作者：Zoya Street

问题：如果免费增值模式也能了那些鼓励长时间游戏的平台（例如掌机或PC）的主导盈利模式，那么内容丰富，长达8小时以上的叙事型游戏（例如《半条命2》、《古墓丽影》等其他高质量线性游戏）或《天际》等探索型游戏又该如何盈利？

Skyrim(from vehq.net)

回答：

Patrick O’Luanaigh（nDreams首席执行官）

在《天际》中，游戏给予玩家一个巨大的自由世界，允许他们购买黄金以兑换更强大的武器、装备、房子和马匹等道具，从而加快他们的游戏进程。我可以自己花钱跳过一些障碍，并迅速获得一些梦寐以求的东西。

你还可以通过限制特定东西（例如婚姻，或者购买房子的能力）以及一次性付费小道具，并植入一些箭头、同伴/宠物等可易消耗物品来盈利 。

玩家所购买的这些东西对其他玩家来说并没有炫耀的价值（也许游戏中应该添加一些有用的多人会面积分），但却可以让玩家购买得到额外任务（例如他们当前出售的DLC内容包）。

只要游戏免费玩的时候仍然具有乐趣，那我就会怀疑它究竟能否获得可观比例的付费用户。最大的问题是，这种模式真能创造比一次性预付费模式更多的收益吗？真的要由那些忠实粉丝挥斥大笔资金以补贴非付费玩家？这种模式真的能让游戏获得比付费版本多10倍的用户？

Tadhg Kelly（What Games Are顾问）

我认为“叙事型游戏”代表两种截然不同的类型：角色扮演游戏和动作冒险游戏。

《Mafia Wars》、《暗黑破坏神》到《天际》这种角色扮演游戏可以通过免费增值模式盈利。其中一个简单的原因就在于，这类游戏的核心动态就在于他们是由战利品和等级所驱动。它们本质上是经济挑战任务，而出售虚拟货币、能量、升级内容等则是经济型游戏的一种直接盈利方式。它们在一定程度上都采用了“战利品&等级”主题，在这种情境中让玩家消费也是一件很自然而然的事情。除此之外，在经济型游戏中花钱获得进程也并不违背公平原则，因为这些花钱买来的东西仍得合适使用才能生效。

而《半条命》等动作冒险游戏却并不属于经济型游戏。它们就像是体育运动，属于活动类游戏，只含有非常基础的经济元素。它们的核心吸引力与肢体技能有关，而通过作弊超越于他人（这是免费增值模式的一般手段）则会给游戏体验带来更多失衡效应。因为这实际上等于是花钱赢得游戏，它会减损游戏的魅力。就像在《毁灭战士》中使用旧IDDQD作弊码一样，这款游戏趣味性几乎消失殆尽。

但这正是我认为《Temple Run》很有趣的一个原因。它是一款简化的动作冒险游戏，其经济基础是出售虚拟货币，玩家可使用这些货币购买多数的助推道具而非永久升级道具。每个助推道具都具有时效性或者限量供应，并且需要在游戏世界中搜集到一定数量才能真正使用。我不知道类似方法是否适用于动作冒险游戏，也不知道这种系统所创造的收益是否足够收回其开发成本。

在《马里奥64》这款平台游戏中，多数环节仍具有一定挑战性，但如果你需要的话，就可以寻求额外的帮助。与经济型游戏比较相似，它也是让玩家消费获得进展，而非花钱获胜。我认为这其中有些原则也同样适用于《Serious Sam》等第一人称射击游戏。

Dylan Collins（Fight My Monster执行主席）

儿童游戏中也存在同样问题，虽然它们的原因不尽相同（游戏邦注：IAP模式很难获得家长认同，因此这一领域的顶级公司多采用订阅模式）。我的观点是通过虚拟+实体渠道创收。选择了订阅/预付费模式的玩家很可能购买实体商品（例如集换卡片、指南、服装等）。

除了任天堂（《宠物小精灵》），游戏行业在周边产品这一点上基本上鲜有作为。电影行业在这一方面都做得比我们好。

很显然，推出周边产品要极为谨慎，但从我们在Fight My Monster所观察到的数据，以及Moshi、Rovio等相关数据来看，这种措施可以让平均收益/用户双倍甚至三倍增长。

虽然这并非人人皆适用的方法，但确实值得考虑。

Harry Holmwood（Heldhand顾问）

我怀疑单人模式的线性叙事游戏（游戏邦注：这里指拥有开始和结局的游戏，例如《猴岛》、《天际》和《半条命》）极难通过免费增值模式盈利。但这并不意味着用户不需要这种模式——单人线性游戏是我个人最喜欢玩的游戏，但从短期来看它们不太可能采用这种盈利模式。

同样，原先的经营模式也让内容丰富的单人模式游戏难以通过零售方式盈利，我们只好将多人模式和DLC硬塞进所有的零售内容中以维持产品生命周期/零售定价，免费增值模式将来可能将特定类型的游戏排挤出大众市场。但现在我们从Double Fine大众融资项目的成功，就可以看到用户仍希望体验那些无法通过现有渠道盈利的游戏，因此新的融资机制和商业模式开始崛起并填补这一空白。过去几年中，指向点击冒险游戏几乎成了被废弃的题材，但App Store的出现让《Charles Cecil》等此类游戏得以在新平台恢复生命力。

Dylan关于周边产品的看法十分正确。行业中有一个“最糟情况”就是大家都竞相压价，导致开发者难以直接通游戏内容甚至是IAP盈利。我们应该汲取音乐领域的教训，要从内容之外的范围考虑创收。周边产品的盈利性已经不容小觑，但一定要保住自己的IP。

Andrew Smith（Spilt Milk Studio主管）

我认为创造内容将变得低廉而便捷，从而让每周更新内容变成现实，这只是一个时间早晚的问题。

但现在，这一点还并不可行。这可能会很像发行商定期发布出自多个开发者之手的内容（就像电视频道），但这有一点奇怪。

最终你只需要赚取足以支付下款游戏开发成本，并略有盈余的资金。最理想的情况是赚比这更多的钱，但我并不认为“无尽潜在收益”式的免费增值就是解决之道。我们仍需探索可行的盈利模式。

Oscar Clark（木瓜移动倡导者）

我们不能因为免费增值模式的游戏是基于资源管理的类型，就认为我们不能制作出采用这一模式的叙事型游戏。我们只是还没有想到可以使用这种模式的大量出路。

我在《天际》这款游戏中投入大量时间，并得出一个结论：它可以成为免费增值型叙事游戏的完美模版。但棘手之处就在于区分玩家重返游戏的原因，以及那些推动故事情节发展的元素。只有解决了这个问题，我们才能在确保不损害故事情境的同时，添加一些障碍元素和虚拟商品。

我认为我们重返《天际》是为了体验那种探索世界的乐趣以及享受其故事情节。搜集原材料，创造自己的装备和药水的过程也非常令人愉悦。假如我们在游戏中的武器和装备随时间发展生锈腐烂了，我们就有更多在游戏中寻找资源并花时间修复它们的理由。如果我们制作了较不强大或更难获取的特定组件，情况又会如何？

想象一下如果我们所获得的体验将直接受到所使用装备的影响这种情况。《无尽之剑》拥有一个强大的机制，你在其中可通过库存中的盔甲和武器而获得加成点数，但在你精通掌握它们之后就会遇到加成数值上限。此时你就得替换武器，否则就无法迅速获得经验值。

Mark Sorrell（游戏总监）

我在《魔兽世界》中花了500英磅，《天际》显然是单人模式版本的《魔兽世界》。当然《魔兽世界》本身是个单人模式游戏，但这是题外话。

《天际》并非叙事型游戏，并且如果许多人并不将其视为叙事游戏，我也并不意外。

它也并非战利品驱动的游戏，这里我要反驳一下Tadhg的观点。如果它真属于这种游戏，那也只是一种次等的战利品驱动游戏，它的战利品比例很糟糕，也没有什么值得炫耀的，因此很快就会变得乏味。

它是一款探索导向型游戏，在我看来免费增值模式并不适用于探索型游戏。我仍然坚持认为《天际》是一款自由和自我决定型的游戏。自由与免费增值模式并不相容，在许多方面它们甚至是相互排斥的，自由意味着你可以在游戏中去任何地方，做任何事情。免费增值模式则会在多个方面对你进行限制。

自我决定可同免费增值模式兼容，它主要强调自定义特点。《天际》如果添加更出色的战利品和社交元素，可能就可以使用这一模式。

Teut Weidemann（育碧在线专家）

我认同设限是通过玩家盈利的一个途径这种说法，但你也可以换个说法：扩大付费玩家的自由权。这样游戏就不会有太多限制性了，对吗？

例如，可以为付费玩家提供更快速/更好的旅程，更广泛的探索范围，增加XP升级或锻造道具的速度，为地下城添加英雄模式，创建分级的盔甲设置，让玩家购买不足的元件。

这些都已经在MMORPG中实现了，它们也适用于《天际》。我不知道为何没有人将《天际》与MMORPG中的强大盈利模式进行对比。这些盈利模式多数都适用于单人游戏。（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）

Can narrative-led games be free-to-play? – The Gamesbriefers

Zoya Street

This post is the third in a series called ‘The Gamesbriefers’ where industry luminaries debate topical questions about game design, monetisation, business and ethics.

Editor note: this post originally published with missing text, and has since been fixed, revealing exciting new content!

Question:

If free-to-play becomes the dominant business model for platforms that encourage longer play times and less ‘snacking’ (such as consoles or PC), how can rich, 8+ hour single-player narrative games (such as Half-Life 2, Tomb Raider or any other high quality linear game) or exploration-led games such as Skyrim be monetised?

Answers:

Patrick O’Luanaigh CEO at nDreams

Maybe it’s naïve, but for Skyrim, I’d give players the huge world for free, slow the amount of gold that they make by doing in-game tasks, and allow players to buy gold in order to purchase more powerful weapons, better armour, houses, horses etc. much quicker than they would be able to otherwise. I could imagine myself paying money to skip ahead and instantly get that amazing thing that I want without having to wait. You could even restrict specific things (such as marriage, or the ability to buy a house) to small one-off payment items. And then you have consumable items built in like arrows, companions/pets and so on.

It lacks the social side in terms of showing off what you’ve bought to other players (maybe I’d add some kind of useful multiplayer meeting point), but players could pay for additional missions (like the DLC packs they currently sell).

As long as the game was fun to play for free, I suspect you’d get a decent percentage of people paying given the quality of the game. The big question is – would it generate more revenue than the current premium up-front model? Would the true fans who spend thousands on their passion compensate for those that don’t? Would it reach 10 times the number of people that the paid-for version reached?

Tadhg Kelly Consultant at What Games Are

Well I think ‘narrative games’ represents two entirely different cases: roleplaying games and action adventures.

Roleplaying games from Mafia Wars to Diablo to Skyrim can be monetised in this way. The simple reason is that the core dynamic of that type of game is driven by loot and levels. They are essentially economic challenges, and selling coins, energy, upgrades and so on in economic games is pretty straightforward. They all play into that core loot-n-levels theme on some level, and shops make reasonable sense within that environment. Furthermore buying to get ahead in an economic game doesn’t really violate the sense of fairness because the bought resources still have to be used well.

Action-adventure games like Half Life, on the other hand, are not economic games. They are activity games, like sports, where economics are generally very basic. Their core appeal is all to do with physical skill, and cheating to get ahead (which is what freemium basically offers) has a much more unbalancing effect on the experience. It is essentially buying to win, which detracts from the fascination and mastery of the game. Like using the old IDDQD cheat code in Doom, the game becomes boring almost immediately.

However this is where I think Temple Run is interesting. It’s a simplified action-adventure game, and its economy is primarily based on selling coins, which the player uses in turn to buy mostly boosters rather than permanent upgrades. Each booster is time- or use-limited, and has to be collected in the game world to actually be used. I wonder whether something along the same lines (but more considered and less arcade-y) could work for action-adventure games. I also wonder whether such a system could really sell enough to cover the vast production budgets for the top games that we know and love.

Budget aside, I could definitely see a platform game which sold coins for to buy temporary jump and speed boosts. Mario 64, but with that extra spring that you need. For the most part the game would still be every bit as challenging – but when you needed it, that extra leg up would be there. Much like with economy games it’s buying to cheat ahead, not buying to win. I could see something along those lines also working for the more party-fun first person shooters like Serious Sam.

Dylan Collins Executive Chairman at Fight My Monster

The same problem exists with kids games, although for different reasons (IAP is very hard to justify with parents, hence the dominance of subscription amongst the top companies). Increasingly my view is to look a revenue stack comprised of both virtual + physical revenue lines. A player which has committed to a sub/up-front fee is going to be statistically more likely to purchase a physical item (e.g. trading card, guide, clothing etc.).

With the exception of Nintendo (Pokémon) the games industry has been pretty awful at merchandising. The movie guys still kick our ass in that regard.

Obviously any merchandising needs to be done super-carefully but based on numbers we see (Fight My Monster) plus approx data from Moshi, Rovio, it’s clear that average rev/customer can be doubled or possibly tripled.

Certainly not for everyone but one approach to think about.

Harry Holmwood Consultant at Heldhand

I suspect that a single player linear narrative game (basically one you play through with a start and an end, whether Monkey Island, Skyrim or Half Life) is extremely difficult to monetize through freemium.  That doesn’t mean consumers don’t want them – personally single player linear games are the ones I enjoy playing most – but we’ll see an economics-enforced shift away from them in the short term.

In the same way that the pre-owned business has made content-heavy single player games difficult to sell profitably at retail, and seen us shoehorn multiplayer modes and DLC into almost all retail releases to preserve shelf life/retail pricing, freemium models will drive certain game types out of the mass market for a time.  However, as we’re seeing now with crowdfunded successes like Double Fine’s, actually consumers still want to play in ways that have become economically unviable through existing channels, and so new funding mechanisms and business models emerge to fill the gap.  For years, point and click adventures were a dead genre, until App Stores allowed the likes of Charles Cecil to bring his games back on new platforms.

Dylan’s point on merchandising is spot on.  There is a ‘worst case’ scenario for the industry where extrapolating the race to free drives pricing down to the point where we’re unable to generate revenues directly from game content, even via IAP.  At this point, we’re into music business territory and need to look outside of content for money.  Then, merchandising becomes everything.  Make sure you retain your IP!

Andrew Smith Director at Spilt Milk Studio

I’m not sure if I’m repeating someone else’s point but I wonder about freemium and linear story led games.

Basically, how much more money would Telltale make from their games if the first episode of each was free? Certainly more people would get in on the ground floor, and characters (as well as stories, etc.) are a proven way of getting the mass market to care deeply (and commit to seeing through to the end) about an IP. Deeply enough to pay. HBO wouldn’t exist if this wasn’t true.

People clamour for great stories and interesting characters. It’s a fundamental part of the human experience – telling stories is a way for us to learn and for us to broaden our horizons, and empathy with characters helps us to deal with our own situations and issues. People will of course pay to have this in their lives (they already do so in so many different media) but the problem lies with a) our broad inability to tell a GREAT story reliably and b) introducing the paywall at a sensible time. The stories would have to be built around this. Ask for money at an emotionally improper moment would kill a person’s investment just as surely as the right timing would guarantee payment.

Harry Holmwood Consultant at Heldhand

Just the nature of freemium is ‘keep playing free forever in the hope you’ll pay some time’ – if we have a finite amount of game to play through, you can’t just keep playing forever (unless we get into the territories of algorithmic or user-generated narrative which could theoretically be amazing but nobody’s even come close to making work).
It’s tempting to say you could have a shallow experience for free and a deeper one if you pay – like, you can only get so far into the details of the backstory, or hear so much from characters if you don’t pay.  But that probably reverses the freemium model and says you’ll progress more slowly through the game if you’re paying which, if completion is the goal for most players, would be counterproductive.

Andrew Smith Director at Spilt Milk Studio

I reckon it’s just a matter of time until content generation – even authored – is cheap and easy enough to generate that a weekly update is not that unrealistic.

But yeah, right now, it’s not very viable. It might work as a publisher of content putting out tons of regular stuff from several developers (along the lines of a TV channel) but that’s a bit weird.

Ultimately you only need to make enough money to both cover the costs of your next game and have some left over. Ideally you’d do better than that, but I don’t think the ‘endless potential income’ version of freemium is the only viable one. We’re still exploring what’s possible. Very exciting times

Oscar Clark Evangelist at Papaya

Look guys, just because Freemium games have been resource management based that doesn’t mean we can’t make narrative-based freemium games.  There are massive opportunities to use this amazing business model we have yet to dream.

Skyrim is a game I have spent a huge amount of time playing (I got tennis elbow from playing for more than 200 hours) and I have come to the conclusion that it could be the perfect template freemium narrative based games. The trick is to separate what is the reason to return to the game over time from the elements which drive the plot forward.  Only then can we add friction and virtual goods without destroying the context of the story.

I argue we come back to Skyrim as much for the sheer joy of exploring the world as the plot itself.  The process of collecting raw materials, creating your own equipment and potions is therapeutic and enjoyable.  What if the weapons and equipment we used in the game decayed each time they were used and we had more reason to spend grind resources and crafting time to repair them.  What if we made specific components less powerful or harder to find?

But more than that… imagine if the experience we gained was affected by the equipment we are using.  Infinity Blade has an amazing mechanism where you get bonus experience points for the armour and weapons in your inventory; but! they have a maximum cap before they become mastered.  Once they are mastered you have to replace them or you don’t gain EXP quite so fast.

Mark Sorrell Game Director

I spent upwards of £500 on Wow and arguably Skyrim is singleplayer WoW. Arguable, WoW is singleplayer WoW but that’s another story.

Skyrim isn’t a narrative driven game, at least it doesn’t have to be and I wouldn’t be surprised if most people didn’t play it that way. I didn’t.

It’s not a loot driven game either, I’d argue against Tahdg there. If it is, it’s a shitty one, the loot scaling is awful and as there’s no-one to show off to, it gets boring very quickly. It could be much, much better without changing any other aspects of the game in any significant way (bit of maths fiddling I suppose) but as it stands, it’s not a loot game.

It’s an exploration driven game, IMO and exploration doesn’t lend itself well to freemium as she is currently practiced. I still maintain that Skyrim – as is – is about freedom and self-determination. Freedom doesn’t fit with freemium, in many ways it’s the exact opposite, the idea being that you can go wherever you like and do whatever you like. Freemium is about you being limited in various ways (there’s the time-skipping elements that might work, to be fair)

The self-determination does work with freemium, as it’s basically about customisation. And with a better loot game and some social elements, Skyrim could host that relatively well.

Teut Weidemann Online Specialist at Ubisoft

Ok, I have to jump on this. Yes I agree that limiting is one way monetizing players, but you can also do the opposite: extend the freedom for paying players. Then it is not considered too limiting, no?

Examples would be faster/better travel (mounts anyone?), wider exporation radius, increase in XP speed for leveling or crafting, heroic mode for dungeons, build in tiered armor sets where you can buy tokens for the missing parts etc etc.

All of this has been done in MMO RPG’s and can be applied to Skyrim easily. I wonder why no one compares Skyrim to the wonderful monetization methods we have developed for MMO RPG’s since they exist? Most do work for single player.（source:gamesbrief）