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功能即服务将成为手机游戏发展的下一站

发布时间:2015-11-06 14:15:49 Tags:,,,,

作者:Alan Price

Fuel Powered的首席技术官兼联合创始人Alan Price的讨论

sceenshot(from develop-online)

sceenshot(from develop-online)

手机游戏不断向我们证实着自己是手机应用以及手机游戏产业的主导力量。本身已经拥有250亿美元资产的手机游戏将在2015年赶超主机游戏收益,并且到2018年其收益将达到400亿美元。

如果你与那些已经在游戏产业中打拼十多年的人进行交谈,你会发现这是许多人并未预料到的情况。如果说我们的产业中存在一个常量,那一定是变化。在游戏产业中,我们必须不断练习自己的敏捷性。只有拥有对改变的灵活反应以及强大的包容性,你才有可能创造持续的成功。

我创造了25年的游戏。我曾经在艺电担任首席技术官负责审查《FIFA》以及其它体育游戏,而参与这些游戏创造的经验也让我对手机游戏拥有一些独特的见解。艺电的产品会以每年为基础进行迭代,开发团队将调整那些已经获得成功的内容以推动之后的销量增长。我认为这便是现场操作模式的先驱。在像《FIFA》等游戏中,开发团队每年都会添加一些新功能和更新内容去满足粉丝们,手机游戏也必须基于同样的方式发展,不过发展速度可能要更快。

主机游戏开发模式是诞生于不同时代。当我致力于《FIFA》时,我们总是要从头开始创造所有内容,并且我们通常都是在工作室内部完成这项工作。而在竞争激烈的手机游戏领域,这种业务模式并不适合大多数游戏开发者。

在一个只有10款游戏在赚钱的产业中,有效投入资源是非常关键的—-现在许多开发者都为了能够做到这点而着眼于外部技术。开发资源总是很紧张,而让整只团队去提交这些带有非常优秀游戏玩法的游戏是非常具有挑战性的。

随着成功的手机游戏大幅度转向免费的“游戏服务”模式,我们开发并管理成功游戏的方式也发生了巨大转变。在更早前的主机时代,如果能够得到索尼和微软的帮助去发行游戏,开发者们都要偷笑了,但随着时间的发展,如今的开发层已经变成一座空城。现在,发行一款游戏只是开发者利用实时数据着眼于长期发展的开始。

对此我们有许多想要咨询游戏开发者的问题,特别是当我们不能预知一款游戏能否获得商业成功的时候。

使用Unity。Unity的民主化任务是帮助我们着眼于这个产业的一种强大方式。作为一个游戏引擎,它已经成为了大多数手机游戏开发者的重要技术资源。它将开发带到了许多人手上并为一些硬核游戏体验降低了开发成本。特别是对于手机游戏来说。只有少数致力于游戏的人能够获得真正的成功,去年年末发行的的《过马路》便能够证实这点—-这是一款由3个出色的开发者花12周时间创造出来的游戏。

通过着眼于Unity在过去的发展,我们开始能够看到产业未来的发展走势。该公司将继续优化其引擎作为基本产品组件,而他们在Unity Services的发展也吸引了我的注意。

去年三月,Unity收购了Applifier,并整合了GameAds Video Ads(游戏邦注:现在已经是Unity Ads了)和Everyplay社交游戏社区解决方法到自己的平台上。在接下来几个月里Unity又收购了Playnomics(该公司能为游戏开发者提供预测性分析)。Unity Services伴随着Unity Multiplayer继续发展着,该资源能够帮助开发者突显于服务器中并使用自己的API创造跨越不同平台的统一体验。

就像你所看到的,手机游戏是伴随着“后端即服务”诞生于价值链的最后一步。

Gamesparks,Playfab和Nextpeer都已经开始开创这一领域的立基群体去降低团队进入市场的压力。他们都将社交动机元素作为确保玩家继续游戏的关键。实际上,根据App Annie和IDC的研究,突出统一体验的游戏能够利用社交元素获得更高的成功几率。根据他们的报告,在排名前50的手机游戏中,多人游戏占据消费者支出的60%。鉴于这一点,你们便可以将这一功能作为产品的关键部分。

后端即服务(BaaS)这一概念是提供给开发者构建模块并让他们再次创造基于云端的功能。使用服务器结构去传递基于云端的统一体验可以成为产品一个非常侧重资源的部分,也难怪有众多公司相继出现为手机开发者们解决这一问题。他们都在创造API吸引力让游戏能够轻松创造多人游戏功能,同时他们也提供了社交媒体元素让玩家能够邀请好友加入自己的体验,从而获得社区的病毒性潜能。

这是一种很好的解决方法。

然而开发者仍然需要付出大量的努力才能基于服务器结构去创造一个功能。基于这一原因,我选择了与Fuel Powered合作。我们将这一项目称为“功能即服务”。我们传达了有关游戏利润最大化结果的统一追踪记录的云端功能。

我们的最终产品叫做Compete,它能够实现面对面的挑战以及自定义的比赛。我们同时也提供了白色标签解决方法去缓解创造这些功能的压力。因为我们发现我们的所有产品在7天内的用户留存获得了巨大增长,所以我们认为可以继续下去。我的下一个产品将提供能够与我们的运营门户网站相结合的实时活动与任务。

一个晚上是不可能成就改变。随着时间的发展,我相信来自工作室内部的定制开发的改变将更加广泛。而使用擅长于特定领域的外部团队的能力也变得更有意义。游戏开发者应该专注于那些能够将自己的产品与市场上其它产品区分开来的有效功能。

而当你不需要白费力气去做某些事的时候为什么还要如此折腾呢?

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

Features-as-a-Service: The next frontier in mobile games

By Alan Price

Fuel Powered’s CTO and co-founder Alan Price discusses

Mobile gaming continues to demonstrate itself as a leading sector of both the mobile apps and gaming industries. Already a $25bn industry itself, it is predicted to surpass console revenue in 2015 and boom to reach $40bn by 2018.

If you were to ask anyone who has spent more than a decade in the gaming industry, you’d find that this is not something that many would have predicted. If there is one constant in our industry though, it’s change. Staying relevant in the gaming business is a constant exercise in agility. One must be unbelievably flexible and receptive to change to create continued success.

I have been making games for over 25 years. I was the CTO at EA overseeing FIFA and other key sports titles, and my experience with these franchises has allowed me to have a unique perspective on mobile gaming. EA Sports products iterate on an annual basis, with teams tweaking and tuning what had previously proved successful in order to drive future sales. I see this as a precursor to the live operations model. Whereas in a game like FIFA additional features and updates are added each year to satisfy fans, mobile games must evolve in the same fashion, but at an extremely accelerated pace.

The console model of development was born of a different age. What I saw while working on FIFA was that we always built almost everything from scratch, and we always did it in-house. This is not a business model that will work for most game developers when competing in mobile.

In an industry where only one in 10 games make any money at all, being efficient with the investment of your resources is absolutely key – and many are now looking outside of in-house technology in order to do this. Indies and triple-A studios alike are all looking at ways to mitigate their exposure to risk as they launch on the store.

With gamer expectations on the rise, cloud-based, connected experiences that change over time are a must – but that is a very expensive proposition with no guarantee of success. Development resources are always stretched, and committing full teams to deliver these connected games with fundamentally great gameplay is an incredible challenge.

In an industry where only one in 10 games make any money at all, being efficient with the investment of your resources is absolutely key.

As successful mobile games have predominantly moved to a freemium, ‘Games-as-a-Service’ model the way that we develop and manage them towards success has drastically shifted. In the older console days, shipping a game through Sony or Microsoft was a moment of true celebration, time off was taken, and the development floor became a ghost town. Now, launching a game is really just the beginning of the journey with real live data to look at to engage and retain for the long haul.

This is a lot to ask from any game developer, particularly when none of us possess a crystal ball to know whether a game will be a commercial success.

Enter Unity. Unity’s mission to democratize the landscape is a very powerful way of looking at the industry. As a game engine, it has become a key technology resource for the majority of mobile game developers. It has brought development into the hands of many and helped vastly reduce development costs for core game experiences. Particularly for those on mobile. Viable success can be had with just a few people working on a game, and this was most ably demonstrated late last year by Crossy Road, a game that was made in just 12 weeks by three talented developers.

By looking at Unity’s expansion over time we can really start to see a shift in where the industry is going. The company is continuing to optimise its engine as a foundational piece of their offering, but it is their growth in Unity Services that captures my attention.

In March last year Unity acquired Applifier, and with it integrated the GameAds Video Ads (now Unity Ads) and Everyplay social gaming community solutions into their platform. The following month Unity expanded again with the acquisition of Playnomics, which provides predictive analytics for game developers. Unity Services has since continued to expand with Unity Multiplayer, a resource currently in preview that is designed to allow developers to stand up servers and create connected experiences across platforms using their APIs.

As you can see, an entire category has been born at what seemed to be the last step in the value chain, and with it the term ‘Backend-as-a-Service’.

Standing up server architecture to deliver a cloud-based, connected experience can be a very resource heavy aspect of production, and is no wonder that companies have started to pop up with the purpose of solving this problem for mobile developers.

Gamesparks, Playfab and Nextpeer have all started to carve out a niche in this area to reduce pressure on teams as they get to market. All tap into elements of social motivation as a key to keep gamers playing. In fact, according to research from App Annie and IDC, games that feature connected experiences that can leverage social elements tend to have much higher rates of success. Multiplayer accounted for 60 per cent of consumer spending among the top 50 mobile games according to their report. Given this, it seems logical to ensure that this feature is a key portion of your product.

The BaaS concept is to give developers the building blocks on which to build cloud-based features. Standing up server architecture to deliver a cloud-based, connected experience can be a very resource heavy aspect of production, and is no wonder that companies have started to pop up with the purpose of solving this problem for mobile developers. All of them build API hooks to enable a game to easily create a multiplayer feature, and they also offer social media hooks to allow gamers to include their friends in their experiences so they can capture the viral potential of community.

For some this is a great solution.

However, developers are still required to do a significant amount of legwork to build a feature from the foundation of the server architecture. It is for this reason that I co-founded Fuel Powered. We deliver a solution that goes another step further. We call this ‘Features-as-a-Service’. We deliver operable, cloud-based features that have a consistent track record of maximizing bottom line results for games.

Our mature product called Compete enables head-to-head challenges and custom tournaments. But we also offer white-label solutions to alleviate the pressure of building these features. Since we have been live ,we have seen strong increases in D7 retention across our portfolio and we thought we might as well keep going. Our next product will offer live events and missions that can be integrated through our operations portal.

Change doesn’t happen overnight. With time I believe that the shift away from in-house custom development will become widespread and gain momentum. The ability to use an external team who specializes in a specific area just makes sense. Games developers should be free to concentrate on the features that are truly going to differentiate their product in this busy marketplace.

Why reinvent the wheel when you don’t have to?(source:develop-online)

 


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