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Big Fish首席执行官分享开发商的盈利秘诀

发布时间:2012-11-01 14:56:23 Tags:,,

作者:Jim Squires

目前,游戏开发与发行领域盛行着大量流行语,比如“曝光率”、“免费增值”、“社交”,然而,对于开发商来说,只有一个词最具分量——获利。Big Fish首席执行官Paul Thelen在Casual Connect Kiev大会上谈到开发商获取更多利润的方法。

除了采用一些必然的推广手段(比如,通过Big Fish发行游戏可创下更多利益),Thelen还关注开发商的发行方向。具体而言,他觉得开发商应投入更多精力在销售方面,而不是新兴的行业动态。为此,他更加具体地列出下列事项:

*针对高端休闲玩家的冒险游戏、寻物解谜游戏及益智游戏

*针对免费玩家的寻物解谜游戏、模拟游戏(包含RPG/建设机制)

*博彩游戏

big fish casual game(from bigfishgames.com)

big fish casual game(from bigfishgames.com)

Thelen表示:“如我们所知,这些游戏均可为开发者带来源源不断的收益。每款获得成功的《愤怒的小鸟》背后,大约有1万家希望复制这种成功的开发商空手而归。在此,我所列出的游戏类型均具有较低风险以及较有保证的投资回报率,只要你制作的是优质的内容。你应该知道,iOS平台上基于物理的街机游戏或一些卡牌游戏均大获成功,但它们存在极高的风险性。因为它们的每次成功都要历经大量失败。”

这并不意味着Thelen反对开发商在iOS平台上发行游戏。其实,Thelen支持这种做法,只是他坚信,如果某款游戏打算取胜,那它应瞄准正确的平台。比如,当所有人试图将社交游戏引入iOS平台上时,他们发现免费模式更加畅销,但却忽略了单人模式的重要性。跃居App Store热门榜单前列的并非社交游戏——它们主要是免费增值模式的单人游戏。

换言之,想要取胜意味着开发商应理解目标用户。最近,Thelen对于Big Fish推出的免费PC游戏上也做出相同评价:“社交性本应是PC平台免费游戏的长处……而许多免费游戏却并不具有社交性,但我们门户网站上的用户很喜欢社交型游戏。仅发行第一周,我们便创下不错的佳绩。”

成功并非单指选择正确的盈利方式或目标平台,而是获得大量用户。Thelen指出:“如果你发行了游戏,并打算获利,那么你必须让自己的游戏覆盖所有主流平台。”

比如,Big Fish发行的游戏可以通过以下渠道盈利:

*PC/Mac上的珍藏版

*PC/Mac上的标准版

*发行在iOS平台

*发行在Android平台

*通过Big Fish Unlimited (云端)服务发行

*重新将游戏改造为免费增值模式(比如,重新利用游戏的资产、主题和品牌,发行一个全新版本)

通过长期的移植与调整,开发商便可从某款游戏中获取双倍利益。当然,实现这一愿景需要遇到适当的商机,或者与能够做到这一点的发行商合作。Thelen指出:“在选择合作方时,应保持明智的头脑。游戏领域存在大量发行平台。你应与最大的发行商合作,让他们帮你将游戏推广到这些平台上,从而获取最大规模的用户。千万不要选择能力与你相仿的发行商。如果你不想与发行商合作,你也可以选择自主发行游戏。但如果你正与发行商合作,你应确保他们的发行与营销能力均具有价值。”

Thelen的演讲可能类似产品推销,但回顾他所说的每句话,我们会看到自己更大的发展前景,他的某些建议对开发商而言也十分受益。当你打算推广一款游戏时,寻找发行合作伙伴多半能够为你带来额外优势。(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

Big Fish CEO shares the secrets of developer profitability (Casual Connect Kiev)

by Jim Squires

There are a lot of buzzwords out there in the world of publishing and game development: “discoverability,” “free-to-play,” “social” – but in the end, there’s only one word that really matters if a developer wants to keep the lights on: profit.  Big Fish CEO Paul Thelen took to the stage at Casual Connect Kiev this morning to talk about what developers should be doing to make more of it.

Outside of the inevitable sales pitch (“make more money by publishing through Big Fish!”), Thelen focused on which baskets developers might want to put their eggs in.  Specifically, he feels developers should focus less on emerging trends and more on safe bets.  More specifically, he outline the following;

adventure, hidden object, and puzzle games for premium casual

hidden object, sim, with RPG/builder mechanics for free-to-play

casino

“Those are the games that we see making money time and time again,” says Thelen.  “For every Angry Birds arcade game, there are about 10,000 want-to-be Angry Birds that made no money.  What I’m showing here are games that are lower risk, and have a pretty much guaranteed ROI if you build a quality version of them.  The physics-based arcade [games] or some of the card games you see on iOS are very successful, but they’re very high risk.  For every success, there are a lot of failures.”

That isn’t to say Thelen is averse to iOS releases.  Quite the contrary, in fact.  He just believes that if a game is going to be successful, it needs to target the right platforms.  For example, when everyone tried to bring social games to iOS, they found that while the free-to-play business model worked, the lack of a single-player focus didn’t.  As a result, the top grossing games on the App Store aren’t social games – they’re primarily single player games with a free-to-play monetization structure.

Success, in other words, is about understanding your audience.  This very sentiment carried over to his comments about Big Fish’s own recent unveiling of free-to-play PC games: “social was considered the PC environment for free-to-play…[yet] many free-to-play games are not that social, [but] they work with our audience on our portal.  We’ve seen a lot of success just in the first week.”

Success isn’t just about picking the right monetization method or platforms, though – it’s about being everywhere your audience might be.  “If you take your game and you want to make money, you need to hit all of the platforms that are relevant,” says Thelen.

For example, a single game published through Big Fish may monetize the following ways;

Collector’s Edition on PC/Mac

Standard Edition on PC/Mac

iOS release

Android release

Big Fish Unlimited (cloud) release

F2P rethinking of the game (reuse assets, theme, and branding to release a new version of the game)

By going down the long path of ports and tweaks, a developer could easily double the income from a single game (or so the examples Thelen shared with the audience at Casual Connect led us to believe).  Of course, being able to pull this off means having the right opportunities, which means having the know-how …or partnering with someone who does.  “When you choose a partner, choose wisely.  There’s more than just one platform out there.  You want to get distribution across platforms with the biggest publisher you can to get a maximum amount of users.  Don’t choose someone as a publisher who can do basically what you can do yourself.  If you don’t want to work with a publisher, self-publish.  But if you’re working with a publisher, make sure they have the distribution and marketing to make it worthwhile.”

Thelen’s presentation might have felt a little like a sales pitch, but stepping back from it and looking at the bigger picture, there’s some great advice in here for developers.  Playing it safe has its advantages, and when marketing a game, it probably doesn’t hurt to find a publishing partner to give you that extra edge.(source:gamezebo)


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