作者：Tomasz Mazurek

通过Steam最近尝试着将每一款已发行的游戏整合到自己的列表的行为，我们听到许多关于要求某种类型的质量控制的呼声。这些呼声主要是来自消费者的关心，即那些被开发者骗取了钱财但却只获得像《Air Control》这样糟糕的游戏。当然了，也有人反驳从整体式更轻松访问Steam更加重要，而那些呼吁质量控制的消费者也只能怪自己不多留点心。现在，作为开发者的我也对这种看法持反对意见，原因有两点。首先是对于游戏销售者来说，“买家风险自负”是最愚蠢的说法，即使是用拉丁语来说。其次，我认为在当前PC市场的环境下，缺少质量控制不仅会伤害到消费者，也有可能会伤害到独立开发者。在本文中我将解释这到底是如何发生的。

steam(from v2ex)

柠檬市场

你是否听过柠檬市场？“柠檬市场：质量不确定性和市场机制”是经济学家George Akerloff在1970年写的一篇论文，他描写的是自己在二手车市场中所观察到的市场失败机制。二手车与计算机游戏又有何关系呢？我认为这篇论文中所描述的市场失败机制，也就是所谓的“信息不对称”也可能发生在游戏市场中。实际上，我认为这种情况已经发生在某些市场中，我们也即将在PC独立游戏市场中看到它。

首先，让我们回到柠檬市场中。“柠檬”是关于二手车的一个美式俚语，即指代购买后一段时间出现缺陷。在二手车市场中，柠檬是必不可免会出现的问题。买家并不能完全保证自己不会买到一个“柠檬”—-检查某种类型的危险，如内部引擎部件等是不切实际的。更糟糕的是，个体卖家通常都不愿公开这些问题，因为这么做将会拉低汽车的价格。另一方面，如果卖家能够保证自己的汽车真的很好，他也很难向买家证明这点，因为所有人都会宣称自己的汽车是最佳的。

在这种情况下，买家可以做的最理智的事便是基于市场上汽车的平均质量去评估汽车的质量。这种理性行为的结果将能在汽车质量和价格间创造一个积极的反馈循环。假设市场上低质量汽车的数量出现上升。也许汽油的价格也出现上升，难以支付适当维修费的最穷的汽车拥有者已经没有钱再开汽车了，所以他们便将其出售掉。结果便是平均的二手车质量出现下滑。这意味着买家将假设二手车的质量下滑，并且他们也将为其支付较少的钱。这可能导致好车的卖家不愿意基于这样的价格去出售自己的汽车—-也许他们会选择再多开几年或者将其卖到国外去。这将进一步压低二手车的平均质量。很快地这种情况将导致，尽管有人愿意购买较贵的二手车，并且也有人愿意出售这样的汽车，但是市场中却只会交易“柠檬”，因为每个人都在假设大多数二手车都是“柠檬”。需要注意的是，这种市场状态可能会一直持续着，尽管质量下降的最初原因已经过去很久。同样地，积极反馈循环可能会开始于任何阶段—-在平均质量开始下滑的时候，在价格下滑的时候，或者在高质量的汽车撤离市场的时候。

显然，这种“信息不对称”问题并不只局限于二手车市场。实际上，George Akerloff和Joseph Stiglitz认为信息不对称是一种常态，他们通过自己的作品获得了诺贝尔经济学奖，所以我认为这一看法应该是有道理。可能关于柠檬最常见的其它市场例子应该是私人医疗保险市场。不过我并不打算在此对其多加讨论。

游戏市场中的信息不对称

现在让我们考虑是否在特定条件下游戏市场可能成为柠檬市场。显然游戏开发者总是比玩家更了解游戏。并且独立开发者不可能去宣称自己的游戏是垃圾。但是因为游戏可以接受评估，所以并不可能像二手车那样。尽管评论并不是最有效的方法，但却能够帮助玩家避免买到垃圾品。

如果因为盗版件的肆虐而导致市场上充斥着各种游戏，那么许多游戏便不可能接受评估，并且有些游戏也只是经过一些玩家觉得不可靠的评论网站的评估。这没有什么好奇怪的—-评论需要花费时间并且没有人愿意去评论第255款《愤怒的小鸟》的仿制品。用户评论能够带来帮助，但它们通常因为太容易操作而很难发挥真正效果。实际上，我们拥有证据能够证明人们并未阅读任何评论便购买了游戏—-因为我们知道有人购买了《Air Control》以及其它类似的游戏。而他们会这么做的唯一理由便是他们并未阅读任何评论。所以如果人们并未阅读评论的话，他们又如何评估一款游戏的质量呢？他们可能会基于市场上平均游戏质量进行猜想。

如果我们在游戏中应用“柠檬市场”的推理，我们便可以推断出，如果游戏供应超过了评论者评论它们的能力，那么游戏的质量便会出现下滑，结果便是平均游戏质量和价格均开始下降。当然关于这一整体趋势也具有一些例外。能够以某种方式标记游戏质量的开发者（通过来自可辨认的评论者的积极评论，广告，可识别的品牌或商店的推荐等等）将能够赚到更多钱。然而那些不能承担这项标记的开发者则会遭遇失败。

手机应用商店的例子

我想我们已经在手机应用商店中看到这种情况—-当iPhone和iPhone 3G最初问世时，App Store中有许多非常高质量且具有创造性的游戏。许多人将其当成是独立游戏的天堂，并且有一些非常知名的独立工作室在此创造了他们最初的成功故事。但很快地，随着新开发者的涌入，这不仅给评论者带来了巨大的压力同时也导致游戏价格出现下滑。游戏的平均质量也伴随着价格持续下滑着，直至游戏到大0.99美元。很快地，随着免费模式（也带有许多自身的问题）的出现，这一障碍被推翻了。

需要注意的是，深受这些情况影响的并不是消费者。他们仍然能够为自己的iPhone购买一些高质量的内容，不管是来自大型公司（能够负担得起广告，品牌和推荐等等）还是来自带有已建立品牌的小型开发者（如Vlambeer）。受影响最大的应该是全新的独立开发者，即不能承担传统市场营销费用也缺乏足够的品牌认知去使用社交媒体渠道的群体。全新独立开发者经常被劝告要避开App Store或避免经历长期的品牌意识建立过程。在Android市场中也发生了同样的情况。

Steam的例子

如果我说下一个柠檬市场将是基于PC独立市场的Steam，应该也没有人会感到惊讶。因为未拥有评论或者只有一些来自小型网站的评论，Steam上的大多数独立游戏都未拥有Metacritic分数。Stema允许开发者能够将让人不快的用户评论隐藏在商店页面中。因为Valve向许多因为太糟糕而不能出现在Steam上的早前游戏，盗版件，以及像《Air Control》这样糟糕的游戏敞开大门，所以我们清楚地看到了平均游戏的质量出现下降。我们也看到了收入的下降—-最近几个月独立领域的魔咒是“出现在Steam将不再帮你致富”。而这里所存在的问题是，收入的下降是否会导致平均游戏质量的下降，并创造完整的循环？

到目前为止我并未注意到这点。较为乐观的解释是也许收入下降了，但是它们仍足以帮助开发者创造高质量的游戏。而较为中立的解释是，也许开发者觉得受挫，但是他们找不到更好的市场去销售自己的游戏，所以他们只能忍着痛并尽可能地做好自己的事。而悲观的解释是，PC独立游戏较长的制作过程意味着我们仍需要等待这一效果发挥作用。我找不到任何数据能够证实或否认任何的这些假设。我想要相信乐观的解释是事实，然而如果许多盗版件继续猖獗下去，我便找不到PC市场应该避免被手机应用商店踩在脚下的命运的理由。

能做什么呢？

这是个问题。Valve可以做许多事。但问题是他们可能不会做这些事。不幸的是，我只想到一件事是开发者能够做到的。

Valve能做的第一件事当然的引进某些质量控制。如果这像主机认证那样的话Valve将能从中受益，在这个过程中将是由开发者或发行商去支付测试费用。然而这样的过程可能会阻止Steam上同时发行200款游戏，所以我想这种情况应该不会发生。

而第二件事至少能够改变商店页面布局去呈现游戏的分数以及用户的平分—-这虽然不是最完美的，但至少能够过滤掉那些最糟糕的盗版件。

第三个理念便是改变Steam的退款政策。现在，据我所知，其官方政策是“不退款”，然而他们还是会根据适当情况进行退款。如果这种情况发生改变，玩家便有可能会在购买后一周内所求退款，玩家会根据“如果我不喜欢这件商品，只需要申请退款便可”的心态而更乐意购买更昂贵的高质量独立游戏。实际上，这是开发者所能够赋予的选择，即作为标志性行为去向玩家呈现“我对自己的游戏很有信心，并保证你购买后肯定不会想要退款”的心态。因为微交易经济的特殊性，我很怀疑Valve是否喜欢这一解决方法，但退款的确是解决信息不对称问题的一种有效的方法。

第四个理念更具争议。因为引起问题的原因是缺少评论或者用户并未阅读评论，所以Steam可以引进一个规则，即只有带有评论的游戏才能出现在市场上。这些评论可以是来自一些小型网站或者博客，所以为了不减少独立开发者的机会，Valve将保证来自可信任的评论者的数据库，并可能会引进他们自己的评分。同时也将在商店页面的适当地方设置分数以及来自评论的摘选。当然了，我意识到这一方法将给游戏评论者带去较大的压力，并且可能不是所有人都会喜欢这一方法。

第五个理念是关于开发者—-我们可以尝试着改变游戏演示版本的旧传统。“我将让你免费玩一部分游戏，我敢保证你将会被吸引”将是你能够传达的一个很好的信号。当然了，与Valve合作也能够帮助你实现这一理念，即如果他们能够在Steam商店中用一些可行的演示版本去标记你们的游戏的话。

结论

作为开发者的我们必须与下降的质量和价格相抗衡。我们不仅需要创造高质量的游戏，同时也需要寻找解决方法去保护我们的消费者免受柠檬小贩的欺骗。否则我们将会遭遇当前市场被摧毁并且找不到任何替代选择的情况，而这最终有可能给整个独立游戏活动造成大麻烦。

（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 Lack of Quality Control and the Race to the Bottom

by Tomasz Mazurek

With the recent attempts by Steam to include in their catalog every game that has ever been published we have heard many voices calling for an introduction of some sort of quality control. Those voices are mostly motivated by the care for the customers, who get cheated out of their money by developers selling barely functional junk like Air Control. Of course one can and many have made the counterargument that easier access to Steam is overall good and those players have only themselves to blame, caveat emptor and so on. Now as developer I oppose this view, for two reasons. The first is that for a seller of games, or anything really, “buyer beware” is one of the stupidest things to say, even if said in Latin. The second reason is that I believe lack of quality control can, under current circumstances in the PC market, hurt the indie developers as much if not more than it hurts the customers. In this article I will explain how exactly this might happen.

The Market for Lemons

Have you ever heard about the market for lemons? “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism” is a 1970 paper by the economist George Akerloff describing a market failure mechanism that he observed in the used cars market. What do used cars have to do with computer games? I think the market failure mechanism described in the paper, known as “information asymmetry” may happen in the games market. In fact, I think that it has already happened in some of the markets and we might be at the verge of it happening in the PC indie games market.

But first, let’s go back to the lemons. “Lemon” is supposedly an American slang term for a used car that turns out to be defective only some time after it has been bought. Lemons are an unavoidable problem in the used car market. It is nearly impossible for the buyer to be completely sure he is not buying a lemon – checking for some types of damage, like the wear of internal engine parts, is way too difficult to be practical. What makes matters worse is that an individual seller has no incentives to disclose such problems, since that would lower his car’s price. On the other hand, if the seller is sure his car is actually good, there is no easy way to signal this fact to the buyer, since everyone can and does claim his car is in top condition.

Under such conditions the most rational thing the buyer can do is make an assumption about the car’s quality based on the average quality of cars in the market. The consequence of this rational behavior is creation of a positive feedback loop between the quality of the cars and their prices. Assume that there has been a surge in the number of low quality cars on the market. Maybe the price of gas has soared and the poorest car owners, who could not afford proper maintenance, now cannot afford driving cars at all, so they are selling them. The result is that the average used car quality falls. This means that buyers will assume the used cars are of lower quality and they will be willing to pay less for them. This can cause the sellers of the good cars to decide that they do not want to sell their cars for such prices – maybe they will drive them for a few more years, or sell abroad. This further depresses the average quality of used cars and so on and so forth. Soon it may turn out that although there are people who would like to buy a premium used car and although there are people who would like to sell such cars, the market only trades “lemons”, because everybody assumes that most used cars are lemons. Note, that this state of the market might persist even though the original reason for the fall of quality has long passed. Also note, that this positive feedback loop may start at any stage – at the fall of the average quality, at the fall of prices or at the withdrawal of quality cars from the market.

This “information asymmetry” problem is, obviously, not limited to the used cars market. In fact George Akerloff and Joseph Stiglitz argue that information asymmetry is a norm rather than the exception and they got the Nobel prize in economics for their work, so I think there is something to it. Probably the most known (and the most controversial) other example of market for lemons is the market in private health insurance. I won’t discuss that particular topic, due to its rather inflammatory nature.

The Information Asymmetry in Game Markets

Now let’s consider whether under certain conditions it is possible for game markets to become markets for lemons. It is obvious that game developers usually know more about their games than the players. It is also obvious that the individual developers do not have much incentives to announce that their game is crap. But games are not like used cars since a game can be, however subjectively, reviewed. Reviews, even if not perfect, at the very least protect the players from buying utter crap. Or do they?

If the market is flooded with games, e. g. due to an explosion of shovelware, many games are not reviewed at all and many are reviewed only by minor review sites that players might not consider reliable. Nothing strange about that – reviewing takes time and nobody wants to review the 255th Flappy Bird clone. User reviews could help, but they are usually far too easy to manipulate to be useful. In fact we have a proof that people are buying games without reading any reviews – because we know there are people who have bought the Air Control and similar games. And the only way they could have done that is if they have not read a single review. So, if people are not reading the reviews, then how do they assess the quality of the games they purchase? Well, they probably make an assumption based on the average game quality in the market…

If we apply the “market for lemons” reasoning to games, we can conclude that if the supply of games surpasses the reviewers ability to review them and the quality of the games falls at the same time, the result can be a downward spiral of falling average games’ quality and prices. There will always be some exceptions to this overall trend. Developers who are able to signal their game’s quality somehow – either by getting good reviews from recognizable reviewers, by advertising, having a recognizable brand or being featured by the store – will still be able to make decent money. However those who are unable to afford such signaling will suffer.

The Case of the Mobile App Stores

I believe we have already seen this play out in the mobile app stores – when iPhone and (more importantly) iPhone 3G debuted there were many high quality, innovative, payed games in the App Store. Many considered it an indie heaven and several well known indie studios’ made their first success stories there. But pretty soon the influx of new developers both overwhelmed the reviewers and caused the prices to fall. And they kept falling, along with the average quality of games till they reached the minimum allowed price of $0.99. Soon even this barrier was broken with the move towards the F2P model, which has a ton of problems of its own.

Notice those the most affected by this situation are not the even the customers themselves. They still can buy some quality releases for the iPhone, either from large companies that can afford advertisements, branding, features etc. or from smaller developers with established brands (such as Vlambeer). In other worlds from those, who can afford to signal the quality of their games. The most affected group are the new indie developers, who can not afford traditional marketing and do not have enough brand recognition to efficiently use the social media channels. New indie developers are usually advised to completely avoid the App Store or to be prepared for a long brand awareness building process. Similar thing (only faster) happened in the Android marketplace.

The Case of Steam

I think it will not surprise anyone if I say that the next lemon market might be the Steam based PC indie market. Most of the indie games on Steam do not have Metacritic scores due to either not having reviews at all or having them from too minor sites. Steam allows developers to simply hide unfavorable user reviews from the store page, which reduces their utility. We have clearly seen the dip in average quality due to Valve opening their doors to the flood of old games that were too bad to get on Steam when they were first released, shovelware and even barely functional shit like the already mentioned Air Control. We have definitely seen a fall in incomes – the indie mantra of recent months was “getting on Steam no longer makes you rich”. The question is whether this fall in incomes is causing a further fall in the average game quality, thus completing the cycle?

So far I have not yet noticed that. The optimistic explanation is that perhaps the incomes have fallen, but they are still at a level that allows developers to make quality games. The bitter-sweet explanation is that maybe the developers are feeling the sting, but they have no better market to take their games to, so they are biting the bullet and doing the best they can despite lower incomes. The pessimistic explanations is that the longer production cycle of PC indie games (compared to mobile games) means that we still have to wait for this effect to come into force. I have no data to prove or deny any of those hypotheses. I would like to believe that the optimistic one is true however, if the flood of shovelware continues I do not see a reason why the PC market should avoid the fate that has befallen the mobile app stores.

What Can Be Done?

That is the question. There are several things that can be done by Valve. The problem is that they will most likely not do any of them or drag their feet about it. Unfortunately I can only think of one thing that can be done by the developers.

The first thing that Valve can do is of course introducing some sort of quality control. This could even be profitable for Valve if this was done like the certification on consoles, where it is the developers or publishers that pay for the tests. However such a process would prevent Steam from releasing 200 games in a single batch, so I guess it will not happen.

The second thing, essentially a band aid, would be to at least change the store page layout to prominently show the game’s Metascore and the user score – these are not perfect, but at least they could filter out the worst cases of shovelware.

The third idea would be for Steam to change their refund policy. Currently, as far as I know, the official policy is “no refunds” however they do grant refunds on a case by case basis. If this was changed in such a way that the players could request refunds for a week after a purchase, this would make the players more willing to buy the more expensive, quality indie titles according to the logic “if I do not like it, I will just request a refund”. In fact this could even be an option enabled by the developer, as a signaling behavior to show the players “I am so confident in my game I am sure you will not want a refund”. I am rather skeptical whether Valve would like that solution due to the specifics of the economics of microtransactions, but refunds are a well known and tested method of battling the information asymmetry problem.

The fourth idea is rather controversial. Since the cause of the problem is lack of reviews or users not reading the reviews Steam could introduce a rule where the only games accepted into the marketplace would be the ones with reviews. These reviews could be from some minor site or blog, so as not to reduce the chances for the indie developers and Valve would keep a database of trustworthy reviewers and perhaps even introduce their own Metascore. The scores and excerpts from the reviews would be placed in a prominent place on the store page. Of course I realize this solution would put a lot of power and responsibility in the hands of game reviewers and this might not be to everyone’s liking.

The fifth idea is an idea for the developers – we could try reviving the old tradition of game demos. If the signaling is the name of the game, than “I will let you play a piece of the game for free, I am sure you will get hooked” is certainly a good signal to send. Of course this idea could also be helped by Valve cooperation if they somehow marked the games with available demos in the Steam store.

Conclusion

We, the developers, must fight the downward spiral of falling quality and prices. We must fight not only by making quality games, but also by calling for solutions that protect our customers from the lemon peddlers. Otherwise we risk the destruction of our currently best marketplace and with no obvious alternatives (no, not everyone can get on PS4) this could spell troubles for the whole indie game movement.(source:gamasutra)