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从独立开发者视角看F2P游戏的发行

发布时间:2013-09-10 16:32:42 Tags:,,,,

作者:Tim Wicksteed

这是独立视角系列文章中的第三部分。在第一部分中我着眼于免费模式vs.付费困境,并决定我的第一款商业游戏《Ionage》为免费游戏。在第二部分中在注重F2P设计模式的执行和进化,并描述了我在《Ionage》的执行计划。

如今《Ionage》已经在一个多月前发行了,自那以后我便一直忙于推广,更新和分析等工作。所以在今天的第三部分内容中,我将从自己基于游戏发行的独立观点出发,专注于我所提议的F2P模式是如何执行的。

Ionage(from ionage.co.uk)

Ionage(from ionage.co.uk)

免费游戏——《Ionage》所采取的方式

《Ionage》中的应用内部购买的执行方式与大多数F2P游戏有所区别。尽管实际的执行与我在上篇文章中的计划有所偏差,但主要目标仍是相同的。我希望创造一个没有沉闷的刷任务机制,但却能够带给玩家消费理由的系统。

为了实现这一目标,《Ionage》并没有游戏内部货币,所有的IAP都是永久的一次性解锁。关键是,并不存在通过刷任务去打开内容的机制。我认为比起可消费的内容,永久性解锁能够带给玩家更真实的拥有感和价值感,并且除了消费没有其它替代方法也更能推动他们花钱。

关于这一战术的主要结果则是,限制了玩家的终身价值(LTV)。在《Ionage》,玩家的消费不可能超过9英镑,你可以花费2英镑便获得90%的游戏内容。这是故意的设计决策。我这么做的目的是为了明确我们是否能够创造一个IAP政策去推动更高的转换率和较低的LTV,因为比起少量支付较多金钱的玩家,我更希望能够从大量支付较少费用的玩家身上赚取利益。

为了知道它是如何发挥作用的,让我们深入研究相关数据。以下是2013年8月26日,即游戏发行后一个月的数据。

转换率——《Ionage》全世界的终身转换率为2.3%。还有一个有趣的现象是,我们有20%的用户基础是来自英国,并且这里的转换率为3.7%,甚至在过去一个月的平均值还超过了4%。这便说明了我们的永久性IAP策略对英国玩家具有很大的吸引力。

ARPPU——到目前为止,全世界的每付费用户平均收益为2.25英镑,而在美国平均每个玩家的消费是3.65英镑。有趣的是,尽管英国用户的转换率高于美国用户,但是他们的每付费用户消费却比美国用户少了28%,即为2.61英镑。

ARPU——到目前为止,全世界每用户平均收益(包括那些从未花过任何钱的玩家)为5便士。尽管ARPPU低于美国,英国用户的ARPU却为10便士。显然,英国更高的转换率弥补了其较低的每用户消费。俄罗斯拥有最低的ARPU,即0.22便士。比较看来,英国用户是它的45倍。我也拥有一些证据能够证明俄罗斯用户试图欺骗游戏自己做出了消费,即我的分析服务的数值与实际收益数据并不吻合。较低转换率并不是多大的问题,非付费玩家真正喜欢并愿意宣传你的游戏总比没有玩家来得好!

用户粘性——下图显示的是游戏发行后的日活跃用户(DAU)和DAU与当前安装的比例。这一图表深受每天加入游戏中的新玩家数值的影响。因此,我喜欢着眼于回头客,即避免受到推广活动的影响,并着眼于游戏是否真正能够留住用户的心。第二张图表便是关于几天以来的回头用户以及回头用户与当前安装的比例。

DAU over days(from gamasutra)

DAU over days(from gamasutra)

returning users over days(from gamasutra)

returning users over days(from gamasutra)

《Ionage》每天能够将10%的当前用户基础拉回游戏中。我认为这便说明游戏拥有较高的吸引力。考虑到用户基础每天都在提高,回头用户的数量也必须相应提高才能维持同样的百分比。这便暗示着游戏能够每天吸引玩家回到游戏中,而不只是一两次。

房间里的大象(游戏邦注:英国谚语,指代明明存在一个问题,却被人可以忽视)

因为《Ionage》是我的第一款商业游戏,也是我第一次接触F2P这个世界,所以我对这些参数已经很满意了。当你注意到我是一个单人团队,只需要支付一份工资和图像与音乐成本时,那么即使这些参数不能与畅销应用相比较,对我来说也是一个巨大的经济上的成功。

但是房间里却有只大象。到目前为止我所提到的都是百分比或平均值,而不是直接数字。但是你也许已经注意到了最后两个图表的用户数。不幸的是它们并未达到足够的数量!

事实上,尽管我相信参数非常强大,但是总体数字却不是如此。这时候的下载量不到8500;总体数字不足以维持专职开发。不过也有好消息,即这些数字一直在上升着,虽然速度并不是很快。

Ionage installs over days(from gamasutra)

Ionage installs over days(from gamasutra)

下图是有关同时期的游戏收益。7天的移动平均数显示,游戏每天大约能够赚得15英镑,到目前为止还没有任何迹象表明这一数值正在下降。

revenue over days(from gamasutra)

revenue over days(from gamasutra)

推广活动

所以如果用户获取是我的最大问题,这便会引发如下问题:我到底做了什么去获取用户,我该如何做才能获取更多用户?与大多数独立开发者在创造自己的首款游戏一样,我也会进行研究。我读了所有有关如何接近媒体的文章,并花了大量时间去编写邮件,联系世界各地的产业人士。以下是一些成功的故事:

之前提到的Ben的文章对新用户,日活跃用户和每日收益带来了巨大的影响。

我在几周前曾出现在Guy Cocker的Video Games Podcast上,并因此推动了我的游戏在接下来一周下载量的显著提升。

Stuart Dredge在自己于《卫报》网上版的定期专栏中提到了我的游戏,同时它还荣登“本周20款最优秀的Android应用”和“2013年最出色的50款Android游戏”。

游戏在一些Android评论网站上获得了推荐和表扬。

不幸的是游戏不能在我所瞄准的任何大型网络出版物中引起轰动:一个专注于硬核手机游戏,还有一个专注于独立游戏和大型手机游戏。不过说实话,我并未因为这些网站未推荐我的游戏感到失落。我理解新闻记者和编辑有自己的难处,当一封邮件出现在editors@onlinesite.com信箱中,他们总是很难将其从众多邮件中挑选出来。我所获得的建议是,将视线从公共邮箱中移开,专注于培养与个体新闻记者之间的亲密关系。

上周我通过谷歌的Adwords服务尝试了广告这一业务。尽管面对的是较小的样本(游戏邦注:我至为此花了10英镑),但是前景看来似乎不是很乐观。与专注于标语并只为实际点击花钱一样,在英国每用户获取成本已经超过1英镑了。尽管在获取用户时我很高兴能够看到10便士的ARPU,但这却不足以支付用户获取所需成本。如此看来我会被挤出这个有偿获取用户的市场。所以我不得不另辟蹊径去寻找用户。

新市场

我的首个前进目标是提高游戏某一版本在市场中的渗透率。为了做到这点我将游戏带到了三星应用商店,它们正在打造100%的独立开发者—-这是Chillingo的创始人的计划。我也认为将游戏作为面向平板电脑的游戏而带向亚马逊市场有可能取得不错的成绩,尽管那里的用户基础仍较小。我的游戏现在已经走向了韩国市场,我也想借此进军日本。从利益上来看(除了美国),这些国家都具有最大的Android市场,但是到目前为止我所看到的玩家却还不多。这便说明了日本和韩国的Android用户更喜欢玩基于它们本国语言的游戏。

尽管我也曾考虑过将游戏带向iOS,但是当你着眼于游戏当前的利益与移植成本时,你便很难做出这一决定。我将时刻监视着这一情况,如果在未来发现了价值性,我也会选择这么做。

新功能

提高用户数的最后一个选择便是往游戏中添加新功能。《Ionage》社区已经对多画面多人游戏模式,无尽模式和谷歌Play Game Services整合做出了正面的回应。但是基于当前的用户数去落实行动还是非常困难。所以我将专注于带有社交元素的功能/游戏模式去吸引更多用户来到游戏中,并通过现有的用户获取更多利益。

结论

专注于F2P执行的《Ionage》既有优势也有劣势。它拥有适度的转换率,但是ARPU却太低,不足以弥补用户获取成本。为了补偿这点,游戏需要通过社交机制去推动用户下载,但是我认为这正是游戏最大的缺陷所在。

我听到的最糟糕的评价应该是用户抱怨游戏是花钱就能获胜的游戏,但是也有善良的用户反驳了这一观点。基于这点,我愿意继续开发IP,并相信如果我能够找到合适的平台/市场营销策略/业务计划,我便能够获得巨大的成功。

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

An Indie Perspective: Launching a F2P game

by Tim Wicksteed

This is the third article in a series of indie perspectives. In the first I looked at the Free to Play (F2P) vs Premium Dilemma and decided that Ionage, my first commercial title as an indie developer, would be F2P. In the next article I looked at implementing and evolving the F2P design pattern, here I described the manner in which I planned to implement F2P in Ionage.

Ionage has now been released, as of a month ago, and since then I have been busy promoting, updating and analysing. In this third article I’m going to give my indie perspective (or should that be retrospective) on the game’s launch, with a focus on how my proposed F2P implementation performed in anger.

Free to Play – The Ionage Way

The IAPs in Ionage work a little differently to the majority of F2P games. Although the exact implementation is a little different to the plan I laid out in my last article, the main goals are the same. I wanted to create a system which had no tedious grinding mechanics but which still gave the player a good reason to spend.

To achieve this Ionage has no in-game currency, all IAPs are permanent one-time unlocks. Crucially, there is no way to grind your way to unlocking anything covered by an IAP. My argument for this is that permanent unlocks give the player a greater sense of ownership/value than consumable ones and that with no alternative but to pay there is a good reason for the player to spend.

The major consequence of this tactic though, as spotted by Ben Sipe in his Improving Freemium Design article looking at Ionage, is that this strategy limits the Life-Time Value (LTV) of the player. In Ionage, it’s not currently possible to spend more than £9 and really you can get 90% out of the game for just £2. This was a deliberate, if potentially misguided, design decision. The aim of my bizarre experiment was to see if I could create an IAP policy that promotes higher conversion rates but lower LTV because, quite simply, I’d rather make my money from a lot of people paying a little than a few people paying a lot.

To see how it went let’s delve into the statistics. The following is true as of 26/08/13, exactly one month after launch.

Conversion rates – Ionage’s lifetime conversion rate worldwide is 2.3% which seems to be in the middle of the pack quoted for Android games, albeit almost two years ago, on GamesBrief. An interesting addendum is that in the UK, where 20% of my users are based, the conversion rate comes in at 3.7% and at times over the last month has averaged over 4%. This suggests to me that my policy of permanent IAPs is particularly attractive to the UK mindset.

ARPPU – So far, the worldwide Average Revenue Per Paying User is £2.25 and is led by the USA who spend £3.65 on average. Interestingly, while UK users convert at a higher percentage than the USA, they spend 28% less on average at £2.61 per user.

ARPU – So far, the worldwide average lifetime revenue per user (including those that pay nothing at all) is 5p. Despite having a lower ARPPU than the USA, UK users top this statistic at 10p per user. Clearly the higher conversion rate in the UK makes up for the slightly lower spend per user. In terms of lowest ARPU, that prize goes to Russian users at 0.22p. To put that into context, that’s 45 times less than my UK users. I also have some fairly compelling evidence that Russian users have managed to trick the game into thinking purchases have been made, as the numbers from my analytics service don’t match with the actual revenue statistics. It’s not a huge problem given the very low conversion rates and a non-paying player who enjoys and publicises your game is better than no player at all!

Engagement – The graph below shows the game’s Daily Active Users (DAU) as well as DAU/current installs since launch. These graphs are heavily affected by the number of new users joining the game each day. Therefore, I prefer to look at returning users as this removes the effects of promotional activity and just looks at how effective the game is at engaging with and holding onto its users. The graph below it shows returning users over days as well as the ratio of returning users to current installs.

Ionage is able to pretty consistently pull back 10% of its current user base into the game each day to play. I believe this suggests that the game has highly addictive qualities. Given that the user base is increasing each day, the number of returning users has to increase as well to maintain the same percentage. This suggests that the game is able to keep people coming back day after day, not just once or twice.

The elephant in the room

Given that Ionage is my first commercial title as well as my first foray into the world of F2P, I’m pretty happy with the metrics. When you note that I’m a one-man team with just a single salary plus artwork and music costs to pay for, the metrics don’t need to compete with the number one grossing app on the chart for the game to be a financial success for me.

However there is an elephant in the room. So far I’ve been talking mainly about percentages or averages rather than straight figures. However you might have noticed the number of users on the last two graphs. No, unfortunately they are not in thousands!

The truth is that while I believe the metrics are strong, the overall numbers are not. At just under 8500 downloads at this point; the total numbers are just not large enough to sustain full-time development. The good news is, at least so far, the numbers are still going up, just not very quickly.

The revenue over the equivalent period is plotted on the graph below. The 7 day moving average shows that the game makes roughly £15 per day and so far isn’t showing any warning signs that this is dropping off.

Promotional activities

So if user acquisition is my biggest issue, it begs the question: what have I done to gain users and how can I get more? Well like most indies bringing out their first game, I did my research. I read all the articles about how to contact the press and I spent time crafting emails and contacting people from all over the industry. Here are the success stories:

Ben’s great article that I mentioned earlier led to a triple whammy record of new users, daily active users and revenue the day it came out

I appeared on Guy Cocker’s Video Games Podcast a couple of weeks ago which seemed to give a modest boost to downloads over the following week

The game was spotted by Stuart Dredge in his regular column for the Guardian online newspaper and was featured in both the ‘20 Best Android Apps this Week’ and ‘50 best Android games from 2013’

The game was featured and critically praised by a few Android review sites

The game seems to be almost universally enjoyed by my users with 87% opting to leave a 5 star review

Unfortunately the game failed to make a splash in any of the big online publications that I targeted: One which focused on hardcore mobile titles, one that focused on indie games and a large mobile gaming site. Let me make it very clear, I don’t begrudge any of these sites for not featuring the game. I know journalists and editors have a difficult job and when an email appears in the general editors@onlinesite.com inbox then it’s tough to separate the wheat from the chaff. The advice I’ve been given since is to forget the publically available ‘catch-all’ inboxes and concentrate on cultivating selective, more personal relationships with individual journalists. If there are any journalists reading this then feel free to drop me a line if you are keen on the strategy or Android scenes. I’d love to hear from you.

Over the last week I’ve been experimenting with advertising via Google’s Adwords service. Although based on a relatively small sample size – I’ve only spent just over £10 – the outlook doesn’t look good. Even with tightly focused slogans and only paying for actual clicks, the cost per acquisition has been well over £1 per user in the UK. This warrants further scrutiny of my metrics. While I am perfectly happy with an ARPU of 10p when I gain users organically, it’s clearly not sufficient for any type of paid acquisition. With the top grossing games able to pull in average revenues greater than £1-2 per user (that’s including all the people who play for free) I am effectively being priced out of the paid acquisition market. I’m going to have to find another way to find users.

New markets

My first goal moving forward is to maximise the market penetration of version one of the game. To do this I’m taking the game to the Samsung Apps store, where it is currently awaiting approval, via 100% Indie – a scheme created by the founders of Chillingo.  I’m also thinking about taking the game to the Amazon marketplace as tablet oriented games are rumoured to do well there despite the smaller number of users. The game is also currently being translated into Korean and I’d like to do the same with Japanese. These are the largest Android markets, in terms of revenue, alongside the USA [REF] but so far I’m seeing very few users. This suggests to me that in general, Korean and Japanese Android gamers like to play their games in their own language. Fair enough!

Although I’ve considered taking the game to iOS, it is difficult to make the business case when you look at the game’s current revenue pitted against the cost of porting. I’ll monitor this and if I make the judgement that it is worth it in the future, then it is definitely something I’d like to do.

New features

The final option I have to increase my user numbers is to add new features to the game.  The Ionage community has already reacted positively to the suggestion of a split-screen multiplayer mode, endless mode and the integration of Google Play Game Services. However, making the business case for them is difficult based on current user numbers. I will focus primarily on features/game-modes that have social aspects as these have the potential to drive additional users to the game as well as extra revenue from existing ones.

Conclusions

Looking at the F2P implementation specifically, Ionage has strengths and flaws. It has a moderate conversion rate but the ARPU is too low to justify paid user acquisitions. To make up for this, the game really needs social mechanics to drive user downloads; it is here I believe the game’s biggest flaw lies.

Gameplay-wise the response has been almost unilaterally positive. The worst comments I’ve had were from users who complained the game was pay-to-win, however one user was kind enough to prove this is not the case. Based on this I’m keen to continue to develop the IP and I’m confident, that if I can find the right platform/marketing strategy/business plan then I can make it a success.(source:gamasutra)


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