作者：Lee Bradley

在经历了中间件项目上的成功，以及主机游戏开发上的失败之后，NaturalMotion迅速在短时间内变身为移动游戏领域的佼佼者。

无论是制作热门的付费游戏，还是转向免费增值模式，该公司均表现出极大的灵活性。

NaturalMotion首席执行官及联合创始人Torsten Reil在最近访谈中介绍了公司来历，向免费模式转型的过程，以及未来发展方向。

公司起源

NaturalMotion于2001年成立于牛津大学，最初是该大学动物学系的一个衍生公司，原先关注的是与类生命和自然动画系统有关的领域。

该公司利用这项科学知识开发了Euphoria动画引擎，该引擎后来被《侠盗猎车手4》、《星球大战：原力释放》、《荒野大镖客》等AAA游戏所采用。

得益于在中件间领域的成功，NaturalMotion在2010年成立了开发工作室，并推出了美式橄榄球主机游戏《Backbreaker》。

尽管游戏采用了强大的开发技术，但它在市场上还是受到了冷遇。

Torsten Reil回忆道，“这是一个巨大的打击……微软表示不想在XBLA平台发布这款游戏时，我们只好转向零售渠道。这意味着我们将面对更大的市场，极短暂的展示时窗，极有限的货架空间”。

这款游戏当时出现了一系列严重的漏洞，最终影响了游戏的销售。但也让该公司收获了重要的经验和教训。

Reil表示，“最重要的是，我们从中获得了许多教训：只有在准备就绪时才能发行游戏；专注于一两个领域的创新；永远不要涉足零售领域，并且只同可推动游戏向前发展的平台合作。”

向移动平台进军

“通过主机平台，我们掌握了大量与引擎开发、运行优化、美术管道和QA有关的经验”。

“但更重要的是，我们了解如何提升视觉保真度，以及如何使用即时模拟系统创造可信的角色和意外玩法。”

该公司最终决定将其中部分理念运用到移动领域，再加上公司的开发技术，这一举措成了公司的一个重要转折点。

“当我们意识到iPhone支持运行我们的技术，我们就知道这是一个机遇，我们可以将高质量图像和易用性玩法结合起来，令其匹配移动设备的游戏模式。”

“我们认为当时风靡一时的2D资源管理游戏只不过是昙花一现，丰富而具有真实感的游戏体验终将获得大量用户需求。”

正是这种信念以及NaturalMotion顺应时势的举措奠定了该公司在手机游戏领域的成功基础。

付费游戏

NaturalMotion在2009年推出了首款手机游戏《Backbreaker Football》（游戏邦注：这实际上是该游戏主机版本中的Tackle Alley迷你游戏），不同于失败的主机版本，这款手机游戏大获成功。

这款游戏的成功确实令Reil大感意外，下载量突破500万次，并且这是一款付费游戏。

“这款游戏的iOS版表现完全出乎我们的意料，同时也让我们确信，含有高质量画面和通俗性玩法的游戏存在大量发展机遇。”

随后NaturalMotion又在原作人气的基础上，接二连三地发布了《Backbreaker 2: Vengeance》、《, NFL Rivals》以及《Icebreaker Hockey》，这些游戏无一例外地成为热作。

此外，该公司还发布了一款基于Jenga授权的游戏，它是NaturalMotion目前仅有的两款授权游戏之一（游戏邦注：另一款是《NFL Rivals》）。

尽管Reil表示同这些授权公司“合作很愉快”，但NaturalMotion目前主要开发自有IP项目。

这家公司头6款游戏均属于付费游戏，投资回报率高达500%。NaturalMotion也因此在极短时间内晋升为手机游戏领域的神话。

但此时市场却有其他更具盈利性的模式悄然兴起。

免费增值模式

Reil认为“移动市场发展速度比传统游戏市场快10倍，虽然我们的付费游戏收益很可观，但显然移动市场的免费增值模式将带来更大发展机遇。”

鉴于这一情况，NaturalMotion宣布将专注于免费增值游戏，并依此推出了一款动物饲养题材的游戏《My Horse》。

Reil指出这款游戏的“基本理念是尽力展示图像质量，将这个被多数游戏开发商所不屑的游戏题材发挥到极致。”

“有了iOS这类精英平台，游戏行业开始涌现大量发展机遇。”

《My Horse》发布三个月内收获500万次下载量，拥有50万DAU，该游戏至今下载量已超过1100万次。

更重要的是，游戏中极具说服力的IAP选项让《My Horse》在收益上表现出色。

《CSR Racing》

但比起该公司另一款游戏《CSR Racing》的收益，《My Horse》的成功其实是小巫见大巫。

这款游戏最初是在苹果WWDC 2012大会上亮相，由于苹果的支持，《CSR Racing》成了今年6月份的热门iOS游戏，其人气如星火燎原般迅速扩散。

这款汽车管理及赛车游戏发布首个月就让NaturalMotion创收1200万美元。

尽管该公司随后并未透露这款游戏的收益数据，但从该游戏长踞App Store榜单前列就可以预料到其收益的持续增长。

更值得一提的是，这款游戏除了在WWDC露面之外，几乎没有依靠任何营销或用户获取渠道，仅凭用户口头传播而获得了这一成就。

可以说，扣除苹果30％的抽成和游戏开发成本，《CRS Racing》每一分钱收益都属于纯利润。

该游戏运营的成功关键因素在于对IAP的运用方法，它支持用户以多种方式在游戏中消费。尽管如此，Reil认为NaturalMotion在免费增值模式的运用上仍然存在不足，“我们还处于学习经验的起步阶段”。

扩张

在过去一年多时间中，NaturalMotion扩展迅速，在伦敦成立了一家新工作室，收购了位于布赖顿的《CSR Racing》开发商Boss Alien，在旧金山和牛津总部吸收了不少新成员。

Reil称这是为了让公司保持在行业前沿位置。

“我们最大的目标是在不断发展的同时保持灵活性。这个行业变化迅速，我们希望自己能够快速适应变化——最好是赶在别人考虑进行转变之前。”

“我们并不会以拥有大量成员而自豪，我们只为以紧凑型的团队制作出很棒、具有创新性（并非原有游戏的克隆版本）的游戏而骄傲。”

除此之外，这家公司还获得了投资者的青睐，最近通过Benchmark Capital获得了1100万美元资金，后者的Mitch Laskey也因这笔交易而加入了NaturalMotion董事会。

该公司至今总共接受了1900万美元的外部投资。

展望未来

除了一些尚未公开的“高端免费游戏”，NaturalMotion目前正开发一款已在苹果第五代iPod Touch发布会上亮相的新游戏《Clumsy Ninja》。

这款训练忍者题材的游戏仍将采用高质量的画面，以及访公司最新迭代的模拟AI动画系统。当然，还有IAP功能。根据NaturalMotion过去游戏的表现情况来看，《Clumsy Ninja》应该也会是一款杰作。

Reil对公司以及移动领域的未来充满信心，“从商业以及创意角度来看，移动游戏都是娱乐行业最大的发展机遇之一。也许我们将来只会将其简称为‘游戏’，因为这类游戏已经入驻掌握了最多用户群体的强大设备。”

“质量和玩法很重要，真正能够取悦玩家的开发商，将比那些大手笔花钱获取用户的公司更为成功。”Reli的目标就是确保NaturalMotion实现这一愿景。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，需转载请联系：游戏邦）

From backbreaking to drag racing: NaturalMotion Games, a studio profile

by Lee Bradley

Rising to prominence in mobile following success in the middleware business and a disastrous spell in console game development, NaturalMotion has achieved a great deal in a relatively short amount of time.

From creating popular premium games to leading the free-to-play charge, the company has displayed a intuitive knack for anticipating the industry’s greatest shifts.

In this the first of our revamped studio profiles we talk to NaturalMotion CEO and co-founder Torsten Reil about the origins of the company, its transition to freemium and its potentially sparkling future.

Origin

Founded in Oxford in 2001, NaturalMotion began as a spin-out company from the University’s Zoology Department, initially focusing on life-like and natural animation systems.

That expertise was used as the basis for the company’s Euphoria animation engine, employed in AAA console releases such as as Grand Theft Auto IV, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Red Dead Redemption.

Buoyed by its success in the middleware business, NaturalMotion made its debut as a development studio in 2010, with the American football console title, Backbreaker.

Yet despite the game’s ambitious tech, it was a commercial failure.

“Initially, it was a big blow,” says Torsten Reil, pictured below.

“When Microsoft decided it didn’t want Backbreaker on XBLA, we were forced to go into retail. This meant a larger scope, a very small time window for release, and limited shelf space.”

CEO and co-founder Torsten Reil

It was a situation that led to a series of crucial bugs that hampered the game upon release and ultimately affected sales. Yet it also taught the company a number of important lessons.

“Most importantly, we learnt a lot from the experience: only ship when you’re ready; focus innovation on one or two key areas; never-ever touch retail and only work with platforms who want to move the game forward,” says Reil.

The shift to mobile

“On console, we built a lot of experience around engine development, performance optimisation, art pipelines and QA.

“But more than anything else, we learnt how to push visual fidelity and how to use real-time simulation systems to create believable characters and emergent gameplay.”

It was working out how to bring some of these these ideas to mobile, alongside much of the company’s tech, that proved to be a turning point for the company.

“When we realised the iPhone had the power to run our technology, we knew there was an opportunity to combine high quality visuals with accessible gameplay suited to the play patterns of mobile devices,” says Reil.

“We believed that the then-dominant 2D resource management games were going to be a transient phenomenon, and that there was going to be a strong demand from people for rich, believable experiences.”

It’s this ethos and NaturalMotion’s canny knack of anticipating and informing emerging trends that would form the basis of the company’s mobile success.

Premium hits

NaturalMotion made its mobile debut in 2009 with Backbreaker Football – a version of the console title’s Tackle Alley mini-game. And in contrast to the console release’s failure, Backbreaker Football was a huge hit.

Indeed, such was the game’s success that it caught Reil off-guard, racking up well in excess of 5 million downloads, all at a premium price.

“The iOS version of Backbreaker wildly exceeded our expectations and confirmed to us that combining high-end visuals with accessible gameplay was a huge opportunity,” he says.

NaturalMotion’s Backbreaker series was a hit on iOS

Following Backbreaker, NaturalMotion released Backbreaker 2: Vengeance, NFL Rivals and Icebreaker Hockey in quick succession, capitalising in the original’s popularity. All were hits.

A version of Jenga was also released, which alongside NFL Rivals constitutes the company’s only licensed titles thus far.

And while the Reil says that license holders are “great to work with,” NaturalMotion is now concentrating on developing its own IP.

All-in-all the company’s first six titles, all of which were paid-for apps, secured a 500 per cent return on investment. In an incredibly short amount of time, NaturalMotion became a runaway mobile success story.

Yet more potentially lucrative models were emerging.

Freemium frontrunners

“The mobile market moves at 10 times the pace of the traditional games market,” says Reil. “And while the returns on our paid games were very good, it was obvious that free-to-play on mobile was going to be an even bigger opportunity.”

With this in mind, NaturalMotion announced that it was to concentrate almost exclusively on free-to-play titles, a process that began with My Horse, an animal care-taking game.

“The basic idea was to go all-out on visuals and treat seriously a genre that most game developers snigger at,” says Reil.

“There are a lot of these opportunities in the games industry, now that we have a meritocratic platform like iOS.”

NaturalMotion’s My Horse has been a runaway success

Thanks to this approach, My Horse racked up five million downloads within three months along with 500,000 daily users. The total download figure that now stands well in excess of 11 million.

More importantly, the game’s persuasive in-app purchase options ensure that My Horse “blew everything out of the water” in terms of revenue.

Racing ahead

Yet My Horse’s success is relatively modest compared to NaturalMotion’s next release, CSR Racing.

Demoed on stage at the WWDC 2012 keynote, exemplifying Apple’s strong support for the company, CSR Racing hit iOS in June 2012. It has been wildly popular.

Within the first month of the game’s release, the car management and racing title earned NaturalMotion a staggering $12 million in revenue.

And while the company is reluctant to release any further figures, the game’s prolonged stay in the top grossing charts suggests continued success.

Perhaps even more remarkable is that the game achieved all this by word of mouth alone, with very little press (beyond the WWDC announcement) and no money spent on marketing or user acquisition.

Once you deduct Apple’s 30 per cent and the game’s development costs, almost every penny of CSR’s enormous revenues are profit.

Boss Alien’s CSR Racing fit the NaturalMotion mould

The key to CSR’s financial success is its sophisticated use of IAP, allowing users to invest in the title in a number of different ways. Yet despite the huge numbers it has inspired, Reil doesn’t believe NaturalMotion has yet perfected the freemium model.

“Nope,” says Reil. “We’re only at the beginning of the learning process.”

Expansion

In the past year or so NaturalMotion has expanded greatly, opening a new studio in London, acquiring CSR developer Boss Alien in Brighton and taking on new staff across both its San Francisco office and a new Oxford HQ.

Reil says it’s all about staying ahead of the curve.

“Our biggest goal is to stay nimble despite our growth. The industry is changing quickly, and we want to make sure we are able to adapt to it fast – ideally before anyone else even has the change on their radar.”

“We don’t get a kick out of having large staff numbers. We get a kick out of creating amazing games in close-knit teams, and making stuff that’s new – not clones of existing games.

“So far, we have found that revenues and profits follow.”

In addition to this the company has also proved adept at securing major funding from investors, the most recent being $11 million from Benchmark Capital in a deal that saw Mitch Laskey join NaturalMotion’s board of directors.

In total the company has now received $19 million in outside investment.

A bright future

As well as “several” unannounced “high-end free-to-play games” in development across NaturalMotion’s numerous studios, the company is now working on Clumsy Ninja, announced at Apple’s fifth generation iPod touch keynote.

Arguably the culmination of everything NaturalMotion has worked towards over the past decade, the ninja training game promises high-end visuals combined with the latest iteration of the company’s simulated AI animation systems.

Plus, no doubt, cleverly managed in-app purchasing opportunities. Based on the NaturalMotion’s track record, success seems inevitable.

It’s no surprise then that Reil is enthusiastic about the future of both the company and the mobile industry’s future.

“Mobile gaming is one of the biggest opportunities in entertainment, both from the commercial as well as the creative side,” he says.

“Most likely, we’ll end up calling it just ‘gaming’, since we’re essentially talking about games on powerful devices that most of the population own.

“Quality and gameplay matter now, and whoever can truly delight their players is going to be much more successful than big spenders on user acquisition.”

It’s Reil’s continuing goal to ensure that NaturalMotion does just that.（source：pocketgamer）