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每日观察:关注Akbank银行以Facebook游戏推广品牌(8.17)

发布时间:2011-08-17 15:36:45 Tags:,,

1)“社交股市”Empire Avenue日前宣布融资120万美元,并利用这笔资金扩大公司团队规模以及开发虚拟货币平台。

该轮融资支持者包括Crosslink Capital、iNovia Capital和视频游戏公司BioWare创始人Drs.Ray Muzyka、Gre Zeschuk。Empire Avenue原先就是由前BioWare团队、EA和MySQL成员所创立。

Empire Avenue--MAU(from insidesocialgames)

Empire Avenue--MAU(from AppData)

Empire Avenue目前是一个独立网站和Facebook应用,支持用户通过社交互动模拟股市交易活动。据其首席执行官Duleepa Wijayawardhana所称,Empire Avenue可以通过Facebook的社交圈为用户带来真正的乐趣和价值,根据AppData数据显示,Empire Avenue的Facebook应用最近的MAU是4万5883,DAU是3万6324。

2)据games报道,土耳其银行Akbank通过推出数款Facebook游戏进行品牌推广并取得了明显成效,公司Facebook页面目前已有50万8397名粉丝。该银行推出的其中一款游戏名为《Kur Yönet》(意为管理兑换率),支持用户建设一个虚拟,然后处理生产、营销等各项事务,所有涉及银行业务的内容,都需要通过Akbank在游戏中的分行执行。

Kur Yönet(from games)

Kur Yönet(from games)

另一款游戏《Kırmızı’nın Peşinde》(又名《Pursuit of the Orange》)是在《吃豆人》的基础上进行改编,玩家虚拟形象在游戏每一个关卡都要收集个人必需品(游戏邦注,例如教育、假期和装修房子等),每个关卡之间都会插播广告。

除此之外,该银行还有一个为年轻用户提供音乐会入场券的音乐活动页面,一个申请个人贷款的礼券赠送页面等多项旨在推广银行品牌的服务。

3)Kuju Entertainment首席运营官Adrian Hawkins在日前的GDC Europe大会上发言表示,当发行商与开发商的合作濒于破裂时,双方最好指派一名调停者协助解决问题。他举例称,这种调停者的身份好比是婚姻咨询顾问,有时可以促使双方达成共识,而高级的内部制作人正是扮演这一角色的理想人选。

shake-hands(from edupics)

shake-hands(from edupics)

他认为开发商最好不要形成整天都在工作室抱怨发行商的企业文化,因为多数情况下项目出现差错应归咎于开发团队的决策失误,但开发团队通常不愿承认这种错误,却将发行商当成了指责对象。

4)德国社交游戏公司Wooga首席执行官Jens Begemann在日前的GDC Europe大会上发言称,社交游戏并非针对当今“硬核玩家”的游戏,异步游戏玩法也不会销声匿迹。

Jens Begemann(from games)

Jens Begemann(from games)

观察者称Jens这番话可能意指,社交游戏并非为《使命召唤》这种游戏用户而设计,而是着力于取悦《FarmVille》这种每天短暂体验游戏的玩家。他认为Facebook休闲游戏用户规模远超过那些硬核游戏群体,“社交游戏是一种平行玩法,大家都是在为自己而玩游戏,但偶尔会访问好友,向对方提供帮助或者趁其不备摧毁其建设的东西。”

5)市场调研公司eMarketer日前总结PlaySpan和VGMarket调查数据并预测,2011年美国用户在社交游戏虚拟商品中的消费额将达6.53亿美元,到2012年可能增长至7.92亿美元。

US-social-gaming-virtual-good-revenues(from eMarketer)

US-social-gaming-virtual-good-revenues(from eMarketer)

Inside Network则预测今年美国所有虚拟商品交易额将达21亿美元,比2009年增长10亿美元(游戏邦注:这包括社交、掌机和手机等各平台游戏及应用虚拟商品交易)。而Javelin Strategy & Research则预测美国虚拟商品营收在2012年将达24亿美元。

Journey of Moses(from games)

Journey of Moses(from games)

6)Hexify公司日前发布一款以经书为题材的Facebook游戏《Journey of Moses》,它涵盖了《出埃及记》、《申命记》(圣经旧约中的一卷)等内容。该游戏以故事为主线,要求玩家扮演Moses的角色,引导他经历Moses一生所遇到的故事。该游戏的发展由任务和对话顺序所推动,玩家可以让自己的Moses角色建立营地,然后为来访的好友提供奖励。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

1)Empire Avenue Nets $1.2 Million in Funding

By AJ Glasser

“Social stock market” Empire Avenue announced a $1.2 million round of funding today, led by Pandora investor Crosslink Capital. The money will go toward expanding the company’s team and into development on its virtual-currency-driven platform.

Other participants in the round include iNovia Capital and video game studio BioWare founders Drs. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk. Empire Avenue was originally created by a team of ex-BioWare, Electronic Arts and MySQL employees.

Empire Avenue currently exists as a standalone website and as a Facebook application where users simulate a virtual stock market through social interactions and an intangible measure of online influence. Rather than being the classic “buy and sell your friends” app type that flourished in the early days of Facebook, Empire Avenue CEO Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana tells us that the app adds real value to users through integration with Facebook’s social graph. By participating in trading, he says, “the game will basically lead you into social media; it’s a great training tool as well as something to have a lot of fun with.”

Aside from functioning as a social tool, Empire Avenue is also positioning itself as a business tool for brand integrations. The market recently added branded “luxury” virtual items and Achievements as part of an integration with Xbox.

According to our traffic tracking service, AppData, the Empire Avenue Facebook companion app has 45,883 monthly active users and 36,324 daily active users.(source:insidesocialgames

2)Turkish bank earns 500k fans by offering Facebook games

by Jenny Ng

These days, many companies are turning to Facebook games as a way of connecting with and building their audience (e.g. Channel 4′s Beauty Town). But one pioneering company, a Turkish bank called Akbank, is really throwing themselves into their official Facebook page.

As of this writing, Akbank’s Facebook page has 508,397 fans. The bank itself has 913 branches serving 8 million customers, and they’ve been managing a total of 15 social media accounts between Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. They’ve also created 5 Facebook applications, some of which, are games promoting their brand.

One of these games, Kur Yönet, which translates into “Manage the Exchange Rate”, allows users to build a virtual factory that involves everything from production to marketing to R&D. All banking, of course, is handled by the Akbank branch within the game.

Another game, Kırmızı’nın Peşinde or “Pursuit of the Orange”, is based on Pac-Man and comes with a super dramatic game trailer. Your characters run around each level collecting personal needs (e.g. education, vacation, home renovations). Ads are shown in-between level changes.

Aside from these two, there’s also been a music trivia page offering free concert tickets that was targeted at the youth, a gift cards giveaway page on applying for personal loans, and another trivia game involving current events in Turkish history that later tells players how much money they could’ve made if only they opened a Cumulative Mutual Fund account on a certain date. These are all a bit of a stretch, but Akbank seems completely devoted to pushing their brand, wherever, whenever, and however possible. Moreover, it appears that all their efforts have paid off.(source:games

3)GDC Europe: Diplomacy Is The Best Route For Troubled Projects Says Kuju’s Hawkins

by Simon Parkin

Assigning a diplomat figure to intervene when relationships between publisher and developer break down is the best way to move towards resolution. This was the advice Kuju Entertainment COO Adrian Hawkins gave at a Gamasutra-attended talk at GDC Europe today.

“When projects go bad, you usually need a diplomat, someone who can step in between the publisher and developer and work to liaise between the two to act as a channel for the relationship,” said Hawkins.

“A useful analogy is marriage guidance counseling,” he continued. “Sometimes this can help both parties move towards a resolution, and bringing in a more senior internal producer can help with this. One of the lessons I’ve learned is not to write off a relationship with a publisher, no matter how bad it seems.”

Hawkins urged teams to avoid creating a culture of complaining about the publisher within a studio. “There are various perils to publisher-bashing,” he said. “Common complaints aimed towards a publisher on a troubled project include personal attacks on a so-called ‘junior’ associate producer or complaining that the publisher routinely changes their mind on the game’s direction, or even that the publisher can only see the details and is failing to grasp the bigger picture.”

“But in many cases this is just the team covering its ass, or evidence of not wanting to admit poor decisions that they made earlier in the project,” he continued. “There needs to be a raw honesty within a team about where they are at and the reasons for it. Too often a publisher becomes an easy scapegoat when things start going wrong.”

Hawkins admitted that there can be terminal issues thrust upon a studio by the publisher. “For independent developers cash flow is very difficult. Milestone payments are usually how developers get paid, and this is an easy target for publishers to exert pressure on developers to change scope, or make unreasonable demands. If you are coupled with a giant multinational publisher it can be a David and Goliath situation in trying to get your payment.”

Hawkins again advised diplomacy, such as talking to someone higher up the publisher’s management structure who may have worked previously at a developer. “Sometimes, someone at a lower rank in the publisher can be completely oblivious to the issues facing a small developer. Speaking to their bosses can be useful. Likewise, sometimes splitting milestone payments can be useful — splitting Alpha and Beta payments into separate entities.”(source:gamasutra

4)Diamond Dash creator: ‘Asynchronous play is not going to go away’

by Joe Osborne

Well, there goes my dream of a real-time Diamond Dash battle with hundreds of crashing fireballs. Wooga CEO Jens Begemann (pictured) laid it out for everyone who had questions about social gaming at his GDC Europe keynote recently. Begemann said, “Social games are not here to take today’s gamers and make them Farmville farmers,” Gamasutra reports. The CEO of currently the second most popular Facebook games creator (according to AppData) also pointed out that, “Asynchronous play is not going to go away.”

What he seems to imply here is that hardcore social games aren’t going to overtake Facebook and other platforms. Social games weren’t designed for your friends that play Call of Duty for 30 hours a week, but for those who pop into FarmVille for a few minutes to check on their crops every day. This is exactly why Begemann thinks that asynchronous gameplay (think of how friend interaction is handled in Empires & Allies as opposed to CivWorld): It caters so much better to casual spurts of play.

Begemann is of the belief that the majority of the 270 million plus Facebook gamers play for just minutes a day, and judging from a recent study regarding FarmVille players he’s probably right. So, there are a great amount of Facebook gamers that play hardcore games like the recently-released Edgeworld by Kabam or Kixeye’s Backyard Monsters. But, in Begemann’s eyes, they pale in comparison to the growing casual Facebook player base that just doesn’t have the time or care to check in on whether their base was invaded in the middle of the night.

“Social games are parallel play,” Begemann said during his keynote address. “People want to play for themselves. Sometimes, they may walk up to the other and either help or destroy what the other has been doing.” Considering wooga–which just launched Magic Land–is the second largest social games developer right now, it’s hard to argue with that ideology. However, the hardcore approach is doing just fine for a select few companies. If anything, Facebook is proving to be quite the microcosm of the games industry at large.(source:games

5)Virtual Goods Purchases Rise for Certain Gamers

Most people associate virtual goods with social games such as FarmVille and CityVille. After all, it was game developer Zynga’s uncanny ability to sell virtual items within those and other titles that helped grow social gaming into a billion-dollar industry.

Two years after FarmVille became an overnight sensation, virtual goods marketplaces are thriving in other forms of gaming. In fact, a July study from Visa-owned payment specialist PlaySpan and research firm VGMarket showed that median virtual goods payments grew more rapidly in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), free-to-play games, and console and PC games with online play than in social games.

Median Amount Spent on Virtual Content Among US Gamers, by Game Type, July 2011

Social games, which initially drove this trend, have stalled in 2011, at least from the standpoint of median spending on virtual goods. PlaySpan and VGMarket estimated that median spending in player-to-player transactions dropped to $20 in July 2011 from $50 a year earlier, and to $20 in third-party transactions from $30 in 2010.

Although these drops are significant, they do not necessarily indicate that overall virtual goods spending is declining. eMarketer estimates that US virtual goods spending in social games will grow to $792 million in 2012, from $653 million in 2011.

US Social Gaming Virtual Goods Revenues, 2010-2012 (millions and % change)

Further, Inside Network estimated that total US virtual goods spending will reach $2.1 billion in 2011, from $1.1 billion in 2009. This includes transactions in social, casual, console and mobile games, plus social networks and applications. Similarly, Javelin Strategy & Research estimates that US virtual goods revenues will reach $2.4 billion in 2012.(source:emarketer

6)Journey of Moses: Exodus to Deuteronomy get FarmVille treatment

by Joe Osborne

Bringing Moby Dick in its entirety to Facebook was sort of a noble gesture. But we’re left trying so, so hard to give Journey of Moses the benefit of the doubt. Hexify has formally announced the release of its Facebook game of biblical proportions, Journey of Moses.

The game takes the epic, sacred (to religious folk) story that spans the books of Exodus to Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Bible … and presents it in a format only a FarmVille fan could truly appreciate.

The game appears to have a much heavier focus on story than similarly-styled Facebook games like FrontierVille and recently PyramidVille. Journey of Moses begins with a laughable dramatic introduction depicting the moment Moses’ mother sends him down the river Nile to avoid execution and into the arms of the Pharaoh’s daughter. For the rest of the game, you literally assume the role of Moses, and guide him through the story of his life.

This is done through … searching tiles (seriously), and much like games such as Treasure Isle. The game’s story is pushed along through quests and dialog sequences, but players’ Moseses (kinda had to make up a word here, folks) can build their own camps to provide friends with bonuses when they visit daily. It doesn’t do much of anything to advance the story, but keeps Journey of Moses in line with the norm of Facebook games (and provides players with free Energy through a honey tree).

There are even “bonus” pieces to the Moses story that players can purchase for Facebook Credits. Or, you know, they can just read the Bible, if they’re into that sort of thing. It’s a well-polished game with amusing visuals and a surprising amount of depth, much more so than Vatican Wars or Holy Town. It kind of leaves us waiting with bated breath for when The Four Gospels hit Facebook. Or not.(source:games


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