作者：Derek Reynolds

我是Derek Reynolds，我同妻子Tiffany一起成立了Perceptive Pumpkin Productions这家独立游戏开发公司，在闲暇时间针对移动设备、浏览器和PC/Mac编写游戏。我们在2011年11月份开始制作自己的首款益智游戏《Villagers Vs Vampire》，并在2012年6月发布了游戏。以下是我们开发游戏过程中所收获的经验和心得。

Villagers VS. Vampire(from play.google.com)

收获经验

在这个过程中，我们遇到了三个重大意外（以及一点小意外）情况。第一个出乎意料的情况是，我们发现编写游戏远比你预想的时间更长。即便我已经拥有25年的编程和软件开发经验，我还是低估了大约一半左右的时间。第二个情况是发现Unity居然适用于多种设备。我们主要使用Unity开发游戏，这样就可以相对轻松地向多个不同平台发布游戏。

第三个意外与游戏销售有关。但这与销量无关，主要与游戏销售来源有关。

游戏在哪个平台表现更出众？

我们分别在iTunes、Google Play、亚马逊以及我们网站http://vvv.perceptivepumpkin.com上发布了游戏。在亚马逊和iTunes平台都推出了免费版本和0.99美元的付费版本（含IAP功能），而我们自己的网站和Google Play版本则是不含IAP的免费版本。通常人们普遍认为，开发者在iTunes比在Android平台更易创收。Flurry数据就曾指出，开发者在iTunes的收益比在Google Play多4倍左右。对于广义上的Android应用商店来说，这一说法可能是真理，但从我们在亚马逊平台的销售经历来看，事实却并非如此。

实际上，我们在亚马逊平台的销量比在iTunes还多2.4倍。

iTunes vs Amazon(from gamesbrief)

从以上图表可以看出，游戏在亚马逊和iTunes销量最初都呈快速增长趋势，随后就逐渐趋于平缓。这一点我们早有预料。但即使在发售初期，亚马逊的销量也比iTunes多了将近3倍。这一趋势自游戏发布以来鲜有变化，这一点确实让我们深感意外，因为我们原先的设想与之相反。

而免费版本（含有推广付费版游戏的广告内容）的下载量则是另一景象。

free versions(from gamesbrief)

该版本发布首个月主要下载量来自iTunes平台，发布首周后的下载量增长迅速。但即使其下载量远超亚马逊平台，这个免费版本也并没有实现真正的付费转化率。

值得注意的是，用户下载行为也相当有趣。亚马逊免费版本下载量呈稳定上升趋势，日均下载率也高于iTunes。如果将Google Play与亚马逊下载量合并，就会发现Android免费版本总体下载量超过iTunes版本，并且还在持续攀升。

downloads per day(from gamesbrief)

亚马逊版本在7月29日下载量突然飙升的情况让我们百思不得其解。当天我们所做的唯一不同的事情只是在我们Facebook页面发了一个贴子，详细介绍了最近的应用更新情况（7月23日发布的更新版本）。我们Facebook页面粉丝不足30人，所以这很难解释为何当天下载量增加了6倍。我们的游戏最近出现在亚马逊“Android热门游戏”之列，但我们并不清楚究竟是因为我们下载量增长而获得推荐，还是因为其他原因而获得推荐，从而提升了游戏下载量。出现在该列表中并没有明显提升我们在亚马逊的日均下载量，我们的游戏下载量又返回了原先的水平。

为何亚马逊应用商店会让我们交好运？

我们不知道为何自己的经历与其他开发者存在差别，所以我们只能自己进行一番推测：

*我们在不同网站上推出了一些广告，但这些广告并未瞄准特定设备。有些广告出现在针对亚马逊/Android平台的网站显眼位置，这有可能发挥了一定作用。但我还是不认为这是主要原因。

*这可能与数据有关。因为我们的销量较少，比起大型市场或更热销的游戏，我们更容易看到销售数据的波动。

*也有可能是因为亚马逊是一个缺乏竞争性的小型市场。这里的游戏较少，竞争性不大，所以比iTunes更易让我们实现相对较高的销量。我妻子是Kindle社区中的活跃成员，自游戏发布以来就在其中发布关于游戏的贴子，并回复用户问题。这些用户可能与“常规”游戏玩家略有不同——他们多为书籍读者，正好拥有基于Android的Kindle Fire设备，也更有可能通过亚马逊购买数字内容。

*也可能只是因为我们有幸在亚马逊撞运，或者不幸在iTunes碰壁。

无论是哪种原因，我们都觉得这些多少有违直觉的数据很有意思。虽然销量不是很高，我们还是很乐意于大家分享这些结果。因为这是我们首款游戏，所以我们不是很在乎游戏有多少销量，我们相信今后推出的游戏将更加出色。希望我们的数据和分析对你也会有所启发。（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）

Platforms move in mysterious ways

Derek Reynolds

Hello, I’m Derek Reynolds, and I’m co-owner of Perceptive Pumpkin Productions, along with my wife, Tiffany.  We’re an independent game development company, writing games in our spare time for mobile devices, browsers, and PC/Mac.  We started writing our first puzzle game, Villagers Vs Vampire, back in November 2011 and it was released in late June 2012.

What we learned developing our first game

During this adventure, we’ve encountered three major surprises (and many smaller ones).  The first surprise was that writing a game takes a lot longer than you realize up front.  Even with 25 of programming and software development experience, I still underestimated the time it would take by about half (normally my estimates go the other direction).  The second surprise was the way in which Unity “just worked” across devices.  By primarily developing in Unity, we were able to distribute our game across several different platforms with relative ease.

Surprise number three was our sales.  Not the quantity of sales, necessarily, but rather where our sales are coming from.

Which games platform performs the best?

We released Villagers Vs Vampire to iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, and directly on our game website at http://vvv.perceptivepumpkin.com.  Amazon and iTunes both carry our free and paid ($0.99)

versions with in-app purchases enabled, while our website and Google Play host the free versions with no IAPs.  The prevailing wisdom of the mobile app market is that you’ll make way more revenue on iTunes than on Android.  The Flurry blog reports as much, stating that developers can expect to make more than 4 times the revenue on iTunes than Google Play.  While that may still be true for the greater Android market, it hasn’t been true for our Amazon experience.

In short, we’ve had 2.4 times the number of sales on Amazon as we’ve had on iTunes.

Sales figures over time on three platforms – click to enlarge

You can see that both Amazon and iTunes sales results ramp up quickly upon release, then level out over time.  This is expected.  But even early on, Amazon had nearly 3 times the sales of iTunes.

This trend has more or less continued since initial release.  It certainly surprised us, as we were expecting the opposite behavior.

The downloads of our free version (which includes ads for the paid version) tell a slightly different story:

Downloads over time on four platforms. Click to enlarge.

The iTunes store represented the majority of the free version downloads for the first month, increasing rapidly during the first week of release.  However, even though the number of downloads on iTunes was much higher than that of Amazon, the free versions didn’t really translate into purchases.

Another interesting bit about the data is the download behavior.  The free version on Amazon has been steadily climbing in downloads, at a higher daily rate than iTunes.  If you add the Google Play downloads to the Amazon numbers, total Android downloads of the free version have surpassed iTunes, and continue to climb.

Downloads per day. Click to enlarge

The spike in Amazon downloads on 7/29 is somewhat of a mystery to us.  The only thing we did differently on that day was write a post on our Facebook page, detailing the recent app updates we had released during the week of 7/23.  Our Facebook page has less than 30 followers, so that doesn’t fully explain the 6X increase in downloads for that day.  We’re currently on Amazon’s “Popular Games for Android” list, but we don’t know if being on the list was a result of the increased downloads, or if the extra downloads occurred because we were listed for some other reason.  Being on the list has not appreciably affected our daily download rates on Amazon since then, however, as the downloads have settled back down to previous levels.  Such is the adventure of independent game development!

Why has Amazon marketplace been so good for us?

We’ve been trying to puzzle out why our experience differs from other developers we’ve heard from, so prepare for some wild and baseless speculation (or as my wife says, “over-analysis”).

•We’ve been running advertising across several sites, but these campaigns haven’t been targeting any particular device.  Some of our ads may have been featured on Amazon/Android-centric sites,which could account for the extra activity.  I don’t think this one holds much water, though.

•It could just be a matter of numbers.  Since our sales are so small, we may be seeing greater fluctuation as compared to the larger market or a higher-selling game.

•It could also be that Amazon is simply a smaller market to compete in.  Fewer games and less competition may have lead to higher sales for us than the crowded market of iTunes.  My wife is also active within a Kindle community, and has posted about the game and answered user questions since the game’s release.  These users may be a slightly different demographic than “regular” gamers – they are primarily book readers, who happen to have the Android-based Kindle Fire and may be more comfortable with purchasing digital content from Amazon.

•We just got lucky/unlucky and released at a good/bad time for Amazon/iTunes.  Fence-sitting at its finest.

Whatever the reason, we thought this data was interesting and somewhat counter-intuitive, so we’re happy to share these results with you, even if the numbers aren’t very high.  Since it’s just our first game, we’re not too concerned about the actual sales, as we both have full-time jobs and we know each subsequent game we write will be better than the last.  I’m always interested to see real-world numbers from other developers, so hopefully our numbers and analysis have been intriguing for you as well.  Thanks for reading, and happy gaming!（source:gamesbrief）