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探讨游戏开发者的未来经济状况

发布时间:2014-06-13 12:26:51 Tags:,,,,

作者:Raph Koster

最近我思考了许多关于开发者未来经济形势的问题。

创意作品的供应链

在2006年我曾经提出你应该以这种方式看待媒体呈现给公众的曲折过程:

*投资者负责掏钱,这样创意人士才能够在工作的时候有饭吃。有时候这可以是自主集资,有时候是预付款,有时候是赞助。

*创意人员的任务就是创造艺术作品。

*编辑要扮演守门人和质量把关的角色,决定哪些东西可以更上一层楼。他们不只是为了把关而扮演监护人角色,还要负责维持市场秩序以免其失控,以及最大化特定作品的收益。

*发行商以自身名义向市场散布作品。许多人可能认为这个角色并不重要,但聚合作品可是个庞大的经济范围,这里涉及到税收、法务和商务等领域的问题。它还具有品牌识别,让大家的工作更轻松等作用。

*营销渠道令艺术作品得以被大众所发现,其形式包括评论、杂志、广告等。这正是公众发现某些事物的媒介。

*分销商要将作品传送到商店。这个角色是在幕后发挥作用,但却相当重要。这其中有大量的基础设施需求。

*商店则向终端消费者零售包装好的艺术作品。商店有自己的品牌任务,很可能再一次发挥监护和推荐引擎的作用,此时其目的是为消费者找到合适的产品。

*用户负责体验作品。

*二次使用者之后就会根据现成的作品,以另一种形式重新开始这个过程,例如改编电影、音频书、经典游戏包装等。

在不同时间,不同媒体,不同用户都在以这种方式掌握作品的所有权。例如,今天的一名独立开发商要处理他们的自主集资和创作问题。像James Patterson、Robert K. Tanenbaum等出色的作家实际上会外包其创意环节的工作。EA的庞大企业令他们得以在相当长的一段时间内主导游戏领域,原因就在于他们先于他人创建了自己的分销至零售网络(过去曾存在介于发行商和零售商之间的电子游戏分销公司)。

角色集中

这些角色至今存在,并很可能一直存在。只不过是换了风景,有些人开始扮演更多角色。

让我们以苹果App Store为例。

*你可能自主集资。

*你可能自己创造游戏。

*App Store扮演编辑的角色,只不过不像传统编辑那样严厉苛刻。

*如果你是自主发布产品,你就像是发行商,但实际上这更像是苹果的角色。

*苹果还控制了多数重要的营销渠道,即苹果自己的首页,排行榜和推荐模块。

*苹果还是分销商,各国市场都有App Store。

*苹果还是一个门店。

*玩家还是玩家。

*但这里的二次使用者通常是个山寨者。

行业变化的一个结果就是,将越来越多角色整合到少数公司手里。发行商更少了,分销商更少了,营销渠道更少了,商店也更少了。唯一变得更多的是“控制台”:

*Playstation 4 & Vita

*XBox One

*WiiU

*Nintendo 3DS

*Ouya

*Amazon Fire TV

*iOS App Store

*Google Play

*Facebook

*Steam

对游戏开发者而言,它们的作用实际上都相同。现在,主机不过是一个数字发行商/分销网络/商店的一个硬件前台而已。姑且将其称为“亚控制台”。即使是这样的生态系统扩张,我们在和整个行业的多样性和复杂性上也出现了净亏损。

通常来说,更少意味着更糟,即创意人员的出路更少了,消费者的选择也更少了。如果你是少数人之一那就很棒。但实际上,市场动态总会随着时间发展清除这种混乱无序的扩张。

资金为王

虽然市场很疯狂,但仍然是创意当道。总有人去尝试古怪的理念,其中有一些甚至成为热作,也因此创造了不少新题材。

what mobile pubs(from gamasutra)

what mobile pubs(from gamasutra)

那么,市场成熟的时候会发生什么情况?也拥有最多资金者将开始蚕食更多角色。它们大举圈地扩张,直到庞大到足够改变为止。在这些成熟市场中,创造者必须在资金上展开竞争。没有创意,没有创新,只能向钱看齐。他们得把钱花在营销投入上,花在华丽丽的产品价值上,花在扩张分销渠道上。

在2011年一场截然不同的讨论叶,我并不看好独立开发者。根本来说,当时这种趋势显而易见,我也说过自己非常担忧成本攀升后的独立开发者处境,担心他们无法对抗坐拥庞大营销预算的竞争者。他们也许仍然可以创造出色的游戏,但却可能因为资金短缺而迅速投向发行商的怀抱。中型开发商的出路不是成为大型公司,就是被大型公司所合并,或者降格成为甚至难以维持生计的小型公司(但如果够幸运的话也可能像中彩一样,一夜翻身)。那些资金雄厚者实力也会越来越强,就像上图的开发者和手机游戏发行商之间的对话所反映的情况。

从长期来看,这对于生态圈持有者来说并不是件好事。目前来看,正如成熟市场一样,传统商业智慧转向了轰动一时的心理。少下注,多投入成了当前的新道具,而在过去我们也看到了GTA, SWTOR, WoW, Final Fantasy和Sims Online等游戏的相同情况。其风险在于通过减少作品多样性,可能会因为一些连续失败的作品而摧毁整个公车 。任何仅依赖轰动巨作为生的组织都无法在这个社会长存,因为吸引人气需要相当的运气,所以每款发布产品几乎都是一场赌博。

所以聪明的公司总会通过优秀的管理和平衡赌注获得生存。

不幸的是,在这个自主发行时代,所有风险都因自主集资的创作者而被卸载,我认为这里有一些新的动态在发挥作用。

有些开发者制作了一款游戏并将其投放到应用商店中。它的存在为苹果提供了真正、实在的经济价值——毕竟,iPad广告内容都是应用。它甚至只不过是为每天新发布的7000款应用又增加了一块砖头,为苹果再添加一个可宣传的数据而已。

但上传到App Store的普通游戏根本不会有收益。

它当然无法收回成本。如果它能实现大笔收益很可能是因为有庞大的营销预算支持,因为市场是由热作所驱动的。所以拥有该游戏的公司获得了价值,但单人开发者却无所收获,除非你是制作出《Flappy Bird》这种游戏的独立开发者。这种罕见的特例正是垂直整合的“控制台”赖以生存的一个主张——它还是会让你看到希望和梦想成真。好比是你去拉斯维加斯的赌场,也可能在一个回合中成为千万富翁。

在市场的最低端我们看到的是富有创意却难以谋生的开发者,而在最顶端却是吃饱喝足却无甚创意的开发者。这中间并没有什么过渡地带。

旧解决方法?

在2006年,我曾预测今天的行业状态,并提出了以下解决方法:

*与你的用户直接建立关系

*让自己成名

*创造服务型游戏,以留住用户

*开拓多种盈利来源,创造能够为下游环节使用的游戏IP。

*可向他人集资,但要确立自己身为开发者、编辑、分销商和二次使用者的地位。

从2006年来看,这的确是一些很完美的建议。但却存在一个问题。

有些人并不擅长驾驭所有的角色。即使他们做得到,他们在非创意环节投入的精力越多,就越可能影响自己的创意。他们就会开始停止追求全新的想法,因为他们无法从中看到市场前途。他们会开始改变自己的游戏设计,以便让游戏成为服务,即便这可能有违游戏的根本。最后,这意味着成为一家商业实体——而这几乎意味着总有一天你会失去控制权。

事实上旧解决方法仍然管用。但它也让我们返回一个不存在大量独立游戏兴起的世界。

不要再执拗于“但这一代的索尼真的很好”或者“Steam是站在开发者一边的”这种想法。要知道是角色塑造了组织,Steam越像一个亚控制台,它表现得就越像是一个多角色实体。

最中肯的主张

我们是否可以从音乐行业获得启示?

这里应该存在一些肯定创作者贡献的外部公司。如今,像“她很早就离开了,所以我们将她列入‘特别鸣谢’名单”或者“他是主创,但只负责前半部分,所以我们要将他列入‘额外编入’名单”已经成为一种可被接受的做法。其余开发者就会认为留下来继续完成项目是最重要的事情,这真是荒唐可笑的想法。

不妨进行一些思考试验:如果有人花一整年制作了整款游戏,只是最后几分钟由别人操刀,那你就能说要把这些人列入“额外编入”的名单吗?那么如果这些人投入项目一周?一个月呢?如果他们只是在第一个月参与,即他们所做的一切不过是游戏设计,建模、核心引擎和美术方向呢?如果他们的贡献只是变成了一种辅助工作,那还有什么意义呢?

这家公司之后就可以保持准确、完整的所有游戏鸣谢名单数据库。这将为其他用途带来极大帮助(例如,许多游戏履历通常就是这么伪造来的)。此外,它还可以用于识别移植版本和续作等作品,比如说Dona Bailey仍然出现在《Centipede》各个衍生版本的名单中。但我们的主要用意却是这样:

所有游戏销售渠道——App Store、社交网络都会染指这家公司的银行帐户,抽取其30%的分成。Facebook去年每个季度游戏收益就超过了10亿美元。这里还要算上谷歌、索尼、微软、苹果……它们真的没有必要如此盘剥一家公司的收益。

这些企业为什么要这么做?因为它们也很了解其中情况。

而这家鸣谢公司,就好像是一家执行权利的机构,不得不向其数据库所记载的所有人分发这些收益。Dona Bailey每天都能因那些玩《Centipede》衍生作品的用户而收到支票。

你并不需要如此平均地分配收益。因为相当不公平。要有所倾斜地分配,让那些赚得最少的人得到比例不均的付款。毕竟,如果你有足够的运气中彩,你已经赢得了自己的资本回报。但如果你已经白发苍苍,离开所在公司十年了,而你的游戏却仍然在盈利时,情况就不一样了。

为何出现这种情况?因为游戏开发者:

*受聘工作

*在美国并不享有精神权利

*并不享有像其他媒体一样的IP保护权

游戏是世上最难获得保护的创意工作。上述建议究竟有多大可行性?我不知道。但我知道如果每位向App Store发布游戏的开发者都意识到自己不但将为此丧失时间和金钱,或者被山寨者所搞垮,我们就有可能看到更多种类、更具创意以及更多应用。

如果这种情况发生了,整个行业生态圈就可能a)不需要那么担忧解决曝光度的问题b)宣扬不断增长的数据c)实现用户增长,因为多样化的创造者必须会产生多样化的用户d) 避开那些跟随他们并终将在某天给予其致命一击的轰动效应问题。(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

The Financial Future of Game Developers

by Raph Koster

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the financial future of developers.

The supply chain for creative work

To go back a ways, back in 2006 I suggested that you could look at the winding path a piece of media takes to the public in this way:

A funder of some sort ponies up the money so that a creative can eat while they work. Sometimes this is self-funding, sometimes it’s an advance, sometimes it’s patronage.

A creator actually makes the artwork.

An editor serves the role of gatekeeper and quality check, deciding what makes it further up the ladder. They serve in a curatorial role not just for the sake of gatekeeping but also to keep the overall market from being impossible to navigate, and to maximize the revenue from a given work.

A publisher disseminates the work to the market under their name. A lot of folks might think this role doesn’t matter, but there are huge economies of scale in aggregating work; there’s boring tax. legal, and business reasons to do it; it serves brand identity, making the work easier, to market…

Marketing channels make it possible for the artwork to be seen by the public: reviews, trade magazines, ads. This is how the public finds out something even exists.

Distributors actually convey the work to the store’s hands. This role functions in the background, but it’s absolutely critical. There’s a lot of infrastructure required.

Stores then retail the packaged form of the artwork to the end customer. Stores have their own branding task, and likely serve as a curatorial and recommendation engine all over again, this time trying to find the right fit for the customer.

The audience then gets to experience the work.

Re-users then take the creation and restart the process in alternate forms; adaptations to movies, audiobooks, classic game packages, what have you.

At different times, and for different media, different people have held ownership of chunks of this pathway. For example, an indie today handles both their self-funding and their creation. There are popular writers, like James Patterson or Robert K. Tanenbaum, who actually outsource the creative part. EA’s big business initiative that led them to dominating the game landscape for quite a while was that they decided to build their own distribution network to retail long before anyone else (there used to be independent videogame distribution companies that sat between publishers and retail).

Consolidation strikes

All of these roles still exist, and likely they will always exist. It’s just that as the landscape changes, some people start to wear multiple hats, fulfilling more than one role.

Let’s take the Apple App Store as an example.

You likely fund yourself.

You like make the game yourself.

The App Store acts as editor, though they have a much lighter hand than traditional editors have had.

If you self-release, you’re supposedly the publisher, but really, it’s more like Apple is.

Apple also controls the most important marketing channel, which is Apple’s own front page, charts, and features.

Apple is the distributor, as is the case with all App Stores.

Apple is the storefront.

The player is the player, hurray!

Alas, the re-user is often a cloner.

One consequence of the changes in the industry has been to consolidate more and more roles into the hands of fewer organizations. There are less publishers. Less distributors. Less marketing channels. Less stores. About the only thing there are more of is consoles, and that’s because what we call “a console” isn’t:

Playstation 4 & Vita

XBox One

WiiU

Nintendo 3DS

Ouya

Amazon Fire TV

iOS App Store

Google Play

Facebook

Steam.

These are all functionally the same, as far as a game developer is concerned. Today, a console is really just a hardware front end to a digital publisher/distribution network/storefront. Call it a “metaconsole.” Even with this proliferation of ecosystems, we have a net loss in diversity and complexity of the overall landscape.

Less, generally speaking, is bad. It means fewer outlets for a creative, and fewer choices for a consumer. It’s great if you are one of the few. But in practice, market dynamics tend to clean up this sort of messy proliferation over time.

Money wins out

While the landscape is wild and crazy, creativity reigns. Wacky ideas get tried. Some of them hit. Genres are created.

whatmobilepubs

So what happens when markets mature? Well, whoever had the largest piles of money tends to start swallowing up more roles. And they get entrenched, and they stay entrenched until there’s a massive enough shift. In those mature markets, creators have to compete on money. Not creativity. Not innovation. Money. Money in the form of marketing spend, in the form of glossy production values, in the form of distribution reach.

In a different talk back in 2011, I doomcast indies. Basically, these trends were plenty visible then, and I said that I was very worried about indies because as costs rose, they wouldn’t be able to compete in terms of marketing dollars and glossiness. They might still make great games, but they would rapidly end up beholden to The Man again, as the need for deep pockets rose. It’s a recipe for hollowing out the middle, you see. Midsized devs have to either become big ones, be subsumed by big ones, or slip down to become small ones, who probably don’t make a living (but might get a stroke of luck and win the visibility lottery, as viral hits do). Those who have the money become more and more predatory, as in this parodic conversation between a dev and a mobile game publisher that was making the rounds yesterday.

In the long run, though, this is bad for the ecosystem owners. Right now, as it always is in mature markets, the conventional business wisdom is to move to a blockbuster mentality. Place few bets, spend like utter mad against them (500m for Destiny, is the current news item, but in the past we have seen the same story for GTA, SWTOR, WoW, Final Fantasy, and Sims Online. Even for Cityville). The risk, of course, is that by reducing the portfolio diversity to that degree, a few failed blockbusters in a row topple the whole organization. Any structure that depends solely on blockbusters is not long for this world, because there is a significant component of luck in what drives popularity, so every release is literally a gamble.

So a wise org is always trying to keep the fringe alive through good curation and hedging bets.

Unfortunately, in these self-publishing days, where all the risk has been offloaded as much as possible to the creator who self-funds, I think there are some new dynamics at play.

Some dev makes a game and puts it up on the store. Its mere existence provides real, tangible financial value to Apple — after all, the ads for iPads are all about the apps, and even adding one more useless one to the 7000 that appear each day is putting another brick in a large edifice, giving Apple another number to trumpet.

But the median game uploaded to the App Store makes zero dollars.

It certainly doesn’t cover its costs. If it was wildly profitable it probably became so with big financial backing because the market is more hit-driven. So the value goes to the company that owns the game, not down to the individual developer, except in rare cases like a Flappy Bird. And that rare case is what the vertically integrated “consoles” count on — because it instills dreams and hopes that you, too, could make that happen. And you could, just like you could go to Vegas and win ten million bucks on a single quarter.

Basically, at the bottom end of the market you have devs who get to be creative but not eat. At the top end you get devs who get to eat but not be creative. And there is no middle.

The old solution?

In 2006, my prediction was today’s world, and I offered up as solutions the following:

build direct relationships with your audience

celebritize yourself

create games that are services, to lock in that audience

develop alternate revenue streams, by creating games that are IPs that support downstream uses of the IP

Get someone else to fund, but make yourself the creator, the editor, the distributor, the re-user.

This is all perfectly good advice. Excellent, even, considering it was given in 2006. But here’s the rub.

Some people aren’t good at all these roles. And even if they are, the more they have to pay attention to the non-creative aspects, the more it is likely to affect their creativity. They start not pursuing a wild idea because they see no market for it. They start changing their game design to make the game be a service even though it’s working against the grain of the game. And lastly, it means being a business entity, to a much larger degree — which almost certainly means that someday you will lose control of it.

The fact is that the old solution does work. But it also returns us to the cycle, to a world where the massive indie explosion we saw doesn’t exist.

And don’t go thinking that “Oh, but Sony is good this generation!” or “Steam is on the developers’ side!” The fact of the matter is that the role molds the organization. The more Steam becomes a metaconsole, the more it acts like one.

A modest proposal

Couldn’t we take a cue from music?

Some external organization should exist that provides credit validation. Today, practices like “oh, she left early, so we’ll just list her in Special Thanks” and “he was Lead, but only for the first half, so we’ll list him under Additional Programming” are not just rampant but culturally accepted practices. Fellow devs will argue that staying to finish a title is the most important thing, which is ludicrous.

Just run some thought experiments; if one person made a whole game for a year, except for the last five minutes, whereupon someone else took over, would you say that they should get credited as “additional”? OK, what if it’s a week? A month? What if they were only there for the first month, which means “all” they did was “just” the game design, architecture, core engine, and art direction? At what point does their contribution become ancillary?

This organization then can maintain the accurate, comprehensive database of all game credits. This will be incredibly useful for other purposes (game resumes are routinely falsified, for example). Further, it can do things like recognize ports and sequels and the like, so that say, Dona Bailey still gets credited on every derivative of Centipede. But our main purpose is this:

All game outlets — App Stores, social networks, what is today the plumbing of our lives — contribute into this org’s bank account, right off the top, out of their 30% cuts. Facebook alone made over a billion dollars in game revenue every quarter last year. Add in Google, Sony, Microsoft, Apple… they really don’t need to skim much off the top to put into this org’s coffers.

Why is it that these folks do it? Because they are also in the position to know what gets played.

And then this credits organization, acting much like a Performing Rights Organization, distributes almost all of that money back to everyone in their database.It’s effectively royalties for every play. Dona Bailey would get a check for people who play some Centipede derivative today.

Oh, and you don’t distribute this evenly. Not fairly, no: unfairly. Tilted so that those who earned the least get a disproportionate payment. After all, if you got lucky in the popularity lottery, you are already earning your capitalistic reward right now. No, this is more for when you are old and gray and haven’t been at that company for ten years, but your game is still making them money.

Why this construct? Because game creators

work for hire

don’t have moral rights in the US

don’t have the sort of IP protection that other media do

Games are the worst protected creative job there is. And given the libertarian politics that are common currency in the industry, they are also the creative group least likely to organize.

How feasible is the above? I don’t know. But I do know that if every developer who put a game up on the App Store knew that they weren’t just going to lose their time and money on it or get screwed over by faceless moneygrubbing gladhanders, we’d see more diversity, more creativity, and plain old more apps.

And if that happened, the ecosystems could a) be a little less worried about solving a probably unsolvable discovery problem b) trumpet ever growing numbers c) likely grow their audiences as diverse creators lead to diverse customers d) hedge the blockbuster problem that is stalking them and will someday hunt them down and kill them.(source:gamasutra


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