作者：Zoya Street

问题：

Nicholas Lovell

我一直在琢磨有关鲸鱼玩家的定义，即“那些贡献了50%游戏收益的玩家”，这意味着开发者可以同此快速认识到鲸鱼玩家对于自己业务的影响。

而这是否是一种正面的想法或基准，如果不是的话，又是为什么？

whales(from gamesbrief）

答案：

Tadhg Kelly——Jawfish Games创意总监

这种想法不会太有针对性吗？我认为鲸鱼玩家之所以引人注意是因为他们总是与一些有形的数字（大于100美元）维系在一起，而大多数管理者，会计人员以及金融家们总是能够感性或理性地理解这些数字。

Patrick O’Luanaigh——nDreams首席执行官

这种定义只适用于免费游戏——如果你想要定义“鲸鱼玩家”，你就必须确保这种定义也适用于盒装游戏玩家（也就是50%的盒装游戏收益也是来自于50%的玩家）。对于我来说，鲸鱼玩家是指那些“愿意投入大量成本于他们所喜欢的游戏的玩家”，并且更重要的是不同游戏对于“大量”的价值定义也不同。

Oscar Clark——Applifier倡导者

我同意Tadhg的看法，即这种基准太有针对性，并且不具备真正的统计功效。

并且从User-Centric的角度来看，我们可以基于不同类别去理解玩家的动机，而基于收益比去定义类别则不能帮助我们进行有效的分析。举个例子来说吧，如果你面对的是经营惨淡的鲸鱼社区，你每个月便不可能获得100美元的玩家生成收益，这时候50%的利润比例便不具有任何意义。

最好是根据一致行为划分用户群体，这样你便能够获得最有意义的数据——例如35至40岁的女性女性玩家每个月会在游戏中投入100美元以上。我们可以基于这一定义在不同游戏中进行用户划分。

Teut Weidemann——育碧在线专家

摆脱了“50%”这个束缚就容易定义了:

鲸鱼玩家是指那些贡献了10倍以上每用户平均收益的用户。

这种定义同时适用于Facebook（游戏邦注：拥有较低ARPU）和其它免费游戏（拥有较高ARPU）。而因为ARPU同样也包含了非付费玩家，所以这便避免了将转化率作为一种参数。

Andy Payne——Mastertronic创始人

在我们的两个游戏世界中，也就是飞机和火车模拟游戏（10年前是基于盒装产品销售，现在开始趋向于数字化），我们将鲸鱼玩家定义为愿意花费10倍以上ARPU的玩家——每个月都会不断往自己的虚拟世界中添加新内容。我们便拥有数百名鲸鱼玩家，并且我也一直在收集各种新数据。

Eric Benjamin Seufert——Grey Area Labs市场营销总监

我认为自上而下的方法并不适用于定义“鲸鱼玩家”——鲸鱼玩家主要是基于行为进行定义（收益上的开销也是取决于行为），而将其划分为“50%的收益”群组并不能帮助开发者更好地理解这些用户。相反，如果你是基于自下而上的方法，也就是根据大多数鲸鱼玩家所表现出的行为进行判断，你便能够使用这些信息去发展游戏。

作为一种高级基准，50%的收益真的已经很不错了。基于自下而上的方法以及大量的收益额，我们可以将鲸鱼玩家定义为那些投入了至少1%的总产品收益的玩家（游戏邦注：例如总产品收益为5000欧元，那么愿意花费50欧元以上的玩家便属于鲸鱼玩家）。

（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）

How do you define whales?

By Zoya Street

Question:

Nicholas Lovell

I’m toying with the idea of defining whales as “those players who represent 50% of your revenue”, meaning that you can quickly get a sense of how whale-dependent your business is.

Is this a good idea and/or benchmark, and if not, why not?

Answers:

Tadhg Kelly Creative Director at Jawfish Games

Is it maybe a bit too relative? I think whales has caught on because its usually tied to a tangible number (> $100) that most managers, accountants, financiers and so on can emotionally understand as well as intellectually.

Patrick O’Luanaigh CEO of nDreams

That definition doesn’t work outside of F2P games – if you’re trying to define ‘whales’, it would be best to have a definition that makes sense to boxed product guys as well (obviously 50% of the revenue for most boxed game comes from 50% of the players). For me, whales are “people who are willing to spend a substantial amount of money on a game that they love”, and the key is setting a value for what a ‘substantial amount’ is – that value being different for different games.

Oscar Clark Evangelist at Applifier

I agree with Tadhg that its too relative and that as an approach is not really statistically useful.

From a User-Centric view (marketing) we want to understand the motivations of the player by category or segment and to define a segment by percentage of revenue doesn’t allow us to understand what is going on. For example if you are poorly monetising a Whale community you may not be getting any players generating (for example) $100 per month or more, and the 50% of profits proposal is of little value as a data point.

Better to segment your audience and identify consistent bands of behaviour to which you can apply meaningful data – e.g. 35-40 female spending $100+ pcm. Only if we can apply this same definition across multiple games does the segmentation stand up for itself and become useful.

Teut Weidemann Online specialist at Ubisoft

Its easier to define once you get rid of the 50% of whatever:

Whales are people who spend 10x ARPU or more.

I guess that also works for Facebook (low arpu) or other f2p games with high arpu. As arpu also includes non payers this also gets rid of the conversion rate as a parameter.

Andy Payne Founder of Mastertronic

In two of our [ little ] worlds  namely flight and train simulation,  which used to be completely boxed goods about 10 years ago at which point we went digital, we define Whales as those who spend 10 x ARPU which sort of equates to a piece of add on content for their virtual world (flight or train) each and every month. We have hundreds of those. I may even run a report to get the up to date data. These are the same customers who come and visit us at Aviation and Railway shows.

Eric Benjamin Seufert Head of Marketing at Grey Area Labs (via comments)

In my opinion, a top-down approach doesn’t work for “whale spotting” — whales are primarily defined by behavior (revenue spent is the artifact left behind by that behavior), and I feel that grouping them as the “50% (or whatever arbitrary number) of revenue” group doesn’t actually add anything to the organization’s understanding of its players but another graph on the dashboard. If you know, bottom up, who whales are because you’ve identified the behaviors that most whales tend to exhibit, then you can actually use that information to inform the evolution of your game.

As a very high-level benchmark, 50% of revenue is pretty good. One way to proxy bottom-up while still using broad revenue numbers could be to define a whale as someone who has spent at least 1% of the total product catalogue (i.e. if the total product catalogue is €5k then a user who has spent 50€ is a whale)(source:gamesbrief)