作者：Robert Winkler

玩游戏为什么那么有趣？因为它们让我们体验人类所能产生的各种情绪，从痛苦到失望，从满足到狂喜。对于免费游戏，当玩家决定花钱时，通常是在内心受到强烈的刺激之时，这意味着如果开发者能够强化玩家对游戏的情感依恋，那么游戏赢利就会更加高效。

核心游戏在这方面往往做得特别好。因为它们的制作比其他游戏的更精细、剧情更复杂，玩家对其情感投入更大。甚至大多数核心游戏的美术在情绪水平上也更加引人共鸣。核心社交游戏甚至把这个概念运用得更极致，因为群体玩家的互动通常起到放大情感反应的作用。

gamer-community(from capecodonline.com)

有些核心游戏开发者主张通过调动玩家的报复心理来获得赢利。考虑到PVP战斗通常是这些游戏的重要部分，这种主张完全是合情理的——你当然会想报复把你辛苦玩了几个小时才做出的东西破坏掉的人。你可能甚至乐意花钱加大报复的破坏性，使自己更加满足。

然而，我们已经发现在核心社交游戏中还有一种利用玩家情感投入的更好的赢利方法。在5th Planet Games工作室，即使我们也有针对报复玩法的消费项目，但我们发现，相比于花钱“杀死”陌生人，玩家更加乐意花钱帮助自己的朋友。我们的赢利策略不是刺激玩家为了“报复”而消费，而是鼓励玩家因为“社区”而购买。我们的成功基本上归功于让玩家团队起来，而不是让他们绝裂。

早在我们开始制作游戏前，我们就已经在《无尽的任务》和《魔兽世界》的玩家行为中注意到社区第一的心理，其中最精华的体验来自公会。公会使成员之间产生一种亲密的同伴情和归属感。在我们开始设计自己的游戏时，我们知道我们希望把这种情感复制给其他玩家。

以我们的核心社交游戏《Dawn of the Dragons》为例，公会是游戏的核心系统，代表了玩家最高级的沉浸感。这款游戏中有成千上万个公会，成员规模从5人到100人不等。在任何时间，超过30%的MAU（月活跃用户）和85%的DAU（日活跃用户）都有加入公会，这些玩家往往比没有加入公会的玩家玩得更久更频繁——他们每天上线的次数是后者的3倍、每次游戏时间是后者的4倍。这些高沉浸感的玩家也正好对应了高消费的玩家：有公会玩家的付费可能性是无公会玩家的8.5倍，其ARPU（每用户平均收入）比后者高53倍。不是高53%,而是53倍！

如何开发一款让人们愿意加入公会的游戏？我们要确保游戏的框架对人们加入公会有强大的刺激作用。例如，在对抗共同的敌人时，玩家想使自己的角色更强大，就要增加伤害输出。玩家可以召集其他玩家参与这些战斗，玩家加入这种战斗越多，他们的力量就会越强大。然而，在三天的时间内，玩家能发起的战斗是有限的，所以为了提高效率，他们必须与其他玩家共享战利品以及协助其他人发起的战斗作为回报。公会便利了这种合作活动，所以想变得更强大的玩家就会很有动力加入公会或家族。

我们的游戏的另一个重要的社区建设项目是游戏论坛。我们不是把论坛当作纯粹的公布更新或玩家召集公会成员的场所。确实，论坛也用于发布标准教程和技术支持帖，但玩家也聚集到论坛上提供游戏建议、讨论最佳策略、鼓励新玩家或甚至征集自己根据游戏角色写的同人小说的反馈。我们甚至把论坛当作举行用户测试、获得玩家反馈和产品开发建议的渠道。

到目前为止，我们的论坛上共有超过100万个帖子，每一个被审批通过的帖子都被阅读过了。每个论坛都会有版主和社区经理，事实上我们将20%的资金用于社区建设——有些开发者可能会认为这样的比例太不合理了，但我们认为这是必要的投入。

这些投入转化为赢利了吗？绝对是有的。我们发现，在论坛上表现活跃的人比那些表现不活跃的人更可能在游戏中消费。超过半数的发贴数为20以上的玩家在游戏中花了钱。这些玩家甚至更可能花大钱，在前50名大额玩家中，有41人在论坛上发帧至少5次。

社区建设与我们的游戏玩法也密切相关，例如世界战斗、军团、竞技场等活动都能促进玩家互动。但最能体现我们对玩家社区的重视的例子莫过于我们在北加州的工作室每月举行一次的玩家议会了——我们邀请资深的、休闲的玩家为游戏的发展提出建议。

通过这种玩家议会，玩家不只是成为游戏的“用户”，还成为帮助游戏发展的“主人翁”。我们认为它表明我们真正关心玩家的所思所想、乐意倾听他们的反馈，但更重要的是，我们把这当成一个大大改进游戏的机会。以上一次的《Clash of the Dragons》玩家议会为例，我们根据玩家反馈修改了卡牌格式，允许玩家从三张卡牌中选择两张，而不是只能选择一张，结果是，我们的收益翻倍了。

社区建设不只是我们应该关注的环节，而是我们的游戏开发的核心理念。我们认为，当游戏是社交性的，让玩家之间形成一种互相帮助和促进的关系而不是互相分裂的游戏才是最好的。对于某些开发者来说，靠复仇赢利也许对某些游戏管用，但对于我们，我们的社区建设的策略让我们得到的回报更多。（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）

Monetizing Community in Free-to-Play Core Games

by Robert Winkler

What makes games so fun is that they take us on a joyride through every sensation in the emotional spectrum known to man, from grief and frustration to gratification and downright ecstasy. For free-to-play games, that moment when a player decides to pay is usually preceded by a strong pull on one emotional heartstring or another, which means that if developers can learn to intensify the emotional attachment players have to their games, they should monetize their games more effectively.

Core games tend to do this particularly well. Because they feature more elaborate setups and more intricate storylines than other games, they often draw the player into the overall experience more deeply and make them more invested in its outcome. Even the artwork of most core games is intended to appeal to players on a very emotional level. Core social games take this concept even further to the extreme, as the group dynamic often causes emotions to become even more heightened.

Some core game developers claim to monetize their games by leveraging their players’ desire to exact revenge. And given that Player-versus-Player battles are often such an important part of these games, it makes perfect sense—of course you’d want to get even with somebody who just destroyed something you’d spent countless hours making. You might even be willing to fork over a buck or two to make that revenge especially damaging—and satisfying.

And yet, we’ve discovered a better way to monetize the emotional investment players make in core social games. At 5th Planet Games, even though we have our share of revenge-based purchases, we have found that players are significantly more willing to pay a few dollars to help out a friend than they are to pay the same amount to “kill” a complete stranger. Instead of monetizing “revenge,” we monetize “community,” and we owe our success almost entirely to the way we bring gamers together rather than tearing them apart.

This community-first mentality began for us long before we even started building games, when as a group of gamers playing games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft, the best part of our experience was being part of a guild. They inspired a certain sense of camaraderie and togetherness that, once we started designing our own games, we knew we wanted to replicate for other gamers.

Take our core social role playing game Dawn of the Dragons, for instance. Guilds are a core feature within the game and represent the highest level of engagement for its players. There are thousands of guilds in the game, ranging anywhere from 5 to 100 players. At any given time, more than 30% of our MAUs and 85% of our DAUs belong to a guild, and these gamers tend to play longer and more often than players who are not in one—they deliver 3 times the number of sessions per day, with session lengths that are 4 times longer. This deep level of engagement correlates directly to higher monetization numbers as well: players who belong to a guild are 8.5 times more likely to monetize than players who do not, with an ARPU that is 53 times higher. Not 53% higher—53 times!

How do we develop the game in a way that makes people want to join guilds? We make sure that there’s strong incentive within the framework of the game to do so. As an example, one way for a player to make their character more powerful is to contribute to the damage inflicted during raids against common enemies. Players can summon other players for these raids, and the more raids a player supports, the greater their power will become. However, a player can only summon a few of these raids over a three day span, so to be efficient they’ll need to share their raids with others and join other raids in return. Guilds help facilitate this type of cooperation and coordination, so players who want to become more powerful are incentivized to join guilds or alliances.

Another important community-building feature inherent in all of our games are their forums. We treat our forums as way more than just a place for us to post news updates or for our gamers to recruit people into their guilds. Sure, there are the standard tutorials and tech support threads, but on our forums you’ll also find people coming together to offer each other advice on the game, debating the best strategies for success, encouraging one another, or even soliciting feedback on short stories that were written based on characters within the game. We even use our forums as a channel for user testing, player feedback and product development.

There have been more than 1 million posts on our forums to date, and every post gets read and taken action on, if warranted. Each forum has a dedicated moderator and community manager, and in fact roughly 20% of our payroll is associated with this type of community interaction—a percentage that some developers might find unconscionable but we believe is a critical investment that we can’t afford not to make.

Does it translate to monetization? Absolutely. We have found that people who are active on our forums are way more likely to monetize than those who aren’t. More than half of the players who have posted 20+ messages to the forums have monetized within the game. And in some cases, they are likely to monetize in a big way—41 of our top 50 whales have posted at least 5 times on our forums.

Community building is inherent in our gameplay as well, with features such as World Raids, Armies, Colosseum, and other events that facilitate player interaction. But nothing exemplifies our commitment to community quite like the Player Councils that we hold about once a month in our Northern California offices. For each Council we fly in about a half a dozen players representing every cross-section of our community—from the most dedicated and passionate to the most casual—and solicit their input on how they’d like to see the game evolve.

Through these Player Councils, gamers become much more than just “users” but active participants in helping shape the future of our games. We believe it shows that we genuinely care what our players think and are willing to listen to their feedback, but much more than that, we use it as an opportunity to make material improvements to our games. After one past Council for Clash of the Dragons, for instance, the player feedback led us to change the drafting format for cards to the best two out of three instead of just a single choice, and as a result we were able to nearly double the percentage of revenue that drafts brought into the game.

Community building isn’t just some phrase that we pay homage too. It is truly the core of our philosophy. We believe that at their roots, games are best when they are social, and that gamers would rather lift each other up than tear each other down. This talk about “monetizing revenge” might work for some developers, but for us, we’re much better off by “monetizing camaraderie.”(source:gamasutra)