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马克·平克斯分析游戏盈利的细节内容

发布时间:2013-07-30 08:43:12 Tags:,,,,

作者:Will Luton

在这篇关于新书《Free-to-Play: Making Money From Games You Give Away》的摘录中,咨询师Will Lyton与前Zynga首席执行官马克·平克斯关于游戏盈利的细节内容展开了交谈。

Will Luton:可以说是免费游戏创造了Zynga。为什么这是一种如此成功的业务模式?

马克·平克斯:2007年,当我们创建了Zynga时,我认为游戏只是在谷歌出现前的搜索。这是一种业务模式,是一个逐渐成熟的产业。但是那时候游戏甚至还未真正开始发展。

谷歌也拥有相同的经历:这就像是出现了第15种或第25种搜索引擎,而人们所熟知的引擎已经消失了。

Mark Pincus(from hauteliving)

Mark Pincus(from hauteliving)

但是谷歌却向我证实了搜索将在我们的生活中扮演着更重要的角色,显然,该公司带动了这场搜索革命。

同样地,我认为将游戏与大众市场活动隔离开来的一大元素便是它们需要吸引更多玩家的注意。我不相信人们没有游戏的需求,我更愿意相信是游戏门槛太高了。就像许多人是因为游戏成本太高而放弃游戏,而不是因为需要担负更高的承诺,不管他们面对的是主机游戏,在线游戏,下载游戏还是网页游戏。最终证明,游戏在很多方面看来很像漫画书,就像有些人会想办法找出漫画书店去购买漫画。但是绝大多数人尽管喜欢漫画,也不会愿意花大量时间坐着看漫画。

但是如果在报纸上刊登了一篇四格漫画,当他们在偶然情况下发现这一漫画时,便会高兴地将其带到日常生活中。所以如果我们能够降低游戏门槛的话会怎样:去掉定价,去掉下载,去掉搜索,去掉导航,甚至去掉学习和教程等等。

一开始我便说过,如果你需要点击三次才知道目标内容以及为什么需要拥有它,你便不可能花钱进行购买。

如果我们能够将游戏放在玩家触手可及之处,让他们可以免费获得游戏,轻松理解游戏,那么玩家便会愿意玩游戏。除此之外,我们发现如果能够缩短游戏长度,让玩家可以无需长居于此,让游戏具有社交性,那么玩家便会愿意不断回到游戏中。

很早以前我便意识到,如果我们想要将准入障碍降到0,我们就需要使用免费模式。不管怎样的定价都不可能低于免费。随后我们可以开始提供给玩家一些有价值的内容。我们开始攻击所谓的游戏是浪费时间的理念,我们可以传达投资回报率(ROI),如社交ROI或基于时间的ROI。

现在如果你能够给我们15分钟的时间,我们便能够提供给你技能。我们可以提供进程。我们还可以提供不断增强的关系,而不只是娱乐。

所以我认为这是推动着我们为了今后十年的发展不断创新与完善的基本价值范式,因为你可以将障碍和成本降为0。也许当你做到了这点,你便可以通过0点而开始进入正类别,即贷方类别。你可以在一边摆脱借方,同时你也可以开始在另一边添加贷方。所以我所意识到的是,在某一时刻你会让人们尝试着去玩游戏。

最后,如果你真的作为一个产业取得了巨大的成功,你便需要与其它生活活动相竞争。这里有一定程度的娱乐,但是人们却没有足够的时间在自己的生活中享受娱乐,所以我们是否能够想办法让他们在观看电视/电影,或做其它事情的同时执行多种任务并玩游戏?我们能否确保较小的游戏规模而将其整合在这些发现时刻中?我们能否确保较小的游戏规模而呈现在当前的手机设备中,从而去丰富你那本来只有工作而毫无娱乐的日常生活。

现在(我也这么对Zynga的新员工说),智能手机让我们可以在醒着的每一分每一秒中都具有生产力。大多数生产力都是以电子邮件,文本信息,一对一交流,社交媒体或浏览与网页浏览的形式呈现出来。

这便意味着我们做任何其它事的机会成本也会不断上升。在20世纪50年代,60年代,70年代或80年代时,你下班回家时可能会携带着一个公文包,里面夹着一份可随时拿出来阅读的复印内容,那时的你并不能轻松地拿出手机玩游戏,所以你并不多产。而现在你却可以在任何清醒的时刻充满生产力,但是这种发展作为一种媒介除了会带给我们帮助,也有可能伤害到我们。

一方面,这能带来帮助是因为存在许多我们可以适应的时刻,因为我们并不局限于电视或PC设备上。另一方面,我们也能与其它论坛的生产力进行竞争。作为一个产业,我们将消灭单方面的视频娱乐,除非它能变小或趋于多任务,否则它便会不断向你索取更多。

从现在开始,我们便能够提供给你一些超越娱乐的内容;例如,我们可以让你变成世界级的扑克玩家,即可以参加世界性的扑克比赛;我们可以让你结交新朋友,结婚,或者从许久未联系的亲戚中获得什么等等。

Luton:比起付费内容,免费游戏对于玩家来说是更好的交易?

平克斯:免费游戏当然是一种更好的交易,特别是当你在面对90%至98%的玩家从未消费的现实情况时。但同时你也必须记住,对于大多数未消费玩家来说,这并不是一种更好的交易,因为他们之前就未曾购买过付费内容。

所以我并不相信免费游戏和社交游戏会真正搞垮电子游戏产业。就像我不相信Craigslist(游戏邦注:一个网上大型免费分类广告网站)会扼杀报纸一样。我认为它只是在自己的范围内做得很好。报纸可能会摧毁自己,但是Craigslist和eBay却是对它们有帮助的。它们会扩展人们在分类广告中的参与度,并从中看到更多价值。

免费游戏对整个游戏产业的影响都是积极的,因为它将游戏推向或重新推向数百万玩家面前。我们很难说这是否是对等的。但说实话,我真的认为免费游戏对于人们来说是一种很好的交易。

Luton:你认为创造一款优秀的免费游戏的关键是什么?

平克斯:我不知道。但是对于我来说,比起如何创造出一款优秀的免费游戏,我更加重视如何创造出一款优秀且畅销的游戏。我之所以会这么想是因为免费游戏在大多数情况下(但并非总是)都需要成为畅销游戏。

现在,我们可以拥有不同的大众市场层次。就像你可以拥有这些纸牌战斗游戏和CCG游戏。我的意思是你可以拥有一款具有上百万玩家的游戏,他们可以为开发者创造出巨大的利益。

但是上百万玩家便会构成一款大型游戏。这便意味着你需要带着免费游戏去瞄准巨大的玩家群体。而当免费模式作用于只能获得10万玩家的游戏时,我才会真正感到惊讶。所以游戏必须面向大规模市场,不管它是硬核游戏还是利基游戏。

如何才能创造出一款优秀的游戏?首先它必须适应大众市场的营销模式,这便意味着它必须能够进行病毒式扩展,或通过广告与其它推广方式进行传播。这便意味着它需要快速向玩家证明自己及其用户粘性。当然了,它并不会变成主机游戏那样的计划性购买。

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

Interview: Mark Pincus

by Will Luton

In this extract from his new book Free-to-Play: Making Money From Games You Give Away, consultant Will Luton speaks to former Zynga CEO Mark Pincus – who stepped down last month – about the finer points of games monetisation.

Will Luton: Free-to-play has ostensibly allowed Zynga to exist. Why is it such a successful business model?

Mark Pincus: In 2007, when we launched Zynga, I thought that games were like search before Google. It was a business, an industry that was considered mature and over. And games hadn’t even gotten started.

Google had the same experience: It was like the fifteenth or the twenty-fifth search engine to appear and believed search was already over, or so everybody thought.

But Google showed us that search could be so much more useful in our lives that the company ignited, obviously, the search revolution.

Similarly, I believed that what had kept games from being a mass-market activity was they asked too much of the users, of the players. And I didn’t believe it was a lack of demand from people to play. I thought the bar was too high to play. And so, like so many other people I had to kind of give up game playing for a while, because the cost was too high, not so much the economic cost, but the commitment was too high, whether it was consoles or even online, downloading, or even going to a website. It turns out that games, in a lot of ways, are like comic books, in the sense that some people will seek out a comic book store and buy comics. But most people, even if they enjoy comics, can’t rationalise spending time during the day sitting with a comic book.

However, if there’s a comic strip in the newspaper that they trip over, they can enjoy it, find it through serendipity, and add it to their day. So, I thought, what if we could lower the barriers to play: Take out the price, take out the download, take out searching and navigating to it, and even take out the on-ramp of having to learn it and having to go through tutorials and everything to play a game.

In the beginning I said, if you need more than three clicks to know what it is and why you want it, it’s not going to make it in the real consumer market.

What we saw was that if we put games where the people were, made them free, and made them easily understandable, people would play. Beyond that we saw that if we made them short session, made them not live and not require live engagement, and made them social so players wouldn’t just try them, they would stay and play.

Fairly early on I realised that when you take the barriers down to zero, you make them free. We can’t make it any cheaper than free. But then after that we could start to actually offer people value back. We then started attacking the concept that games are a waste of time and we could deliver what I think of as ROI (return on investment), as a social ROI or an ROI on your time.

Now, if you give us 15 minutes, we can give you skills. We can give you progression. We can give you enhanced relationships, not just entertainment.

So I thought that there was this fundamental value paradigm and equation that we could keep innovating on and improving for decades to come, because you can get the barriers and the cost down to zero. Then maybe once that’s done, you can go past zero and start going into the plus category, the credit category. You can get rid of the debits on one side and start adding credits on the other. So what I realised was that at some point you’re getting people to try games and to play games.

Eventually, if you’re really successful as an industry, you’re competing with whole other life activities. There’s a level of entertainment, OK? But people have less and less time for entertainment in their lives, so can we get people to multitask and play games while they’re watching TV or movies, or doing other things? Can we make play so bite-sized that you can put it in these found moments? Can we make play so bite-sized that there’s, with mobile now, so many moments in your day that you’re currently filling with pure productivity, not pleasure and entertainment.

Right now – and I say this to our new hires at Zynga – smartphones allow us to be productive every waking moment of the day. Most of that productivity comes in the form of e-mail, text messaging, one-on-one communication, social media or browsing, and web browsing.

It means that also our opportunity cost of doing anything other than being on a smartphone has gone up. So in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, or 80s you would come home from work with a briefcase containing printouts to read, and other than picking up the phone and bothering somebody, you couldn’t be that productive. Now you can be productive every waking moment, which both helps and hurts us as a medium.

On one hand, it helps us because there’s so many more moments that we can also fit into, because we’re not tethered to the TV or the PC. On the other hand, we’re also competing with other forums’ productivity. As an industry, we will kill it against one-way video entertainment, because it asks too much of you, until it also gets bite-sized and multi-taskable.

Where we go from here is that we could start to give you something that’s beyond entertainment; for instance, we could make you a world-class poker player that could compete in a world series of poker; let you make a new friend, get married, or get out of calling your long lost relative.

Luton: Is free-to-play a better deal for players than paid content?

Pincus: Well, free-to-play is for sure a better deal, especially when you think about the fact that anywhere between 90 and 98 per cent of players never pay. So it is a better deal, but you have to remember that for most of those people it may not be a better deal, because they weren’t buying the paid content.

So I don’t believe that free-to-play and free and social games have actually cannibalised the video game industry. Just like I don’t believe that Craigslist killed newspapers. I think it was doing just fine on its own. Newspapers were killing themselves, and Craigslist and eBay actually were good for them. They expanded peoples’ participation in classified ads and people saw value.

Free-to-play gaming has been a net positive for the whole gaming industry, because it’s introduced gaming or reintroduced it to millions of people. So it’s hard to say it’s apples-to-apples, that it’s a better deal on that. But yes, I think that free-to-play gaming is a great deal for people.

Luton: What do you think is the key to making a free-to-play game a good free-to-play game?

Pincus: I don’t know. To me it’s not what makes it a good free-to-play game; it’s what makes it a good mass-market game. The reason that’s the real point for me is that a free-to-play game for the most part, but not always, needs to be a mass-market game.

Now, we can have different gradations of mass market. You could have these Card Battler and CCG games. I mean you can have games that only have an audience of a million people, and they can make very good money for a developer.

But a million people constitute a big game. To say it could be as small as a million people is saying how big an audience you have to focus on with free. I’d be surprised to see a free-to-play model work for games that only reached an audience of 100,000 people. So the game has to be pretty mass market, even if it’s a hardcore game or a niche.

What makes it great? It has to have an easy, compelling on-ramp. Part of what makes it great is that it has to fit within a mass-market marketing model, which means that it has to be able to spread virally or spread through advertisements or some other kind of promotion. And that means that it needs to prove itself and its engagement for people extremely quickly. It’s probably not going to be a planned purchase, like a console game.(source:develop-online)


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