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Cadir Lee谈Zynga游戏经济模式及模仿问题

发布时间:2012-07-09 15:00:55 Tags:,,,

作者:Quintin Smith

Zynga处于变化之中。但你深知这点。发行《CityVille》和《Words with Friends》及其余10大热门Facebook的社交游戏巨头以惊人步伐开始自己的扩张计划。

单在过去4个月里,Zynga就收购开发工作室Omgpop、Wild Needle和Buzz Monkey,最近公司新推出一个统一的社交游戏网络Zynga With Friends。无论你是通过手机设备,还是Facebook和Zynga.com体验此网络上的游戏,你都能够存取同个保存游戏(存储于“zCloud”),和相同好友进行互动(“zFriends”)。这是公司在脱离Facebook孵化箱方面迈出的颤抖第一步,而Facebook依然是Zynga 90%的收益来源。

Zynga from wired.co.uk

Zynga from wired.co.uk

这在很多玩家看来有些令人担心,因为Zynga已树立一定声望。

Zynga Wikipedia页面的“争论”版块有9个副标题,从员工待遇到“既有游戏的复制”。众所周知的是,2010年SFWeekly引用前Zynga雇员复述公司CEO马克·平卡斯说过的话:“我不想要什么创新。你不比竞争对手聪明。你只需复制他们的内容,进行相应改造直到达到他们的数字目标。”

更有趣的是,《纽约时报》2011年发表的一篇文章详细描述Zynga和虚拟世界开发者MyMiniLife之间的会面。谈到报酬主题时,Zynga高级副总裁从钱包中取出一叠百元大钞,扔向MyMiniLife创始人,说道:“这些够不够”。

哑剧

Zynga首席技术总监Cadir Lee身着紧身ZyngaT恤,有双安静且无懈可击的眼睛,留着寸头。Zynga是否真的是游戏发行商哑剧中的恶棍?

也许我们所犯的错误的是将Zynga视作游戏发行商。

Lee笑着表示,“我多半怀有偏见,因为我是技术总监,但我认为Zynga首先是个技术公司。如果你从后端查看我们制作的内容,很多资源和精力都瞄准技术创新。我们擅长的不仅仅是云计算和技术分析之类的东西,而是诸如整个虚拟商品模式之类的元素。从很大程度上来说,处理虚拟商品及避免欺骗性是项复杂工作。即便是在游戏客户端——Flash是个受限资源。”

“我们有内部经济学家和统计员。我们有负责行为元素的心理学家。我们引入许多这类元素。”

Zynga的正面形象是,代表某种先锋精神。Zynga的社交游戏共有2.92亿月活跃用户,因此他们需要克服身处这一规模所面临的问题(游戏邦注:其他游戏行业公司尚未步入这一阶段)。

Lee表示,“我们的的一个计划是提供更多基础设施,向第三方提供若些许我们所开发的服务(这些服务某些Zynga的zynga.com合作伙伴已享有)。这是在游戏中植入社交性、扩充游戏及在游戏中进行分析的渠道。各式各样的元素将促使游戏变得更杰出。虽然这不是我们的目标,但若有些服务被PC游戏或主机游戏运用,我并不会感到惊讶。”

“我们在玩家之间嵌入许多沟通元素,仅是通过推送通知或邮件,或是Facebook等渠道实现这一目标非常困难。所以如果我们向他人提供其中某些服务,他们有望制作出更杰出的游戏。”

“通过体验连接世界”

Lee表示,也许Zynga的未来不在于成为发行商,而是成为一个平台,成为有计划的平台。Zynga的宗旨——“通过体验连接世界”值得我们深入探讨。

Lee表示,“我们只着眼于3个关键要素——免费、社交性和通俗性。这3个要素不是游戏,它们是游戏过去未曾融入的要素。游戏从来都不是免费的,它们鲜少具有社交性,它们并非通俗易懂。电子游戏刚问世就是遵循此越来越狭窄、越来越严格的路线。”

“这就是像是,只有那些持有此特殊硬件设备,掌握这些特殊组合元素的用户能够体验这些游戏。值得称赞的是,任天堂已摆脱此路线。我的意思是,Wii依然是专有硬件设备,但在我看来大家对于设备的风靡感到非常惊讶。”

退一步来说,这令人愉悦的“疑惑”。整个游戏行业都出错,Zynga是家旨在扩展这一业余爱好的技术公司?Lee继续表示:

“我们认为,在我们完成通过游戏连接世界的使命期间,游戏公司享有描绘‘体验’的机会。当我们将自己称作‘因特网财富’时,我们指的是成为某个同义词的公司。所以谷歌&搜索,亚马逊&商店,Zynga&游戏体验。我们希望成为当中的一个持久品牌,在此之前你无法记住互联网的样貌。”

反馈循环

下面让我们来弄清真相,从最模糊的免费模式罪状着手。在基于日&月均用户的商业模式中,你如何平衡积极反馈循环和潜在用户成本之间的关系(游戏邦注:这通常没有上限)?

换而言之,你如何调解旨在诱惑用户的产品道德原则,同时维持让玩家在游戏中随意消费的现状?

Lee表示,“若你查看我们的游戏就会发现,我们将其视作长期的社交体验。从此角度来看,玩家也许会在游戏中体验几百小时。据我了解,有玩家在13小时里顺利完成《暗黑破坏神3》之类的作品。”

“玩家通常不会意识到这点,但由于这采用免费模式,障碍对我们来说要高很多。有多少时候,玩家将以60美元(38英镑)将游戏买回家后发现‘内容并不是非常精彩。’在此用户花费了60美元,而我们则没有这笔收益。如果玩家不喜欢我们的游戏,我们就玩完了。所以我们得积极制作吸引眼球的体验。”

所以Zynga游戏没有消费上限,也没有游戏时间上限?

Zynga表示,“是的,或者是你消费的内容。若《哈利·波特》发行第8部作品,读者是否会购买?是的,他们会购买。但他们能够从中收获价值。相比传统游戏(包装当中的内容有一定限度),这是更开放式的体验。”

“若查看《魔兽世界》你会发现,这些游戏也没有上限。我的意思是,玩家已订阅这款游戏6-7年。随后你可以从其他玩家那购买设备,这更像是‘黑市’。”

换句话说:我们并没有试着进行平衡。因此出现所谓的免费模式游戏“鲸鱼用户”,这是对在免费模式游戏中花费超过1万元的用户的别称。Zynga秘密的“Platinum Purchase Program”活动还被邮件转载,一次性消费特定金额的用户将获得折扣。

我们逐步脱离“通过体验连接世界”的简单想法。

模仿问题

Wired.co.uk问及Lee有关公司密切复制竞争作品的问题,这一问题颇为严重,令公司多次同他人对薄公堂或是进行庭外和解。

Lee带着坚忍的微笑说出早有准备的答案,“市面上有许多第一人称射击游戏?《毁灭战士》不是第一款第一人称射击游戏。如今第一人称射击游戏不胜枚举,但大家不会到处传播称,‘这是我的首款第一人称射击游戏’。我觉得其他题材也是如此。你有责任在此进行创新。”

但显而易见的是,第一人称射击游戏开发者鲜少对薄公堂。他们也没有在庭外以700-900万美元(450-570万英镑)进行和解(游戏邦注:有传言称,《Mob Wars》设计师David Maestri就《黑手党战争》起诉Zynga,最终Zynga赔偿700-900万美元)。

Mafia Wars from mafiawars.maxupdates.tv

Mafia Wars from mafiawars.maxupdates.tv

商业结果

在Lee看来,Zynga之所以采取这一运用方式,是因为免费模式是个残酷领域?他稍作思考。

“游戏和内容如今是项业务,在此大家积极提供娱乐性。娱乐是项棘手的业务。所有人都在积极获得关注度。这主要围绕你如何进行高效竞争。”

“Zynga是家积极进取的公司。这毫无疑问。这也是公司取得成功的原因所在。我们遵循若干核心价值——关于‘Zynga速度’:快速前进,公司CEO赋予个人众多行动自主权。我们进行真正的精英管理。但任何优点都有其对立面。有时这可以视作是有侵略性。我们以商业结果为导向。我们着眼于获得结果,实现目标。”

但商业导向的精英管理模式将“通过体验连接世界”的理念置于首位所带来的效果如何?毋庸置疑,大家需要认同独立游戏领域的一个普遍观念:你首先需要制作出杰出游戏,然后期望从中获得利润。

Lee表示,“我认为独立开发者就是绝佳范例。这就像是艺术需要小众化方能成为艺术。‘如果人人都喜欢,这如何成为艺术?’这是个奇怪理论,我们认同其反面观念。大受欢迎的内容也可以成为艺术。我们想要成为主流艺术和轰动巨作。这没什么不妥。内容不过是刚好很受欢迎。”

灌装红酒

最后,我们问及Lee,在他看来,硬核玩家强烈排斥Zynga是否合理。

他的回答非常巧妙,在酒精饮料中,有人选择啤酒,有人选择红酒,但当你生产综合二者的产品时——灌装红酒,销量则非常糟糕。我们点头表示认同,如同魔术方块般在脑中思考他所说的内容,试图理清其中意思。

最后,Lee递上他的商业名片,其重量和硬度像个飞标。投身游戏行业10年,这比我们见过的任何名片要厚很多。国际通讯总监Michelle Kramer也给我们她的名片。她的名片设计独特,但纸张比较薄,颜色也没那么鲜艳。

Zynga是否邪恶?这是个错误问题。Zynga的过错也许在于它成为一家公司。

无论玩家给这家公司下什么结论,他们显然渐渐不再觉得如此震惊。(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

Eville: Zynga CTO Cadir Lee on cloning, ethics and economics in social games

By Quintin Smith

Zynga is changing. But you knew that already. The social gaming giant, owners of CityVille, Words with Friends and the rest of the ten most popular games on Facebook has been expanding at a startling pace.

Development studios Omgpop, Wild Needle and Buzz Monkey were acquired in the last four months alone, and recently Zynga announced a unified social gaming network, Zynga With Friends. Whether you’re playing the network’s games on your mobile, Facebook or Zynga.com, you can access the same saved games (stored on the “zCloud”) and play with the same friends (“zFriends”). It’s a trembling first step from the incubation chamber of Facebook, where Zynga continues to earn some 90 percent of its revenue.

Which, for many gamers, might be very worrying indeed, because Zynga has developed something of a reputation.

The “controversies” section of Zynga’s Wikipedia page has eight subheadings, ranging from employee treatment, to “replication of existing games”. Famously, in 2010 SFWeekly quoted an ex-Zynga employee who recalled CEO Mark Pincus saying “I don’t fucking want innovation. You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.”

More colourfully, an article published by the New York Times in 2011 detailed a meeting between Zynga and virtual world developers MyMiniLife. When the subject of compensation was raised, a senior Zynga Vice President removed a stack of hundred dollar bills from his wallet, threw it at one MyMiniLife founder and asked “if that was enough”.

Pantomime

Zynga’s CTO, Cadir Lee, is a mahogany carving of a man. Peering up at him treats you to a tight Zynga t-shirt, followed by quiet, invulnerable eyes and an earnest buzz cut. Is Zynga really the pantomime villain of games publishers?

Perhaps where we’re going wrong is thinking of Zynga as a games publisher at all.

“I’m probably biased,” smiles Lee, “because I’m the CTO, but I think Zynga is a technology company first. If you look under the covers at the things we’re spending time on, a lot of the talent and effort goes toward technology innovation. Not just things like cloud computing and data analytics that we’re well-known for. But things like the whole virtual goods model. It’s actually quite complex to deal with virtual goods on a massive scale, avoiding fraud and so on. Even within the game client — Flash is a constrained resource.

“We have in-house economists and statisticians and so forth. We have psychologists who look at behavioural pieces. We bring a lot of that to bear.”

A kind portrait of Zynga would display a certain pioneer spirit. With 292 million monthly players of its social games, Zynga has had to overcome problems on a scale the rest of the games industry has yet to encounter.

“Certainly one of the things we were planning to do is offer more of our infrastructure and some of the services we’ve developed to other third parties,” says Lee, a service some of Zynga’s partners on zynga.com already enjoy. “This would be ways to add social to games, ways to scale games, ways to do analytics in games. A variety of things that I’d hope would make games better. While it’s not our target, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those services were used by PC games or console games.

“We send a lot of communications between players, and just doing that efficiently over push notifications or email or Facebook channels or whatever is hard. So if we offer those services to others, hopefully they can make better games.”

“Connecting the world through play”

Perhaps, Lee agrees, the future of Zynga isn’t being a publisher, but a platform. A platform with a plan. Zynga’s mission statement, “Connecting the world through play”, merits some discussion.

“We just focus on three key things,” says Lee. “Free, social, and accessible. And those three things aren’t not ‘gaming’, but they’re things games haven’t traditionally focused on. Games haven’t been free, they’re rarely social, and they’re not accessible. Once videogames came out they they started down this path that got more and more narrow, and more and more rigorous.

“It was like saying, only the people who have this special hardware, who’ve mastered these special, twitch combinations, can play these games. Nintendo, to their credit, have kinda stepped away from that. I mean, the Wii is still proprietary hardware, but I think people were surprised at how much that caught on.”

That’s a disarming bit of spin, to say the least. To indicate the games industry as a whole is at fault, while Zynga is a technology company simply trying to crack the hobby open? Lee continues:

“We believe that during our mission to connect the world through games, there’s an opportunity for a company to represent ‘play’. When we call ourselves an ‘internet treasure’, we’re talking about being a company that’s synonymous with a particular word. So, Google and search, or Amazon and shop. Zynga and play. We want to be one of these enduring brands, where you can’t remember what the internet was like before that.”

Feedback loops

Then let’s set the record straight, starting that most nebulous of free-to-play sins. With a business model based around daily and monthly average users, how do you balance the positive feedback loops that you create with the potential costs to the player, which have virtually no ceiling?

In other words, how do you reconcile the ethics of a product designed to hook people and never let go with the fact that players can spend any amount of money on it?

“If you look at our games,” Lee explains, happily, “we view them as long-term social experiences that you can have. From that perspective, a player might play hundreds and hundreds of hours in our game. I read there are people that beat Diablo 3 in 13 hours, or something.

“People don’t often realise, but because it’s free, the bar is a lot higher for us. How often do people go home with a $60 (£38) game, only to realise ‘Oh. This isn’t really that good.’ And they’re out $60. We don’t have that luxury. If people don’t like our games, we’re done. So we work hard to create compelling experiences.”

So Zynga games have no cost ceiling, and no ceiling for the amount of time you can spend, either?

“Exactly,” says Lee. “Or the amount of content you can consume. If there was an eighth Harry Potter book, would people buy it? Yes. They would. But they’d get value from that. It’s a much more open-ended experience than a traditional game, where a finite amount of content goes into the box.

“If you look at World of Warcraft, those games have no upper ceiling either. I mean, people have been subscribed to that game for six or seven years. And then you can buy equipment from other players, which is a little more black market.”

In other words: We don’t try and balance it. Hence the existence of free to play gaming’s “whales”, the worrisome nickname of players who’ve been known to drop in excess of ten thousand dollars on free-to-play games. Emails have also been reproduced from Zynga’s clandestine “Platinum Purchase Program”, a discount offered to players who spend enough money on a single purchase.

Already, we’re travelling away from the simplicity of “connecting the world through play”.

Cloning

Wired.co.uk asked Lee about the company’s close reproduction of competing games, a matter serious enough to see the company in court or settling outside of it on several occasions.

“Look, how many first person shooters are there?” asks Lee, with the patient smile of a prepared answer. “Doom wasn’t even the first first-person-shooter. Now there are tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of first-person-shooters, but people don’t go around saying ‘Hey, that’s my first person shooter’. I think the same is true across any genre. It’s your responsibility to create an innovation on that.”

To state the obvious, though, first-person-shooter developers don’t often end up in court together. They especially don’t end up settling out of court for somewhere between $7 million and $9 million (£4.5 to £5.7 million), as Zynga is purported to have done after Mob Wars creator David Maestri sued Zynga over Mafia Wars.

Business results

Does Lee feel that Zynga acts in the way it does because free-to-play is a cut-throat environment? He thinks for a moment.

“You know, I think it’s been… games and content is a business where everybody’s trying to provide entertainment. And entertainment is a tough business. Everyone’s competing for attention. And it’s about how you compete effectively.

“Zynga is a very driven company. No doubt about it. That’s what makes it great. We have some core values — about ‘Zynga speed’: moving fast, about the CEO giving a lot of autonomy to individuals to go and do things. We have a real meritocracy. But any strength has a flipside. And sometimes that can be viewed as aggressive. We’re very business-results-oriented. We’re very focused on getting results, and hitting our goals.”

But how well can a deeply business-oriented meritocracy put “connecting the world through play” first? Surely for that, people need to subscribe to a viewpoint found most often within the indie games scene, where you try to make a great game first, and hope profit occurs after the fact.

“I think indie developers are a good example,” says Lee. “It’s like, art somehow needs to be unpopular to be art. You know, ‘If everybody likes it, how can it be art?’ Which is kind of a weird concept, and we subscribe to the other side of that view. Something can be popular and art. We want to be the mainstream art, the blockbusters. There’s nothing wrong with that. It just happens to be popular.”

Box wine

We closed by asking Lee whether he feels that hardcore gamers’ strong dislike of Zynga is justified.

He replies with a lengthy quip about how within alcoholic beverages, you have beer drinkers, and wine drinkers, but when you try and make something in the middle — box wine — the sales are poor. We nod sagely, turning the statement over in our head like a Rubik’s Cube, trying to make sense of it.

In closing, Lee hands over his business card. It has the weigh and rigidity of a throwing star. After ten years in the games industry, it’s thicker than any card we’ve ever seen. The director of international communications, Michelle Kramer, also gives us her card. The design is identical, but the cardstock thinner, the colours less vivid.

Is Zynga evil? That’s possibly the wrong question. Zynga is, perhaps, only guilty of being a business.

Whatever conclusions gamers care to draw about the company, they’d probably do well to stop being quite so shocked.(Source:wired


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