作者：Robert Levitan

在某个玩家较难以接触到游戏甚至不可能接触到游戏的地区中，游戏发行商要如何获得成功呢？拉丁美洲（游戏邦注：尤其是巴西）的游戏市场成长迅速。没有人怀疑拉美地区高达数百万的玩家数量，而且他们对MMO和其他网络游戏的需求正在上升。仅上周，哥伦比亚、阿根廷、智利、墨西哥和秘鲁玩家下载FPS-MMO游戏《Operation7》就超过3万次。同时，巴西玩家上周共下载了6.9万次的《Combat Arms》。

但是，在近期的研究中，我所在的公司Pando Networks分析了世界各地224个国家的下载速度和完成率，巴西、阿根廷和哥伦比亚等拉美国家的排名几乎垫底。我之前在Gamasutra发表的博文中强调了提供快速和简单下载对确保网游获得成功的重要性，然而就相同游戏而言，与美国相比在巴西下载游戏需要耗费10倍的时间，而且失败的频率也要高得多。

我的想法并非意在反对你将业务拓展到拉美市场。相反，我对该地区的网游行业很有信心。我曾到过圣保罗与某些游戏公司面谈。在当地游戏公司高管谈论起这个地区的成长和机遇时，我可以明显地感受到他们乐观的态度。这里让我重新回想起互联网发展的早期，我觉得自己又回到了1995年的网络世界。

Latin America The Future Of Online games(from schedule.sxsw.com)

发行商完全有可能在巴西之类的国家中获得成功，但是需要对该地区独有的挑战有更好的了解，探索解决这些障碍的正确方法。我们可以看到Level Up!和axeso5.com已经取得了成功，他们将《Maple Story》、《Grand Chase》、《Audition》和《Perfect World》等轰动市场的游戏带给拉美的玩家，在这个地区确立自己顶级游戏发行商的地位。去年4月份，axeso5.com声称同NHN Corporation展开合作。Level Up!和axeso5.com二者都已经成为那些希望在拉美国家开展业务的公司的可靠合作伙伴。我同这两家公司的员工交谈，希望能够更深入地了解拉美游戏市场。他们提供了某些不可或缺的建议，所有决定拓展用户数量的人都应当铭记在心。

对于初次进入这个市场的公司来说，有必要指出的是Level Up!和axeso5.com二者在拉美都有一定的根源，他们对这些国家玩家及其习惯都有所了解。比如，Level Up!打开巴西市场时委派Julio Vietez作为主管，他之前曾在世嘉巴西代表公司Tectoy工作过。同时，axeso5.com在拉美的业务由阿根廷籍高管开创，随后扩展到秘鲁、哥伦比亚、委内瑞托和其他拉美国家。身处美国或韩国的公司或许并无法充分理解本土玩家与巴西、阿根廷玩家之间的差异。具体地说，这些差异体现在他们玩的游戏种类、玩游戏的方式和地点以及付费习惯。

这些差异最主要体现在拉美玩家更青睐网吧这个游戏环境。正如我之前提过的那样，诸如巴西这样的国家平均网络连接速度要大大低于美国或韩国，许多巴西城市的网速位于全球十大网速最慢城市之列，下载速度为65Kbps。而且，终端用户的PC硬件配置也较低，通常只能满足现代游戏的最低配置要求。对于普通拉美玩家而言，网吧可以让这两个问题有所缓和，提供更快的网络连接和更高端的硬件。

那么，通向成功的第一步便显而易见了：同网吧及其运营者维持良好且稳固的关系。这不仅能够为玩家提供更优良的游戏体验，让他们对你的产品有更好的印象，而且还会让你的产品接触到最多的潜在用户，主要是那些热爱游戏并且希望能够将业余时间和金钱花费这种娱乐形式上的人。当然，确保拥有执行良好的用户下载体验仍然至关重要，这包括流畅的注册、游戏下载和修补漏洞过程。但是，网吧将成为你战略计划的重要组成部分。正如我从axeso5.com和Level Up!的同事所听到的那样，网吧可能成为提升游戏曝光、留存玩家和盈利的关键。

据axeso5.com首席财务官Mariano Martire所述，以网吧为目标将会比通过传统广告或媒体散播游戏更有效果。他在近期的交谈中告诉我说：“这里二十岁左右的人几乎都玩过MMO游戏。但是，那些玩家耳熟能详的游戏，比如《魔兽世界》等，你几乎看不到它们出现在主流媒体之上。没有电视广告，没有出版物，没有人会在新闻上谈论这些游戏。但是，仍然会有许多人在讨论这些游戏，新游戏的曝光方式通常在线下进行，它的发展非常自然。人们通常是面对面地在网吧中同好友谈论游戏。”

网吧不仅能够给玩家提供更可靠和高质量的体验，它们还能够充当社交中心，玩家会在此讨论游戏并且同好友一起玩游戏。美国MMO玩家的普遍情形是，独自一人在自己的电脑上玩游戏，仅通过网络与好友产生联系。相比之下，在巴西很经常可以看到网吧被分成几块，每块都有几台PC，4到5个玩家玩着相同的游戏，通过实体接触享受MMO游戏带来的社交体验。曾经有人告诉我说，这些国家的家长们更希望孩子聚集在网吧这种相对安全的地方，而不是在街上到处游荡，这使得网游在这片土地上的传播具有合法性。这些紧密相连的社交群体是主要的游戏受众，而且他们对体验的分享和高价值的口头传播能够决定游戏能否在拉美生存下去。

这让我想到了成功的第二个关键所在：与受众产生联系，维持游戏在他们心中的地位。Martire警告我称，由于有些希望接触拉美玩家的发行商在拉美推广免费MMO游戏的实验并不成功，玩家认为MMO游戏缺乏质量、服务和耐久度。“这里的玩家现在已经习惯于没有强制政策和没有耐久力的MMO游戏。玩家不想要购买虚拟商品，因为他们认为游戏会在半年之后消亡。而正是因为没有人购买虚拟商品，所以游戏肯定会在半年后退出市场。”

这也是对市场潜力的巨大浪费，因为拉美玩家对游戏很忠诚，会持续不断地玩游戏。由于网速较差，所以导致玩家见到新游戏的难度提升，一旦玩家发现了一款他们喜欢的游戏，他们在游戏中的留存时间会超过韩国或美国玩家，后面这两个国家的玩家会常会因些许的不满而将注意力转移到其他游戏上。

目前拉美还有很大的市场空间可让游戏获得成功，但只有那些真正花时间了解并关心用户的公司才有望收获胜利果实。游戏公司不妨向axeso5.com和Level Up!等已经在这个地区确立自己地位的发行商取经。真正的成功不只是在游戏中添加支持“西班牙语”的选项（游戏邦注：巴西的官方语言是葡萄牙语）。认真调查和做足功课，你就会有更多的机会获得成功。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

What You Might Not Know About the Latin American Games Industry

Robert Levitan

How can a game publisher succeed in a region where getting their titles into gamers’ hands is difficult, or even impossible? Latin America, and Brazil in particular, are cited as a rapidly growing market for games. Nobody is disputing that there are millions of gamers across Latin America, and their appetite for MMOs and other online titles is growing. Just last week, FPS-MMO Operation7 was downloaded over 30,000 times by gamers in Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Peru. Meanwhile, in Brazil alone, gamers downloaded Combat Arms 69,000 times last week.

However, in a recent study, my company Pando Networks analyzed the download speeds and completion rates in 224 countries around the world and Latin American territories such as Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia ranked near the bottom. In the very first blog I wrote here on Gamasutra, I stressed how crucial it was to provide quick and easy downloads in order to ensure the success of an online game, yet getting a game in Brazil will take up to ten times longer and fail far more frequently than getting the same title in the United States.

It’s not my intention to be a naysayer and warn you away from expanding your business into South America. On the contrary, I am bullish about the online game industry in that region. I’ve been in Sao Paolo meeting with game companies. The energy in the air is palpable when local game company executives discuss the growth and opportunity that is possible there. In many ways it’s reminiscent of the early days of the internet and I felt like I was reliving my own start in the online business world in 1995.

Success as a publisher is certainly possible in countries such as Brazil; it simply takes a better understanding of the unique challenges that the area presents, and the right approach to those obstacles. Witness the success of Level Up! and axeso5.com, which have brought major hits such as Maple Story, Grand Chase, Audition and Perfect World to Latin American audiences, establishing themselves as top game publishers in the region. Just last April, axeso5.com announced a partnership with NHN Corporation. Both LevelUp! and axeso5.com have become highly desirable partners for publishers who wish to start doing business in Latin American countries. I spoke to colleagues at both of these companies to gain a better understanding of the Latin gaming market, and they provided some indispensable advice that everyone should keep in mind when they decide to broaden their userbases.

For starters, it’s worth pointing out that both Level Up! and axeso5.com have their roots inside Latin America, and have an intrinsic understanding of their countries’ gamers and their habits. Level Up!, for example, launched in Brazil with the appointment of Julio Vietez as Managing Director who had previously worked with Tectoy, a Brazilian company which represented SEGA. Meanwhile, axeso5.com was founded by Argentinian executives and expanded into Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and several other countries in South America. A company operating in the US or Korea may not fully appreciate the differences between their local gamers and those playing in Brazil or Argentina – namely, what they play, how and where they play it, and how they ultimately pay for it.

Chief among these differences is the cybercafé as the Latin American player’s gaming environment of choice. As I mentioned earlier, the average internet connection in a country such as Brazil is far slower than the US or Korea, with several of Brazil’s cities included in the ten slowest cities worldwide with download speeds of 65Kbps. In addition, end users’ PC hardware tends to be less powerful, often falling well below the minimum specifications needed to run a modern game release. The cybercafé alleviates both of these problems for the average Latin American gamer, providing faster connections and higher-end hardware.

The first step towards success, then, is an obvious one: maintain a strong relationship with cybercafés and their managers. Not only will this provide players with a far more optimal game experience and a better impression of your product, but it offers you the broadest and best possible audience, composed primarily of game-friendly citizens looking to spend their spare time and money on the sort of entertainment you provide. It’s still vital, of course, to make sure you have a well-implemented consumer download experience including a smooth registration, game download and patching process. The cybercafé, though, will be a critical component of your strategy. As I learned from my colleagues at axeso5.com and Level Up!, it may be your key to everything from discovery, to retention, to monetization.

According to axeso5.com’s CFO, Mariano Martire, targeting cybercafés will provide a far more effective ROI than attempting to disseminate your game through traditional advertising or media. “It’s hard to find someone in their late teens or early twenties who has never played an MMO,” he told me in a recent conversation. “Yet, for all of those players’ familiarity with the genre, through industry leaders like WoW and others, you don’t see them appearing in the mainstream media. There are no TV ads, no print stories; nobody talks about them on the news. Still, plenty of people talk about them – discovery of new games happens in a more ‘underground,’ organic way. Usually that’s face to face, with friends at the cybercafé.”

More than just offering gamers a more reliable and higher-quality experience, cybercafés function as their hub for social activity, where players can hang out together, talk about games, and actually play with their friends. The popularized image of an MMO player in the US is that of a solitary gamer, isolated at their computer but connected to friends digitally. In Brazil, by contrast, it’s common to see a cybercafé divided into clusters, a few PCs at a time, with four to five gamers all playing in the same game, enjoying the social aspects of their MMOs via actual physical proximity. I have been told that parents in these countries prefer for their children to gather in the relative safety of a cybercafé rather than roaming the streets, lending online gaming a legitimacy and importance it is still struggling to reach in other parts of the world. These tightly knit social groups are the primary gaming audience, and it is through their shared experiences and their highly valued word-of-mouth that a game will live or die in Latin America.

This brings me to the next vital key to success: Form a bond with that audience and maintain a constant presence at the forefront of their attention. Martire warned me that, due to a number of unsuccessful free-to-play MMO experiments by publishers to reach Latin American gamers, MMOs have a reputation for lacking quality, service, and longevity. “Players here are accustomed to games with no enforcement of policies and no staying power. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: the players don’t want to buy any virtual goods because they expect the game will be gone in six months, and because nobody buys any virtual goods, the game is gone in six months.”

This is also a tremendous waste of potential because Latin American gamers are players that stick around and keep playing. Owing to poor internet speeds and the resulting difficulty of obtaining new games, once a player discovers a game they like, they tend to stay with it more than gamers in Korea or the US, where a player can easily move on to the next title if they are even slightly dissatisfied.

There is plenty of room for success in Latin America but it will only come from companies that take the time to actually know and care about the audience there. Take your cues from companies such as axeso5.com and Level Up! which have leveraged their local expertise to become the top publishers in the region. True long-term success takes more than just checking off “Spanish” on your list of supported languages. (For starters, the official language of Brazil is Portuguese.) Do your homework and you stand a much better chance of making the grade. (Source: Gamasutra)