Zynga开发了多款最热门的Facebook社交游戏，但要在这一领域取得成就并非看上去那么容易。尽管越来越多AAA游戏开发商和发行商也争相涌入社交领域，但并不是所有人都快速走上了成功大道。Zynga首席游戏设计师布莱恩·雷诺兹（Brian Reynolds）在最近的媒体采访中解释了其中原因。

brian-reynolds

他首先指出了传统游戏与社交游戏之间存在的巨大差异，“我认为传统游戏不会走向末路，我只是认为它的规模会缩小……它在去年略有收缩，在前年收缩得更为明显，虽然不会永远处于收缩的状态，但也绝不会以社交游戏的发展速度向前迈进，AAA领域中不会出现某款游戏突然间吸引成百上千成玩家的这种情况。传统游戏平台不具备这种发展潜力，它们仍将是一个绝佳的经济领域，但不会超越目前的这种规模。在我看来，它们会以有条不紊的速度向前发展。其中有些发行商最终会找到破解之道，然后通过进军社交领域获得成功。但也有些摸不着门道的公司，可能会因此失败。任何一个新平台都不免如此，大家都是在成功和失败之间总结经验，汲取教训。”

针对许多传统游戏开发商、发行商转战社交领域的现象，雷诺兹的看法是他们推出的游戏并不具有真正的社交性。“理解社交游戏的核心在于社交性，这一点非常重要。你不能只是开发了一款《使命召唤》之类的游戏，然后再简单地添加Facebook功能，你得制作一款真正社交化的游戏，在开发游戏之初就得将社交性作为核心，然后围绕这一点创建游戏。我认为许多AAA游戏开发商制作社交游戏的失败原因是，他们普遍存在这种想法，‘我们只要创建一款游戏，然后加上点Facebook社交功能，这样应该就很棒了。’事实上，他们忽略了社交性的定义，以及社交性的作用这个要点。”

雷诺兹还表示，“我常告诉Zynga的新游戏设计师，尤其是那些来自AAA领域的新成员，‘不要有先开发AAA游戏，然后再添加社交功能的想法，应该先创建一款社交游戏，然后再充分利用你们的AAA游戏开发经验，让它更加完善，更好玩，更有吸引力。持有这种观念的AAA游戏开发商，也正是转战社交领域的成功者——他们真正理解了社交性的概念，并运用自己数十年的传统游戏开发经验，提升了社交游戏的质量。”

游戏邦获知雷诺兹还补充道，社交游戏的优势之一在于它的即时体验这个特点。人们并不需要像传统游戏一样先经过繁琐的下载程序，或者漫长的加载过程才能玩游戏，现在的玩家对游戏的期望已经发生了改变。

“在过去，我们都在讨论黄金时段这个法则——你得在一个小时的黄金时段吸引玩家，让他们向好友推荐这款游戏。但今天，我们应该称之为黄金15秒，你很容易发现，加载时间越长，用户流失得就越多，用户反馈参数会显示出这种情况，Zynga在这方面就深有体会。”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Zynga on Why Triple-A Developers Fail at Social Games

Zynga makes success in the social games arena look easy, but crafting huge hits for Facebook isn’t as simple as it appears. And while there have been more triple-A developers and publishers entering the social space, they’ve not all had instant success. Zynga’s chief games designer, Brian Reynolds, explained to IndustryGamers why that’s the case.

He began by noting the huge disparity between the traditional and social spaces at the moment: “I don’t think the traditional space is going to go away. I mean, it has shrunk…it shrunk a little last year, and it shrunk a lot the year before. It’s not going to always even be shrinking, but it’s never going to be growing the way social is growing right now. It’s never going to suddenly have hundreds of millions of players on a game or something like that. Those platforms don’t have that potential. It’s going to continue to be a perfectly fine business, but it’s just not going to become a particularly larger business then it already is. It’ll grow at a modest rate is my take on it. Some of these publishers will figure it out and they’ll get into social and they’ll succeed. Some of them will try and they’ll fail.That’s what we see with any new kind of platform, is their success and failure in adopting the platform and figuring it out.”

As for the problem with traditional developers and publishers attempting to make social games, Reynolds said they’re failing to make a game that’s truly social.  “The important thing with social is to understand that the core of it is social. You can’t just go write… Call of Duty and add Facebook functionality. You’ve got to make a game that’s about socializing, make social the core of what you’re inventing, and then build the game around that. Mostly where I see triple-A people or developers trying to get into social and then failing is where they say, ‘We’re just going to take game X and kind of give it a little bit of Facebook plumbing and that’ll be great. In some ways, they’re missing the point of what social is all about and why it works,” he said.

Reynolds continued, “What I tell new game designers at Zynga to do, particularly the ones that come from the triple-A industry, is I say, ‘Don’t try to make a triple-A game and then try to figure out how to add the social into it. Make a social game and then figure out how to draw on your triple-A experience, to make it better, to make it more fun and more compelling. Those are the people that succeed – the people that come in and really learn social qua social and bring their immense decades of experience to improve it from there.”

Reynolds added that one of the advantages of social games is they’re instantly accessible and easy to get into. There are no huge downloads or wait times during loading screens like in some console titles. Gamers’ expectations have changed.

“In the old days, again, we were talking about the golden hour – you had to catch the player in the golden hour to get them to love it enough and tell their friends and whatever. These days it’s more like the golden 15 seconds,” he commented. “You can actually watch the little waterfall graph of the longer the bar goes for loading, the more people you lose forever for first time players. That’s part of the whole metric driven thing; we learned that stuff.”（source:businessinsider）