people and the actual content-producers in all artistic industries has been rough, to put it very kindly.

However, things are changing for the better – we just have to stay in touch with how they’re changing if we want to succeed. It’s an exciting time to be a game developer!（source:.gamasutra）