作者：Rampant Coyote

这是本系列的第3部分（第1、2部分详见此处）本文中，我将主要回答“为什么？”的问题。

这里我们将省掉《Minecraft》之类的例子。普通独立开发者制作诸如《Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon》之类的作品，虽说这理应能够获得100万份销量，但他们多半无法做到。他们没有足够营销预算，将游戏变得家喻户晓。行业人士不会蜂拥至公司面前，争取此有利可图作品的授权。没有人会以数百万美元换取出售角色毛绒玩具的权限，而Michael Bay（游戏邦注：美国好莱坞导演）多半也不会将其电影授权给步履维艰独立开发者的平台谜题游戏。你可以出售整个“灵魂”（即整个IP），但多半不会有买家。通常是无人问津。

Frayed Knights The Skull of S’makh-Daon from games.brothersoft.com

所以这为什么这如此重要？成为独立开发者的优点是什么？如果无人问津，你有什么必要这么做？

这里是两个主要原因：

1. 保留IP能够带来机会——意味着你无需征求同意，方能利用资产。

2. 你的IP能够促使他人给你带来收益。

若你着手其他相关项目，第1点更有意义。如果你需要谨慎避免侵犯所有者的权限，你就会深刻理解我的意思。或者你得到机会，但你所能做的就是“传递此信息”之类的情况。

如今在很多情况下，大家考虑的都是“较大”机会。电影和连环画协议，印在Wheaties盒子上的脸庞，在Comicon发言的邀请，诸如此类的东西。我觉得这完全有可能。但我着迷于若干较小的机会。

参与促销活动，或是开展自己的促销活动。制作角色的网页漫画。制作续集。制作扩展内容。调整你的定价，或是整个推广方式。进行免费赠送。免费提供源代码。通过游戏名称出售另一款游戏。重新进行制作。通过新合作伙伴进行推广。出售全部内容，这样你就能够着手其他内容。无论好坏，这完全由你决定。这也许事与愿违，整个公司停滞不前，但这完全由你发号施令。

void war from doublegames.cn

下面是若干个人事例，就来谈谈《空间战争》。我不计划推出续集，虽然这一想法曾闪过我的脑海许多次。这不是款赚钱的作品。游戏只售出1-2份，对此我心存感激，我个人为这款作品而感到自豪。但这显然不是什么高创收作品。所以这对我来说有什么用处？

这样来看：我通过游戏给Rampant Games树立一定信誉，而此时我正在开发《Frayed Knights》。这有其原因，如果你没有发行过游戏，作为独立开发者，要提高自己的曝光度很困难——95%的新手独立开发者最终都没有真正发行自己的首款作品。我利用游戏提高网站和博客的关注度，额外代售他人的作品。我有很多的小型机会（有些有进行尝试，有些没有），这些机会没有真正发挥作用，但它们原本可以得到充分利用。我的意思是，我有《空间战争》的光盘副本，这和鞋子一起发行。是的，鞋子。玩家的鞋子。我不是很清楚，我不是鞋子方面的行家。

重点是——虽然游戏没有带来什么实质性的收入，但“Void War家伙”的身份给我开启了许多扇门，给我带来了许多合约。过去受雇于游戏工作室时，这些机会就流失到他人手中。

我知道，如果我最终变成亿万富翁，受邀在各种大会上发表演讲，鼓励大家，提供经验的话，故事会更精彩。而恰恰相反，我依然还是个奋斗中的小型独立开发者，如今的表现比几年前稍有进步，但不是个白手起家的故事。也许有天我可以这么说；“看，这些内容并不突出，但它将我推向成功之路。”也许有这一天，也许没有，但至少现在还不是时候。

但我要说的是，这些经历（游戏邦注：享有IP权限，能够自由做决策）带给我许多前所未有的机会。

关于第2点，让他人给你带来收益。如果你和我一样，那么你首先想到的就是，大家排队争取游戏的电影或人形公仔授权或是提议制作续集，然后支付给你大笔版税。是的，从严格意义上说，这种情况可能出现。但规模远要小很多。

下面就来谈谈移植情况。有人试图将你的游戏移植至Android平台。你们就某些条款达成协议，假设五五分成。你游戏的销量对得起他们的投入。这算不上是“免费收入”，但相对你的少量额外工作，这算是较高的回报。其他人替你赚钱。对于你的合作伙伴来说，他们获得一个已知实体，运用自己的技能，创造出自己的“创收机器”。双赢，是吧？

而且还有代销销量，就像我在RampantGames.com的做法。通常，老派风格的合作计划不会带来众多销量。但就双向平衡来说，我喜欢这些项目。代销项目提高《Frayed Knights》的销量，而我也推广了其他开发者的作品。

这些只是一点见解，远不够详尽。不是什么能够带来高回报，让我提早退休的方案。独立开发者承接外包工作或接受全职工作换取些许收益没什么错。在成功推出《邪神拯救世界》和《Breath of Death VII》之后，Zeboyd Games计划发行下款《Penny Arcade》RPG游戏——和他人的独立资产合作。这对双方来说都是个绝佳机会，是件好事。

有关独立开发者，我最喜欢的一篇文章是Joe Indie的“Write Yourself a Mini-Van”。自文章发布以来，独立领域已发生些许变化，但基本原则依然保持不变。小型热作积少成多，如果你坚持下去，你还能够就此展开全面经营。

掌握游戏控制权（游戏邦注：即便最终你会在心生厌倦后将权限售出），这能够让你获得选择、机会，是的，还有责任。但很多年来，能够享有这些权限的只有大型发行商和大型中间商。数字时代让小型开发者也能够利用这些之前大多被忽略的中小型机会。是的，这里存在巨大的机会和成功潜力。虽然成功并不总是以数百万美元年创收或数百万份销量的形式呈现，但在我看来，那些持之以恒的独立人士将能够顺利实现这些目标。（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）

IP Rights-Why Are They Important to Indie Game Developers?

by Rampant Coyote

Okay, part three of my ramblings (I’m stressed out in a foreign country trying to post between 12-hour days, so forgive me) about IP. In this one I try to finally answer the question… “WTF?” Or, rather, “Why?”

Let’s dispense with the lightning-in-a-bottle examples like Minecraft for a minute. Your average indie, making a game like, say… Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, while fully deserving of selling a million copies (heh), probably ain’t. They don’t have the budgets to throw at marketing to make their game a household name. The world is not going to beat a path to their door trying to get a license for that lucrative franchise. Nobody’s offering them millions to sell plushies of your characters, and Michael Bay isn’t soliciting any struggling indies for the movie rights to their platform-puzzler. You can offer to sell your ‘soul’ – your entire IP lock, stock, and barrel – and may find there’s no buyers. Nobody cares.

So why the freak does it matter? What’s so great about being all indie and stuff? If nobody else cares about this stuff – at least not enough to write you a check – why should you?

Here are my two big reasons:

#1 – Retaining your IP Rights brings opportunities – and means not having to ask permission to take advantage of them (or not).

#2 – Your IP rights provide a way for other people to make you money.

The first one is probably more meaningful if you’ve worked on the other side a bit. If you’ve ever had to be really careful to avoid infringing on the rights of the owners, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Or when you are offered opportunities and all you can do is “pass that information along.” Or whatever.

Now, most of the time, people think of the “big” opportunities. Movie and comic book deals, your face on a box of Wheaties, invitations to speak at Comicon, stuff like that. I suppose that’s all possible. But I’ve been kinda fascinated by some smaller things.

Participating in promotions. Or creating your own. Making a webcomic about your characters. Making a sequel. Making an expansion. Changing your pricing, or your entire method of distribution. Giving it away for free. Giving away the source code for free. Using the name of your game to sell another one. Creating a remake. Distributing it through a new partner. Selling the whole thing so you can work on something else. It’s your call, for good or bad. Yeah, it may not feel like much when the whole enterprise is barely treading water (or worse), but you are the guy (or gal) who can call the shots or pull the plug.

Here are some personal examples. Let me tell you about Void War. I’m really not planning on a sequel, though it or a related product has crossed my mind a few times. It’s not exactly a lucrative franchise. Oh, it sells the occasional copy or two, for which I’m quite grateful, and I’m personally quite proud of it (and found myself sucked into playing it again for the first time in a long while a few months ago, and having a lot of fun with it). But no, it’s not exactly a revenue-generator. So what use is it to me?

Well, let’s see: I used it to establish some credibility for Rampant Games while I was developing Frayed Knights. For good reason, it’s tough to draw much attention to yourself as an indie if you have never released a game – for the simple reason that 95% of first-time indies never actually release their first game. I’ve used it to bring attention to the website, and this blog, selling other folk’s games as an affiliate. I had a bunch of little opportunities – some of which I took, some of which I didn’t -  that never really took off, but they could have. I mean, I have copies of a CD-ROM containing Void War that shipped with pairs of shoes, for crying out loud. Yeah, shoes. Gamer shoes. No, I don’t know, but I’m not a shoe expert.

The point is – while the game has never brought in anything resembling a real income, being “the Void War guy” opened a few doors for me, and made me a lot of contacts that I’d not have had otherwise. In the past, working for game studios, those calls got forwarded to somebody else.

Yeah, I know, these stories would be a lot cooler if they ended with me being some bazillionaire indie who gets invited to speak at game dev conferences to offer motivation and stuff. No, I’m still a struggling little indie who’s doing a little bit better now than he was a few years ago, but I’m no rags-to-riches story. Maybe someday I can point to something like that and say, “Oh, hey, look, here’s where this stuff happened that wasn’t awesome, but it put me on the path to success.” Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t, I’m not there yet.

But what I can say is these experiences – being the guy with the rights and the freedom to make decisions with them – exposed me to a lot of opportunities that I had no idea even existed.

Okay – about #2 – the right to have other people make you money. If you are like me, the first thing you think of is people lining up to pay you cash for licenses to make movies or action figures for your game, or offering to make a sequel and giving you a big, fat royalty. Yeah, technically that could happen. But usually it’s a bit smaller than that.

Let’s talk ports. Someone offers (or you manage to convince them) to port your game to the Android for you. You agree on …. I dunno… let’s say splitting the revenue 50/50. Your game has sold enough to make it worth their time. It’s not entirely “free money” or anything, but it could be a significant revenue increase for very little extra work on your part. Somebody else makes you money. For your partner’s part, they’ve taken a known entity (your game with sales that Didn’t Suck), applied their known skillset, and cranked out a revenue-generator of their own. Win/win, right?

And then there’s affiliate sales, like I do at RampantGames.com.  These old-school style affiliate programs don’t, as a rule, generate a ton of sales. But I love ‘em from both sides of the equation. Affiliates have added to Frayed Knights‘ sales for me (getting their cut, of course), and I try to do the same for other developers (sometimes not doing much, but in some cases moving over a hundred units).

Again – these are little ideas. And they are far from exhaustive. None are slam-dunk, retire-early things. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with indies taking some contract work or (I hope!) even working a day job to balance things out to trade off “potential” for some positive values in the bank account.  I look at what Zeboyd Games is doing now, after the success of Cthulhu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII, about to release the next Penny Arcade RPG – working with somebody else’s indie property. It looks like a great opportunity for both parties. It’s all good.

One of my favorite articles I ever read about being an indie was by “Joe Indie,” called “Write Yourself a Mini-Van.” The indie world has changed a bit since the article was written, but the basic principles remain. Little base-hits all add up, and if you keep at it, you may get some home runs in there, too.

Having control over your games – even if it’s only to sell ‘em off the rights later after you are sick of ‘em – gives you options, opportunities, and yes, responsibilities. But for too many years, the only guys who had access to that were the big publishers, the giant middlemen. The digital age has made it possible for the little guys to take advantage of the little – to – medium sized opportunities that would have gotten ignored before. Yes, there are big opportunities and big success potential too. And while success may not always be measured in millions of dollars per year or millions of copies sold, I do believe that success is out there for the folks willing to keep at it.

At least I hope so. I plan to at least go down trying.（Source：rampantgames）