以Hearthstone为例谈大型企业如何出品创新型游戏产品

本文原作者：Rob Fahey（特约编辑） 译者ciel chen

在过去的几十年里，游戏产业经历了一系列的重大转变——主流平台的变迁、玩家支付方式以及与游戏之间的交互方式的改变、甚至玩游戏的用户群都在变化。这一个个变化都给游戏产业带来了一系列需要克服与跨越的挑战；这里大概没有一个是可以一下子就被完美解决的问题。然而与此同时，还有一些默默在幕后的挑战——那些对游戏业本质来说更基础的一致性问题，这些问题也许不比最新的伟大转变来的鼓舞人心，激情四射，但同样需要有机智的解决方法。比如说教育和技能培训；再比如说税收体系以及行业与政府的关系。

也许这些问题里首当其冲的就是那些在各种行业中都存在的共同的问题——创意类的问题。这是与创新有关的问题，或者再具体一点来说——是有关如何让创新在大公司依旧发挥其效力的问题。现代资本主义的传统智慧这样认为：创新主要源自于小型初创企业；由于不受大型成熟企业掌控下制度、结构和企业文化的约束，它们能够自由地按照最初的理念去执行方案来达到创造新事物。然而随着这样的公司壮大起来，他们失去了原来的敏捷性和灵活度——项目因为内部政策夭折——开发者被要求去处理令人窒息的和股东之间的关系，以及更常见的是情况：创新者的窘境——他们不再愿意追求鲜活的创新作品，因为会害怕自己做的不够好以至于让他们曾经的辉煌毁于一旦。

Hearthstone(from us.battle.net)

于是，我们就见到了这样一种结构：小型创新企业出创新型产品；而大型企业介入来并购这些小型企业。这种结构同样存在于游戏产业中——发行商巨头对创新型的成功游戏工作室进行收购。这样的收购往往意味着同时可以将那些杰出的开发人才收入旗下，要求他们为新的雇主工作一段时间——然后他们就可以离开去再次投入到小型创新作品的创作中去了（除此之外，他们现在口袋里可是揣了几百万英镑的资金了）。这就形成了一种循环，一班子的持续创新者重复地创立新小型公司，取得一定成就后再卖给那些渴求创新产品的大型企业。

对于很多大型企业而言，这并不是完全令人满意的境况。他们肯定会想：肯定有什么方法让公司的扩大规模的同时又不失去创新能力的吧？然而大部分公司的境况都依旧是如此；大公司确实是能创造好产品的，不过这些产品大多是过去成功作品的迭代品和衍生物，只有极少数公司扩大规模后还能开发出成为主流颠覆过去的产品。主要还是因为游戏产品有太多阻碍要克服；有太多的政策阻碍着研发航路；然而层层管理者他们因为担忧害怕投资者无法理解游戏产品概念，就把产品描述成“跟《使命召唤》玩法很像的GTA”、或者什么“它就是一把像素超好的iphone”之类的噱头博人眼球，让新思路新点子根本无处施展拳脚。

大企业这种想让小型创业团队能够在自己的控制下继续发光发热的愿望在愈发强烈，而这也让很多受欢迎的举措得以出现。也许这其中最火爆有名的话题应该就是Eric Ries的《The Lean Star-Up》这本书了，书中指导人们如何有效地在创业型企业中进行商业实践，它所倡议的方法就是趁早发行、趁快迭代。尽管这本书在创业型团队中有一定的影响，但它最大的作用似乎在于让大型企业找到了如何在企业内部营造构建适宜小型创业团队发展环境的法子——好让这大企业能像孵化器一样，为那些家养型创业团队提供跟野生创业团队一样自由革新和快速迭代的环境。

但上文所述的那些努力没有几个结果是成功的。现实情况是这样的：一家大型公司内部的创业团队终究跟在原生市场环境下的创业团队不一样——他们没有了相同的环境限制因素也就失去了相对的可能性；其成员终究属于大型企业中的一名职员，所以即不能奢求有着跟原生创业团队一样的回报，也没法奢望能有跟他们相同的决策环境，甚至不能以同样的衡量方法来判断其基本意义上的成功与失败，在大型公司里，有企业投资人、企业顾问——这些有经验的风险投资家们一生致力于在精密的企业体系下执行决策，现在却声称要颠覆性地给创业团队以自由，然而这些企业内部的创业团队只能感觉到被控制被审视被评判。所以这种努力没有产生效果让人丝毫不感到惊讶——这无论是对游戏行业而言还是对其他行业而言都是如此。

到此为止我们都还没提到开头标题就出现的《炉石传说（Hearthstone）》。现在我们可以对此展开讨论了。

Hearthstone是暴雪游戏公司旗下的可多平台运行的一款卡牌对弈游。它其实是《魔兽争霸（Warcraft）》的变身，就在去年这款游戏创收3.5亿美金（该数据由SuperData所估算）。这礼拜其独立用户量达到了7000万，尽管没有发布其现有用户数据，但暴雪在4月份发布的最新资料片中声称它在用户量方面创下了新的记录。这款世界上最受欢迎的主流游戏之一实在真他丫的是一则有关成功的故事，同时，它从本质上为反驳“大型企业做不出小型创新产品”提供了一个论据。Hearthstone是标准地由暴雪公司（大型企业）内部的创业型小团队所开发的作品，自从它发行以后所使用的都是典型创业型小团队会采取的方法——快速地进行迭代并通过类似于“Barroom Brawl”这样一个允许开发者测试新游戏机制和新想法的沙盒（如果测试结果良好就能投用于到游戏中）来对这类游戏特性进行测试。
鉴于Hearthstone算得上是暴雪最赚钱的游戏，而且它所获得的商业成功的背后是一支相对小型的基础团队（相对小型是指跟开发《魔兽世界》这样庞然大物的团队相比而言的）。因此我们就想问了——其他发行商和开发者能从暴雪的这个成功案例中学习怎样的经验呢？有人倾向于把这个暴雪的成功故事归结于一种无形不可定义的“暴雪式奇迹”，就好像那些闪闪发亮、代表着奇迹的精灵粉尘在空气中自由散落，最后都播散在了暴雪公司的尔湾校区。尽管事实上，暴雪公司只不过一家非常有创意并且管理良好的公司——只不过这家公司无论是在对公司本身的构造方式上还是对公司自身的定义上，（作为大型企业）都保持着一颗创新精神的心。

游戏行业中人们对于暴雪公司最深的印象应该是它扼杀那些不符合自己标准项目时展现的“残忍暴虐”。《星际争霸：幽灵（StarCraft:Gohst）》经过多年的开发依旧不可见天日；《泰坦（Titan）》，本应该是一款《魔兽世界》的后续MMO游戏一样也被封杀了（后来团队的核心几个成员快速地继续对后来的成功巨作《守望先锋（Overwatch）》进行开发来作为其“反弹项目”）。这些都意味着暴雪公司在开发游戏时所秉承的内部文化是很多其他公司所缺失的；所拥有的能力足以冷静理智地进行判断决策，而不会过于被公司内部政策、沉没成本谬误或者其他类似的顾虑所牵制。

在暴雪公司的员工们、甚至高管们，都知道听取建议把项目取消虽然会是有益的，因为从事后来看给建议的人的决定都是完全无误的，但无疑地，这种中途放弃项目的举措会让人受到情感上的煎熬。公司会抛开对负责项目人员的个人看法，只看从项目的可行性上进行判断，这似乎已经成为了一种公司文化；我当然不否认这种系统流程存在瑕疵，并且在决策是存在大量的摩擦，但总体上来说，它依旧是有所效果的。

这一系统为公司创造了环境让小型初创风格内部团队得以存活——这些小型创新的团队可以致力于开发创新型游戏、快速建模以及在开发的同时进行高效的品质鉴定。于是经过几次内部项目砍杀和重启的循环，存活下来的项目最后就会以“迷你型试用版”推入市场；这里可不是那种干巴巴的伪装模型，而是可以有资格称为暴雪游戏的迷你型游戏试用版——经过打磨后有趣好玩，不过这并不是昂贵的完整版游戏，而只是用来作为团队可以根据真实玩家的反馈进行迭代和创新的跳板的一个版本。

不是每家游戏公司都能做到这种程度的；这种程度也不仅仅是倚靠暴雪公司严格的质量控制标准，还有很重要的因素就是公司对投资人的不透明性（这也让开发者能做出符合市场趋势的产品而不用去投股东所好）以及其根据现有IP系列为引导开发新游戏的能力（像任天堂模式就是一个很基本的例子）。然而这里根本没有什么所谓的魔法经历粉末成就了像《炉石传说》这样的成功游戏（或者就此而言的《守望先锋》）。只要有正确的方法与能做出正确决策的角色，是可以形成一种可复制模仿的模式的。而这种模式其实也存在于别处——比如说，这跟Supercell公司的运营结构没有什么不同，这也是Supercell公司为什么可以成为唯一一家能把“电光石火的创意储存起来”并不断开发出超火爆游戏的原因。另外它跟任天堂也很像（尽管在结构上有些许不同）——任天堂近年来在进行转型，Splatoon正是在这样的转型中应运而生的游戏产品。

所以说大公司也能够变得富有新意与创造力、有勇有谋甚至成就颠覆过去开创未来之举。《炉石传说》就是暴雪公司给我们的很好例子——它让其他游戏公司知道，“将培养创新精神作为首要任务、把良好品味和卓越创造力看做高于一切”的企业文化是多么精致而与众不同。对于很多游戏公司来说，这都会是一个翻天覆地的转型——这些公司必须因此在优先项目、结构甚至员工组成上进行大换血——但从长期上来看，这种转变会让公司在将来省下一大笔钱，因为这样你就不再需要每隔几年就花大价钱买下一个能开发出你意想不到游戏的新型创新小团队为你工作了。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

The games industry has gone through a series of major transitions and changes over the past couple of decades – changes to the platforms people play on, the way they pay for and interact with games and even to the audiences that are actually playing. Each of those has brought along a series of challenges which the industry has had to surmount or circumvent; none of them, arguably, is a perfectly solved problem. Meanwhile, though, there have also been a handful of challenges running in the background – consistent issues that are even more fundamental to the nature of the games business, less exciting and sexy than the latest great transition but no less in need of clever solutions. Education and skills is one example; tax regimes and the industry’s relationship with governments is another.

Perhaps chief among those issues, though, is one which ties in to a common problem across a wide variety of industries, creative and otherwise. It’s the problem of innovation; specifically, the question of how to make innovation work in the context of a large corporation. The conventional wisdom of modern capitalism is that innovation bubbles up from small start-ups; unencumbered by the institutional, structural and cultural constraints that large, established companies operate within, they’re free to create new things and execute original ideas. As firms grow bigger, they lose that nimbleness and flexibility. Projects become wrapped up in internal politics, in the stifling requirements of handling shareholder relationships, and all too often, in the innovator’s dilemma – the unwillingness to pursue fresh innovation for fear that it’ll disrupt one of your proven cash cows.

As a result, we see a structure in which innovation happens at small start-ups, which large companies tap into through acquisitions. We see this in the games industry too, in the form of big publishers acquiring innovative and successful developers. Such acquisitions usually come with golden handcuffs for the key talent, requiring them to work for their firm’s new owners for a certain amount of time – after which they’re free to go off and create something new, small and innovative again (with a few million quid in their back pocket, to boot). This creates a cycle, and a class of serial innovators who repeatedly build up new, successful small companies to sell to larger, innovation-starved firms.

“The reality is that a start-up inside a company isn’t the same as a start-up in the wild. It doesn’t have the same constraints or the same possibilities available to it”
For many large companies, this isn’t an entirely satisfactory situation. Surely, they reason, there must be some way for a company to scale up without losing the capacity to innovate? Yet for the most part, the situation holds; big companies can create great products, but they are generally iterative and derivative, only very rarely being major, disruptive breaks from what was offered before. There are just too many barriers a game or a product needs to get through; too much politics to navigate, too many layers of management stumped by new ideas or worried about how something hard to explain will play to investors who only want to hear descriptions like “it’s like GTA, but with elements of Call of Duty”, or “it’s like an iPhone, but with a better camera”.

The desire to find some way to bottle the start-up lightning and deploy it within existing corporations runs deep, though, and it’s resulted in a number of popular initiatives over the years. Perhaps the most famous of recent years is the buzz around Eric Ries’ book The Lean Start-Up, a guide to effective business practices for start-up companies which extolled a launch-early, iterate-fast approach. Though it had some impact in the start-up world, The Lean Start-Up seemed to find its most receptive audience among executives at large corporations keen to find some way to create “internal start-ups” – silos within their companies which would function like incubators, replicating the conditions which allowed start-ups in the wild to innovate and iterate rapidly.

For the most part, those efforts didn’t work. The reality is that a start-up inside a company isn’t the same as a start-up in the wild. It doesn’t have the same constraints or the same possibilities available to it; its staff remain employees of a large corporation and thus cannot expect the same rewards, or be exposed to the same decision-making environment, as staff at a start-up. Even something as basic as success or failure can’t be measured in the same way, and in place of experienced venture capitalists (often the final-stage Pokémon evolution of the serial innovators described above) as investors and advisors, an internal start-up finds itself being steered and judged by executives who have often spent a lifetime working within precisely the corporate structure they now claim to wish to subvert. It’s hardly surprising that this doesn’t work very often, either within games or in any other sector.

We haven’t talked about Hearthstone yet, even though it’s right up there in the opening lines. Let’s talk about Hearthstone.

Hearthstone is Blizzard’s card battling game, available across a variety of platforms. It’s a spin-off from the Warcraft franchise, and last year it made somewhere in the region of $350 million (according to estimates from SuperData). This week it topped 70 million unique users, and though the company doesn’t release concurrent user figures, it claims to have set a new record for those following the release of its latest expansion pack in April. It also remains one of the most popular games in the world for streaming. It’s a hell of a success story, and it’s also, in essence, a counterpoint to the notion that big companies can’t do small, innovative things. Hearthstone was prototyped and built by a small team within Blizzard, and ever since its launch it has embraced a distinctly start-up approach – iterating quickly and doing its experimentation in public through features like the “Barroom Brawl”, a sandbox that allows developers to test new mechanics and ideas that might make their way into the main game if they work well.

“Blizzard has developed something within its internal culture that a lot of other firms in the industry lack; a capacity to coolly, rationally judge its own work on a purely creative and qualitative level”

Given Hearthstone’s commercial success and the relatively small team and infrastructure behind it (relative, that is, to a behemoth like World of Warcraft), it’s probably Blizzard’s most profitable game. The question is, can other publishers and developers learn from what Blizzard did here? There’s a tendency with Blizzard success stories to simply attribute them to some intangible, indefinable “Blizzard Magic”, some sparkling pixie dust which is sprinkled liberally on all of their games but which can only be mined from the secret goblin tunnels under the company’s Irvine campus. In reality, though, Blizzard is simply a very creative and phenomenally well-managed company – one which has, in many respects, placed the solving of the whole question of how to innovate within a large company environment at the very heart of how it structures and defines itself.

One of the most famous things that people in the industry know about Blizzard is that the company is ruthless in its willingness to take an axe to projects that don’t live up to its standards. StarCraft: Ghost never saw the light of day after years in development; Titan, the planned MMO follow-up to World of Warcraft, was similarly ditched (with a core part of its team going on to rapidly develop the enormously successful Overwatch as their “rebound project”). What that means is that Blizzard has developed something within its internal culture that a lot of other firms in the industry lack; a capacity to coolly, rationally judge its own work on a purely creative and qualitative level, and to make very tough decisions without being overly swayed by internal politics, sunk-cost fallacies or other such calculations.

It’s instructive to listen to comments from people who worked on cancelled projects at Blizzard, even at a high level; while it was no doubt an emotional and difficult experience for them, their comments in hindsight usually express genuine agreement with the decision. There appears to be a culture that allows the company to judge projects without extending that judgment to the individuals who worked on them; I don’t doubt that this is an imperfect system and that there’s still plenty of friction around these decisions, but by and large, it seems to work.

That creates an environment in which a start-up style approach can actually thrive. Small, creative teams can work on innovative games, rapidly prototyping and being effectively judged for their quality along the way. After only a couple of cycles of internal culling and restarting, surviving projects can be pushed out to the market as a kind of “minimum viable product”; not a thinly disguised prototype, but the minimum required to be a viable Blizzard game. Polished, fun and interesting, but designed as a springboard from which the team can go on to iterate and innovate in a way that’s informed by feedback from a real audience, rather than as an expensively developed, monolithic product.

Not every company can accomplish this; it’s not just Blizzard’s exacting standards of quality that permit it, there are also important factors like the company’s opaqueness to investors (which allows it to make products for the market rather than making products for shareholders) and its ability to bootstrap new games with IP from existing franchises (the Nintendo model, in essence) to consider. There is, however, no magic pixie dust involved in the success of games like Hearthstone (or Overwatch, for that matter). This is a model that can be replicated elsewhere, given the right approach and the right people in decision-making roles. In fact, it’s a model that does exist elsewhere; it’s not dissimilar to the structure of a company like Supercell, for example, which helps to explain why Supercell is one of the only mobile developers that’s been able to “bottle its lightning” and consistently develop hit titles. It’s also close, though slightly different in structure, to the way Nintendo has shifted towards working in recent years, which has resulted in titles like Splatoon.

Big companies can be creative; they can be innovative, daring, clever and even disruptive. Hearthstone shows this at work within Blizzard, and it’s also present in a select but distinguished line-up of other game companies that have made it a priority to nurture innovation and to create a culture where good taste and creative excellence are celebrated above all else. For many companies, this would be a radical shift – requiring a change in priorities, in structure and even in staffing – but in the long run, such a shift might end up a lot cheaper than having to pull out your wallet every couple of years to buy the next innovative start-up that came up with an idea your own firm couldn’t conceive of.（source：gamesindustry.biz）