作者：Nigel Little（英国手机游戏开发商Distinctive Games总经理）

过去18个月来，免费增值运营模式在手机游戏中的崛起异乎寻常。

我们亲身体验过免费增值游戏《Football Kicks》，而且App Store上升最快排行榜上的免费增值游戏也很多，毫无疑问这种运营模式有一定的效果。坦诚地说，任何反对这种说法的人都只是在浪费时间而已。

换句话说，我觉得免费增值也是近期的最大趋势，未做足准备的开发商都将被时代所淘汰。

Nigel Little(from flickr)

免费增值运营模式有众多微妙之处，与制作付费游戏并努力将其售出的做法大不相同。免费增值中有多种选择，有些能使游戏获得大笔盈利，有些可能导致游戏彻底失败。

为进一步挖掘这种运营模式，下面我们讨论两个最常用的用户度量以及它们如何影响盈利、游戏设计和用户体验。

DAU：日活跃用户。该数据衡量的是游戏每日的活跃用户。流行游戏的日活跃用户通常在10万至40万之间，但有些游戏的数值更高。

ARPDAU：每日活跃用户平均盈利。该数据可衡量每个活跃用户产生盈利的能力。iOS游戏的ARPDAU通常在0.01美元和0.20美元之间。

这样看来，流行免费增值游戏平均每日产生盈利高达5万美元。

因而，要获得大笔盈利，你的游戏需要数百万的下载量，然后将10%的人转化成活跃用户并吸引他们每天投入0.1美元。这么做的难度如何呢？

答案是，很难，而且随着时间推移会变得越来越难。

你不仅需要说服玩家下载游戏，还需要吸引他们在游戏中花上大笔时间，说服他们相信游戏中的虚拟商品存在真正的价值。

与付费游戏相比，你的优势在于游戏是免费的。但是随着免费增值游戏的数量逐渐增多，这已经不足以成为竞争优势。

而且，行业中有传言称，某些大型免费增值游戏发行商每天花费逾1万美元给游戏做广告，以期维持或增加它们的DAU。独立开发者自然没有如此充裕的资金。

这也是为何你需要谨慎使用这种模式的原因。iOS平台上将近60%的ARPDAU是通过应用内置付费功能实现，剩余的40%来自广告。这意味着要增加ARPDAU，你就需要增加用金钱购买商品的用户数量。

可以通过两种方法来实现上述目标：

第一种方法较为理想，在游戏中提供有吸引力且不断更新的虚拟商品，使付费购买的用户数翻倍。不足之处在于，你需要有完善强大的内容计划和游戏设计，可以为此制作、销售并吸引玩家购买虚拟商品。

第二种方法是在游戏中设置“付费门槛”，玩家每天或每周游戏时间达到预定数量后要付费才能够继续游戏。

第二种方法较为简单和便宜，但不足之处在于它可能使DAU下滑，因为你的做法让玩家无法时时刻刻投入游戏中。这导致你需要每天花数千美元营销资金来维持DAU。

正如你所看到的那样，尝试增加一种关键度量就会导致另一种度量值的减少。

完美模式

因而，要利用免费增值运营获得成功，你需要在设计环节就让游戏极具吸引力，足以让玩家投入大量时间。另外还要创造出可支持大范围虚拟商品经济的游戏世界。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Distinctive’s Nigel Little on designing mobile games for freemium success

Nigel Little

The rise of the freemium business model in mobile games over the last 18 months has been extraordinary.

Looking at our own experience of freemium with Football Kicks, the number of freemium games in the App Store top grossing charts or Zynga’s IPO filing, there can be no doubt this business model works. Anyone arguing against it is, frankly, wasting their breath.

That said, I can’t help but feel freemium is also the latest bandwagon and developers who haven’t done their homework are going to be crushed under its wheels.

Ways to skin that cat

There is a lot of subtlety in the freemium business model; it’s certainly not the same as making a paid game and trying to sell as many as possible. With freemium there are many choices to be made, some of which lead to highly profitable games while others can lead to dismal failure.

To dig slightly deeper into the business, we’ll look at the two most commonly used metrics and how they impact revenue, game design and user experience.

DAU: Daily Active Users. This is a measure of the unique daily active users of a game. Typical numbers for popular games are between 100,000 to 400,000 daily active users, but some games will produce higher numbers.

ARPDAU: Average Revenue Per Daily Active User. This is a measure of how well you are monetising each active user. Typical numbers for iOS games is somewhere between $0.01 and $0.20 per day.

As you can see, by optimising DAUs and ARPDAUs, popular freemium games can generate gross revenues upwards of $50,000 per day.

Easy peasy?

So to make huge piles of cash all you have to do is to pull in a couple of million downloads, convert 10 percent into active users and extract $0.10 daily. How hard can that be?

Hard, and getting harder is the answer.

Not only do you have to convince players to download your game, you need to keep them engaged over long periods of time and also convince them your virtual goods have real value.

OK, you have the advantage over paid games in that your game is free but, given the increasing number of freemium games, this in itself is not a large enough competitive advantage.

Additionally, industry rumours suggest some of the big freemium game publishers are spending over $10,000 daily advertising their games in order to maintain or increase their DAUs. Independent developers certainly don’t have that sort of cash.

Ying meets Yang

This is why you have to get subtle. One example of this is that around 60 percent of ARPDAU on iOS is delivered in the form of in-app purchases, with the other 40 percent generated by advertising. This means that to increase ARPDAU, you really need to increase the number of users buying things with real money.

There are two ways of doing this.

The first and ideal way is providing compelling and constantly refreshed virtual goods that double digit percentage points of users want to buy. The downside is you need a strong content production pipeline and game design that allows for lots of virtual goods to be created, delivered and desired by users.

The second way is to put ‘payment gates’ in the game so people are required to pay real money to continue playing for longer than a preset amount of time per day/week.

This is simpler and cheaper than the first option but the downside is it’s likely to drive down DAUs since you’re actively discouraging players from remaining engaged with your game. This results in you having to spend thousands of marketing dollars per day just to maintain your DAUs.

As you can see, the act of trying to increase one key metric can actually reduce the other.

The perfect model

Hence, to be successful with the freemium business, you need to be able to design your games from the ground-up to be very engaging for long periods of time, as well as creating a game world that can support a large-scale virtual goods economy.

Our goal at Distinctive is to prove this can be done in new and interesting ways – without resorting to building FarmVille clones. (Source: Pocket Gamer)