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每日观察:关注Apple Watch游戏市场潜力(4.28)

发布时间:2015-04-28 09:18:19 Tags:,,,

1)据venturebeat报道,德国手机游戏开发商Wooga日前发布了其首款Apple Watch游戏《Toby》,这款虚拟宠物应用是Wooga对Apple Watch游戏市场的一次尝试,采用完全免费模式,不含任何应用内付费选项。

toby(from venturebeat)

toby(from venturebeat)

该公司首席执行官Jens Begemann表示,他们发布该游戏的主要目标是了解用户如何使用这种新设备玩游戏。

这款游戏支持在iPhone和Apple Watch下载,但与其他Apple Watch游戏一样,《Toby》本身并不在这款智能表上运行,而是通过iPhone进行处理,然后由iPhone通过蓝牙向Apple Watch发送指令。

2)据venturebeat报道,纽约工作室Robot 5(于2014年成立)最近面向Apple Watch推出了3款休闲游戏,并计划在5月底前针对该设备再推出7款游戏,其宗旨是成为智能表领域的重量级角色。

分析师曾预测Apple Watch发布首年销量将达4000万部,所以Robot 5的游戏就有可能覆盖这些用户。

card game for Apple Watch(from venturebeat)

card game for Apple Watch(from venturebeat)

该公司创始人及CEO Peter Chen相信智能表游戏也是将来的一大趋势,他们从去年12月就开始试验具有可行性的游戏类型,经过多次创建原型、设计和集体讨论推出10款Apple Watch游戏。他称智能手机游戏可能需要一整个团队开发一整年才能完工,但智能表游戏却只需要数名开发者历时一周或一两个月就能完工。

他认为开发此类游戏最大的挑战在于动画的复杂性,iPhone游戏具有极端复杂的动画,可以完全控制每个像素和每个对象在屏幕上的移动。但Apple Watch并不具备这种处理优势,所以他们只能模拟出相似的行为。

3)据gamasutra报道,Valve日前与Bethesda联手移除了Steam平台上《天际》的所有付费mod,并将向已经购买了该游戏mod的用户退款(游戏邦注:Valve曾在上周更新Steam平台,推出一项新功能允许《天际》mod制作者出售自己的作品,但其收益要与Valve和游戏发行商共同分成,具体分成标准由发行商来决定,此举激怒了许多玩家,因为在过去数十年游戏mod都是免费的)。

skyrim mod(from 3dmgame.com)

skyrim mod(from 3dmgame.com)

Valve员工Alden Kroll表示“很显然我们也不知道自己究竟在干什么,我们低估了自己之前成功的收益分成模式与添加付费mod这两者之间的差距。”目前还不清楚Valve未来是否会向Steam平台重新引进付费mod。

4)据gamasutra报道,Quantic Dream首席执行官Guillaume De Fondaumiere在日前的Reboot Develop大会演讲中表示,电影领域的联合投资和联合制作现象甚为普遍,但在游戏领域却较为罕见。他认为游戏行业中的小型工作室应该借鉴这种方式,以便联手推出大型项目。

Guillaume De Fondaumiere(from ctrip.com)

Guillaume De Fondaumiere(from ctrip.com)

他称自己最近在中国看到Square Enix和XPEC联手制作《最终幻想15》,这两家公司不但联手制作游戏,还可以联手开发利用游戏。XPEC具有该游戏在中国大陆和台湾地区的发行权。

Fondaumiere列出了联合制作模式的潜在优势,包括共担成本和风险,技术共享,人才交流,市场流通,以及税收抵免等。例如在德国和英国有两次税收抵免,那就相当于节省了100万欧元。

但他也指出了这种模式的潜在困难,合作双方要有确保项目开发顺利进行的基础设施和人员,另外双方也很难在收益如何分成上达成共识。所以关键是要找到正确的合作伙伴,这就好比是结婚,期间难免磕磕碰碰,并非一帆风顺。(本文由游戏邦编译,转载请注明来源,或咨询微信zhengjintiao)

1)Wooga unleashes Toby, a free Apple Watch virtual pet game

Dean Takahashi

Successful CMOs achieve growth by leveraging technology. Join us for GrowthBeat Summit on June 1-2 in Boston, where we’ll discuss how to merge creativity with technology to drive growth. Space is limited. Request your personal invitation here!
Wooga has released its first game for the Apple Watch in the form of Toby, a virtual pet app that will let you know when it’s time for the dog to pee.

This is one of many games that will debut as experiments in wearable gaming on the new Apple Watch that goes on sale today. The app is free, and it has no in-app purchases. Wooga isn’t monetizing it in any way.

“The main objective is to learn about how people use the watch for fun,” said Jens Begemann, chief executive of Wooga, in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.

I checked it out, and Toby is adorable. He shakes and looks very uncomfortable if he has to pee. So you have to let him off his leash, and he runs off the Watch face display to relieve himself. He’s much more relaxed and happy when he returns.

“I hadn’t let him off the leash for a while so he really had a desire,” Begemann said.

You have to take care of Toby by swiping. You can get him to go to sleep, feed him, and play with him. Once you’ve performed those activities, a circle will fill up, and Toby will be at peace. You can let him make music by tapping away on some virtual musical keys.

The app is available now for download on the iPhone and the Apple Watch. You can earn coins over time that allow you to unlock a range of new interactions, decorations, and designs. There’s a wide range of animations used to express Toby’s personality.

Like other Apple Watch games, Toby doesn’t run on the watch itself. Rather, the processing is done in the companion iPhone, and the instructions for the display are sent back to the Apple Watch via Bluetooth communications.

Toby started as a small internal prototype. But it was greenlit, and four engineers put the game together over a period of 10 weeks, Begemann said.

Toby is available now.

“For us, if we sell it and make a few tens of thousands of dollars, that is not meaningful for our company,” Begemann said. “But we can understand players. To build games that work with this kind of device will take time. By being there on launch day, we can learn faster and see what users like or don’t like.”(source:venturebeat

2)One game studio plans on releasing 10 Apple Watch games before June

Dale North

Gaming execs: Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more at GamesBeat Summit. This is an invite-only event so apply now!

Robot 5 is throwing everything it has at the Apple Watch.

Founded late last year, this New York-based studio is dedicating itself to creating games solely for Apple Watch. It has three casual games lined up for launch week, including a card game, a matching puzzle title, and a football game. But it plans to release seven more Watch games between now and the end of May, establishing itself as a major player in the emerging smartwatch space. Analysts forecast sales of up to 40 million Apple Watches in its first year, so Robot 5 could find its games on millions of wrists very soon.

Peter Chen, the founder and CEO at Robot 5 Studios, tells GamesBeat that a future vision of convenience in gaming fueled the company’s creation. It believes that wearable gaming will eventually pick up where larger screen gaming leaves off.

“Robot 5 Studios is a gaming studio that was formed specifically for the sole purpose of creating Apple Watch games,” Chen told GamesBeat in an interview. “If we think back to the transition from gamers spending time on consoles and desktop games to spending more and more time playing games on a smartphone that’s always nearby, we can imagine a future not too far away where gamers prefer the convenience of playing certain types of games on their Apple Watch instead of pulling out their smartphones.

“There’s a time and place for games on a watch, smartphone, and huge screen — we think that an increasing amount of time will be spent on watch games.”

While Chen admits that coming out with 10 games before this summer is ambitious, he maintains that it’s possible, noting that the current level of game complexity enables for creation of an app in a matter of weeks

“Most companies are announcing one or two Apple Watch games. Building 10 Apple Watch games is a bit ambitious but within our reach,” he says. “We started experimenting with the kinds of games that were possible last December. After many prototypes, designs, and brainstorming sessions, we figured out not only what did and didn’t make sense for wrist-based games, but we also figured out what was technically possible on the Apple Watch.”

Chen points out that while smartphone games could have full-scale teams building games for a full year, watch games aren’t there yet.

“Apple Watch games may eventually get to that size, complexity, and timeline, but they currently can be built by one to a handful of people in a week to a month or two.”

To start building games for Apple Watch, Chen says that Robot 5 had to reset from a smartphone-minded focus, scrapping a lot of what it knew about building games to start fresh. It also had to overcome several device limitations that game developers are not used to, such as manually creating animation through image sequencing.

“Part of the challenge and limitation is time,” he says. “Adding the kinds of complex scenes that are in our games is very challenging and time-consuming. For example, changing the color of a football in an iPhone game might take a few minutes by changing a few lines of code. In an Apple Watch game, this change might take several hours depending on how many times the football is used in different scenes.

“The biggest challenge is the complexity of the animations. iPhone games can have animations that are infinitely complex, with full control of each pixel and also of objects movements across the screen. Apple Watch games don’t have this kind of control over pixels and objects, so we have to mimic this kind of behavior.”

But through this work Chen believes the studio has come up with some new techniques that give it a leg up on games from other companies.

“Almost every game that we’re seeing from other companies have objects onscreen that are segregated from one another,” Chen says. “So you’ll see buttons in a grid, a static scene in a forest with a simple sword slash, or cards that instantly appear onscreen and never overlap.”

And he’s glad that these games aren’t as ambitious as those Robot 5 is working on.

“Our games are pushing the limits of the Apple Watch in several ways,” Chen says. “First, our games use a large number of layers of complex images to show a rich and diverse scene. Second, we’re coordinating these images and their animations together to provide a seamless experience and gameplay. Finally, we’ve hand-tuned the timing of players interacting with the screen and the layered animations to make the gameplay feel natural and responsive.”

Berry Quest is one of the first Apple Watch matching puzzle games.

Robot 5 likes the Apple Watch enough that it’s passing over other wearables to focus solely on it. Chen believes that its convenience opens up new avenues for gaming and that its ties to the iOS ecosystem will lead to widespread adoption.

“The Apple Watch is an extraordinary device that is beautifully designed and more easily accessible than a smartphone or any other device in existence,” Chen says. “Its games will be played by millions of gamers in April, then tens of millions by the end of the summer, and beyond. There’s no better creative and technical challenge than developing games for an amazing new platform, and nothing more exciting than to make breakthroughs that tens of millions of gamers will get to enjoy. In short, building games for the Apple Watch is and has been a game developer’s dream.”(source:venturebeat

3)Valve changes its mind, removes all paid Skyrim mods from Steam

By Alex Wawro

Valve has (at least temporarily) removed all paid Skyrim mods from Steam in conjunction with Bethesda, and will issue refunds to anyone who purchased a Skyrim mod since Valve updated Steam last week to allow Skyrim modders to charge real money for their work.

“It’s clear we didn’t understand exactly what we were doing,” explains Valve employee Alden Kroll. “We underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim’s workshop.”

Kroll claims Valve has a “dump truck of feedback” to mull over, and it’s yet unclear if the company will attempt to reintroduce paid mods to Steam in the foreseeable future. Gamasutra has reached out to Valve for further comment.(source:gamasutra


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