作者：Giordano Bruno

手机——我指的是智能手机和平板，是最热门和发展最快的游戏平台，并且没有任何减缓的趋势。几年以前，我认为就受众规模而言，手机会成为大多数玩家最大的游戏市场——甚至可能是全球人主要的游戏平台。手机游戏引发了市场模式的巨大变迁，而在五年前，这场变革几乎没有人曾预料到。

mobile game(from edge-online)

世纪交替，玩游戏作为大众休闲方式即将成为现实。全世界大约有8000万人玩游戏，他们基本上是年轻人，男性或者说多数是男性。我们都目睹了在那之后的市场如何演变和鼓胀；利用大众数字平台的崛起，提高游戏的易玩性，从而将非玩家引入游戏世界，像PopCap这样的大公司在这其中发挥了重大作用。也就是说，无论游戏多么优秀，多么容易玩，如果没有运行的平台，这些游戏也就毫无意义了；市场本不会膨胀到现在的规模——大约15亿玩家，如果他们当中所有人都没有一部或几部游戏设备的话。

如果说PC和网页是休闲游戏迅速发展的驱动力，那么就可定位的玩家受众而言，手机和平板设备就是引爆市场的导火索，五年内就从小小的行业发展到占据玩家20%游戏时间的大产业。这个数字只可能继续增长。时至今日，世界上至少有5亿部智能手机和平板设备，不过，普遍估计仅2015年就会卖出10至15亿部。随着硬件越来越强大，越来越便宜，以及更新周期对购买新手机的促进作用，新的格局将是这样的：从现在起往后三年，超过20亿人会拥有能够运行当代游戏的手机设备，并且绝大多数都配备了便于发现和下载内容的应用商店。

但是，纯粹的受众规模的强劲增长并没有揭示全部真相：手机市场变得越来越重要，这个现象的强大信号是，当一个人开始在手机或平板上玩游戏，他就会无时不刻地玩。根据PopCap最近的调查表明，44&的成人在最近一个月内至少玩一款手机游戏，这比前一年增长了29%。但更有趣的是，几乎接受调查的玩家都表示他们在家用手机玩游戏，50%的手机游戏玩家认为手机是他们在家最喜欢的游戏设备。调查结果具有重要而普遍的启示是：首先，如果玩家在家用他们的手机玩游戏，他们花在电脑或传统的掌机上玩游戏的时间就会更少；其次，在沙发上玩游戏的玩家（69&的玩家是这么做的，数字非常庞大）可能不太会看电视，无论是看广告还是节目，因为他们的注意力集中在移动设备的游戏上了。

我认为，这些趋势直接指向一个明确的结论：因为绝大多数的玩家会将绝大部分的游戏时间投入移动设备，所以对于所有游戏公司，无论它的目标受众是哪类人，绝对有必要制定可行的移动战略，并投入部分资源到移动设备游戏上。至少，休闲和大众游戏公司应该走“移动优先”的道路，这意味着所有游戏都应该着眼于移动设备，并且一般应该先登陆移动平台，再考虑进军其他平台。

这对于所有游戏设计（触屏控制、优化小屏幕、片段式游戏）、运营（所有游戏都应该连接到实时服务，并定期更新）、推广（有一个用来推广新游戏的文件夹，这个功能越来越重要）和营销（免费模式是主导，可能成为唯一的模式，因为它能吸引更多潜在的玩家尝试游戏）方法都是一个广泛的启示。另外，为了适应平台的特点和限制，游戏会变得越来起相近，这种相似性也有风险。事实上，我不认为这种事会发生。开发商会平衡平台，以达到多样化游戏的目的，并且随着开发成本和玩家进入游戏的门槛降低，这确实会鼓励和促进游戏开发中的实验和创新。成功的大作仍然是热作，但小众游戏也会繁荣起来，长尾产品的尾巴会更长（游戏邦注：长尾产品是指那些原来不受到重视，销量小但种类多的产品或服务，这类产品由于数量大，累积起来的总收益超过主流产品的现象。在互联网领域，长尾效应尤为显著）。

所以，所有游戏都要以移动平台为开发目标吗？不是，当然不是。人们还会在电脑和电视上玩游戏，即使他们会越来越不需要用专门的设备玩游戏，并且可能会将他们的移动设备连接到电视屏幕上玩。也就是说，大部分游戏时间会花在移动设备上，不能在移动设备上玩的游戏将会流失大量玩家。大多数游戏设计会考虑到移动平台，甚至大屏幕的游戏也会有移动拓展版，适应移动平台这一要求最终可能与游戏体验一样重要，或甚至更重于游戏体验。最成功的游戏会着眼于各个平台的特点，传递跨平台的乐趣体验。

移动平台的崛起正在改变游戏；移动设备作为最重要的游戏平台将会在更大程度上改变并丰富游戏类型。（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）

“Mobile first” isn’t a choice, it’s a necessity

by Giordano Bruno

Mobile – by which I mean smartphones and tablets – is one of the hottest and fastest-growing gaming platforms, and it shows no sign of slowing down. A few years from now, I believe, mobile will be the largest gaming market in terms of audience size, and the primary platform for a majority of gamers – maybe even for a majority of Earth’s population. Mobile gaming is causing a dramatic paradigm shift in the market, one that few would have predicted could happen just five years ago.

At the turn of the millennium, the idea of gaming as a massmarket pastime wasn’t even on the horizon. Around 80 million people were playing games worldwide, and they were mostly young, male and of questionable hygiene (I can say it – I was one of them). We’ve all seen how much the market has changed and expanded since then, and companies like PopCap played a big part in making gaming accessible to a larger audience by capitalising on the emergence of massmarket computing platforms to introduce non-gamers to the joy of our favorite pastime. That said, no matter how awesome and accessible those games are, they would not have gotten anywhere without platforms to run on, and the market would not have swelled to its current size – an estimated 1.5 billion players – if every one of them didn’t have access to one or more gaming devices.

If the PC and the web were the drivers of casual gaming’s rise, mobile and tablet devices are the poster boys for the ongoing explosion in terms of addressable audience of players, rising in five years from being a tiny slice of the market to represent around 20 per cent of the total time spent playing games. That number will only increase. As of today, at least 500 million smartphone and tablet devices are active worldwide, but a common estimate is for between 1 billion and 1.5 billion devices to be sold in 2015 alone. As hardware gets more powerful, cheaper, and as update cycles bring holdouts to purchase new phones, the net result will be that, three years from now, more than 2 billion people will own mobile devices that are able to run current-generation games, and the vast majority will come equipped with an app store, making discovery and downloading easy and even fun.

Strength in numbers, then, but the sheer size of the audience only tells half the story: the strongest indicator of the increasing importance that mobile has in the gaming space is how pervasive it becomes once an individual starts to play games on a phone or tablet. A recent PopCap survey, for example, found that 44 per cent of adults have played at least one mobile game in the last month, an increase of 29 per cent compared to the previous year. What’s even more interesting, though, is that nearly all of the gamers surveyed admitted playing on their mobile device at home, and 50 per cent of mobile gamers agreed that mobile is their favoured method of play at home. This has important and wide-ranging implications: first, if gamers are playing on their mobile phones while at home, they are playing less on computers or traditional and portable consoles; second, gamers playing on the couch (a whopping 69 per cent of mobile gamers do so) probably aren’t paying as much attention to what’s on TV, be it advertising or a show, as they are absorbed in activities on their mobile device.

Those trends, I think, point to a pretty straightforward conclusion: as the vast majority of the audience will be spending the vast majority of their gaming time on mobile devices, it’s absolutely imperative for every game company, no matter what its specific target audience is, to have a viable mobile strategy and to devote a sizeable slice of its resources to mobile. At the very least, casual and massmarket gaming companies should go “mobile first”, meaning that every game should be developed with mobile devices in mind, and often should be coming out on mobile before reaching other platforms.

This has wide-ranging implications for the way games are designed (controlled by touch, optimized for smaller screens, playable in brief sessions), operated (every game should be a connected live service and be updated regularly), marketed (having a portfolio of games that can be used to promote new titles will be increasingly important) and monetised (freemium will be the dominant, maybe the only, model, as it allows a much larger number of potential players to try out the game without committing to it). Furthermore, there may be a risk of uniformity, of games becoming similar to each other in the effort to adapt to the characteristics and limitations of the platform. In fact, I don’t believe that will happen at all. Developers will be leveraging the platform to achieve more diversity, not less, and dramatically lowering the barrier of entry in terms of development cost and effort required by players should actually encourage experimentation and give rise to games that otherwise wouldn’t see the light of day. Hits will still be hits, but niche games will prosper, and the long tail will get longer.

So, will all gaming be done on mobile? No, of course not. People will still be playing on computers and on TVs, even though they will increasingly lose the need for a dedicated console to do so, and might indeed be using their mobile device to beam games to their TV screen and to control them. That said, the majority of game time will be spent on mobile devices, and games that aren’t available there will lose the opportunity to engage constantly with players. Most games will be designed with mobile in mind, and even games that are meant for big screens will have to have a mobile extension, which might eventually become equally or more important than the main experience. The most successful games will play to the characteristics of each platform, and deliver engaging cross-platform experiences.

The rise of mobile is changing gaming; the advent of mobile as the most used gaming platform will change it even further, enrich it and make it more accessible. (source:edge-online)