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在2015年发行独立游戏所面对的困难

发布时间:2015-11-02 15:08:56 Tags:,,,,

作者:Daniel West

在过去三年半时间里我一直与一支小型学生团队致力于创造一款名为《Airscape:The Fall of Gravity》的独立游戏。我们主要是以兼职形式进行;而在中期我花了一年时间全职参与了这个项目。

让我先简单介绍下这款游戏。《Airscape》是一款关于一只被机械外星种族绑架的深海章鱼的2D行动平台游戏,这只可怜的章鱼不得不离开自己的设备而生存在一个充满危险的机器人敌人的疯狂且失重的世界。

Airscape(from gamecareerguide)

Airscape(from gamecareerguide)

《Airscape》获得了一些奖励,包括PAX Australia Indie Showcase的提名以及Intel Level Up的比赛。我们将游戏带到了Indie MEGABOOTH三次,同时也参加了许多其它贸易活动。

而在三个星期前,《Airscape》最终出现在了Steam和Humble Store。当发行禁令解除时,我们得到了70%至80%的评价分。这对于一支由学生组成的团队的首次尝试来说是个不错的成绩。虽然不算惊艳,但我们会坚持走到最后。

但是从商业上来看《Airscape》是失败的。我从未听过一款发行于Steam的游戏卖得比《Airscape》还差。据统计,现在《Airscape》在所有分销平台上的总销量大概只有150份。保守估算的话,其10%的销量是在发行时创造的,我们很难做到收支相抵,更不用去考虑开发成本了。幸好我们的团队成员都不是依赖于这款游戏养活自己—-我们都有自己的收入来源。

为什么《Airscape》会遭遇如此惨烈的失败?我们知道,要说清楚答案是很困难的。我并不清楚完整的真相,但我会尽我所能讲清楚原因,以及这一结果对于其它想要面向PC发行一款独立游戏的开发团队的影响。

市场营销

在《Airscape》的早期开发阶段,我意识到如果这款游戏想要获得成功,市场营销将会扮演一个很重要的角色。我阅读了各种指南,并寻求了各种建议,所以我非常清楚如何去营销一款PC独立游戏。所以当游戏真正发行并迎来一些后续媒体推广活动,如GDC,PAX East,Prime,Aus等等,我便尽所能地去接触所有的媒体。

不可否认的是我收到了许多毫不关心的反应。尽管在一开始我会非常失望,但当我意识到自己没有能够真正呈现给媒体的内容时(如一款游戏或Kickstarter活动),我便知道没有媒体的关注是再正常不过的事。虽然如此,在发表游戏公告到正视发行的2年半时间里,我还是尽了自己最大努力去宣传游戏。以下便是我在此期间为《Airscape》所做出的市场营销努力:

就我个人来讲,我会用电子邮件将任何有关游戏的新消息发送给媒体,如公告,全新预告片,或者参加某个展会等等。

出席世界范围内的多种活动,如GDC,PAX East,PAX Prime,PAX Aus,Denver Comic-Con等。

提交各种奖励。

积极活跃于社交媒体上。

经营一个外观吸引人的网站,并包含一些综合的资料。

在Reddit以及各种论坛上发布内容。

当我们离发行日期越来越近时,我发现最聪明的方法便是找一家专业游戏PR公司来推广游戏。我知道对于PR我没有太多发言权,所以与一家拥有实际知识的公司合作能够大大地填补我的不足。对此我花了不少的钱,但这却是为了证实市场营销在游戏发行期间是否真的很重要。

当发行禁令解除时,我们再次失望地看到所有媒体和新闻记者表现出的不感兴趣。当然也有一些值得注意的例外,但随着发行期的过去,游戏媒体甚至未承认我们游戏的发行。尽管如此我也并不认为PR公司的努力是白费的—-你将从之后的内容中找到原因。

比媒体市场营销更加强大的是Steam参数所推动的首页;毫无疑问,一款优秀的游戏总是能够出现在“受欢迎的全新发行内容”版块中,特别是一些针对于少数显著发行内容的时窗中。

但其实并不是这样的。在首页上的短暂停留对于所有Steam游戏是个保障,但是在此之后《Airscape》却消失了。根据相关数据,我们可以看到在首页上的停留只创造了非常少的销量,在Humble Store上多日的首页停留也是如此。这点很重要,你很快就会知道答案。

如此看来,我认为我们可以不再将糟糕的市场营销当成导致这款游戏失败的主要原因。媒体拥许多机会去写下有关游戏的各种内容,而多亏了PR公司所做的一切,他们让公众知道了游戏的存在。的确,我们听说许多大型媒体都表示不想访问或描述这款游戏的发行。而就像之前提到的,这并不是一段忙碌的时期,所以我认为将问题归因于糟糕的时机也是不对的。

在经过一周左右的时间,游戏销量迅速降低到每天差不多只能卖出一份。

游戏

现在让我们着眼于游戏本身。毕竟有可能答案非常简单,即《Airscape》可能就是一个垃圾!

如果你阅读了评论,你会发现事实并不是如此。就像之前提到的,游戏得到的分数大概是在70%至80%之间。那些正面的评价是关于其优秀的艺术风格,华丽的音效以及具有创造性的重力转移游戏玩法。而负面评价则是关于不断旋转的摄像机以及能够调整旋转速度的灵活游戏设置。还有一个负面评价是关于游戏的高低不平的难度曲线,并且从整体看来游戏是非常复杂的。虽然这具有设计目的,但是我认为还存在许多元素导致评论者未能将难度作为一个加分点。

如此看来,我们既创造了一款优秀的游戏也进行了优秀的市场营销,那到底是哪里出错了呢?

这里只可能有一个答案:即我们创造了一款人们并不想购买的游戏。

这有点夸张了—-我非常坚信这款游戏具有一批会非常喜欢它的潜在用户。的确,那些购买了游戏的玩家都表示这款游戏绝对能够取得巨大的成功,甚至有位玩家表示这是他们今年玩过的最棒的游戏之一。

也许这款游戏可爱的图像阻挡了那些我们所需要的硬核玩家。

但是尽管我们付出了最大的努力,游戏还是未能吸引大众市场的注意。我曾观察过像《超级食肉男孩》,《迈阿密热线》和《废土之王》等均取得了商业成功的“非常”复杂的游戏,并且我们也认为具有挑战的游戏具有很大的市场。而在这里我所犯的一个问题便是我将这些游戏当成了一些普遍案例而非突出例子。

关于艺术风格与游戏玩法间的基本分解,我们可能犯了一个销售问题。可爱且迷人的章鱼,管弦乐以及充满活力的颜色都能让游戏显得更独特且更有趣,但这也会因此而疏远那些我们想要获得的用户。

两个漩涡

因为创造了一款没人想买的游戏,我们将自己带进了我所谓的市场营销死亡漩涡中。

spirals(from gamecareerguide)

spirals(from gamecareerguide)

如果一款游戏不能成功进入生命漩涡中,它最终一定会进入死亡漩涡里。漩涡是让一些大网站去宣传你的游戏的一种主要(唯一)方式。当然了,这里也存在一些例外—-如有些热心肠的记者或youtuber总是会特别关注一款游戏,但是从一个更大的规模来看,媒体总是想看到点击率。如果你的游戏“很受欢迎”,它自然能够获得更多点击率,并因此变得更受欢迎。

这时候便可以提到我们所使用的“饱和方法”策略—-即尝试着进入生命漩涡中让所有人及其身边人了解到我们的游戏,如此我们便能够获得来自那些对游戏感兴趣的人的销量。还有另一种营销游戏的方式,即我所谓的“社区方法”,即我们会接受大多数人对游戏不感兴趣的事实,并转而专注于创建一个将呈现有机发展的专门粉丝社区。该方法有效作用于我们所认识的不少游戏以及许多你可能根本都没听过的游戏中,当然了它可能并不适用于你从未听过的大量游戏中。虽然饱和/社区二分法较为粗糙,但却非常符合我们的目的。

而社区方法可能更适合《Airscape》。然而它还需要执行一些工作,如不断的更新,创造游戏的预览版,或者组织Kickstarter活动。我认为预览版并不适合《Airscape》,因为这款游戏的大多数乐趣都是来自各种惊喜,此外我们也并不需要来自Kickstarter的资助。所以我最终选择了基于饱和方法的破罐子破摔发行方式。

核心问题

以下便是一些核心问题:

游戏很优秀

市场营销活动很优秀

销量很糟糕

所以我意识到:

在2015年,这正是你应该期待的。

似乎人们总是认为如果你所有一切都做得很好,你必定能够获得成功。但似乎在提及游戏时这个理念便不再适用。很多时候你会发现开发团队总是会误解根本的失败原因。如果他们能够参加更多展会,给适当的记者发送电子邮件,或投入更多努力去接触Youtuber们,结果可能就会不一样。

我发现了一些相反的情况:

如果你所有的一切都做得很好,你便不大可能获得成功。

一款成功的游戏需要一些魔法的帮助—-及能够将游戏从优秀变成特别的不确定元素。毕竟,如果昨天出现了一款充满魔力的游戏,人们又怎么会去选择一款优秀的游戏呢?

我认为唯一合理的答案是,“因为这是来自我个人的立基市场”。然而如果没有足够多的用户愿意将游戏加入自己的立基市场中,游戏最终便会因为人们的无视而不得不进入死亡漩涡中。

Airscape(from gamecareerguide)

Airscape(from gamecareerguide)

所以只是创造一款优秀的游戏是远远不够的。优秀的游戏已经有很多了,它们的诞生速度也是不断变快。而拥有出色的市场营销也是不够的,要知道每一天都有许多拥有比你的游戏更高市场营销成本的游戏会出现。

在我看来,如果你想将游戏带向生命漩涡,你便需要拥有以下三个元素之一:

一款优秀/且让人印象深刻的游戏,

一场出色的市场营销活动,

非常棒的运气。

就我个人来讲我还未看过有关这点的反例。而最近出现的主要改变是“让人印象深刻”的标准迅速提高了,即将所有的这三个元素置于一个难以触及的范围。如果你的游戏未能满足该列表中一个以上的元素,它便很容易进入死亡漩涡中并快速让所有媒体失去兴趣。

当然了,关于“让人印象深刻”的定义是非常主观,不断变化且很难做出判断的。所以几乎每一款游戏在某种程度上都有可能让人印象深刻!我不打算在此深入探讨什么内容让人印象深刻而什么内容不行。这种判断应该由那些比我更有经验的人来完成。

所以这一切意味着什么呢?

首先,将一款游戏的表现作为今后几年产业发展方向的指南是一种错误的想法。请把握好这个信息:一个单一的数据点。也就是说我将尽所能去总结《Airscape》的发行所教会我们的有关独立游戏PC市场的一切。

Steam很早就不再提供给PC独立游戏利益。游戏开发者不能再以Steam上一款优秀且拥有出色市场营销的游戏的成功作为标准。不管你接不接受,Steam都变成了另一家App Store,它不再只是侧重于免费游戏。人们可能会认为Steam现在的位置与App Store早前发展阶段相似,即将最低价格战作为向前发展的唯一方式。但是就我个人来讲,我希望事实并非如此。我认为在面对越来越低的价格压力以及游戏发行后不断减少的销量,独立游戏开发者能更加坚强地走下去。

较低的准入障碍推动了每个月新发行的游戏数量不断增加。最直接的结果是,现在的我们更难去创造一款能够脱颖而出的游戏了。显著性,市场营销以及运气的标准都不断提高,所以我们的游戏就需要变得更大,更棒,并拥有更昂贵的市场营销活动才能吸引公众的注意。

在通过创造独立游戏而谋生的道路上我已经失去了全部信心。我从未在此投入这么多,但是现在我却发现这是不值得这么做的大风险。不管我却放弃不了游戏,所以我会坚持在业余时间继续制作游戏,而不再寄希望于商业上的成功。

我真的非常希望自己的观点是错误的,即《Airscape》的失败并不代表一个更大的趋势。独立开发领域充满活力,我也对自己作为其中的一份子感到自豪。独立游戏绝对会继续生存下去。我只希望创造者们所肩负的代价不会太大。

本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转发,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

‘Good’ Isn’t Good Enough: Releasing an Indie Game in 2015

- Daniel West

For the past three-and-a-half years or so, I’ve been working with a small team of students on an indie game called Airscape: The Fall of Gravity. We worked mostly part-time; I took on about a year of full-time work in the middle.
As a quick introduction, Airscape is a 2D action platformer about a deep-sea octopus who has been kidnapped by a mechanical alien race, left to its own devices to survive in a crazy, gravity shifting world full of dangerous robot enemies.

Airscape has won a few awards, including the PAX Australia Indie Showcase selection and the Intel Level Up competition. We’ve showed the game in the Indie MEGABOOTH three times, as well as appearing at numerous other trade events.

Airscape finally went on sale on Steam and the Humble Store just over three weeks ago. As the review embargo lifted, we saw fairly consistent reviews of 70-80% – Airscape currently sits at around 75% on Metacritic. Not bad for a first effort from a team of students! Not amazing either – but we’ll get to that later.

Airscape was a total commercial failure. I’ve actually never heard of a game released on Steam (with some level of marketing) that has sold less copies than Airscape, although I’m sure they exist. Currently, the exact figure sits just shy of 150 copies sold across all distribution platforms. Even conservatively estimating 10% of lifetime sales at launch, we will barely break even on PR costs, never mind development costs. Thankfully, none of the team was financially reliant on the game doing well – all of us have good safety nets.

Why did Airscape flop so badly? As always, the answer is complicated. I certainly don’t know the whole truth but I’m going to do my best to spell out what happened, and what I think it means for other development teams hoping to release an indie game for PC.

The marketing

Early on in the development of Airscape, I realized that marketing would play a very important role if Airscape was ever going to be a success. I read every guide out there, asked for advice, and got a pretty good picture about the right things to do when it came to marketing a PC indie game. Starting with the launch, and with subsequent press pushes at major events like GDC, PAX East, Prime, Aus, etc, I reached out personally to all the media I could.

I was met with almost universal disinterest. While this was disappointing at first, I realized that without something actionable (a game or Kickstarter launch, for instance) I couldn’t really expect a lot of press attention. Even so, for the 2.5 years between the announcement and launch window, I did the best I could to spread the word. Here are some of the things I did marketing-wise for Airscape during this time:

Personally emailed press whenever there was reasonable news – announcement, new trailer, showing at a con, etc.

Exhibited at several events across the globe – GDC, PAX East, PAX Prime, PAX Aus, Denver Comic-Con, and more.

Submitted to a number of awards. The game was selected for two of them!

Was fairly active on social media.

Maintained a good-looking website, with presskit() integration.

Posted to Reddit, forums, and so on.

As we moved towards the launch window, I figured the smartest move would be to hire a professional game PR company (obviously one with lots of indie experience) to promote the game. I knew that I didn’t have all the answers when it came to PR so I removed myself from the equation by hiring a company with real-world know-how. I spent a decent amount of money on that, just to make absolutely sure that the marketing would be a success during the critical launch period.

When the launch embargo lifted, we were again disappointed to see almost total disinterest from all major press outlets, streamers and journalists alike. There were a few notable exceptions, but overall, launch went by and the gaming press at large simply didn’t acknowledge the game’s release. I do not think the PR company failed in any way – you’ll see why bit later.

Reviews of the game had been universally positive. Here then, perhaps, lied our salvation. Even more powerful than press marketing is the raw power of Steam’s metric driven frontpage; surely a good game would find its way to the hallowed ‘popular new releases’ column, especially during a time window specifically chosen to contain very few notable releases?

Not so. After the brief stint on the frontpage that is guaranteed to all Steam games, Airscape vanished.
Metrics showed that this front page stint generated very few sales, as did a multiple-day front page presence on the Humble Store. This is important, as you’ll see shortly.

At this point, I think it’s fair to say that we can eliminate bad marketing as the main cause of the game’s failure. Press were given ample opportunity to write about the game, and for the most part, thanks to the great work done by the PR company, they were made aware that it existed. Indeed, we actually heard back from many large press outlets saying they would not review or cover the game’s launch. As mentioned before, it wasn’t exactly a busy period so I think it would be incorrect to chalk it all up to bad timing.

After a week or so, sales trickled down to roughly one copy per day. At the moment, it’s about zero copies per day.

The game

Let’s now look at the game itself. The answer, after all, may be simple – Airscape could be rubbish!

If you read the reviews, you’ll find that this also is probably not the case. As previously mentioned, the game universally scored around 70-80%. Positives included its gorgeous artstyle, wonderful soundtrack, and innovative gravity-shifting gameplay. One negative was potential dizziness from the constantly spinning camera, mostly fixable by game settings which could adjust the rotation speed. Another negative was the game’s steep (sometimes uneven!) difficulty curve, and rather brutal difficulty in general. This was always the intention on the design side, however I suspect numerous factors (including the fact that there were a few sections that were unintentionally unfair) prevented reviewers from praising the difficulty as a plus point.

So, we made a good game, and had good marketing – what went wrong?

There’s only one answer: we made a game that nobody wanted to buy.

This is a slight exaggeration – I strongly believe that the game has a potential audience of players who would absolutely love it. Indeed, quite a few of the people who actually did buy the game have reported having an absolute blast – one even said it’s one of their games of the year!

The game’s cute graphics may well have pushed away the masochist audience we needed.

But, despite our best efforts, the game (or, crucially, what people saw of the game) simply didn’t appeal to the mass market. I had looked into games like Super Meat Boy, Hotline Miami, and Nuclear Throne – all *very* hard games that have done well commercially – and assumed that there was a large market for challenging games. The mistake I made was looking at these games as average examples instead of the outliers that they are.

We may also have made a marketability mistake with the fundamental split between artstyle and gameplay. Cute, appealing octopuses, orchestral music, and welcoming colours were intended to make the game unique and interesting, but might have alienated the very audience we needed to attract.

The Two Spirals

By making a game that nobody wanted to buy, we launched ourselves into what I’ll call the Death Spiral of marketing.

If a game doesn’t make it into the Life Spiral, it will undoubtedly end up in the Death Spiral. Getting into the Life Spiral is the major (only?) way to get the big sites and LP’ers creating content about your game. Of course, there are usually exceptions – some kind-hearted journalist or youtuber will often take a special interest in a game, but on a grander scale, press want clicks. If your game is ‘popular’, it’s going to get more clicks, which is going to make it more popular, and so on.

This is a good time to mention that the strategy we used could be called the ‘Saturation Method’ – Trying to get into the Life Spiral so that everyone and their mother hears about the game, which then naturally filters down into sales from those that are interested. There’s another way to market a game – what I might call the ‘Community Method’, which is to accept that most people are not going to be interested in the game, and instead focus on building a core community of dedicated fans which will grow organically. This has worked very well for a number of games you have head about, quite well for a bunch you might not have heard about, and presumably very poorly for a sizeable number of games you definitely haven’t heard about. The Saturation/Community method dichotomy is crude, but works well for our purposes.

The Community Method may very well have worked out better for Airscape. However, it crucially requires something for people to rally around – a constantly updated, Early Access build of the game, or at the very least a Kickstarter. I didn’t feel that Early Access would fit Airscape – a game where much of the joy comes from being surprised at what’s coming to kill you next – and we didn’t need a Kickstarter for funding. Instead, I ended up opting for a go-for-broke launch push with the Saturation Method.

The Core Problem

To recap, here are the core issues:

The game is good

The marketing campaign was good

Sales were terrible

And here’s what I’ve realized:

In 2015, this is exactly what you should expect.

There seems to be a prevalent attitude that if you just do everything right, you’re sure to find success. This idea abounds when we talk about games that failed to meet expectations. Much of the time, you’ll see failures explained away as fundamental errors made by the misguided development team. If only they’d gone to more shows! Mailed the right journalists! Put more effort into Youtubers!

What I’ve found is just the opposite:

If you only do everything right, it’s quite unlikely you’ll find success.

A successful game needs magic – that undefinable element that turns a game from something good into something special. After all – why would anyone want to play a good game when a magical game just came out yesterday?

The only reasonable answer, that I can see, is ‘Because it’s in my personal niche’. However, without a large enough percentage of people including a game in their niche, the game will still end up in the Death Spiral as the vast majority of people simply won’t care.

It’s no longer enough to make a good game. Good games are plentiful, and the rate at which they come out is constantly accelerating. Consumers are absolutely spoiled for choice, good and great games abounding. Good marketing isn’t enough either – Games with way more marketing spend than yours also come out every day.

In my opinion, in order to actually hit that Life Spiral, you need one of three things:

A great/remarkable game,

An excellent marketing campaign, or

Very good luck.

I personally haven’t seen any counterexamples to this, ever. The main change recently (And perhaps the cause behind the latest ‘indie bubble panic’) is that the standard for ‘remarkable’ has shot way up, putting all three of the elements on that list even further out of reach. If your game does not fulfil one or more options on this list, it’s extremely likely that you will hit the Death Spiral and lose all press interest very quickly.

Of course, the definition of what is ‘remarkable’ and what isn’t is hugely subjective, constantly changing, and very hard to determine. After all, absolutely every game is remarkable in some way! I won’t attempt to go further into what is and what isn’t remarkable here. Any such judgements are better suited to someone much more experienced than myself.

So, what does all this mean?

First of all, it’s a bad idea to take the performance of one game as a guide for the direction of the industry in years to come. Please do take this information as it is: a singular data point. That being said, I’ll do my best to summarize what Airscape’s release has taught me about the indie game PC market on the whole.

Steam has long stopped providing much benefit for PC indie games, beyond simply being the expected norm, and amplifying success when it comes. Game developers can no longer rely on some baseline level of success coming from having a good, well-marketed game on Steam. Like it or not, Steam has become the App Store, sans human curation and with less emphasis on free-to-play. One might look at Steam’s position now as similar to the early phase of the App Store, with a pricing race to the bottom the only way forwards. Personally, I hope this isn’t the case, and that indies will stand strong against constant pressure to lower prices and submit to steeper and steeper sales sooner and sooner after release.

I’d include the famous ‘steam releases by month’ graph here but I’m sure you all have that comitted to memory by now.

An incredibly low barrier to entry has ensured that the number of games released per month is skyrocketing. As a direct result, it’s harder than ever to make a game that sticks out. The standards for remarkability, marketing, and luck have increased dramatically, meaning that games need to be bigger, better, and have more expensive marketing campaigns to stand out from the crowd.

I’ve lost pretty much all confidence in the possibility of reliably making a living with indie games. I had never put a whole lot of stock in it, however at the moment I see it as a risk that’s simply not worth taking. I can’t help but make games, so I’ll keep working on them in my spare time, but without any real hope for commercial success.

I truly wish that I’m wrong, and that Airscape’s failure is not an indication of a larger trend. The indie development scene is incredibly vibrant and I’m absolutely honoured to be a part of it. Indie games will certainly survive. I only hope that the toll on their creators is not too heavy.(source:gamecareerguide

 


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