作者：Leigh Alexander

《英雄联盟》的日活跃用户堪比Instagram，其决战广播的观众也超过了《Game of Thrones》——从多项参数来看，它是世界上最多人玩的游戏。

但如果看看它的盈利系统，你会发现：模仿《英雄联盟》的做法并不是个好主意。

育碧Blue Byte团队的Teut Weidemann拥有丰富的网游顾问经验，他研究过不少网游的参数、玩法体验和盈利情况。他利用Comsocer、Alexa或TrafficEstimate等公共追踪工具获取了一些一般未曾公开的数据，还研究了新闻媒体、会议演讲和投资者报告等资料，调查了相关参数的意义。

他玩游戏进行研究时，首先会在不付费的情况下进行体验。他称自己会通过衡量进度感，研究游戏行为，障碍点和付费提示，以及访问核心玩家等方式来衡量游戏与玩家的对话情况。之后，他才会开始投入10美元左右的小额消费（这是一个最受欢迎的切入点），在仅购买最有用的道具时最大化自己的回报，并且研究这种小额投入如何改变了自己的体验。

Weidemann称《英雄联盟》甚少公布自己的相关数据。ComScore和Alexa在电脑中植入了Trojan木马，通过隐形追踪器来监测用户——这些数据并不总是完美的，但用于大致研究方向和在游戏之间进行对比还算是管用的。

League of Legends(from gamasutra)

《英雄联盟》玩家

据Alexa/ComScore数据显示，多数《英雄联盟》玩家是男性，多数人没有大学文凭——那是因为他们多数人都还很年轻，还没到大学毕业的年龄。官方说法是，超过90%的《英雄联盟》玩家是男性，85%年龄介于16-30岁。区域性调查和服务器参考有助于确定游戏的最强大市场地理分布位置（美国和法国）。

目前该游戏拥有6700万玩家，几乎比2013年12月翻了一倍。其中日活跃用户达2700万，在2013年其活跃用户将近于Instagram日常用户的4倍。

这款游戏采用了双轨货币系统——影响点数，这是玩家通过游戏可赢取的“软”货币；以及Riot点数，这是玩家需付费获得的“硬”货币。玩家输赢都会有相应的回报，多数道具都需要一定量的两种货币。玩家过去可以通过游戏进展获得少量的Riot点数，但其开发公司自发布游戏以来就减少了这种优惠。

Riot每隔两个月就会发布新的champion，玩家可用影响点数或Riot点数换取，每周都会推出10个可免费玩的champion。Weidemann称获得最少数量的champion这一点很重要，游戏中有成百上千的英雄，玩家必须了解每一者的情况才可能获得成功。旧champion会因为持续的跌价而失去价值，而新champion则会因为调整而受到损害。

《英雄联盟》的champion

Weidemann指出，“他们发布的新champion总是过于强大。所以游戏的付费玩家总会很快购买新champion……之后Riot就会介入并逐渐削弱这个champion的价值，直到获得‘平衡’为止。除了削弱你刚购买的商品之外，他们还会降低之前发布champion的价格。我觉得这像是一种欺骗。《英雄联盟》怎么会侥幸因此而成功呢？”

Riot不讳承认自己发布了过于强大的角色并在之后进行了调整，而其玩家群体似乎对此并不在意，即便这给他们选择第一个champion带来了麻烦。你很难自然地掌握该游戏的玩法规律，除此之外，《英雄联盟》的聊天室充斥大量满口污言秽语的少年，它对新用户来说甚为不利，所以Riot不得不关闭了聊天室。

Riot向玩家出售装饰其心爱champion的技能——这意味着更新的玩家掌握游戏皮肤之前，他们无法辩认出champion的样子，即便他们已经了解其行为。事实上，即使是购买皮肤的人（游戏邦注：这是该游戏最热销的道具）也不知道新皮肤究竟是怎样的，除非他们已经购买到手并在YouTube进行了一番研究。从根本上来说，这款游戏极难掌握：“你一开始根本不知道自己在做什么”。

但《英雄联盟》的销售物品有并不是“付费获胜”，多数是装饰性道具，或者提升竞争体验而不是数值的道具。玩家喜欢收集champion，引用令人喜爱的团队玩法和PvP战斗。他们认为与好友组队极具社交性——尽管多人模式PvP可能具有内在的反社交性，玩家共享胜利回报，并参加“法庭系统”共同处理玩家问题。

游戏是否给予太多？

截止2013年，《英雄联盟》的收获如下：自2009年来已有7000万注册用户，3200万MAU，1200万DAU，300万PCU，ARPU为1.32美元，收益为6.24亿美元。热门游戏每付费用户的平均收益为35美元：分析这些数据可得1200万付费玩家，转化率为3.75%。这种表现实际上相当糟糕。

Weidemann透露，“通常情况下，客户端游戏的转化率为15%至25%。《坦克世界》为30%，它的用户基础是《英雄联盟》的三分之一，但收益却与后者相当。”

Weidemann称《英雄联盟》给予玩家太多免费内容。该公司本可极大增加其收益，但他们却并没有这么做。

“Riot并不在乎这一点。优化盈利性并非其首要目标。他们纯粹是通过普及率来盈利。所以这款游戏是因为庞大的用户基础而盈利，如果你没有这种用户规模或者不指望这种用户基础，你就不能采用他们的盈利模式。这并不是适用于你的盈利系统。”

“但你应该深入挖掘并了解它具有可行性的原因，以及其中的错误。还有他们为何能够承受如此之低的转化率，他们可以承受但你可能不行。”（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）

Don’t monetize like League of Legends, consultant says

By Leigh Alexander

League of Legends has daily active users to rival Instagram and its finals broadcasts see more viewers than Game of Thrones — across several metrics, it’s the most-played game in the world.

But if you’re looking at monetization systems, be warned: it’s not a good idea to emulate LoL.

Ubisoft Blue Byte’s Teut Weidemann has a great deal of experience consulting for online games, studying how they work — from their metrics to their play experience to their monetization. Using public tracking tools like Comscore, Alexa or TrafficEstimate, Weidemann can crunch numbers that aren’t generally publicly available. He researches press releases, conference talks and shareholder reports to get to the meat of metrics matters.

When he plays games for study, he does so at first without paying. “I measure how the game talks to me,” he reflects, from measuring the sense of progress and studying the game behavior to friction points and prompts for payment, and he interviews core players. After that, he starts with a small $10 investment — the most popular entry point — and maximizes his rewards while buying only the most useful items, and studies how that small investment changes his experience.

League of Legends is fairly open with its numbers, Weidemann says. ComScore and Alexa implement Trojan horses into computers, to monitor users via invisible trackers — the data isn’t always perfect in a vacuum, but can be useful in big-picture studies and comparisons among games.

LoL’s players

According to Alexa/ComScore data, most players of LoL are male, and most do not have a college education — that’s because many of them are too young to have earned a degree yet. Officially, over 90 percent of LoL players are male, and 85 percent of them are aged 16-30. Geographic studies and a look at server referrals helps determine the strongest geographic markets for the game (the U.S. and France).

Currently the game has 67 million players, a near doubling just over December 2013. 27 million of those are daily active users; in 2013, that was close to four times as many as the number of users Instagram gets every day.

The game has a dual currency system — Influence Points, the “soft” currency earned by playing, and the Riot Points, a “hard” currency one pays for. There are rewards for both winning and losing games, and most items require some amount of both types of currency. Players used to be able to earn small amounts of RP through progress, but the company’s reduced these giveaways since launch.

Riot releases new champions every couple of months, all available for either IP or RP, with ten of them playable for free each week. Access to a minimum set of champions is important, Weidemann says — there are hundreds of heroes and players need to learn what each can do in order to be successful. Older champions lose value for ongoing price drops, while new champions are damaged by rebalancing.

LoL’s champions

“They release a new champion that is always, always overpowered. So the people who pay for the game buy the champion immediately… and then Riot will go in and slowly devalue the champion until he is ‘balanced.’ In addition to damaging the goods you just bought, they also lower the price of the previous champion they released,” Weidemann says. “I would feel cheated. How come LoL can actually get away with that?”

Riot has freely admitted releasing overpowered characters and adjusting them later, and the player base doesn’t seem to mind, even though it makes it hard for players to choose their first champion. The game is very hard to learn organically, and on top of that, LoL’s chat, populated with foul-mouthed young boys, was such a deterrent to new users that Riot had to close it.

Riot sells skills for players to customize their favorite champions — which means until newer players learn about the skins, they might not recognize a champion even if they’ve already learned his behavior. In fact, even people buying skins (the best-selling item) do not know what the new skin will look like until they purchase it and are forced to research on YouTube. Fundamentally the game is very difficult to learn: “You have no idea what you’re doing at first.”

Yet LoL’s objects for sale are not “pay to win”, but mostly cosmetic items, or boosts to the experience of competition rather than the statistics of them. Players love to collect champions, cite enjoyable team play and gratifying PvP. They also find teaming up with friends to be social — although multiplayer PvP can be inherently anti-social, players share rewards from successes, and participate in a “tribunal system” to deal with problem players together.

Giving too much away?

As of 2013, League of Legends had earned: 70 million registrations since 2009, 32 million MAU, 12 million DAU, 3 million PCU, $1.32 ARPU and $624 million in revenues. The average revenue per paying user on popular games is about $35: Crunch all these numbers and get 1.2 million paying players, a 3.75% conversion rate. That’s remarkably poor as rates go.

“Usually, conversion rates for client-based games is between 15 and 25 percent,” Weidemann reveals. “World of Tanks has 30 percent. It could afford to have 1/3 of the customer base and have the same amount of money as League of Legends.”

LoL gives away too much for free, Weidemann suggests. The company could aggressively increase its revenues across even a smaller player base, and chooses not to.

“Riot doesn’t care. Optimizing monetization is not the top priority. They monetize purely through their reach. So it only works because of the large user base, and if you don’t have that user base or don’t expect to, you should not adopt their monetization. It should not be a role model for your monetization system.”

“But you should dig deep and learn why it works, and where the mistakes are,” he suggests, “and why they can afford to let the conversion rate be so low. They can afford it; you might not.” （source：gamasutra）