作者：Mike Arcuri

《Wolf Toss》如今的安装量接近180万次，之前我曾谈到我们如何将这款游戏同时投放于iOS、Android和 Chrome Web Store平台，以及这些平台存在哪些差异及不同挑战和机遇。

本文所谈内容我已思考很久——云服务支持对于成功发行和运作一款手机游戏来说必不可少。

Wolf Toss 01 from appguru.com.tw

分析：

几乎所有现代手机游戏都结合第三方分析服务。我们在游戏中采用ApSalar，在头周于加拿大测试《Wolf Toss》时，我们发现，游戏指南和俯瞰地图有些令人困惑，因为在指南和初始关卡期间，用户数量急剧缩减。

我们很快就发现这一问题，在于全球发行作品前就在首个修正版中修复这一问题。随后，我们在游戏商店中植入更多可购买道具，我们发现这给ARPU带来积极影响(+110%)。

总之，你需要腾出时间思考若干关键问题，设计能够协助你回答这些问题的分析方案，在游戏发行前进行全面测试。在学习游戏的过程中，它每天的运作都对你的业务来说弥足珍贵。若你的分析不完整——那么你就是在盲目飞行。

创收：

这是免费模式游戏的明显整合元素，从没有直接进行虚拟消费的用户身上获取经济价值非常重要。我们让玩家能够选择通过Tapjoy的供应内容及AdColony视频广告获得《Wolf Toss》硬币，我们得以就其他的用户基础进行创收。这里的原则是让玩家以自己期望的支付方式付费享受游戏。

崩溃报告：

我们之前有谈到手机游戏崩溃报告的重要性，但其价值不应被过分夸大。若有玩家在体验你的游戏时遭遇崩溃现象，那么这些用户会在应用商店里留下1颗星评价，阻碍你游戏的发展。

是的，游戏支持各种手机和平板电脑，其中包含各式各样的OS版本、GPU和CPU。多数独立游戏工作室无法手动就所有平台进行测试。

Wolf Toss from appguru.com.tw

但你可以采取和我们在《Wolf Toss》中一样的举措，将发行平台限制于特定满足最低要求的设备，在此仔细监测和修复崩溃问题，确保有超过99%的玩家都能够获得积极的游戏体验。我们通过Crittercism即时获得运作信息和崩溃问题，追踪各发行版本的相关表现。

社交性：

很多游戏作品都结合Facebook和Twitter，但如何高效整合这些平台取决于游戏设计。在《Wolf Toss》中，我们支持激励型社交行为（游戏邦注：like和follow），允许玩家在完成关卡时，通过适当客户端SDK进行简单社交媒介分享。

我们的新作品《Slots Tycoon》植入玩家个人档案及基于Facebook社交图谱的礼物馈赠，但同时融入定制Moai Cloud服务，提供“也体验这款游戏的好友”的个性化列表，及管理好友间的礼物赠予和接受活动。

支持虚拟交易：

当玩家进行消费、观看奖励广告或完成奖励内容时，他们最好能够真正得到虚拟货币或其他虚拟商品。还有一点非常重要，在游戏中获得众多虚拟货币和商品的玩家能够在切换至新手机或平板电脑后继续体验他们所赚得的东西。《Wolf Toss》在接受确认和玩家状态恢复上采用简单的Moai Cloud服务，以便准确处理这些情况。

除这些基本虚拟交易服务外的下个步骤是，通过云端数据商店配置所有游戏商店存货。发行《Slots Tycoon》（在部分地区）的第一天，我们发现自己错过商店的关键价格点，因此决定添加新的虚拟交易机制，调节所有可购买道具的名称。隔天我们开始给虚拟商品设置新的价格点。这类快速转变相当有价值，即便是在游戏有数百万安装量之前。

用户忠诚方案：

盗版是手机应用领域的的一大问题，UDID显然无法永远存在。在《Wolf Toss》中，我们通过明确的选择性加入模式建立用户联系。选择通过邮件地址注册Wolf Coins的玩家会立即得到额外钱币，有资格参加游戏相关的季度竞赛和促销活动。

这一服务还能够给参与者/获胜者带来包含游戏奖励的创造性社交媒介促销内容。就技术层面来说，支撑这一方案的云服务创建用户账号，连接邮件地址和设备ID，验证邮件地址，带来注册的自动钱币奖励，让游戏管理者能够给予个人玩家或团体一定奖励。

推送通知：

如今本地和推送通知很容易理解——至少就包含突出在线服务支持的手机社交游戏而言。但在于《Wolf Toss》中添加推送通知后我们学到的一点经验是，不同玩家对于推送内容有不同的理解——从有益和无害内容到令人厌烦的营销信息。

在我们即将问世的新作《Slots Tycoon》中，我们通过Moai Cloud服务基于粘性水平和购买习惯查询用户，只向最感兴趣的用户群体发送推送通知和特殊内容。

客服支持：

包含IAP及有超过100万用户的游戏将有稳定的客服支持和退款请求。《Wolf Toss》通过User Voice获取支持和反馈信息（游戏邦注：这是支持请求的标准形式），同时向支持团队提供Moai Cloud网络服务，这能够向玩家提供所购买和赚取的游戏货币记录。

当有人遇到支持问题时，我们就能够查看其经济交易记录，验证他们的要求，然后给予他们额外的游戏货币或道具，通过在网页UI中进行若干点击解决相应问题。

排行榜和成就：

这对于所有电子游戏来说是个古老元素，Game Center直接支持这些功能。但手机领域有至少50%的Android设备，因此创造单一后端解决方案具有积极意义。《Wolf Toss》采用Moai Cloud排行榜和成就服务，向iOS设备的Game Center发送多余信息。为什么不让iOS和Android玩家竞争高分及完整成就列表呢？

总之，现代手机游戏涉及许多后端编程工作和第三方服务，即便核心游戏逻辑和玩家数据没有服务器上进行处理。好消息是，多数手机游戏都有相同基本需求，你无需在所发行的各款作品中进行重复工作。此外，还有很多高质量的服务供应商会提供特殊应用和游戏服务，例如分析和崩溃报告服务供应商，作为服务公司的手机游戏云端平台等。（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）

Why every mobile game needs a cloud back-end

by Mike Arcuri

Wolf Toss is now pushing 1.8 million installs, and I’ve previously described how we brought it out simultaneously on iOS, Android, and the Chrome Web Store, the differences we saw between these platforms, and the challenges and opportunities unique to each.

Today’s post is one I’ve meant to write for a while – what our studio team has learned about the cloud services support necessary to release and operate a successful mobile game.

Analytics:

Almost all modern mobile games integrate with a 3rd party analytics service, and for good reasons.  We use ApSalar for our titles, and we learned in our first week of testing Wolf Toss in Canada that our tutorial and overworld map was too confusing, as shown by massive drop-off between the tutorial and initial levels.

We spotted this right away and fixed the problem in our first revision before the worldwide launch.  Later, we rolled out many more purchasable items to the in-game store and we could measure the positive effect on ARPU (+110%).

The key takeaway here is that you have to spend some time thinking about your most important questions, design the analytics that will support you in answering those questions, and test it all before your game launches.  As long as you’re learning about your game, every day it’s live is valuable to your business.  If you have incomplete analytics – you’re flying blind.

Monetization:

An obvious integration for free-to-play titles, it’s very important to capture some financial value from players who don’t make direct in-app purchases.  We gave players the option of earning Wolf Toss coins with Tapjoy for offers and AdColony for video ads, and we were able to monetize an additional portion of our player base.  The mantra here is let your players pay to enjoy your game however they want to pay.

Crash reporting:

We’ve written about the importance of crash reporting for mobile games before, but its value can’t be overstated.  If your game crashes for some people, those people will leave 1 star reviews in the app store and halt your game’s growth.

Yes, there are a lot of different phones and tablets to support, with various OS versions, GPUs, and CPUs.  Most independent game studios can’t possibly do manual testing on all of them.

But you can handle this like we did with Wolf Toss by limiting your release to devices that meet certain minimum requirements and carefully monitoring and fixing crashes in the field to ensure that more than 99% of all your players have a positive game experience. We use Crittercism to capture performance info and crashes in real time, and to track the relative performance of each version we release.

Social:

Lots of games integrate Facebook and or Twitter, but how best to integrate these depends on the game design.  In Wolf Toss, we supported incentivized social actions (likes and follows), and allowed simple social media sharing via the appropriate client-side SDKs whenever players completed levels.

Our new title, Slots Tycoon, implements player profiles and gifting via the Facebook social graph, but has custom Moai Cloud services to both provide a personalized list of “friends who also play this game” and manage gift giving and gift receipt between friends.

Support for in-app purchases:

When players make a purchase, watch an incentivized advertisement, or complete an incentivized offer, they better actually get their virtual currency or other virtual goods.  It’s also important that the players who have earned a lot of virtual currency and goods in your game can continue to play with the stuff they’ve earned after switching to a new phone or tablet.  Wolf Toss has simple Moai Cloud services for receipt verification and player state restoration to handle exactly these cases.

The next step beyond these baseline in-app purchase services is to configure all your in-game store inventory via a cloud-hosted data store. The first day of our initial (limited geography) release of Slots Tycoon, we decided we were missing a key price point in our store and we were able to both add a new in-app purchase and adjust all the purchaseable item names for players live. We started getting in-game purchases at the new price point the very next day. That kind of quick turn around is extremely valuable even before your game has millions of installs.

Player loyalty programs:

Privacy is a concern in mobile apps and UDIDs are obviously not going to be around forever. In Wolf Toss, we form a customer connection via a clear opt-in model.  Players who choose to register for Wolf Coins with an email address get extra coins immediately and are eligible for seasonal contests and promotions related to the game.

This service also enables creative social media promotions with in-game rewards to the participants and/or winners.  On a technical level, the cloud services supporting this program create the user accounts, connect email addresses and device ids, validate the email addresses, trigger the automated coin rewards for sign up, and allow game administrators to initiate awards to either individual players or groups.

Push notifications:

Local and push notifications are pretty well understood these days – at least for mobile-social games with significant online services backing them up.  But one of the first things we learned after adding push notifications to Wolf Toss is that different players have very different opinions about push – from something helpful and innocuous to an unwelcoming marketing annoyance.

In our upcoming games like Slots Tycoon we’re using Moai Cloud services to query groups of players based on engagement level and purchasing habits, and will be sending push notifications and special offers only to the most interested player groups.

Customer support:

A game with IAP and over a million players will have a steady stream of customer support and refund requests.  Wolf Toss leverages User Voice for support and feedback, a standardized form for support requests, and a Moai Cloud web service for our support team that provides a history of all purchased and earned in-game currency for players.

When someone has a support problem, we can view their economic transaction history to validate their claim, then grant them additional in-game currency or items to address their issue with a few clicks in a web UI.

Leaderboards and achievements:

This is old ground for all kinds of video games, and Game Center supports these features directly.  But the mobile world is at least 50% Android, and it just makes sense to have a single back-end solution.  Wolf Toss uses Moai Cloud leaderboard and achievement services, and sends redundant information to Game Center on iOS devices.  After all, why not let iOS and Android players compete for top scores and full achievement lists?

In total, there’s quite a lot of back-end engineering work and 3rd party service integration required for a modern mobile game, even if the core game logic and player data is not handled on the server.  The good news is that most mobile games have the same basic needs and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for each mobile title you ship. There are also a lot of high-quality service providers offering specific app and game services, from analytics and crash reporting providers, to mobile game cloud platform as a service companies.

What other back-end services are you finding essential to your mobile games?  I’d love to continue the discussion in the comments section.（Source：gamasutra）