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分析免费模式“统治制度”的内在逻辑

发布时间:2013-05-20 17:09:18 Tags:,,,

作者:Ramin Shokrizade

历史上的统治制度

统治制度的历史大概与人类的文明一样漫长。大概可以说,文明就是根据统治制度来定义的。古代的统治制度往往导致巨大的财富分配不均,因为君主和其他贵族占有绝大部分的国家财富。维持这种财富不均的代价是巨大的,比如,随着这种不均加剧,统治阶级需要供养强大的军队。

因此,先进的国家往往通过两种方式维持统治制度。一种是缓和财富分配不均现象和遣散、复员军队。这会拉动人均产值,因为除非通过掠夺和压迫,军队本身并不增加任何收入。但如果国家受到周边军国主义国家的威胁,大概就不能这么做。

另一种是使统治手段更加隐蔽和狡猾。当一个人进入赌场时,如果他参与游戏,就有可能中大奖。当然事实上,赢家总是赌场——一个玩家赢了大奖只意味着其他玩家输了,这些细节真相通常被层层掩盖,使赌客无法理解赌博的真实运作情况。

freemium-play(from blog.games)

freemium-play(from blog.games)

当某人说自己“拥有”一套房子,但他们背上了30年的房贷,这与获得真正的房子所有权还很遥远。房子还在银行手上,银行允许购房者在这30年内居住在那套房子里,只要他们在这段时间里准时偿还5倍的贷款。如果购房者不能如期还款,那么真正的房子所有者(银行)就会将购房者赶出去,并且他之前所偿还的贷款也失效,即使这笔钱已经超过最初的借款额。

当然,当你“购买房子”或进赌场时,真正的关系当然没这么简单,因为这些是以某些参与者付出代价而使其他参与者获益的统治制度。统治制度越是复杂,就容易隐藏;特别是多亏了科技的不断发展。如果收税员必须每月上门收税,那么这个制度看起来就像封建主义制度。而有了现代科技,税收是通过银行帐户每月自动缴纳,再也不需要人力介入。

这就让现代社会的人以为自己是“自由的”。虽然他们可能确实慢慢地获得更多自由(可能让其他人付出代价),这取决于地区和社会地位而有所不同,但因为本文的目的,详细的讨论就不必要了。

统治的动态

人们通常接受有一定程度的统治。他们欢迎统治。不受统治时,人们反而会觉得不知所措。因此,他们能忍受一定程度的统治,但如果这个统治“过分”了,他们就会造反。为了更好地解释这是怎么回事,我必须先介绍两个术语:

统治的可见度(VOC):这表示参与者可以在多大程序上感觉到的统治制度的存在。如果A直接导致D,那么VOC就相当高了。你可以通过增加中间步骤来降低VOC,从而模糊A与D之间的关系。所以,A到D之间的关系就变成A到B再到C再到D,然后A与D之间的统治关系就变得更加隐蔽和有效了。

统治的容忍度(TTC):这表示参与者对统治制度的容忍程度。人们更能接受某些形式的统治,更不能容忍另一些形式的统治,并且他们的TTC会随时间变化,特别是当他们更加熟悉他们当初并不理解的统治的复杂形式时。我再次利用上述的“A到D”的例子。有些人会非常快地发现A与D之间的关系,即使它被二者之间的多个中介所掩盖。而有些人可能永远不会发现A与D的关系。

简而言之:

如果VOC<TTC,那么统治将顺利进行

如果VOC>TTC,那么统治将被拒绝

像对待疾病一样对待消费者

在以前,游戏消费者会花60美元从A到达D,也就是直接花60美元购买他们想要的游戏。这就是10年以前的游戏的黑暗时代。现在,我们的做法是:

A —> B (免费)

B—>C (1美元)

C—>D (500美元)

因为我们从A与B之间包含一个“免费”步骤,所以我们叫这个模式为“免费”。第二步,从B到C,我们称之为“引诱”,因为我们知道一旦消费者开始花钱,无论花的钱多少,他们都有继续花钱的可能。我把第三步称作“套牢”,因为一旦我们发现不能识别C与D关系和A和D关系的消费者,他们就可能被无情地剥削了。这些玩家有相当高的TTC,无论是什么原因,至少在一开始是这样的。另外,通过层层掩蔽我们的赢利手段,我们尽可能地降低VOC。这样,如果我们可以保持一些消费者的VOC低于TTC,那么我们就可以在他们意识到真实情况前,通过他们获得大量收益。

我们可以用现实的例子类比这个情况。也就是我们用抗生素作为武器抗击疾病。在疾病出现变体以前,我们用抗生素消灭它们。如果你可以通过这种方式消灭所有新疾病,那么这个办法就可以长期使用。问题是,有些疾病幸存下来,对抗生素产生抗性。最终,唯一的新抗生素可能会把我们自己也消灭了,那到时,我们就输掉了这场抗击疾病的战争,即使在那以前,我们已经多次战胜那种疾病。另一个办法是,消灭疾病的根源,但美国不支持这么做。这就是为什么我们比其他国家在医疗服务上花的钱更少。

所以,在我的类比中,为了在最短的时间内以最简单的方式挣钱,我们其实是拿强制的免费模型(抗生素)喂我们的消费者(疾病)。借此,我们在早期确实取得了一些胜利。在这里,我尤其要点名社交游戏开发者。手机游戏很快也采用相同的战术。

注意,我们现在使用的强制免费模式从2011年起,在亚洲地区得到发展和反复使用。这个模式在亚洲颇为成功(现在仍然很流行),因为那里的消费者的平均TTC很高。而在欧美地区,我们的平均TTC更低得多,这是因为我们对待消费者的方式一直在降低TTC。

因为消费者可以选择不购买他们认为带有强制性的产品,考虑到他们的TTC正在降低,这种商业策略的最终结果是,强制免费模式的终结。这股趋势在亚洲将持续得更久,因为亚洲消费者的初始TTC更高。如果要使强制免费模式在那里消失,唯一的方法大概就是当地政府宣布其非法,不过这个可能性不大。

注意,免费模式本身并非强制性的。免费模式可能大大增加消费者的权力。完全有可能提前向消费者解释你计划如何向他们销售。我还认为,低TTC的消费者往往比高TTC的消费者更富有。因此,我们的问题不只是在强制免费模式下,消费者的可转化率接近于0%,而是随着这个百分比降低,我们越来越接近消费者市场中不富有的一端。这个群体可能仍然有赢利价值,并且在亚洲市场可以继续维持几年,但无法阻止这个模式走向灭亡。(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

Systems of Control in F2P

by Ramin Shokrizade

Historical Systems of Control

Systems of control have been around as long as civilization. One could argue that a civilization is defined by its systems of control. Ancient systems of control tended to promote massive wealth disparity, with a King and associated nobles controlling the vast majority of a nation’s wealth. Maintaining such wealth disparities is very expensive, as the military power required to maintain them gets geometrically greater as the disparity increases.

Thus advanced societies have tended to go one of two routes to maintain control. One way is to reduce the wealth disparity and demobilize their military. This yields greater per capita productivity because militaries themselves do not produce income except through pillaging or coercion. If you are under threat by a militaristic neighbor, this may not be an option.

The other way to maintain control is by making the control less obvious, more subtle. When a person goes to a casino, they are offered the opportunity of empowerment in the form of a jackpot if they play. Of course the fact that the house always wins over time, and that if one player wins big that means a lot of other players lost, these details are often obscured by the number of layers you need to understand to see what is really going on.

When a person says they “own” their own house, but they have a 30 year mortgage, the situation is far from ownership. The bank owns the house, and the bank allows the occupants to stay there during the 30 year term if they agree to perfectly repay typically 5 times the loan amount during the term. If the loan is not repaid perfectly, then the real owner (the bank) will evict the occupant and any funds invested by said occupant are forfeit, even if they far exceed the original value of the loan.

Of course the true relationship is never explained like this when you “buy a house” or visit a casino, because these are systems of control that benefit others at the expense of the participant. The more complex the terms of the control, the easier it is to hide it. Technology is constantly making this easier. If a collector had to come to your house every month to collect your tithe then the system would look and feel like Feudalism. Modern technology allows the tithe to be extracted painlessly from one’s bank account automatically every month without any sort of human interaction ever being needed.

This provides the citizens of modern societies the feeling that they are “free”. While they may indeed slowly be gaining more freedoms (possibly at the expense of others), this varies by region and caste, and a full discussion is not necessary for the purposes of this paper.

Dynamics of Control

People generally enjoy a certain amount of control. They welcome it. Without it they feel disoriented, uncomfortable. Thus they will tolerate control to a point, but will rebel if the control becomes “excessive”. To better explain what is going on, I am going to introduce two terms:

Visibility of Control (VoC): This is how obvious the controlling system is to participants. If A leads to D directly, then VoC will be high. You can reduce VoC by adding intermediary steps that cloud the relationship. So by having A go to B go to C go to D, then the mechanism of control between point A and D becomes more subtle and effective.

Tolerance to Control (TtC): How much control a participant can tolerate, or even crave, represents their TtC. Some people are more tolerant to some kinds of control than others, and their TtC can change over time, especially as they become more familiar with complex forms of control that they may not understand at first. The “A to D” example above is an example of this. Some people will recognize the relationship between A and D very quickly, even with a number of intermediaries masking it. Others may never figure out the relationship.

So here is what I am getting at:

if VoC < TtC then transaction proceeds

if VoC > TtC then transaction is rejected

Treating Consumers Like a Disease

Imagine that in the old days a game consumer would spend $60 to go from A to D, and get a game they could do whatever they wanted with. You know, back in the dark ages of gaming, like 10 years ago. Now we do something like this instead:

A —> B (free)

B—>C ($1)

C—>D ($500)

Because we include a “free” step, from A to B, we call this model “Free to Play”. The second step, from B to C we can describe as the “Lure”, because we know that once a consumer spends any amount of money, no matter how small, they are then much more likely to keep spending. I will call the third step the “Hook” because once we find a consumer who cannot recognize the relationship between C and D, and thus A and D, they can be farmed fairly mercilessly. These players have very high TtC, for whatever reason, at least initially. Also, by layering our monetization we are attempting to lower our VoC as much as possible. Thus if we can keep VoC below the TtC of enough customers, and milk them rapidly before they realize what is going on, we can make a lot of money.

There is a “real world” system that mirrors this very well. It is our battle against disease where we use antibiotics as our weapons. By hitting diseases with new antibiotics we can wipe them out before they have a chance to adapt. If you could wipe out every last disease this way, this approach would work long term. The problem is that some diseases survive and over time they become more resistant to our antibiotics. Eventually the only new antibiotics available to us might kill us too, and at that point we lose this war despite winning so many battles. The other alternative, removing the source of the disease, is not receiving serious consideration in the USA. This is why we get less bang for our buck in medical care than any other country.

By attempting to trick our consumers into paying much more than the value of the product they are receiving, we are angering our customers. Over time their TtC goes down, and they become much faster at identifying the “A to B to C to D” mechanism. Our industry is very rapidly adopting a strategy where we reduce product quality (and cost to produce) but attempt to maximize our income by adopting an “A to B to C to D” version of F2P. While I could call this “layered F2P”, I think I am going to just call this Coercive F2P.

So in my analogy we are feeding Coercive F2P (the antibiotics) to our consumers (the disease) in order to make money in the shortest and easiest way possible. This has led to some early victories against the consumer. Here I will point to pretty much the entirety of social network game makers, with rare exceptions. Mobile is quickly following the same battle plan.

Note that the current Coercive F2P models that we use now were developed and iterated in Asia starting in 2001. There were successful there (and still are) because on average the consumers there have a much higher TtC. In the West, our average TtC is much lower and due to the way we are treating our consumers their TtC is getting even lower.

Because consumers have the option of not purchasing products that they perceive as coercive, given their TtC (which is lowering), the end result of this business strategy is the extinction of Coercive F2P. This trend will take much longer in Asia because of their higher initial TtC. The only way it could not also happen in the East is if non-coercive business models were outlawed by the state, a situation that seems improbable.

Note that F2P is not in and of itself coercive. F2P is potentially incredibly empowering to our consumers. It is entirely possible to explain to customers up front how you plan to sell to them. I am also of the opinion that low TtC consumers tend to be more wealthy than high TtC consumers. Thus the issue is not only that the number of convertible consumers using Coercive F2P is approaching 0%, but that as that percent gets smaller, we are tapping the least wealthy tail of the consumer market. This group may give till it hurts, and do so profitably in the East for a few more years, but this whole approach is heading for extinction.(source:gamasutra)


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