原文作者：Brendan Sinclair译者：Megan Shieh

通常情况下，一个成功的游戏应该能够帮助开发者制作下一个游戏，但《Crashlands》的情况却恰恰相反。

该游戏于2016年1月在Steam，iOS和安卓平台上同时推出，使用一次性付费的手法出售。

联合创始人Sam Coster接受了gamesindustry.biz的采访，谈论游戏发布后出现的挑战。

Sam说：“我们花费了很多的时间来争论游戏成功带来的后果，可以说我们完全还没有准备好迎接这么大的成功。”

‘管理反馈’在一开始占用了团队的大量时间。

他说：“我们有七个完全不同的联络系统：Facebook、Twitter、Reddit、Steam论坛、iTunes论坛，等等。这个做法差点把我们搞疯掉，因为我们每天都需要在这些不同的反馈渠道上寻找Bug报告。为此我们建立了一个系统，试图简化这个过程。”

《Crashlands》的成功也给工作室带来了许多行政事务，当时工作室仍然只有Sam和他的俩兄弟Seth和Adam，他们仨在这方面几乎没有什么经验。

Sam说：“当你的游戏很成功的时候，许多其他的企业都会看到，你会因此收到很多合作提案，这些提案的内容各种各样。因此，我们也建立了另外一个系统来试图简化这个过程。”

然而这些系统的效果一般，3兄弟也发现自己的工作焦点被逐渐地带离了游戏开发。

《Crashlands》以开发效率为代价支撑了公司的财务状况。

Sam解释说“当时工作室就只有我们3个人，游戏发布前的所有工作都只是制作或推广游戏。然而游戏发布后，突然之间涌现出了大量的行政事务要处理，我们觉得自己作为工作室创始人，甚至是游戏开发者的主要价值都被剥夺了，因为我们所有的时间都花费在这些不同的行政事务上。”

为了重新解放自己，他们决定扩大工作室，并让请人来帮助处理行政方面的工作。

幸运的是，在忙着处理这些其他事务的过程中，《Crashlands》的表现也没有让工作室失望。

Sam将游戏的超长寿命部分归因于业内专业人士的赞美和表扬。《Crashlands》荣获DICE Award 2016年度最佳移动游戏提名，被提名的同类游戏还有《Clash Royale》和《Pokemon Go》。除此之外，游戏还被《时代》杂志评选为2016年度10大电子游戏之一，排位超越了《Battlefield 1 》和《No Man’s Sky》这两个热门游戏。

Sam说：“游戏所获得的荣誉为我们开拓了营销机会，并且是与业内最好的平台合作（例如：Humble Bundle就向我们伸出了橄榄枝）。之前我们很害怕接触营销，然而在前面的8-10个月里，我们所做的大部分工作就是针对营销这块。现在工作室的财务状况保持得非常好，我们在营销方面所作出的努力也能够定期为我们引进新玩家并扩大游戏的知名度。作为一个独立的开发者，营销是整个场景中最困难的部分。”

Crash lands（from gamesindustry.biz）

尽管《Crashlands》表现出色(该游戏在所有平台上的销量已经超过50万份)，但Sam知道它本可以做得更好，尤其是在移动领域。

行政工作的时间需求抑制了他们添加新内容的想法。

Sam接着说道：“对我们而言，所有推动销量的方法都涉及到功能/特性。但是因为忙着处理行政事务，所以我们更新内容的频率不是很高。提供内容更新可以让你再次得到iTunes团队的注意，让游戏再次浮出水面。所以很明显，我们错过了一些赚钱的机会。不过，是我们自己决定要将时间花在发展工作室上的，因此我们没有任何怨言。”

当Butterscotch Shenanigans准备推出《Crashlands》的续集(也是一个在移动和PC上同时发布的高端多平台游戏)时，Sam说他从这个行业里又学到了一个巨大的教训。

当他和兄弟们联合创立Butterscotch Shenanigans的时候，他们每个人的行业经验加起来都不到一年，人们说他们不可能成功。

当他们决定要做付费游戏的时候，这些人告诉他们付费游戏已经过时了，没有前景。

当他去参加游戏研讨会，并向主讲人请教如何在中西部找到一个好的导师时，他被告知“搬到别的地方去就行了”。

当他们想在iOS、安卓和Steam上同时以两个不同售价推出《Crashlands》时，他们被告知这将导致愤怒和利润侵蚀。

Sam说：“基本上，我们想做的任何事都不被认可，人们都说‘你们这样做不可能会成功’。我认为在这个行业里，有些事情虽然被反复强调，但并不代表它们就是事实。

我们经常听到人家说‘付费游戏已经过时了’。在过去的5年里，这句话一直就像是一种预示失败的钟声，但我们却从未被此影响。

我的意思并不是说每个人都应该开发付费游戏，我只是想说，大家的说法不一定就是正确的。”

尽管《Crashlands》已经很成功了，但还是有很多人经常跟Sam说“你不能这么做”，这样说的人并没有比以前少。

然而虽然说法是一致的，但他们针对的点已经不同了。现在人们怀疑的是该公司的发展方式——雇佣可能没有任何游戏经验的人，给他们足够的工资，每周工作4天，每周四进行长达12小时的“头脑风暴”（jaming day）。

他说道：“如果我们成功了，唱反调的人就会继续找其他的东西来说‘你不能这样做’。

直到我们获得了一系列成功，并拥有一个非常健康的独立游戏工作室之前，我知道有一些人根本不会在意我们说的话。就算到了那个时候，还是会有人说‘你现在有7-14个员工，所以你做的事情可以成功，但是你等着，等你有更多员工的时候这种方法就行不通了’。”

Sam说：“对于来自他人的怀疑，我早就习以为常，如果哪一天没人怀疑我们了，我可能还会想念这种感觉呢。

而且有时候觉得自己不足其实是一件好事，因为这会推动你做得更好。”

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Ordinarily, a successful game is what allows a developer to make another game. But in the case of Butterscotch Shenanigans, the studio’s success with Crashlands did nearly the opposite.
The game launched in January of 2016 simultaneously on Steam and smartphones with a pay-once premium approach for all three platforms. Co-founder Sam Coster covered the difficulties leading up to launch in a guest editorial last September, but recently caught up with GamesIndustry.biz to discuss the challenges that came later.

“So much of our time has gone into wrangling the consequences of the success of the game, which I would say we were utterly unprepared for, and is something nobody seems to talk about too much in the industry,” Coster said.

“Suddenly we had this huge amount of admin work to do, and the primary value we thought we were adding as founders of the studio, or even just game developers, was stripped out…”
The demands on the team’s time started with something developers actually do talk about a fair amount: managing feedback.

“We had basically seven disparate contact systems between Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, the Steam forums, iTunes forums and all that stuff, and we were basically getting burned out because we were checking all these different places day by day trying to find bug reports and that sort of thing,” Coster said. “So we built a system for that, trying to streamline that process.”

Crashlands’ success also brought about a level of administrative overhead unfamiliar to the studio, which at that point still consisted of just Coster and his brothers Seth and Adam.

“When you have a game that does well, there is a large number of other businesses that will see this and want to offer you deals of various sorts,” Sam said. “Whether that’s something you know is probably good–like Humble or something from major platforms like Steam or iTunes–or if it’s ‘integrate this SDK to do this particular thing on mobile!’ Or is it Indie Gala asking for bundle keys or that sort of thing? So we built a system for that, trying to streamline that process.”

However, those systems weren’t enough to mitigate the demands on the team’s time, and the brothers were increasingly finding themselves working on things that weren’t the game.

Crashlands bolstered studio finances at the expense of development productivity

“It had only been the three of us before, and all the work we had done had only been making or marketing the game,” Sam explained. “And suddenly we had this huge amount of admin work to do, and the primary value we thought we were adding as founders of the studio, or even just game developers, was stripped out because all of our time was going into these various admin things.”
To free themselves up again, they decided to grow the studio and bring on people to help handle administrative tasks.

“Of course, doing that for the first time was a lot of the same thing,” Sam said. “We were reading books, spending most of our time talking to people or building out a hiring pipeline, reading applications, all this stuff. We’re very happy with where we’ve got to now, as of about February of this year, but it literally took a year of not much game development and mostly studio development to get all these new systems built and all this new infrastructure built so we could actually work again as a game studio without having to be handling all this admin stuff at all times of the day.”

“So much of our ability to move sales, whether it’s on Google Play or iTunes, has to do with the featuring. So in that regard, we certainly did leave money on the table by not providing content updates every six to eight weeks or so.”

Fortunately, Crashlands has still been performing for the studio while it figured all this out. Sam attributed part of the game’s longevity to plaudits like a DICE Award nomination for Best Mobile Game of the Year in a crowded category featuring titles like Clash Royale and eventual winner Pokemon Go, or its inclusion in Time Magazine’s Top 10 Video Games of 2016, ahead of hits like Battlefield 1 and No Man’s Sky.

“What that seemed to do for us was open up the opportunities to do those later lifecycle things, but with the best distributors for them. So Humble, for example, asked us to be in their bundle,” Sam said. “The work we’ve been doing in the last eight to 10 months has been a lot of that later lifecycle stuff that we were just scared to approach eight months after launch last year, when we did the editorial. What we’ve seen from that is that it’s done a great job in terms of keeping the studio’s finances flowing really well, but it’s a good way to regularly bring in a new base of players and people who didn’t even know the game existed. And as an independent developer, marketing is just the hardest part of this whole scenario.”

Even though Crashlands has done well (the game recently surpassed 500,000 copies sold across all platforms), Sam knows it could have done better, particularly on mobile. All that time spent dealing with admin work and away from game development put a damper on any ideas of adding new content to the game on an update schedule resembling anything like most mobile titles enjoy.

“So much of our ability to move sales, whether it’s on Google Play or iTunes, has to do with the featuring,” Sam said. “So in that regard, we certainly did leave money on the table by not providing content updates every six to eight weeks or so. Because providing a content update lets you submit a ‘new and noteworthy’ update to the iTunes team, which allows them to resurface the game. So that most certainly was us leaving money on the table. But we didn’t have any illusions about that. It was us looking at the cash flow we had, looking at where we were trying to take the studio, and making the call of, ‘Do we work on the game?’ or ‘Do we work on the studio?’”

As Butterscotch Shenanigans prepares to unveil its follow-up to Crashlands (also a premium multi-platform title simultaneously launching on mobile and PC), Sam said he’s taken away one big lesson time and again from his time in the industry.

When he co-founded Butterscotch Shenanigans and the team had less than a year of collective industry experience between them, people said they couldn’t do that. When they wanted to make premium games, they were told premium was dead. When he went to a gaming conference and asked the keynote speaker for advice on how a team in the Midwest can find a good mentor, he was told “Just move.” When they wanted to launch Crashlands simultaneously on iOS, Android, and Steam at two different price points, they were told it would result in outrage and cannibalization.

“In essentially every single dimension we operate in, most people we interact with have told us we can’t do the things we do.”

“In essentially every single dimension we operate in, most people we interact with have told us we can’t do the things we do,” Sam said. “Just straight up accepting industry knowledge, or a lot of these claims that are touted by people… Just the fact they’re reiterated a bunch in the industry doesn’t make them true.

“We see this all the time with the whole ‘premium is dead’ argument. It’s been a constant death knell for the last five years. And certainly, we might be the extreme outlier in this particular case, so it’s not to say that everybody should go into premium games. I wouldn’t suggest that at all. I’m just pointing out that it’s not blanketly true that you can’t do some of these things people are claiming you cannot do anymore.”

Even with the success of Crashlands, Sam says he’s hearing people tell him “You can’t do that” just as often. However, it’s not exactly the same refrain. These days it’s more likely to be because of how the company is growing, hiring people who might not have any prior experience in gaming, paying them well (in Sam’s estimation, at least), and working a four-day work week capped off by 12-hour “jam days” each Thursday.（Source: gamesindustry.biz ）