作者：Dan Goodman

最近有很多人在讨论游戏产业中的负面趋势，例如试图根除二手游戏，可下载内容，花钱获胜的免费游戏等等。我们可以将其认为是对游戏中的动机操作系统改变的回应，而这种回应也许能够帮助我们找到更棒的替代选择。

而最主要的动机则是利润动机。有时候利润是一种积极动机（因为人们总是想要赚的更多钱），而有时候它却会变成消极动机，即对于那些并非想通过制作游戏赚钱的人而言。这两种形式的利润动机将会带来不同的影响。

一般说来，利润对于公司（开发商或发行商）是积极动机，但是对于那些为大公司效劳或独立开发游戏的个人来说，这便可能是一种消极动机。当然了，这种判断标准不一定总是成立，因为比起制作让自己自豪的作品，有些人反而更看重收益，不过他们的这种态度并非游戏开发者的普遍想法，因为开发游戏并非他们快速致富的光明大道。大多数有才华的程序员在其它领域总是能获得更多收入。

Incentive(from dezmonlanders)

尽管利润动机听起来不是那么正派，但是它却有可能同时带给游戏质量积极和消极影响。就像一名有钱的独立游戏制作人便不会太看重钱，而处在同样位置上的其他美术人员则有时候会创造出非常优秀的作品，而有时候也有可能只是制作一些没用的垃圾。

从负面意义上来看，像操纵式游戏设计便会为了赚钱而牺牲了玩家的利益。受货币所操纵的街机游戏便是如此。最近还出现了像DLC这种内容，即致力于从消费者身上而赚取更多利益，并摧毁二手销售市场。市场上还出现了大量“反社交”的社交游戏，以及花钱就能获胜的竞争类游戏。

最理想的奖励结构应该是为玩家创造出高质量的游戏，考虑到利润动机，我们可以发现高质量游戏总是能比低质量游戏赚取更多利益。而我们又该如何去实现这一点呢？

让我们着眼于现有的一些游戏销售方法。其中一种便是传统的盒装零售模式。消费者将基于一个固定的价格去购买一件固定的产品。也有许多可下载内容应用了这种模式。就像看电影一样，当你看了一会电影后发现自己并不喜欢这部影片，你也不可能要回之前付出的钱。而游戏样本则能够适度缓解这种情况：即让玩家可以事先判断自己是否喜欢这款游戏。而在这个市场中利润动机又是如何运转的？这里存在着一些能够促成不同结果的策略：你可以选择制定高额预算并进入主流市场去争取更大的销售额。或者你也可以选择创造低预算，低销量的小游戏。在线分销模式则能够有效地推动后者争取更好的结果。

最近，应用商店已经改变了一些可行的方法。尽管我们并不能准确地说出所有可行的方法，但是至少能够列举出到目前为止一些真正有效的方法：

（1）基于广告盈利的免费应用。对于开发者和消费者来说，这一方法具有很多好处。只要人们开始玩游戏，他们便能够看到游戏中的广告，并有可能去点击这些广告，这里所设置的奖励是让玩家去邀请更多人前来游戏，并且更长时间地玩游戏。不幸的是，这同时也意味着会干扰到玩家的游戏过程，而随着广告收入的日趋减少，开发者便需要想办法去提升玩家点击广告的机会。除此之外，开发者还存在着一种有力的奖励便是尽可能多地收集用户信息，并将其传达给广告商——但这却会侵犯玩家的隐私。

（2）免费模式：带有其它付费内容的免费应用。这种方法的使用范围非常广，包括极具操纵性的设计，即吸引玩家进入游戏，让他们在此上瘾后开始向其收费，还包括一些较缓和的方式，如消费者只需要为一些外部装饰内容（游戏邦注：如不同的衣服）掏钱。我并不是从道德角度来看，只是从意义上来看，如果玩家不愿意花钱，游戏就没有多大乐趣，而如果你花的钱越多，游戏将越发有趣：游戏并不会添加其它内容，但却会剥夺某些人的游戏体验。

（3）带有付费式额外关卡和章节的免费或付费应用。从创造出高质量游戏的动机来看，这也许是最棒的方法，但是它却不适用于所有类型的游戏中，实际上，许多消费者都不愿意直接花钱游戏。这一方法所存在的问题是，如果存在一种更廉价的选择，那么人们便会倾向于这种选择而非付钱消费，尽管在其它选择中也隐藏着相应的成本。

似乎创造出有利可图的游戏并推动着更高质量游戏的诞生这一动机的前景非常惨淡。但是，Steam所取得的持续且巨大的成功却为开发者带来了希望。它向我们证实了人们的确愿意为高质量游戏掏腰包：容易接近的游戏，能够快速下载的游戏以及可以在多台电脑上共同进行的游戏等。

而我们是否能够同时实现游戏盈利与创造出更高质量游戏的动机？我并不清楚这一创想是否能够得以实现，但是我却知道一种有效的方法——尽管它可能太过幼稚或具有一些隐藏式的不良动机。

这一方法将提供固定的每月付费服务，即玩家每个月可以按照自己的想法尽情地玩游戏而不需要支付额外的成本。这一平台将追踪玩家在每一款游戏中所投入的时间，从而根据这些时间去划分不同产品所获得的利润。

如果你所提供的是精心设计的游戏，像Steam的游戏，那便能够有效地吸引消费者的注意：他们将尝试更多的游戏，并且即使他们不喜欢游戏了也不会有任何损失。从动机上来看，如果越多人喜欢你的游戏并且未因为游戏感到无聊，你便能够获得更多利润。同时还存在提供游戏更新和可下载内容的奖励。这种奖励对于提高游戏质量非常有帮助。

从消极方面来看：对于消费者来说，如果你不再支付每月费用你便难以再深入进行游戏。而当玩家取消了自己的帐号后，如果游戏仍允许他们购买部分游戏（玩家之前已支付的月费仍可可用来购买游戏）便能够缓解这一问题。从消极方面来看，这也许能够促使玩家更长时间体验游戏——尽管这时候短时间游戏可能会更加有趣。

也许这一想法难以付诸实践，但是可以肯定的是，比起现在开发者所选择的模式（即创造出能够操纵并利用玩家的游戏）来说可能会取得更好的结果。而为了更好的做到这一点我们就需要去理解开发者真正的动机，并利用这些动机去创造出真正优秀的游戏。

（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）

Responding to the profit incentive

by Dan Goodman

There has been much discussion recently of what many perceive to be negative trends in the gaming industry, for example attempts to eradicate second-hand gaming, day one DLC, pay-to-win Freemium games. We can best understand these as responses to the changing systems of incentives operating on those designing and publishing games, and perhaps this can help us to find alternatives.

Please note this is my first gamasutra blog, and I’m not a professional developer, just an interested amateur.

The foremost incentive to understand, of course, is profit. Sometimes this works as a positive incentive (because people want more money) and sometimes as a negative incentive, that is people may want to make great games that don’t make much money, but they have to eat so they can’t ignore it. These two forms of the profit incentive can have different effects.

Broadly speaking, the company point of view (developer or publisher) will largely be the positive incentive, whereas the point of view of an individual, either working within a big company or as an indie, may well be the latter. This won’t always be true, some individuals are primarily looking to make money rather than make something they are proud of, but perhaps this attitude is less common among game developers because it’s not an obvious road to riches. Most talented programmers, for example, could probably make more money in other areas.

The profit incentive, although it sounds sort of dirty, can be both positive and negative on the quality of the games produced. An independently wealthy game maker who has no need for money, like any other artist in the same position, may occasionally make works of genius, but they may equally make self-indulgent rubbish.

On the negative side, we have things like manipulative game design which actually works against the interests of the player in order to make money. Coin operated arcades were always like this. More recently we have things like day one DLC, designed to extract more money from consumers and to destroy the second hand sales market. We have ‘social’ games that make us behave antisocially, and competitive games where we can pay to win.

The ideal incentive structure would be one that rewards the creation of high quality games, and since the profit incentive is so important, it should be one where  high quality games make more money than low quality ones. Is this possible, and if so how?

Let’s look at some existing concrete ways in which games can be sold. One of them is the traditional boxed retail model. You get a fixed product for a fixed price. This also applies to some downloadable content. This is most similar to something like movies, where if you decide you don’t like it after watching (playing) for a while, you can’t get your money back. Game demos go some way towards alleviating this: you can find out if you like the game first. How does the profit incentive work in this market? There are several strategies with different outcomes: you can go for the mainstream market, big budget and lots of sales. Alternatively, you can go for smaller games with a lower budget and lower sales. Online distribution made this latter type of approach much more tenable.

More recently, App stores have changed several aspects of this which has changed the feasible approaches. It’s still too recent to know for sure what all the feasible approaches are, but a few of the successful approaches so far are:

(1) Free app paid for by advertising. This has many positive aspects for the developer and the consumer. As long as people are playing the game they will see the adverts and possibly click on them, and so the incentive is there to make more people want to play the game and for longer. Unfortunately, it also means annoying the consumer with adverts all the time, and as advertising revenues diminish, the incentive on the developer is to make them more and more unavoidable to maximise the chance that someone will click on them. In addition, there is a strong incentive to collect information about users and pass that on to advertisers, infringing their privacy.

(2) Freemium: free app with paid for extras. This covers a wide range of possibilities, from the most manipulative of designs where you suck people in, get them addicted, and then start charging them, to more benign forms where consumers only pay for superficial aspects like different clothes. Even the more benign form, though, is just a lesser evil. I don’t mean that in the moral sense, just in the sense that it is an incentive to make the game worse if you don’t pay, and better the more you pay: it doesn’t add anything, it only takes away.

(3) Free or paid app with paid for extra levels or episodes. This is most like the shareware model. This is maybe the nicest approach in terms of the incentives to produce high quality games, but it doesn’t apply to all types of games and in practice many consumers seem unwilling to pay directly, so indirect approaches like the first two are more successful. The issue for this approach appears to be that if there is a cheaper option available, people will tend to take it rather than paying, even if there are hidden costs to the other option.

The outlook for finding a way to get the incentive to produce profitable games to push towards higher quality games, then, looks bad. However, the enormous and continuing success of Steam provides some hope. It shows that people are willing to pay for a high quality service: easily accessible games, fast downloads, play on multiple computers, etc.

What if an even better such service could be designed that really aimed to make the profit incentive align with the incentive to make better games? I don’t know if this can be achieved, but I have one idea that might work, although it may be too naive or have hidden bad incentives.

The idea would be to have a service with a fixed monthly cost that allowed you to play as much of any game on the service as you liked with no additional costs. The platform would track how long you spent playing each of the games, and the profits would be divided up amongst the products in proportion to how long was spent playing them.

If it was well designed, like Steam, it would be very enticing for consumers: they would be able to play many more games and wouldn’t lose anything if they didn’t like them. In terms of incentives, the more people playing the game and not getting bored of it the more profit you would make. There’s also an incentive to provide updates and DLC. These incentives are good for quality.

On the negative side: for the consumer, you would lose access to your games if you stopped paying the monthly charge. However, you could maybe alleviate this by allowing people to purchase some of their games if they cancel their account (and the amount that had gone to the developer already from their monthly spend could count towards the purchase cost). On the negative side for incentives, there is an incentive to make the player play for longer, even if it would be more fun to play for less long. How significant would this be in practice? I’m not sure.

This idea may well be too naive to work in practice, but surely it must be possible to do better than the current model which incentivises developers to make games which manipulate and exploit the player? To do this, we need to understand the incentives on the developers, and make them work for the good of the games.（source：GAMASUTRA）