作者：George Obsorn

在伦敦2014手机游戏论坛上，来自Chartboost公司的代表Ilja Goosens在演讲中直言不讳地指出，“我认为今年行业会发生一个震动，因为市场上提供相同内容的网络和服务真是太多了。”

除此之外，我们还可以从行业其他重要人物的坐谈会中总结出一些关于开发者、营销人员获取用户的建议。

以下就是你在2014年需铭记在心的5个简单建议和提示。

Get-To-Work-Marketing(from generalassemb.ly)

1.在软发布阶段专注于粘性和留存率

软发布免费游戏是现在颇为盛行的做法，对于推广游戏即服务理念这一行业的人来说，不这么做似乎就是一种冒险。

但是，虽然许多开发者认为多数免费游戏的制作只是微调你的盈利技巧，而对于Grand Cru的Thorbjörn Warin来说，关键在于确保留存率和粘性。

“我们有足够的资金，所以我们也有足够的时间软发布《Supernauts》。我们分三个阶段发布游戏，首个alpha版本在新西兰发布，因这这是一个规模不小的英文市场。我们查看了粘性和玩家行为，之后再看看加拿大beta版本的表现。

“但我们并没有看盈利情况。我们认为盈利是最容易修复的问题。如果你的粘性和留存率很糟糕，那就真的很难修复。我们的原则就是关注粘性和留存率。”

对Warin来说，如果保证了质量，收益也会水到渠成，所以你要确何自己没有把这两者的顺序颠倒了。

2.社区功能是低成本而有效的自然用户获取功能

但如果你并不像Grand Cru那样拥有充足的资金保障，并且需要一切从头做起，那又该怎么办？

来自Pixowl的Sebastien Borget声称，他们有90%的用户源于自然获取渠道。对他而言，他的秘诀就是在社区建设下功夫。

“我们专注于打造玩家社区。我们并没有向一个市场展开软发布活动，我们一开始是推出针对部分玩家的beta测试，根据内容打造一个展示用户杰作的社区。我们增加了一个论坛和一个YouTube渠道，一年之后我们在Facebook的粉丝就超过了30万人，在视频渠道就有了200万浏览量。”

为热情的用户打造一个平台，以便他们由此展示自己对游戏的热爱之情，这样就助于收获大量快乐的自然用户。

3.保持更新出色的内容

多数运营游戏即服务项目的公司每个季度都会更新自己的游戏。但从这次座谈会的情况来看，这个更新频率可能还不够。据Borget所言，Pixowl的更新频率是每个月一次。

“通常三周之后，DAU数值就会开始下降，所以我们得每6周都进行一次大修复，每三周进行一次小修复。”

前Fishlabs成员Michael Schade表示，“如果我们制作了一款新游戏，我们就要让它便于添加新内容。”

那么你如何确保自己制作了出色的更新内容？对Ndemic Creations（游戏邦注：《Plague Inc》开发商）成员James Vaughan来说，这个答案很简单：僵尸病毒。或者更广泛地说就是，符合你用户期待的内容。

“我们推出了让玩家真正兴奋的新内容，当发布僵尸更新时，我们迎来了在收益榜单排名上的佳绩，只要有更新，就可以看到用户重返游戏。”

为了让这些用户持续重返游戏，你就得确保在更新内容时将趣味视为第一位。

4.重复粘性：2014年令人遗憾的营销热词？

最吸引座谈小组成员的一个话题就是重复粘性广告的价值性。

这是一项由广告供应商提供的服务，但对于我们的用户获取专家来说，这更像是一种固化症状而非用户丧失兴趣原因的解决方式。

Next Games成员Joakim Achrén表示，“重复粘性的关键在于，如果你已经有了良好的留存率就不再需要重复粘性。”

“在软发布阶段，你应该看看游戏是否具有让人们玩上数年的潜力，是否会让用户在上厕所时也爱不释手。如果是，那就意味着开发者不需要重复粘性措施，因为用户已经站在你一边。”

所以，与其用付费广告来吸引用户注意，不如一开始就创造一款在本质上就具有留存率的好游戏。

5.为自己制作一些高质量的视频广告

制作出色的广告是获取能够融入游戏中的高质量用户的一个绝佳方法。一般的条幅广告和插页广告，却并非最佳选择，因为我们还有Thorbjörn Warin所推崇的视频广告。

Supernauts（from youtube.com)

“视频广告的转化率很棒，用户质量相当高，所以它们比条幅广告更好。我们的游戏《Supernauts》是一款有点类似于《Minecraft》的3D游戏，支持玩家在其中四处闲逛，创造自己想要的东西，所以它更适用于视频广告，而非蹩脚的条幅广告。”

视频广告是讲述应用故事，并获得高质量用户的理想方式。但即使视频广告具有如此优势，你也仍需确保自己优化了其广告表现。

Warin以《Supernauts》为例， “我们在同部测试了不同的广告，与许多不同的外部团队进行了合作，以便查看哪种广告可行”——所以你也应该考虑采用这种方法。

鉴于用户获取领域的竞争加剧的现象，希望这些建议有助于你的应用在移动市场中获得更大进步。（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）

5 vital user acquisition tips from Mobile Games Forum 2014

by George Osborn

“My opinion is that there is going to be a shake up this year as there are too many networks and services offering the same thing.”

Within a minute of starting his chairmanship of a panel at Mobile Game Forum 2014 in London about the challenges facing indie developers in the user acquisition market, Ilja Goosens of Chartboost set out a frankly informative tone for a refreshingly open twenty minute discussion.

Taking advice from an all star panel of UA heroes from the likes of Grand Cru, Pixowl and Ndemic Creations, an occasionally dense and impenetrable topic of conversation was brought to life with the help of some simple pieces of advice.

Here are five simple hints and tips for you to keep in mind during 2014.

1. Focus your soft launch on engagement and retention

Soft launching a free-to-play game is now so commonplace that not doing it is considered a risk to far for anyone in the business of promoting many games-as-a-service.

However while many developers thought that making the most of them meant fine-tuning your monetisation techniques, for Thorbjörn Warin of Grand Cru, it was all about making sure retention and engagement is in tip top shape.

“We have the luxury of being well funded so we had the luxury to take our time on the soft launch of Supernauts. So we did our release in three phases so we did our alpha in New Zealand because it’s English speaking but a small market so you don’t get burned. We looked at engagement and player behavior, then once we’d looked at that we did a beta which was Canada and have been live their for a couple of months.

“We didn’t look at monetisation though. We think monetisation is the easiest thing to fix. If your engagement and retention suck then that’s really hard to fix. Our philosophy is to focus on that.”

For Warin, then, if the quality is there then the money will follow so you might want to make sure that you’re not doing things the other way round.

2. Community features are a cheap and effective way to gain organic users

But what happens if you haven’t got the money a company like Grand Cru and need to build things from a bootstrap basis?

Sebastien Borget of Pixowl, developers of The Sand Box, claimed that 90 percent of their hundreds of thousands of users came organically. And for him, his secret sauce was the construction of a community.

“We’ve been focused on building a community of players. We didn’t soft launch in a country, we started in a beta with a closed selection of players and we worked on building a community based on content by showing users artwork in a big gallery.

“We added a forum, we added a YouTube channel and a year after that we had over 300,000 fans on Facebook and had 2 million views on the channel.”

By building a platform for enthusiastic users to demonstrate their love for your game, it seems you can reap the harvest of a group of happy organic users.

3. Keep great content updates coming

Most companies running games-as-a-service will look to update their games once a quarter. But, according to our panel, that may not be enough. Pixowl’s update schedule comes in at once a month according to Borget

“After three weeks, DAUs start to drop away so we have a major fix every six weeks and a minor fix every three weeks.”

While Michael Schade, formerly of Fishlabs, said “If we make a new game, we need to make it so you can add new content easily.”

How exactly do you make sure that you make a great update? For James Vaughan of Ndemic Creations, the developer of Plague Inc, the answer was simple: zombie viruses. Or, more broadly, content that fits with what your users really want.

“We launched new diseases and that’s what gets people really excited, We had our best day in the top grossing charts when we launched our zombie update and it got people really excited. When there’s an update, you see people coming back.”

To keep those users coming back, you need to make sure that fun is number one when you’re updating.

4. Re-engagement: 2014′s unfortunate marketing buzzword?

If there was one thing that seemed to be preying on the minds of the panel was the worthwhileness (or otherwise) of re-engagement advertising.

While it is a service being pushed by advertising providers, for our UA experts it seemed to be curing the symptoms rather than tackling the cause of user disinterest.

“The thing about re-engagement is that you don’t need to do it if you have good retention” said Joakim Achrén of Next Games.

“During the soft launch, you need to see if the game is going to be a game people play for years, that they play on the toilet. That means the developers don’t need to re-engage as people are staying with you.”

So, instead of trying to capture the attention of users who have flown the nest with paid advertising, you’re better off building a game from the beginning that has retention firmly at the heart of things. Easy, I know.

5. Make yourself some quality video ads

Making great advertising is a fantastic way of getting great quality users who’ll be engaged with your game. Bog standard banner ads and interstitials, however, might not be the best way of doing it now that there is a new pretender on the scene that Thorbjörn Warin is in love with: video advertising.

“Video is completely destroying everything else; the conversion rates are great and the user quality is good so they’re much better than banner ads. Our game Supernauts is a 3D game a bit like Minecraft where you can run around in space and build whatever you want, so that works so much better in video than on crappy banner ads.”

So video ads are a great way to tell your app’s story and gain the best quality users possible. But, even with that innate advantage, it’s up to you to make sure that you’re optimizing their performance.

As Warin said about Supernauts, “We’ve tested different videos in-house, worked with lots of different externals to see what works” – so you should consider doing that too.

And that’s your lot. With the UA landscape becoming more competitive, these tips could hopefully help you give your app a great leg up in the mobile landscape.（source：pocketgamer）