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开发者调查称HTML5游戏市场潜力巨大

作者:Mark

我曾在博文中称2012年对HTML5手机游戏来说将会是意义非凡的一年,所以我在此投入巨大,尤其是创建自己的游戏工作室。但和所有初创公司一样,我有很多准备工作要做,有些问题我必须仔细进行推敲。

HTML5游戏市场未来将发展至什么规模?

html5 from leiphone.com

html5 from leiphone.com

这片领域在未来1年、2年或5年里将发展成什么规模?

当我首次被问及这些问题时,我脑中一片空白。我发现自己手中并没有这些数据。但我想最适当的切入点当然是智能手机在过去几年的销售数据,以便粗略把握这片领域当前的市场规模及其近年来的发展势头。

下面就先来看看computing.co.uk上的一段陈述:

“手机技术呈迅猛发展势头,据调查公司Gartner表示,本季度全球手机市场的销量提高16.5%。2011年第二季度设备的销量总计达4.287亿部,比去年同期增长16.5%(游戏邦注:去年同期的销量是3.679亿部)。而智能手机设备的销量也提高74%,占2011年第二季度全球手机销量的25%,而在去年同期,智能手机在总手机销量中的比值是17%。谷歌和苹果主导智能手机领域;2011年第二季度,iOS和Android操作系统在智能手机领域的总份额比去年同期提高一倍,达到接近62%的水平,而1年前此数值只有31%左右。”

当然我最感兴趣的还是智能手机的销量,此领域相比去年增幅高达74%。截至2011年第二季度,这一领域在整个手机市场的比重增至25%,而在去年同期,此比重只有17%。我觉得未来智能手机设备的市场份额将有望突破25%,也许会高达35%,且让我们拭目以待。

要把握行业发展势头,我们得回到2009年。据悉,智能手机在2009年的销量约是1.724亿部,前一年的销量是1.392亿部。值得注意的是,仅在2011年第二季度,智能手机的销量就高达1.07亿部左右,将此同2009年的销售情况进行比较我们就会发现,行业在短短几年内就获得显著发展。

这里我假设所有持有智能手机设备的用户都想要体验游戏。当然这种假设不符实际。

那么我们接下来需要解决的问题就是:

* 有多少用户体验智能手机游戏?

* 哪些族群通过智能手机设备体验游戏?

* 用户更偏好哪些题材的内容?

* 特定年龄/性别群体选择的游戏题材是否符合我们预期?

我的谷歌数据呈现什么信息?

一个合理切入点就是我自己的统计数据。通过谷歌,我不仅能够获悉自己的用户规模,还能够查看重返游戏的用户情况。

就2011年11月来看,我的游戏网站的访问量是33207。当然其中有24628位用户是独立用户(unique visitor),因此有8579位用户(或约25%)重返游戏。这高出我的预期,但心中依然存在些许疑惑,因此我就此进行更深入的探索。

据谷歌数据显示,页面的平均访问量约是2次。这和我的预期差不多。第一次是下拉游戏列表,第二次是体验选定的游戏。也许在某些情况下,我的用户会标记游戏列表。我不是非常清楚。

深入分析后我还发现,网站的平均浏览时间是2分钟。这差不多就是仅“玩一玩”游戏的用户所投入的时间,就如排队候车或上厕所时所能够利用的时间。

谁是我的游戏的用户群体?

那么关于实际用户本身,我能够收集什么信息?

操作系统

关于操作系统的统计数据结果,我并未感到很惊讶。数据显示,有55%的用户选择基于Android操作系统,16%的用户选择iPhone,iPad和iPod的用户比例各为15%和12%,其余的用户则就主要聚集在Symbian、三星和诺基亚等平台上。

这里也许有些令人惊讶的是,Android用户的数量竟超越iOS。55%是个惊人的比值,当然这无法代表全球Android用户的具体分布情况。据悉,2011年第三季度,Android在智能手机操作系统中的比例高达52.5%。所以我的统计数据确实准确反映行业的具体情况。值得庆幸的是,我手中握有的显然是众多符合实况的数据。

此外,我还询问Kimia的Jean Philippe,查看其手机门户IOPlay.mobi的数据分布情况。

在该公司各平台总计150万次的点击量中(游戏邦注:即包括Android、Iphone、J2ME、Symbian和黑莓):

* 29.5% Java

* 22% Android

* 21.5%黑莓

* 14% Symbian

* 13% iPhone

就此数据来看,19%的点击量都分布在HTML5游戏中。约有28.5万次(即55%)的点击量集中在iPhone或Android设备。在此时间跨度不是重点,值得我们关注的是,有1/5的用户希望体验HTML5内容,这非常振奋人心。

地理分布

就地域分布来看,我的多数用户都来自欧洲,还有小部分来自美国和亚洲。也许若是美国用户在我游戏中占据更大比重,iOS用户的比重也会相应增加。关于这点我也不是非常确定。这里所呈现的是,我所瞄准的两大操作系统都顺利运行我的作品。随着iOS 5逐步站稳脚步,我希望更多iPhone/iPad用户能够选择体验我的游戏。在iOS 5诞生前,我更多关注Android在全球范围内的动态,但坦白讲,如今这两大操作系统都以较快速度运作我的游戏,所以Android的主导地位已变得无关紧要。

那么用户体验什么内容?

我制作的是什么题材的内容,这是否符合手机玩家的预期?

我的游戏多数都是传统的街机游戏。其中《Hypergunner》和《Galactians》是非常传统的射击游戏,当然还包括《Galactians 2》。《Danger Ranger》是款简单的平台游戏,而《Spy Chase》则基本就是翻版《间谍猎手》(游戏邦注:这是25年前的经典赛车游戏)。选择我游戏的玩家大多对于游戏曾经的黄金时代存有缅怀情感。

就用户数量来说,我的游戏中最热门的要数《Galactians》。

Galactians from spacemonsters.co.uk

Galactians from spacemonsters.co.uk

其他门户网站的热门作品是什么?

要真实把握玩家所体验的游戏内容,我需要进一步查看其他平台的情况。目前业内存在许多高规格的门户网站,而在未来1年里我们有望看到更多这类网站,因为HTML5带给我们更具性价比的营销渠道。未来无需进行安装或借助插件程序的内容定会备受用户追捧,若干成熟的门户网站已深谙此道。

我需要深入探究用户的预期体验内容,方能获得更多的潜在用户。

所以我一开始就先联系位于荷兰的Spil games公司。我之前曾向这家公司授权我的作品,他们非常清楚HTML5游戏的未来发展潜质。

Spil在全球范围内容运作多个门户网站,但不是所有平台都搭载HTML5技术。这是件好事。我想要了解的是用户体验什么内容,而不是游戏运用什么技术。终端用户通常不会在意自己将基于什么方式体验游戏。在他们看来,这无非就是点击屏幕,然后直接进入操作内容。

那么用户选择的是什么内容?谁是核心年龄族群,我们从中能够得到什么启发?

以下是有关Spil门户网站HTML5游戏热门程度的原始数据:

少女(年龄层:8-12岁)

* 变装游戏

* 小测验

* 益智游戏

* 棋盘&卡牌

* 技能游戏

青少年(年龄层:10-15岁)

* 动作游戏

* 赛车游戏

* 体育游戏

* 少女游戏

* 探险游戏

家庭(年龄层:8-88岁)

* 益智游戏

* 少女游戏

* 技能游戏

* 赛车游戏

* 棋盘&卡牌

* 小测验

* 时间管理游戏

从中我发现,自己的游戏品牌主要吸引10-15岁族群。当然现在HTML5游戏还处在初级阶段,这里我们所看到的游戏内容主要是Flash游戏发展过程中的最初类型(游戏邦注:当时Flash开发者尚未认真看待平台的工具和发展潜力)。

据Spil主页面的资料显示,他们每月的用户数量高达1.4亿,当然这里指的是他们所有的作品,其中也包括桌面游戏。若初步估算Spil有1/3的流量来自手机平台,然后套用Kimia的19%比值,最后我们就会得到惊人的880万HTML5玩家/月。我觉得在现实生活中这一比例会低一些,但即便如此,由于公司用户数量规模庞大,依然有许多用户通过自己的网页浏览器体验游戏。

Spil月用户中有8500万是女性族群,占据公司每月流量的一半以上。就此来看,最适合Spil平台的游戏应该是益智游戏,在这类游戏中,玩家需要进行一定的思考,而不是仅仅将外星人炸成碎片。

总结

在此我看到强劲的发展势头。如今越来越多人持有智能手机,技术和标准逐步演变成丰富的内容,因此我觉得HTML5游戏开发者的未来前景一片光明。我猜想,未来浏览器供应商将会考虑通过二元模式呈现JavaScript源文件,以此避开安全问题。我觉得开发社区施加的压力越多,浏览器就越能够适应市场需求。

此外,融入开放网络技术的游戏越来越受用户青睐。仅在过去5-6个月,手机游戏门户网站的数量就提高了3倍(游戏邦注:因为开发者逐步意识到这能够让他们绕开应用商店)。他们原本用于发行和营销工作的资金如今可以转而投入到基础设施中,这意味着他们将能够提高自己的创收能力。若你着眼于HTML5游戏开发,这无疑是个好消息。

游戏邦注:原文发布于2011年12月11日,文章涉及数据以当时为准。(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

The market for HTML5 gaming

By Mark

As I’ve recently blogged I am convinced that 2012 will be an enormous year for HTML5 gaming on mobile phones. So much so that I am staking a fair bit on it. Not least the creation of my own game development studio. But like every startup I need to do my homework and right now there are some fairly obvious questions to be answered.

Just how big IS the HTML5 gaming market?

… and how big can I expect it to be in 12 months, 2 years, 5 years …

When I first asked these questions I drew a blank. It occurred to me that I just don’t have those kinds of figures. Sure I have some contacts that could help me but I really need some broader statistics not just the figures of a handful of portal operators – as big as they may be. The right place to start is of course the sales figures for mobile smartphones over the last couple of years. I need to get a snapshot of today’s market size and an idea for its growth over recent years.

Here’s a quote from computing.co.uk to get things rolling:

“Sales of mobile technology continue to soar as the worldwide mobile handset market grew another 16.5 per cent year on year this quarter. The number of units sold totalled 428.7 million in the second quarter of 2011, a 16.5 per cent increase on the same period last year, when it stood at 367.9 units, according to research firm Gartner. Sales of smartphones were up 74 per cent year on year, accounting for 25 per cent of worldwide mobile phone sales in second-quarter 2011. They accounted for 17 per cent of overall sales in the same period last year. Google and Apple are leading the smartphone market; the combined share of iOS and Android in the smartphone operating system market doubled to nearly 62 per cent in the second quarter of 2011, up from just over 31 per cent a year ago.”

Of course it’s the sales of smart phones that I’m particularly interested in and we can see that they are up 74% year on year. In 2nd quarter 2011 that is 25% of ALL mobile phone sales worldwide. For the same period last year that figure was just 17%. Right now I’m willing to bet that smartphone has a greater than 25% share of all mobile phones sold. Possibly as much as 35%. We’ll need to wait for the figures.

To get an idea for growth we can go back to 2009. I see that for that year an estimated 172.4 million smartphones were sold and the year before 139.2 million. Bearing in mind that approximately 107 million smartphones were sold in the 2nd quarter of 2011 alone compared to a total of 172.4 million for the year 2009 we can see that in just a couple of years we have some marked growth.

What’s interesting of course is that it is the “big screen” devices that now dominate. Blackberry, the pure smartphone developer, has seen some decline in its market share while Apple and Google continue to steam ahead. No doubt due to the marketing prestige of iPhone and the fact that Google simply gives its OS away for free to manufacturers and hence is available on phones everywhere.

I’ve made an assumption here that everyone who owns a smartphone will want to be playing games on it. Of course this isn’t true.

So further questions need to be answered:

* How many people are playing smartphone games?

* Exactly WHO is playing games on their smartphone?

* What genres are people lapping up more than others?

* Indeed is it as easy as that. Are people of a certain age / sex gravitating toward the kind of games that we think they are?

What do my Google stats tell me?

A reasonable starting point is my own statistical data. Courtesy of Google I can not only capture user volumes I can also see just how many of those users are coming back to play my games again.

Last month (November 2011) I recorded 33,207 visits to my game site. Of those 24,628 were unique visitors. So 8,579 (or approximately 25%) had returned to take another look. This is better than I expected but the skeptic in me wants to understand a bit more so I dug a little deeper.

According to Google the average amount of pages viewed was around 2. This perhaps is what I might expect. One view to pull up the game list and another to go off and play a selected game. Perhaps my visitors had in some cases bookmarked the game list (m.spacemonsters.co.uk). I don’t know.

Digging a little further I also notice that the average time on the site is around 2 minutes. I’m fairly confident I can evaluate this to the visitor simply “having a go” on a game. I’d like to think that’s as simple as the time available to somebody waiting in the bus queue or using the bathroom!

Who is playing my games ?

So what information can I glean for the actual visitor himself ?

What can Google tell me about the way that the visitor has consumed my web site. This information is pretty valuable and is of course restricted to the way in which the browser declares itself. To find richer information such as age groups I need to investigate other sources. More on that shortly.

Operating System

A quick look at the data collected for operating systems offers very few surprises. 55% of visitors are using an Android based OS. 16% are on iPhone, 15% on iPad, 12% on iPod and the rest are a mishmash of Symbian, Samsung, Nokia etc.

What is perhaps surprising is the percentage of Android users compared with iOS. 55% is a huge portion and surely can’t be indicative of the global takeup for the operating system. Can it? Well it didn’t take too many clicks to put me straight on that one. For the 3rd quarter of 2011 Android has an astonishing 52.5% share of the smartphone OS market. So my own figures are clearly reflecting what is happening in the real world. Better still I appear to have a suitably large amount of data to play with.

For a little balance I also asked Jean-Philippe at Kimia for a snapshot of his stats for their mobile portal IOPlay.mobi.

From a total of 1.5 million clicks on all platforms (Android, Iphone, J2ME, Symbian, Blackberry):

* 29.5% Java

* 22% Android

* 21.5% Blackberry

* 14% Symbian

* 13% iPhone

From this number 19% of clicks account for HTML5 games. Roughly 285,000 clicks of which 55% are apparently being served to iPhone or Android devices. The time period isn’t really of any concern. I see it as far more significant that 1/5 of visitors are requesting HTML5 content. Very encouraging.

Geography

In terms of geography most of my visitors are from Europe with a fair scattering from the US and a handful from Asia. Perhaps if the US featured more prominently in my results I’d see a greater percentage of iOS users. I don’t know. What all of this tells me is that the two operating systems that I’m targetting with my developments are happily running the games. As iOS5 gets a foothold I’d very much like to see more iPhone/iPad users coming my way. Before iOS5 I guess I may have been a little more focused on what Android is doing worldwide but to be frank the two OS perform my games at lightning pace right now so the dominance of Android is largely inconsequential.

So what are my visitors playing ?

What games do I make and is this in any way indicative of what mobile gamers want to play on their phones ?

Well most of my games are fairly traditional arcade games from a bygone era. Hypergunner and Galactians inparticular are old-school shoot ‘em ups. As is Galactians 2, of course. Danger Ranger is a simple platform game and Spy Chase is essentially Spy Hunter; a classic driving game from over 25 years ago. I think anyone playing my games repeatedly probably has a little nostalgia in them for that golden era of gaming. I’d like to think that my games have enough quality about them to honour that period so perhaps I have converted a few younger gamers to the “good old days”.

The most “popular” of my games in terms of visitors is Galactians.

What games are being played elsewhere?

To get a true picture of what people are playing I need to look further afield. There are numerous high profile game portals around today and more and more will be popping up over the next 12 months as HTML5 offers a more cost effective route to market. Anything that doesn’t actually install itself on your phone or require a plug-in of any kind has to be a safe bet for the future of gaming and several mature game portals are understanding this.

Of course understanding this data is key to my success. I need to tap in to what the gamer wants in order to appeal to potential clients.

So initially I approached Netherlands based Spil games. A company whom I have licenced games to previously and who certainly understand the potential for HTML5 gaming.

Spil operates a number of portals globally not all of which are specifically HTML5. This is a good thing. I really wanted to understand what games are being played not strictly what technology is being used. The end user – the player – after all probably doesn’t care too much how he or she is going to play the game. For them it is a tap on the screen and straight in to the action.

So which games are people playing ? What are the key age groups and what can we learn from them ?

Here is some initial data from Spil for the popularity of HTML5 games on its portals:

Girls (age: 8 to 12)

* Dress Up Games

* Quizzes

* Puzzle Games

* Board & Card

* Skill Games

Teens (age: 10 to 15)

* Action Games

* Racing

* Sports

* Girls Games

* Adventure

Family (age: 8 to 88)

* Puzzle Games

* Girls Games

* Skill Games

* Racing

* Board & Card

* Quizzes

* Time Management Games

What I glean from this is that my own particular brand of game is largely going to appeal to the 10 – 15 age bracket. It is of course early days in HTML5 game development and much of what we see here is the kind of games that we typically saw in the early days of Flash game development before the designers got to grips with the tools and the potential of the platform.

According to Spil’s home page they enjoy an incredible 140 million players each month. This is of course spread across their entire offering which includes desktop gaming. If we rather crudly suggest that 1/3 of Spil’s traffic is coming from a mobile device and then apply Kimia’s ratio of 19% to Spil’s figures that’s an impressive 8.8 million HTML5 gamers per month. In reality I suspect this percentage is much lower but even so with those volumes that’s still a large portion of people playing games in their web browser.

85 million visitors to Spil’s portals every month are female. More than half their monthly traffic. It looks like the games that are working best for Spil are the more cerebral games where we ask players to think a little rather than simply blasting aliens to pieces !

To conclude

I see nothing but growth. As more of us have smartphones in our pockets and as the technology and standard mature in to something really quite rich as a platform I can only see a bright future for the HTML5 game developer. I would also suspect that browser vendors will seriously consider a binary serving of JavaScript source files to get around security issues. I think the more that the game development community applies the pressure the more we will see browsers adapt to the demand.

The market for mobile gaming with open web technologies is expanding at an incredible rate. In just the last 5 or 6 months I have seen the number of mobile game portals triple as they recognise the value of circumventing the app stores. What money they save in store publishing and marketing they can invest in to their own infrastructures which can only mean strengthening their ability to monetise their games. For you the HTML5 game developer this is of course great news.

All those enthusiasts that predicted that the future of IT was in mobile technology can feel quite smug that their predictions have indeed come true. Where technology grows gaming and entertainment in general inevitably follow. Again, for you the HTML5 game developer there couldn’t be a better time to carve a living for yourself.

You have the technology, you have the skills, you have the support of the standards and the growing reliability of the browsers on all platforms. If we can just solve the issues surrounding audio and security we will have at our fingertips a truly wonderful platform for not only making but publishing our games.

Mobile phones are here to stay. The future of HTML5 gaming is in your hands. Literally!(Source:spacemonsters


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