游戏邦在:
杂志专栏:
gamerboom.com订阅到鲜果订阅到抓虾google reader订阅到有道订阅到QQ邮箱订阅到帮看

分析游戏时间和附赠程序对应用排名的影响

发布时间:2013-05-13 15:08:15 Tags:,,,,

作者:James Liu

本篇文章主要谈论我们的游戏《无名:黑客RPG》捆版式市场营销的排名指标。

好消息便是我们仍然觉得游戏触屏界面拥有巨大的潜力。其次,通过销量可以发现App Store的付费游戏仍存在可触及的市场。

面向iOS的《无名:黑客RPG》

Nameless the Hackers RPG(from gamasutra)

Nameless the Hackers RPG(from gamasutra)

App Store排行优化

App Store排行优化与搜索引擎优化有点相似,这是永远都解决不了的问题。这是质量搜索结果与尝试着获得曝光率的作品之间的战斗。

在专注于分内工作之余,我们也发现许多服务能够保证“市场营销费用”的付出是有价值的。通过在网络上进行搜索,我们发现一些有关下载bots farms,评价bots farms,用户奖励评价,用户奖励下载等等内容的文章。但是这却让我们很沮丧,因为我们知道这将不利于产业的发展,并且我们未拥有足够的资金与之相抗衡。

注:我们不能推广这种利用,因为我们认为这不利于产业的发展。但是我们也了解并意识到它的重要性。并不是所有市场营销服务都是基于这样的利用,但是我们却很难说出去区别。

如果你正接近一家市场营销公司,请先问清楚他们是采取何种方法去获取用户。不要盲目地投钱。因为来自安全产业,我们很难去追踪进入官方服务的bot-farms,但是却能够处罚它。我们发现了一些文章谈论遭到App Store禁止的情况。所以说这么做是不值得的。

不管怎样,让我们再次回到指标中。

游戏时间将影响App Store排名

在回顾之前的数据时我们高兴地发现一些像是“游戏时间”内容具有很大的影响。虽然我们并未确认这一理念,但这却是我们所推断出来的。比起游戏下载,排行所受到的更多影响是来自玩家的游戏时间。

我们是在游戏销量开始呈现平稳状态时注意到了一些古怪的排行行为,也就是每天早上的排名都会窜得很高,然后再慢慢下滑。并反复循环。在早上的时候会上升10至15个位次。我们对此进行了内部讨论,并断定这可能是因为我们的游戏属于RPG。我们认为大多数RPG玩家会在晚上玩游戏,所以每天晚上游戏的排名都会开始往上爬升。

以下是关于游戏时间vs.新用户的每日按小时记录的图表:

SessionsToUsersGraph(from gamasutra)

SessionsToUsersGraph(from gamasutra)

我们也有可能猜错了,也许是因为App Store在晚上的时候重新计算了排名,但是根据我们的观察,即使呈现出这种诡异的排名变化,特别是在晚上或午夜时分,我们的销量也未出现明显的变化。

可以说这对于《无名》来说是一把双刃剑。一方面,因为时间也是排名规则的组成部分,所以下载bot并未拥有太大的优势。另一方面,我们的游戏是基于12小时游戏玩法进行设计。

这便引导着我们去相信排名规则能够直接推动无限制,具有竞争性的游戏或沙盒游戏的发展,而不是受故事驱动的游戏或具有有限时间的游戏。

附赠程序并不能提升排名

我们在工作室偶然看到了一篇Imangi Studios描述有关该内容的文章(2010年):

http://www.imangistudios.com/2010/03/gifting-apps-new-promotion-tool-for.html

就像文章中所提到的,分发你的游戏将起到很好的推广效应,因为那些免费获得游戏的玩家将向自己的好友宣传游戏。这也是一种传统的市场营销策略。我们也获得了与Imangi Studios相同的发现,包括Visa/Mastercard的阻碍。

我们必须更加具有创造性,因为iTunes 11不允许用户打印礼物兑换码并透露电子邮件。我们不得不退回iTunes 10.2从而才能生成代码。这花费了几个小时的时间,并且因为不能使用突出/复制/粘帖等方法,这一过程也显得非常乏味。鉴于这是我们的第一款游戏,我们希望自己所认识的所有人都能尝试看看:包括好友,家人,导师,老师等等。最终我们决定为国际媒体保留促销码,并在美国iTunes商店进行赠送。

重要的是,如果你不知道促销码是国际化的,你在每次更新时便只能获得50个,玩家也不能留下评级。

iTunes的附赠程序不能用于不同商店中,也就是你不能购买一个美国附赠程序而将其赠与在加拿大或英国的其他人。所以我们必须在其它iTunes商店中找到能够帮忙的朋友。

我们之所以会提起这一点是因为它刚好应对了之前的假设。再一次地,我们也未验证时间是否真的会影响App Store中的排名。以下是我们在相同时间框中的排名情况:

rank history(from gamasutra)

rank history(from gamasutra)

因为我们的游戏是基于12小时以上的游戏玩法,所以真心喜欢游戏的玩家会玩游戏超过3至5天。这也再次验证了我们的假设,因为在3至5天时间里看到这种“影子推测”的同时,我们也发现游戏销量正在稳步下滑。但是因为我们未拥有足够的数据也未使用苹果算法,所以这一假设不能得到证实,但这却是我们最好的猜测了。

我们想要与其他具有同样想法或拥有关于这种猜测的反面数据的开发者进行交流。

我们关于排名的想法

对于活跃的手机应用来说,围绕着游戏时间应该是个不错的理念,并且能够帮助它们摆脱下载bot,但是但却不能有效地应用于游戏中。

计算游戏时间将导致开发者不能创造出简短/固定长度的游戏体验。这也是为何许多高质量付费游戏仍然待在主机或PC上的一大原因。

赠送应用具有一定的意义:虽然苹果将收取30%的利益,但这却是非常传统的市场营销方法。如此算来30%也只有0.59美元,我们将其当成一种市场营销费用记录了下来。

我们是否还会创造另一款RPG?当然!

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

Effect of Sessions and App Gifting on Nameless AppStore Ranks

by James Liu

This is the third in a multi-part blog about our first game “Nameless: the Hackers RPG”. You can read our first two posts here:

Gamasutra Blog:

Breaking In – Nameless the Hackers RPG

Ranking Metrics for “Nameless” Premium iOS RPG with no IAP

This topic is a continuation of the previous post, talking about the ranking metrics of our boot strapped marketing attempts. By no-means did we excel or make it big, it was just okay.

Good news is that we still feel that the mobile touch screen interface still has a tremendous amount of potential. Secondly, our sales information lead us to believe that there exists an under served market for premium games on the AppStore.

Nameless: the Hackers RPG for iOS

iTunes Link: http://nth.box.cat

Reviews & Mentions: http://box-cat.com/

First, an important disclaimer.

AppStore Ranking Optimization

AppStore Rank Optimization is similar to Search Engine Optimization; it is never solved. Its a battle between quality search results against products trying to gain visibility.

While doing our homework, we found many “services” which offered a guaranteed rank boosts for a “marketing fee”. Digging deep into the Internet, we found articles about download bots farms, rating bot farms, user-rewarded reviews (cash), user-rewarded downloads (cash), and etc… This was definitely discouraging since we know it hurts the industry and we don’t have the funds to compete.

Note: We do not promote exploits; we think they are bad for the industry. However having knowledge and spreading awareness is important. Not all marketing services are exploits, it’s hard to tell the difference.

When you are approached by a marketing company, be sure to ask about how they acquire users. Don’t throw your money away. Coming from the security industry, bot-farms that hook into official services (like the AppStore) are hard to track but easy to punish. Some of the articles we found talked about getting banned from the AppStore. It’s just not worth it.

Anyhow, back to metrics. =)

Play Sessions may affect AppStore Rank

While reviewing our data, we were delighted to see what might seem like “play sessions” making a difference. We’re not validated on this concept, but it’s what we’re extrapolating. The idea of ranking being affected by actual players playing the game rather than rank-buy downloads is better, not perfect, but much better.

At first we started to notice some odd ranking behavior after our sales started to level out. The odd behavior was a jump in rank each morning. It would jump up, then slowly decrease throughout the day. Then pop! It’s up 10-15 ranks in the morning again. We debated internally and figured it’s probably because our game is an RPG. We love RPGs, so we felt most RPG players play at night when they have downtime. Our assumption is that the nightly sessions were boosting us back up in Ranking.

Here are a few daily hour-by-hour graphs that show session play vs. new users:

We could be wrong, perhaps AppStore just re-computes rank at night, but what we observe is that our sales were pretty even for each day while still exhibiting this awkward up/down behavior, specifically in the evenings and across midnight.

This is however was a doubled-edged sword for Nameless. On one-hand, download bots don’t get a heavy advantage since sessions are also part of the formula. On the other, our game was designed for 12 hours of game play.

This leads us to believe that the ranking formulas may directly promote unlimited-play, competitive, or sandbox games rather than story driven narratives or games with limited play-time.

Gift Apps Don’t help Rank

We ran into this while we were doing our homework; a great article about it from 2010 by Imangi Studios:

http://www.imangistudios.com/2010/03/gifting-apps-new-promotion-tool-for.html

As noted, giving away your game as a promotion has a great effect since those that received it for free are more likely to tell their friends. This is also a very traditional marketing strategy. We had the exact same findings as Imangi Studios, including the Visa/Mastercard blocks.

We had to get a bit creative since iTunes 11 doesn’t allow you to print out gift redeem codes and asks you for emails. We had to downgrade to iTunes 10.2 so we could generate codes. It took several hours and was very tedious to cross-stare-type-codes since you can’t highlight/copy/paste from iTunes. Since this is our first game, we wanted everyone we know to play it: Friends, family, mentors, teachers, etc… With four of us, we decided to save the promo codes for international media and use our US iTunes store for the gifting.

Important if you didn’t know, promo codes are international, you only get 50 per update, and players are not allow to leave ratings.

iTunes gift apps are locked to store, you can’t buy a US gift app and give it to anyone in Canada or the UK. We had to find friends willing to help for these other iTunes stores.

We bring this up because it plays into our assumption about sessions. Again, we’re not validated that sessions definitely play a factor in the AppStore Ranks. Here’s our rank history over the same time frame.

Since our game is a 12+ hours campaign, players that were jazzed about it might play it over 3-5 days. This plays into our assumption again since we can see a steady decrease in our sales while somehow seeing this “shadow projection” over 3-5 days. It’s not verifiable since we don’t have enough data and don’t have access to Apple’s algorithms, but it’s our best guess.

Would love to compare notes with any other developers that also see this or have counter-data about sessions.

Our Thoughts on Ranking

Sessions seems like a great idea for on-the-go mobile applications and is probably a very affective way to derail download-bots, but it may not apply very well to games.

Counting sessions may discourage developers from making short/fixed length experiences. This may one reason why quality premium titles stay on consoles or PC.

Gifting your apps make a lot of sense: Apple takes 30%, but it’s a very traditional marketing method. The 30% was only $0.59 for each, we wrote it off as a marketing expense.

?Would we make another RPG? Yup!

Next Upcoming Topics

We have the following topics we’ll be also touching on in the next few days. It takes a while to make these, we’ll be posting every few days until we’re done.

We exhibited at GDC 2013 San Francisco

What we did at GDC: how it helped us and how it didn’t help us

Press lists, getting in contact with media

Our personal thoughts on the Premium iOS market(source:gamasutra)


上一篇:

下一篇: