作者：Mike Arcuri

《Wolf Toss》目前在iOS、Android和Chrome的下载量超过120万次。

本文今天将主要谈论这款游戏的创建过程，我将打破写作规则，论述我们采取及回避的策略及其中原因，因为我觉得其他游戏开发者完全可以参考那些未体现在《Wolf Toss》中的策略。虽然本文不是非常注重数据，但依然主要涉及我们所进行尝试的内容，以及其中的可行和不可行元素。

Wolf Toss from madsenstudios.com

名不见经传的开端

《Wolf Toss》的起步名不见经传。它没有经过长久的排除万难过程或者系列游戏计划会议，抑或者是进行某些市场分析，然后最终确定这将是物理撞击题材的合理演变。

相反，就如Todd Hooper所述，《Wolf Toss》原本不过是个“GDC演示内容，旨在说明Lua编程能够多快通过Moai游戏开发平台制作出现代手机物理游戏。”从根本上说，我们当时的想法是，若小团队能够遵照优秀手机游戏设计经验在较短时间内设计出作品，这将能够有效证明Moai平台的强大功能。最终的确如此。1位设计师/lua编程人员携手1位美工在5天里制作出一款运作流畅，完美融入音效、积分及云端排行榜元素的4关卡“Big Bad Wolf & Three Little Pigs”主题游戏。然后他们额外投入2天时间，旨在确保内容能够在Android平台顺利运作。GDC会议很棒。然后在游戏工作室着手另一项目时，大家就暂时将《Wolf Toss》抛在脑后。

数月后，我们重新回到《Wolf Toss》，因为这是款能够让用户在演示模式中享受其中的作品，我们清楚自己能够在合理的时间内完成和发行这款游戏。入市时机是最具决定性的因素——这也是《Wolf Toss》成为我们首款作品的主要原因。

游戏定位

我们以迭代方式开发《Wolf Toss》（游戏邦注：每日和每周都会进行调整，通过自己的笔记本、手机和平板电脑进行广泛的内部体验）。若干差异化的功能在项目初期就已出现：通用地图，跨越众多关卡的各种大炮，包含众多需要操作的小猪和楼层元素的内部“大厦”关卡，需要解锁的秘密关卡及特殊能量（例如，点燃自己的狼，烧掉所有稻草和木制物品）。不久之后，我将游戏定义成融汇“某超级兄弟”和“某小鸟”元素，并融入老派平台元素的深刻物理撞击游戏。我们觉得自己能够在手机动作&谜题游戏的主流玩家及偏好探索和策略内容的用户交汇处找到游戏的用户群体。我们开始同广告网络平台沟通，思考用户获得渠道，查看5万美元以及2.5万美元的发行推广预算分别能够取得什么成果。

最后，我们的游戏巧妙将同类题材的作品推向新台阶，就较高用户评价来看（游戏邦注：4.5/5星），游戏似乎带给多数用户他们期望的内容：在若干熟悉的玩法元素中融入新体验策略。但作为营销者，我希望我们能够更多突出游戏所包含的差异性，但后来却不得不为配合时间安排而削减游戏的秘密关卡内容。

游戏目标

团队极力将《Wolf Toss》打造成一款令人愉快的完善作品。但我们的主要目标是提高内容的质量，然后进行发行。我们进行少量的易用性测试，但范围不是不大，进行的也不早，测试也不是很频繁。创收设计不是我们的核心设计内容，这部分没有在真正的玩家中进行测试。搭载Twitter和Facebook是我们后来萌生的想法，游戏的核心玩法并没有植入促进病毒式发展的元素和玩家互动关系。所有这些说明一点：基于《Wolf Toss》获得丰厚收益不是我们的主要目标。相反，我们设定如下目标：

1. 发行同应用商店热门作品水平相当的完善作品（游戏邦注：就玩法、图像、动画和音效发方面而言）。

2. 同时在3个现代平台和应用商店上发行内容。

3. 通过较少营销预算获得10万用户。

我们的确希望作品能够出现在iPhone和Android平台的首页上，但去年秋天各开发公司为实现此目标，仅在iOS平台的每日投入就多达2.5万-5万美元，若没有足够的预算支撑，我们很难设定这样的目标。

发行预算

待到成熟发行时间，我们决定在游戏发行上投入些许预算（2万美元以内），我们不期望从自己的营销预算中获得积极的ROI。很多“安全的”CPI或CPE用户获得机制都使得免费手机游戏的用户获得成本超过1美元。CPC、视频和固定比例的推广机会也许能，也许不能带来良好结果。所有这些都颇为值得，若你确信游戏的用户LTV（生命周期价值）会高过投入的相应成本。我们觉得自己作品的用户LTV无法超越我们所投入的资本。关于这点，我们完全正确。就此程度的预算而言，我们很清楚，10万用户的目标存在很大的不确定性——我们完全不打算购买用户。

推广策略

有许多策略我们完全无需考虑：

1. 掏钱让自己的作品置于榜首，从而获得更多流量（过于昂贵）。

2. 提高其他作品的流量，从而降低总体CAC（我们没有其他作品）。

3. 持续购买付费广告，持续进行追踪和调试，从中发现有利可图的渠道（存在不确定性，通常用户LTV很低）。

4. 积累众多积极评论，引起用户的注意（获胜机率很小，尤其是在12月份）。

5. 瞄准单个平台和单个国家，最大程度地发挥营销成本的效用（成本甚至不足以有效刺激单个平台）。

下列是我们决定采取的策略：

1. 将PR工作锁定于iOS/Android/Chrome平台的同步发行工作。这将引起游戏和初创公司的注意，从中获得些许用户，但我们期望这能够带来较多游戏下载量。

2. 优化应用商店SEO，追踪各商店的运作差异。SEO在网络中的作用非常强大，能够查看作品在应用商店的运作情况。

3. 通过社交媒体推广内容，创造能够进行病毒式传播的内容。这是个大胆的尝试，但无需耗费很多资金，若顺利实现，成果将非常惊人。

结果

到目前为止，我们只在营销内容和PR上投入6335美元，另外在奖励下载模式上投入1万7175美元。你会发现我们的投入稍微超过原先的低于2万美元预算，但这是我们有意为之，旨在希望作品能够充分利用Android平台的惊人成就，顺利进入免费游戏榜单的前24名。

这使得《Wolf Toss》的混合CAC水平低于0.02美元/安装。

（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）

Business Post Mortem: Wolf Toss: Pre-launch Planning & Blended CAC

by Mike Arcuri

…Wolf Toss is now at over 1.2 million installs across iOS, Android, and Chrome.

Today’s post is about how it got started. I’m going to break one of the rules of copywriting by describing what we didn’t do and why as well as what we did do, because I think other game developers have good cause to consider those strategies and tactics that we didn’t pursue for Wolf Toss.  While this post isn’t as stats-focused as the last two – it’s all context for the posts still to come about the things we’ve tried and what worked and what didn’t.

Humble Beginnings:

Wolf Toss came out of a humble beginning. It didn’t come out of a week-long game jam, or a series of game planning meetings, or some kind of market analysis showing that it was the logical evolution of the physics knock-em-down genre.

Instead, as Todd Hooper wrote in his MobileDevHQ article last week, Wolf Toss was originally conceived “as a GDC demo showcasing how quickly a Lua scripter could create a modern mobile physics game using the Moai game development platform.” Basically, the thinking at the time was that if a small team could create something along the lines of a chart-busting mobile game in a very short amount of time, it would be a terrific demonstration of the game platform. It was. One designer/lua scripter and one artist built a four level “Big Bad Wolf & Three Little Pigs” themed game with smooth performance, sound, scoring, and cloud-hosted leaderboards in five days. Then they spent two more days making sure it ran well on Android. The GDC meetings went great. Then everyone forgot about Wolf Toss for a while while the studio team worked on another game.

Months later, we came back to Wolf Toss because it was a game that people were having fun playing in demo form, and we knew we could finish and release it in a reasonable amount of time. Time to market was the biggest deciding factor – and is the main reason Wolf Toss is our first studio title.

Positioning the Game:

We developed Wolf Toss in a very iterative way, with daily and weekly adjustments, and lots of in-company play time on our laptops, phones, and tablets.  Some differentiating features emerged early on in this process: an overworld map, multiple cannons allowing quite a bit of travel arond the levels, large indoor “mansion” levels with lots of pigs and floors to navigate, secret levels that had to be unlocked, and special powers (like lighting your wolf on fire to burn through all the straw and wood objects).  Before long, I was describing the title as “_____ birds” crossed with “Super _____ bros” or a knock-em-down physics game made deeper with old-school platformer elements.  We thought we could find a market at the intersection of mainstream players of smartphone action and puzzle games and people who love a bit more exploration and strategy.  We started to talk to ad networks, think through player acquisition options, and look at what we could do in terms of promotion with a $50K vs. $25K launch budget.

In the end, our title is nicely evolved from others in the genre and based on the high review averages (4.5/5 stars) seems to deliver the majority of players exactly what they want: some familiar game play elements with some new strategies mixed in.  But as the marketer, I was hoping for an even greater emphasis on the differentiators, and I shed a silent tear when we had to cut secret levels in the name of making the schedule.

Goals for the Game:

The team worked very hard to get Wolf Toss honed into a enjoyable, polished title. But the overriding push was to get the quality up where it needed to be and ship. We did some very small alpha/usability tests, but not nearly as broad, early, or often as we would have liked to. The monetization design was not central in our process, and not tested with real players.  Twitter and Facebook integration was an after-thought, and neither viral growth nor interplayer relationships were designed into core game play.  All this is context for the fact that making a lot of money on Wolf Toss was just not a goal.  Instead we settled on the goals of:

1. Releasing a polished title on par with top app store titles in terms of smooth gameplay, graphics, animation, and sound

2. Simultaneously releasing on three modern platforms and app stores

3. Netting 100,000 players with a small marketing budget

We really would have liked to chart on the first page for iPhone and Android as well, but as companies were spending $25K-50K per day to achieve that on iOS alone last Fall, we couldn’t commit to a goal like that without the budget to back it up.

Launch Budget:

When it came time to pull the trigger, we decided to go with a small marketing budget for the game launch (< $20,000). We just didn’t expect to have a positive ROI on our marketing spend. Most of the “safe” CPI or CPE customer acquisition mechanisms lead to $1.00+ player acquisition costs for free mobile titles. CPC, video, and fixed rate promotional opportunities may or may not deliver results.  All this is well worth it if you have some proof or hope that you’ll have a player LTV that’s significantly higher than a buck. We thought ours would be less. We were right about this.  With a budget this size, we knew the 100,000 player goal was far from certain – we certainly couldn’t plan to buy the players.

Promotional Strategies:

There were a lot of strategies we had to discard off the bat:

1. Buy our way into the top charts to get organic traffic and “ride them back down” (too expensive)

2. Drive traffic from related titles to lower overall CAC (we don’t have other titles)

3. Start an ongoing process of paid advertising, tracking and tuning to find profitable channels (unknown and expectedly low player LTV)

4. Rack up so many killer reviews that people notice (long shot, especially in December)

5. Focus on a single platform and a single country to get the most momentum from our marketing spend (budget was too low to move the needle on even one platform)

Here’s what we did decide to do:

1. Focus PR efforts around the simultaneous iOS/Android/Chrome launch. This would be noticed by games and startup industry folks, and deliver some players, but we didn’t expect it to drive lots of game installs

2. Optimize for app store SEO and track performance differences across stores. SEO is powerful for the web, how well could it work in app stores?

3. Push what we could through Social media and create viral content. This is a long shot, but inexpensive and could have amazing upside if it hits. We chose the themes of “better than established brand name game,” “funnier than established brand name game,” and the “bacon is the best food on earth” meme.

Results:

To date, we’ve spent just $6,335 on marketing content and PR, and another $17,175 on incentivized installs. You’ll notice that we’ve exceeded our <$20K budget by a bit, but we did that intentionally to try to capitalize on our terrific success on Android and see if we could break into the top 24 (first page) in the free games chart.

This gives us a blended Wolf Toss CAC of less than $0.02 per install.（Source：gamasutra）