作者：Rob Carroll

过去2年来，社交游戏领域由原来拥有大量发展机遇的“西部荒原”，变成正统的游戏类型及顶级工作室的重要运营模式。

随着平台的发展及社交游戏的风靡，这片领域逐步涌现许多作品，有些很棒，有些则不尽人意，但所有作品都需要曝光度。显然过去几个月来，由于病毒式传播渠道的消失及投入成本的提高，这片市场的情况每况愈下。尽管面临新挑战，开发者并没有因此而退却，相反这促使开发者不断调整作品，充分利用每个机会。

从这点出发，我总结出若干社交游戏开发者能够进行完善的内容，涉及设计、病毒式传播和营收。这些机制是开发者创造成功作品的关键。

1. 提供大量货币

对多数RPG或资源管理类游戏而言，维持强大用户经济体系是一大挑战。这些游戏多数都采用双重货币机制支撑其经济体系。这里的双重货币包括适用于各种用户的游戏内货币，这令未掏钱的用户能够充分参与游戏，以及更固定、迎合付费用户需求的真实货币。

在此机制中，真实货币更易于平衡。设计师能够直接平衡用户预期花费的金钱数量，创建程序包和奖励，供用户掏钱。而借助游戏货币，平衡工作就变得更具挑战性，设计师需给予玩家足够资金，供他们体验游戏，同时又要保证数量不会过多，否则货币就会失去价值。

Battle Punks from pc.ign.com

一个常见问题是，设计师会向玩家呈现能够持续创造游戏货币的循环资金来源，无论玩家是否在线。此机制给予玩家大量资金，但未就他们的积极体验行为给予奖励。此问题的一个很好解决办法是将游戏货币奖励同玩家在游戏中的特定行为结合起来，例如激活建筑、拜访朋友或旋转插槽。开发者还能够就玩家参与的普通玩法给予奖励。Gravity Bear的《Battle Punks》就将策略运用得惟妙惟肖。在此游戏中，玩家唯有进行某些原始操作，即同其他玩家战斗，方能获得金钱。这既促使游戏货币具有较高价值，同时又能够给予游戏活跃用户相应奖励。

2. 设计巧妙的虚拟币汇点

完善分配游戏货币的方式后，下个挑战就是如何从玩家身上创收。创造一个“虚拟币汇点”或以吸引眼球的方式令玩家在游戏中掏钱是保持玩法趣味性的要点。因为一旦游戏货币在玩家眼中失去价值，玩家获取游戏货币的动机就会丧失，然后玩法也会相应消失。

NanoStar Siege from yatta.com

所以开发者面临的挑战是寻找方式让玩家掏钱，同时确保玩法在资金耗尽时不受影响。突显此机制的一个典型例子是Digital Chocolate的《NanoStar Siege》。这款游戏的主要目标是进攻其他玩家的基地，这需要大量军队。但玩家在战斗中添加的军队越多，他们所要投入的金币就越多。玩家投入的金币通常超过获胜所需，以保证自己一定能够获胜及收获经验。此机制所产生的结果是玩家持续为下次进攻搜集充足金币，这些战斗促使货币从用户经济体系中流出。

3. 新内容

顶级社交游戏开发商的学习速度很快，这个领域的游戏更像是服务，而非产品。掌机游戏一旦发行，所有工作就基本完成，团队就能够转移至其他项目。而在社交游戏领域，游戏发行后，真正的工作才刚刚开始。若游戏打算融入虚拟商品，就得持续添加吸引眼球的新道具。否则内容就会过时，玩家就会丧失兴趣，选择离开。

满足玩家内容需求的一个有效方式是在发行游戏时保留某些已制作的内容。发行游戏时不要将所有道具都填入仓库。在构思、创意和开发新游戏过程中，围绕什么内容比较好，什么会畅销，故事情节需要什么元素的想法成千上万。通常开发团队脑中想到的道具只需一半就能够造就强势发行。将部分计划发行的内容放置一旁，充当发行头几周的“更新”内容。逐步发行前制作内容不仅能够推动游戏玩法，给玩家带来新鲜感，还能够给开发者创造喘息空间，让他们分析游戏的实际参数信息，继续基于用户反馈创造新内容。

4. 社交压力

很多开发者都竭力适应Facebook病毒传播渠道所发生的变化。这些改变清楚说明一个事实；社交游戏需有社交性。这些游戏刚出现时，开发者向用户传递什么信息无关紧要，这些都是新内容，用户会同好友分享多数内容。如今，用户已经开始出现疲态，他们越来越不愿意向自己的社交好友发送有关奶牛、军队之类的垃圾信息。

City of Wonder from trucoville.net

对开发者而言更有效的病毒传播方式是促使用户寻求好友帮助，以便自己能够在游戏中前进。一个典型例子就是Playdom的《City of Wonder》。游戏融入标准病毒传播选择；以及吹嘘、赠送礼物和邀请元素。此外，他们还采用一个杰出机制：玩家能够通过发帖聘请好友帮助他们，从而免费获得“世界奇观”。游戏此举显然获得很大成功，头一周就获得约300万次的安装量。

5. 新手指南

虽然开发者可以通过调整和测试其他功能提高自己的用户数量，但鲜有内容能够获得如优质新用户体验般显著的效果。有些游戏的机制大同小异，优质用户指南是决定用户是否会感到沮丧的关键。众多游戏都只有30%用户会从头至尾浏览游戏指南，真的体验游戏。若有某功能将令你失去70%用户，你多半会直接去除此功能，但很多开发者都不愿意花时间教授玩家如何体验游戏。

虽然我们很难概述开发者应如何设计游戏指南，但有若干要点能够有效帮助开发者创造优质游戏体验。大箭头或亮光处告知玩家他们应点击什么，在何处点击，简单陈述体验游戏所需的条件，告知玩家游戏最“精彩”的部分。若你带领用户穿过这些地点，他们多半会选择退出，因为这样的游戏并非瞄准他们，很多人会讨厌你的游戏，但若你以清晰而简洁的方式突出关键地点，游戏就有望脱颖而出。

新用户指南的一大典型是5th Planet Games的《鳄鱼伏击》。游戏带领玩家穿过游戏重要地点，同时淡化同当前体验无关的内容，突出玩家需点击的地点（游戏邦注：这有点繁琐，但确实能够有效留住玩家，提高用户粘性）。

虽然这些建议无法保证开发商一定获得成功，但它们已经过时间考验，能够有效提高游戏的用户数量。不论游戏围绕农场、角色扮演主题，还是设计战斗内容，能够促使作品取得成功的最重要方式是尽可能制作优秀作品，然后期望用户能够像你一样喜欢游戏。

游戏邦注：原文发布于2010年10月20日，文章叙述以当时为背景。（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）

How To Boost Your Games’ Potential. 5 Unexpected Solutions

By Rob Carroll

In just the past two years the social gaming space has evolved from a “wild west” free-for-all where internet millionaires could pop-up up over night, to a legitimate category of games and an important new business model for all the top studios. It’s hard to argue against the importance of having a presence on a platform with over 1/2 a billion players one click away from your game.

As the space has grown and the reach of social games become apparent to everyone, the landscape has become crowded with thousands of titles, some great, some not so great, all clamoring for visibility. Without question the space has changed for the worse over the past few months, with the loss of viral communication channels and ever increasing costs. Despite the new challenges, developers aren’t being scared away, but it does increase the importance of fine tuning your game to take advantage of every opportunity you can.

With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of optimizations developers can make to their social games, in design, viral communication and monetization. Each of these systems are critically important for developers to make their games successful.

#5: Endless Floods of Money

For most games that fall in to the RPG or resource management categories, maintaining a strong player economy is an enormous challenge. Most of the games in these categories use a dual currency system as the backend of their economies. These dual currencies consist of an in-game currency that scales to accommodate a wide range of user levels, allowing non-monetizing users to fully participate in the game and a real money currency that is far more fixed and caters to users paying for the game.

The real money currency is much easier to balance in this system. Designers can directly balance the amount of money they expect a user to spend in the game, creating packages and incentives to get user to break out the credit card. With the in-game currency the balance is much more challenging, designers need to give players enough money to keep playing the game while not flooding the system with so much, that it becomes valueless.

One problem that I’ve frequently seen is that designers will give the player a recurring revenue source that is constantly giving the user in-game currency, whether they are on-line or not. This can give users huge stockpiles of money while not actually rewarding them for actively playing the game. A good fix for this problem is to tie the rewarding of in-game currency to specific actions the player performs in the game, such as activating a building, visiting a friend or spinning a slot. Developers can also give rewards simply for the normal game play users participate in. Battle Punks from Gravity Bear has implemented this tactic particularly well. In this game the user is only given money when they perform the primary action in the game, fighting other players. It keeps the value of in-game currency high while rewarding the active players in the game.

#4: Good currency sinks

Once you have refined the methodology of distributing in-game currency to your players, the next challenge is figuring out how to take that money back from them. Developing “currency sinks”, or a compelling method to make your users spend money is a critically important factor in keeping the game play interesting for the player. Because once the player reaches a point where their money has no value for them, the motivation for acquiring in-game currency and thus, game play is lost.

So the challenge for the developer is to find ways to make the player spend money without stopping their game play when the money runs out. A great example of this mechanic in action is in NanoStar Siege by Digital Chocolate. The primary goal in this game is to launch attacks against other players’ bases which requires troops. However the more troops players add to a battle, the more gold they need to spend on that fight. Players will often spend more gold than they will win, in order to secure a victory and gain experience. The result of this mechanic is that gamers are constantly trying to accumulate enough gold for their next attack and currency flows out of the economy with these battles.

#3: New Content

As the top social game developers quickly learned, the games in this space are much more of a service than a product. Once a console game is shipped, the bulk of the work is done and the team can move onto other projects. With social games, once the game is launched the real work is just beginning. If your game is going to have virtual goods in it, there must be a steady stream of new and compelling items for your users to want to buy. Otherwise the content gets stale and your users will lose interest and leave.

One of the better ways to help to keep up with the need for content in your game, is to hold back some of the content you’ve created when the game is launched. Don’t stuff every item you developed in the game inventory at launch. During the concept, creation and development of a new game there an tons of ideas thrown around for what would be cool to have, what sells best and what is needed for the storyline. Odds are that with all of these items the development team thinks of, only half would be needed for a strong launch. Take some of the items you plan to use for launch, put them aside and use them as the “new” content for the first few weeks of the game. Slowly releasing pre-developed content will not only drive game play and keep things fresh for players, but provide you with breathing room for your designers to analyze live metrics from the game and continue creating new content based on user feedback.

#2: Social Pressure

Most developers have struggled to adapt to the changes in the Facebook viral landscape. These changes have made one simple fact clear; social games need to be social. When these titles were just starting out it didn’t matter too much what messaging you gave to your users, it was all new and users would send most any message their friends. Today, fatigue is setting in on users and they are much less willing to spam their social graph with posts about cows, armies, and such.

What is proving to be a more successful viral channel for developers is to require users to call on friends to help them progress in the game. A great example of this is in Playdom’s City of Wonder. They have the standard viral communication options; bragging, gifting and inviting. But they also use a good mechanic where a player can get “wonders of the world” for free by recruiting their friends to help them via posts to the stream feed. They are clearly doing something right as they saw around 3 million new installs in a week, while the other top games we’re lucky to have a quarter of that.

#1: New User Tutorial

And we reach what I see as the #1 tactic developers can be doing to help make their games more successful. While there are a number of features you can adjust and test to help increase your numbers, few of them can have as dramatic an effect as a good new user experience. And while some games share similar game mechanics, a good user tutorial can make a huge difference in which players stay or leave out of frustration. Many games see as few as 30% of their new users reaching the end of the tutorial and actually playing the game. If there was a feature that was causing you to lose 70% of your users, you would likely kill that feature immediately and yet many developers never put the effort into teaching their users how to play the game.

While it’s hard to give a blanket description on what developers should do for their tutorial there are a few key elements that make for a good experience. Big arrows or highlights showing the user what and where they should be clicking, simple instructions for what is needed to play the game, and information for the user on what the “cool” parts of the game are. If you take the user through these points and they still drop out, then the game might not be for them, not everyone is going to like your game, but hit the key areas in a clear and concise way and give your game its chance to shine.

A great example of a new user tutorial is 5th Planet Games’, Dawn of the Dragons. They take the user through the important areas of the game while graying out the parts that are not relevant at the time and highlighting the areas the player needs to be clicking. It’s a bit long but they roll a good amount of story in there to keep the user interested and build engagement.

While these suggestions are not a guarantee for success, they are time tested and will help improve your numbers. Whether your game revolves around farming, role playing, or fighting, the most important way you can help make your game successful is to make the best game you can and hope your players love it as much as you.（Source：casualconnect）