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每日观察:关注日本社交游戏公开gacha机制赢奖概率(8.14)

1)据GamesIndustry报道,King.com英国工作室主管Catharina Lavers Mallet在最近采访中表示,她认为Zynga是一个动作迅速的模仿者,这一点应该是业界众所周知的事情,如果你制作了一款好游戏,Zynga就会复制出同样的产品。

Copy Cat(from games)

Copy Cat(from games)

但她同时也认为关注竞争对手是一个好方法,好创意无处不在,你可以借鉴其他人的长处,但是不能模仿过头,并声称King.com是一家以制作优秀游戏而得名的公司,因此他们不需要克隆他人游戏。

2)据Game Informer报道,雅达利经典游戏《Pitfall!》及动视联合创始人David Crane最近表示,有些人可能会认为《愤怒的小鸟》和《FarmVille》是休闲游戏代表,但他个人无法将这些社交游戏与休闲游戏混为一谈。他认为这些类似Zynga游戏的产品败坏了休闲游戏的声誉。

farmville-sad-cow(from games)

farmville-sad-cow(from games)

3)育碧多伦多总经理Jade Raymond在Official Xbox Magazine最新采访中表示,她觉得当前游戏玩家比以前更加吹毛求疵,因此开发商不得致力于制作无懈可击的产品以迎合用户需求,而追求完美则会让开发者难以发挥创意。

jade_raymond(from joystickdivision)

jade_raymond(from joystickdivision)

她称原先市场只有数百万玩家,他们是真正的粉丝,并且会玩各类游戏,也会容忍游戏中的漏洞,尝试一些与众不同但并不是太有趣的内容。但现在市场上有数千万玩家,他们只会购买排名前5的游戏。如果游戏中的相关元素并不受欢迎,开发商就得削减这部分内容,采用可行的做法,这确实限制了行业的创新。

4)据gamasutra报道,DeNA子公司Ngmoco首席执行官Neil Young认为,日本免费手机游戏领域与美国市场极为相似,但比后者更先进四五年左右。

neil-young(from businessinsider)

neil-young(from businessinsider)

他称自己从日本市场中发现,排名位置并不能准确反映游戏的盈利性,例如Ngmoco旗下热门手机社交游戏《Rage of Bahamut》数月前在应用榜单登顶,但现在的日均收益则是之前的两倍左右。

他认为排行榜位置具有可替代性,它们并非处于静止状态,不可根据榜单头号游戏的收益来评估整个市场规模。

5)据Serkantoto报道,日本政府在数周前推出有关kompu gacha这种社交游戏赌博机制的措施,其中之一就是要求各社交游戏公司公开gacha机制中赢取道具的概率。

这项举措将于9月1日生效,届时所有日本游戏都必须公开其中的gacha道具内容,以及具体的赢奖概率。

也就是说,这类游戏将减少赌博元素,让gacha机制更为透明化,如果玩家知道赢取某项道具的概率很低,他们就不会在其中投入金钱。

mobage-gundam-card-collection(from serkantoto)

mobage-gundam-card-collection(from serkantoto)

DeNA公司近日率先采用这一做法,并在数款第一和第二方游戏中显示了赢取道具的机率。以上图的《Gundam Card Collection》为例,游戏列出了所有道具,及相应的赢奖概率。

gree-doliland-driland(from serkantoto)

gree-doliland-driland(from serkantoto)

但DeNA竞争对手GREE(游戏邦注:该公司比DeNA更依赖gacha机制,并且也更早引进这一机制)尚未公开道具赢奖概率,但在《Doliland》这款游戏中显示了道具的“标准”(Normal)以及“稀有”(Rare)属性。(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

1)King.com studio lead: ‘If you make a good game, Zynga will copy it’

by Joe Osborne

Should it be any surprise that folks are more frank in their opinions of Zynga, given its recent run-in with top dog publisher EA over The Ville? Probably not, but it might be for one of the FarmVille maker’s most dangerous competitors to join in on the bash fest. Even recently-appointed King.com (creator of Bubble Witch Saga) London studio lead Catharina Lavers Mallet weighed in.

“Zynga is a very good fast follower. It seems to be one of the truisms of the space, I think,” Lavers Mallet admitted to GamesIndustry. “If you make a good game, Zynga will copy it.”

The new King.com studio head made the quip in response to a question regarding Zynga’s answer to Bubble Witch Saga, Bubble Safari, which is currently 1.3 million daily players ahead of the former, thanks to the developer’s massive player base. However, she did admit that it’s generally good practice to pay attention to the competition, but not that it should go beyond that.

“I think that if you’re an intelligent person, you’re always paying attention to what your competition is doing. Good ideas come from all over the place – you’re always learning from all from people who are good at what they do,” Lavers Mallet said. “We have a well-deserved reputation for making really good quality games, we’re good at that so we don’t need to copy anyone.”(source:games

2)Pitfall! creator: FarmVille and co. ‘give the ‘casual’ market a bad name’

by Joe Osborne

Opinions on Zynga are like butts: Everybody has one. (Even we do.) The latest to express thoughts on the king of Facebook games is David Crane, the creator of Atari classic Pitfall! and co-founder of Activision, one today’s most prominent game publishers. And, like many, Crane doesn’t seem as if he’ll praise the FarmVille maker any time soon.

“If you ask someone what they thought a casual game was a few years ago, they might have said something like Angry Birds,” Crane told Game Informer. “Now they’ll probably say something like FarmVille. I don’t like to lump those social games in with casual games. I think it’s those Zynga-like games that give the ‘casual’ market a bad name.”

Crane made the comment during an interview at the Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas, and the topic, of course, was casual games. To the Pitfall! maker, he has always developed casual games purely by definition: “Games are about diversion; that’s very casual.” I guess, if you put games like FarmVille next to iconic classics such as Pitfall!, then they might not stack up. But is that even a fair comparison?(source:games

3)Why today’s demanding players inhibit innovation

by Tom Curtis

“One of the things I see that’s different [today] is that our audience expects perfection.”

- Ubisoft Toronto managing director and Assassin’s Creed veteran Jade Raymond discusses the modern challenges facing game developers in a new interview with Official Xbox Magazine.

As the video game industry has grown, Raymond’s found that players have become increasingly picky, and developers need to strive for flawless, immaculate products if they hope to answer their demands. The trade-off, however, is that reaching for perfection makes you less able to take creative risks.

“Before, there were only, say, two million people playing games — they were real fans and they were playing every game. They were willing to forgive bugs, and try things that weren’t as much fun because they were different. Now, there are 30 million people buying and they only buy the top five,” she says.

“It’s not very forgiving. It does limit innovation, because if something isn’t working as you get towards shipping, you have to cut it or revert [back to] what you know does work.”(source:gamasutra

4)Predicting the future by studying Japan

by Staff

If you want to look at where the game industry, or a particular sector of the industry, is going to be in four to five years, you can learn a lot by examining overseas markets that have had a headstart.

Free-to-play PC developers, for example, would look to Korea. For mobile social game network operators and developers like Ngmoco (a subsidiary of Tokyo-based DeNA), the obvious space to study is Japan’s booming mobile industry.

While trying to predict the trajectory of the free-to-play mobile space, Ngmoco found that Japan’s ecosystem seemed really similar to the mobile game market in the U.S., except four or five more years more advanced.

One lesson Ngmoco picked up from Japan’s industry is to do away with its preconceptions of the space’s growth. “I think we often look at our industry as static,” says Ngmoco CEO Neil Young.

“We sort of assume that everything is kind of incremental, but that’s really not the case when you’re going through rapid and dynamic change.”

The studio also learned not to assume that chart position in the mobile space can tell you everything about a game’s profitability — Young notes that Ngmoco’s hit title Rage of Bahamut became the number one grossing game several months ago, but it now makes two times more daily revenue today than it did back then.

“Those chart positions are fungible, you know?” says Young. “They are not static. And we look at, ‘Oh, number one grossing equals this number of dollars, therefore the whole market is this size.’ But actually if you do something different, or you do something better, you can change those definitions.”

He adds, “And that’s something that we’ve been really encouraged by — that we’re able to kind of take this ‘secret knowledge from the future’ and actually make it work here in the West.”

Ngmoco CEO Neil Young shares more about how mobile games can disrupt the console game industry and expand to a $30 billion global market in Gamasutra’s latest feature. (source:gamasutra

5)Ahead Of Self-Regulation: DeNA Starts Disclosing Odds In Gacha [Social Games]

by Dr. Serkan Toto

Gacha, the biggest money-making mechanic in Japan’s social gaming industry, is about to get transformed radically.

A sub-form of this electronic draw concept, “kompu gacha” (or “complete gacha”), was regulated by the Japanese government a few weeks ago. The kompu gacha ban triggered a shock wave in the local gaming industry and prompted the biggest companies active in this field to introduce a set of self-regulatory measures.

One of these measures is that all companies providing games to platforms operated by GREE, DeNA, Mixi, NHN, CyberAgent, and Dwango will be forced to disclose probabilities of winning items in gacha.

This measure will be in effect on September 1: after that day, all items in all gacha in all games in Japan will have to be disclosed, along with exact probabilities of winning each item.

This is a radical move, and I wouldn’t be too surprised to see this having a much bigger effect on sales than the kompu gacha ban because this measure affects the “core” of the mechanic (and not just a sub-form like complete gacha).

In other words, the gambling element will be much smaller. Gacha will be more transparent – and players could lose interest in investing money in gacha when they see how low the chances of getting certain items really are (see below).

As I criticized earlier, gacha right now is a black box: users have no idea what’s in the “pot” and what the odds of winning rare items are. No idea at all. On the other side, absolutely nobody controls the game providers: theoretically, these providers could set probabilities for items to zero at any time they want. There is no supervision, no guidelines, nothing.

This is a scandalous situation, but again, this will be over after September 1.

DeNA has decided to move earlier and is currently experimenting with showing the odds of winning items in a few 1st/2nd-party games.

I made some screenshots of how this looks using Gundam Card Collection.

As you can see, the game’s gacha section is making everything very clear: all items are listed up (the screenshots show just part of the display), along with exact chances of winning them:

What about GREE?

Generally speaking, GREE has “historically” been relying much more on gacha than DeNA, and they also introduced complete gacha before their rival did.

At the moment, I am not seeing GREE games disclosing probabilities, but Doliland, for example, has been showing how many cards are in the pot and how many of them are normal (N), rare (R), etc. for a few weeks now:(source:serkantoto


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