作者：Dean Takahashi

Facebook平台经理Gareth Davis日前在西雅图Casual Connect游戏大会发表讲话，谈及如何设计最佳社交游戏。

gareth davis from venturebeat.com

此演讲是基于社交游戏过去几年的发展情况。游戏公司若留心相关内容，将有望同社交游戏巨头Zynga一较高下。

Davis表示，Facebook如今的MAU（月活跃用户）有2亿，各回合的平均体验时间是55分钟。Facebook试图把这些玩家移至Android或iPhone之类的移动平台。Zynga在Facebook的MAU超过2.66亿，但多元化才是Facebook未来的发展出路，其鼓励更多公司制作社交游戏。

Davis表示，“全面把握平台玩家，你就能创造好的社交游戏。”

以下是Davis就设计最佳社交游戏给出的几点建议。

1. 社交性贯穿始末。不要按照传统方式制作游戏。这表示游戏需方便玩家同好友分享其在游戏中所取得的成就。玩家需长期保持参与，方能同好友进行互动，传播游戏内容。

2. 优化社交曝光和推广渠道。曝光是个大问题，但Facebook有众多传播游戏信息的渠道（游戏邦注：不论是通过消息动态还是发送是邮件消息）。

3. 关注用户粘性。但若玩家不回访也没有关系。

4. 充分利用虚拟商品零售模式。虚拟商品是免费社交游戏的主要营收来源。玩家免费体验游戏，但会花钱购买虚拟商品。促销意味着你需定期向玩家提供折扣。你需向“鲸鱼玩家”提供特定商品，或是瞄准那些想通过掏钱蹿升至榜单前列的社交玩家。

5. 善用分析策略。好分析通常会洞察玩家思维方式，从而获悉应该销售什么内容。

6. 借助A/B测试进行互动开发。在A/B测试中，开发商会测试不同理念，看看哪个更受欢迎。这是游戏开发的科学方法，是社交游戏反馈循环的核心组成内容。

7. 覆盖全球各大平台。游戏开发商应着眼全球玩家，以多种方式获取新用户。开发商或选择创造HTML5游戏（游戏邦注：即跨平台游戏），或开发原生应用，抑或者瞄准某特定平台。通过深入各领域玩家，社交游戏开发商能够促使其用户规模最大化。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Facebook describes how to design the best social games

By Dean Takahashi

Gareth Davis, platform manager at Facebook, gave a talk today at the Casual Connect game conference in Seattle about how to design the best social games.

The talk is based on watching thousands of social games come and go in the past few years. If game companies pay attention to the advice, they just might have a chance to challenge the social game industry’s leader, Zynga.

Davis said that there are 200 million monthly active users on Facebook and that the average length per game session is 55 minutes. Facebook is trying to move those players over to mobile platforms such as Android or the iPhone. Zynga has more than 266 million monthly active users on Facebook, but it’s in Facebook’s interest to diversify that and encourage more game companies to make social games.

“My belief is that you can do good social design by taking the collective learnings of people on the platform,” Davis said.

Here are Davis’ tips on how to create the best social games.

1. Start with social from the ground up. Don’t adapt games from older ways of building games. That means it must be easy for gamers to share what they can achieve in the game with their friends. Those players have to be engaged long enough so they can interact with their friends and help the game spread.

2. Optimize for social discovery and distribution. Discovery is a huge problem, but Facebook itself has a lot of different ways to spread news about games, from the news feed to email messages.

3. Focus on engagement. If they don’t come back, it doesn’t matter.

4. Make sure you take advantage of retail-level merchandising of virtual goods. Virtual goods are the primary means of making money in free-to-play social games. Users play for free but pay real money for virtual goods. Merchandising means you should offer discounts or sales to users on a regular basis. And you should target certain virtual goods toward “whales,” or social gamers who will pay lots of money to climb to the top of the leaderboards in a game.

5. Use analytics for business intelligence. Good analytics allows for insight into the way customers think and lets you figure out what to sell to them.

6. Use interactive development with a/b testing. A/B testing is where you test two different ideas and se which one will be more popular with users. It’s a scientific approach to game development and is a critical part of the feedback cycle in social games.

7. Deploy globally on multiple platforms. Game developers should strive to reach a worldwide audience and support multiple ways to reach an audience. Developers can, for instance, create HTML5 games that are cross-platform titles, but they can also create native apps, or those that take advantage of a particular platform. By pursuing gamers in all markets, social game developers can hit the biggest audience.（Source：venturebeat）