手游的成功之道（三）：用户获取

原作者：Will Freeman 译者：Willow Wu

在本篇中，业内数一数二的开发者将会和我们分享他们在用户获取方面的经验。（前文回顾1，2）

要做一个成功的手游，你最不能缺的就是玩家。

它需要忠实玩家——愿意为F2P机制氪金的玩家，愿意成为游戏传播者的玩家，愿意成为社区活跃成员的玩家，他们对游戏留存率是至关重要的。你的游戏需要用户来玩，而且还要倾尽全力让他们留下来甚至是带动小伙伴一起来。

如何吸引这批玩家，这就是用户获取问题了。提到它，很多人都会想到其中的复杂性以及所需的高昂成本，不禁让人眉头一皱，至少大部分人都是这么觉得的。资金像流水一样地投进用户获取平台、广告推广以及其它各种的渠道，动辄就上百万。

Dead Trigger 2（from unity3d.com）

但是有越来越多使用Unity的游戏工作室在不用花费这么一大笔钱的情况下依然收获了成功的果实。投钱的人也有，而且回报翻了好几番。

当然大多数人的预算还是比较紧张的，第一要考虑的还是付员工的钱让他们继续做游戏。但这并没有影响Unity游戏散发它的魅力。

来自捷克的游戏开发团队Madfinger，他们的热门IP《暗影之枪》(Shadowgun)和《死亡扳机》都用了Unity引擎。据Madfinger的合作创始人&CEO Marek Rabas说，虽然运气成分也有，但游戏能够得到这么多玩家的青睐主要还是因为团队的合理规划以及辛勤工作。

提到《死亡扳机2》，Rabas说：“我们从来就没有营销预算，我们也没借助过任何平台来提高用户获取量。我们所拥有的8000万玩家都是实打实地冲着游戏来的，我很高兴可以这么跟你说。”

其实这并不是什么遥不可及的事情，这是广大Unity游戏开发者们也可以学到的经验。“在过去的四年中，我们的重点就是扩大团队知名度，建立游戏社区，”Rabas继续说道，“我们认为如果玩家玩完我们的一款游戏之后感到开心而且满足，那么他们就会想要去尝试我们的其它游戏。当然，你要满足每个人是不可能的，但觉得好玩的玩家比觉得不好玩的玩家多的话，你的社区就会壮大起来。我们也犯过错误，但犯错是学习过程的一个重要部分。”

对Madfinger来说，能有这么多玩家回来玩续作还要归功于Unity平台的强大实力。游戏引擎的选择对制作出一款热门游戏有多大的影响？对此，Rabas说：“在刚开始的时候，如何选择合适的平台对我们来说是个大问题，我们并不想开发自己的引擎、工具等等。我们选择Unity是因为它能让我们专心于游戏本身。你不用重复开发，只要开发一次就能适用于所有主流平台和设备，这就能省下很多时间让我们进一步提升游戏质量。与此同时，Unity还能在游戏的画面以及音效上提供一定的辨识度。”

至于如何才能吸引玩家来尝试新游戏，Madfinger的用户获取策略还算是相当传统的：做好游戏，扩大知名度，引导玩家逐步接触他们的其它游戏，加快开发速度的同时也要保持游戏质量达标，让玩家玩得开心。一次大受欢迎的发行活动可以当作是推广下一个项目的好机会，由此就可以形成一个用于用户获取的良性循环系统，它的影响力是和团队的名声以及地位成正比的。

这种策略能为游戏带来8000万的下载量，但前提是你有扎实的同类产品或者是一定的忠实玩家基础。但如果你之前都没有产品，无法利用社区呢？

来自以色列的Jelly Button是一家正处于快速发展状态的新兴公司，他们发行的第一款手游在短时间内就获得了非凡的成绩。《海岛冒险》是一款简单但是精致的Unity游戏，最开始是在Facebook平台上发行。游戏采用的是“一键式”玩法，通过转动轮盘来决定你是能得到财宝或者是去进攻其他玩家的私人岛屿。仅仅过了几个月，游戏的日活跃用户就达到了170多万人。每天还有大概4万~8万新玩家来下载这个游戏，安装《海岛冒险》的玩家已经有近500万人。

开发团队只有20个人左右，这就注定了他们不会做大项目。所以他们是如何吸引到这么多玩家呢？Jelly Button的合作创始人&产品设计师Mor Shani说“首先当然是从一个好游戏开始，投入大量的时间还有对完美的追求。但我们在viral loops的设计上十分谨慎，也就是游戏中鼓励玩家把游戏分享给朋友的部分。

“它非常重要，发挥作用时可能会完全超出你的想象。我们的团队规模比较小，现在我们一天能看到9000万左右的邀请通知，玩家想要和其他人一起玩游戏。”

日活跃用户数量达到170万，一天内发出9000万的邀请通知，这显然就是F2P手游走向成功的坚实基础。他们做的只是设计一个巧妙的游戏机制，奖励向其他人发出邀请的玩家。

Shani的同事，Jelly Button CTO Ron Rejwan说“说到Unity在用户获取以及增长方面的具体作用，我想起一件很有意思的事——当时我们的游戏只有iOS版本，但是现在的这批玩家我们早就接触到了。在那个时候，玩家可以通过各种渠道发出邀请，包括Facebook。这就意味着安卓玩家也知道我们的游戏了，但我们还没推出安卓版本。”

Jelly Button明白了当时的状况——他们的游戏吸引了一大批玩不了游戏的人。当时的日活跃用户稳定在3万人左右，以F2P游戏的标准来看，真的是一个相当小的数字。他们得做出一个安卓版本的游戏，而且要抓紧时间，不能让这么一大批用户从自己手中流失。

Jelly Button的创意总监Moti Novo补充说：“用Unity大概只花了我们1个半月就做出安卓版本了。这种快速移植的能力对小型开发团队来说真的是很重要，能让我们及时抓住这些安卓用户。后来的安卓版本游戏让我们的日活跃用户从3万一跃至12万，甚至是13万。这就是涨势的起点，所以说快速平台移植能力对我们的成功有着非常关键的作用。

Jelly Button的故事令人印象深刻，随着日子一天天过去，他们也逐渐向手游主流公司靠近。但对于有些工作室来说，即使是20人团队也是一个很遥远的目标。幸运的是，即使你的团队人数用一只手就能数完，你还是有办法吸引大量玩家。

Lonely Few是一个只有两个人的团队——合作创始人&开发者 Yeong-Hao Han和Rod Green。人数虽少，但是玩家不少。他们在2013年发行的解谜游戏《彩独》甚至成为了iOS以及安卓平台上的大热门游戏。他们的动力来源是游戏上架初期的第一波好评。

但是在Lonely Few看来，他们差点就和这一切错过了。Green说：“一开始我们只是静悄悄地发游戏，没有发布什么公告或者是请媒体推广，我们有发几封邮件，但是没抱太大希望。过了差不多一个月之后，我们开始着手下一个游戏，以为《彩独》就到此为止了。”

所幸的是，Green注意到App Store中的五星评价出人意料地多，受此启发，他决定给这个游戏第二次机会。

Green继续说：“从那些玩家评价中我们得知虽然下载量不高，但是玩过游戏的人们真的很喜欢《彩独》，好评越来越多。对于这个游戏，我们或许还能有更多期待。”

两位搭档很快就回到游戏中去，并且靠他们自己推广。“我们就是自己的公关，给任何我们觉得可能感兴趣的人发邮件、发推特。我们给平台商店发邮件（苹果、谷歌、亚马逊），按照我们的工作方式撒网，直到找到能给《彩独》一个机会发光的人。”

在他们的坚持努力下，Lonely Few成功把游戏送到了平台编辑手中，证明了游戏确实具有不小的潜力，这些编辑看出了游戏的亮点。很快它就成为全球各大手机应用商店的编辑推荐之作——这就是用户获取的黄金渠道。这个两人团队在坚持不懈的努力下做到了其他人砸重金可能都做不到的事情。

Green说：“我们成功了，挣到了那么多用户。我们的玩家遍布全球，目前大概有450万。”Lonely Few的故事证明了两个开发者+一个邮箱账号+一个推特账号是可以做出热门游戏的，而不仅仅只是让工作室维持下去。

至于那些准备在用户获取上投资的人，确实，你们也可以得到丰厚的回报，而且还有一种相对传统的用户获取媒介值得考虑——广告，这比起直接付费给相关平台要便宜多了。

就在不久之前，Pocket PlayLabs还在头痛资金问题。而现在他们手上有着Rovio代理发行的大热门游戏《果汁方块》。这款F2P游戏的下载量已经达到2500万次，目前的日活跃用户大概是200万人，而且很多都是付费玩家。

Pocket PlayLab的合作创始人&CEO Jakob Lykkegaard说：“我们之前一直都是自筹资金，但是过了一年多之后，我们还要付20个人的工资，这就是个比较棘手的问题了。”

他们通过各种不同的渠道做广告，前前后后就投入了几百万美元，但是结果依然是未知的。

“我们在澳大利亚进行测试发行，这就是一切的转折点，” Lykkegaard继续说道，“玩家数量终于达到了一个令人喜悦的数字，我们花在广告上的钱也真的通过IAP收回来了。《果汁方块》甚至都还没正式发行，收入就已经高出开发成本了。与此同时，Rovio Stars还有其他发行商也开始也和我们取得联系。”

作为最传统、最可靠的用户获取渠道，广告对Pocket PlayLabs显然是有益的。虽说几百万的投入听起来是有些吓人，但如果你能找到合适的方法确保收益，那么回报将会是极其丰厚的。

但是就像其他同时期的工作室一样，Pocket PlayLab也会告诉你首先你要有个好游戏。他们能得到《愤怒的小鸟》背后团队的支持，这也要归功于Unity。

“Unity帮我们省了很多事，突然之间我们的关注点只剩下‘游戏怎么做才会好玩’了，其它的事情我们都不用担心。而且我们的大多数开发人员在制作《果汁方块》时是边学Unity边做游戏的。这样一来我们就能制作原型，从而快速发行游戏。还有就是我们不用计划要在哪个平台发行，因为我们现在有办法在所有平台发行，包括移动端和网页端。”

《果汁方块》《彩独》《海岛冒险》《死亡扳机2》都是不同的游戏，由不同的工作室开发，采用不同的方法赢得用户。但是它们有两点是相同的——它们都是成功的移动产品，还有它们都用了Unity。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

In the latest in our series of blog posts bringing you insights from Unity users that have thrived in the mobile space, top developers share their experiences of attracting users.

Making a mobile game a success needs one thing more than most. It needs players.

And it needs devoted players; ones that will spend money on free-to-play game mechanics, fuel the virality that attracts new users, and be proactive in the communities that can be so vital to retention. Your game will need players that play, stay, and share your game.

Getting those players, of course, is a matter of user acquisition. And acquiring users for mobile games is infamously complex and costly. At least, that’s what many will tell you. Millions of dollars can be funneled into user acquisition platforms, ad revenue networks and other systems that can be as bewildering as they are expensive.

But increasing numbers of Unity using studios are making successful mobile games without necessarily spending a fortune. And there are also many that have invested their cash in attracting users, only to see that money come back many times over.

For most, of course, budgets are tight, and paying staff and making the game have to come first. But that hasn’t stopped Unity users attracting impressive user numbers.

One such team is Madfinger, the Czech Republic-based team behind the popular Shadowgun and Dead Trigger IPs, which have both use Unity. And by CEO and Co-founder Marek Rabas’ own confession, while a little luck played a part, a lot of hard work in the right places helped the team acquire significant user numbers.

“We never had money for marketing and we never used user acquisition [services],” confirms Rabas, considering the development of Dead Trigger 2. “I’m happy to say, that all of the 80 million people who downloaded our games were organic.”

But where those users came from isn’t an utter mystery; rather its something other Unity users can apply to their own games. “During the last four years we focused on building our name and the community around us,” continues Rabas. “We believe that players should finish our game feeling happy and satisfied, and in that way, they will be more eager to try our next game. Of course you can’t satisfy everybody, but if more players are happy than not happy, your community will grow. Sure we made some mistakes, but it’s part of the learning process.”

And for Madfinger, it was the quality Unity allowed the team to hit that saw them attracting their players back to subsequent games. “Selecting the right platform was a big question at the beginning,” states Rabas on the matter of how their engine choice helped them build games that would be a success with players. “We didn’t want to develop our own engine, tools, etcetera. We went for Unity because it allows us to focus on the game itself. The fact that you only develop the game once and can use it on all key platforms and devices saves a lot of time that we can then dedicate to game quality. At the same time, Unity allows us to bring a level of graphics and sound into our games that makes us instantly recognizable from many other developers.”

In terms of bringing customers to a new game, then, Madfinger’s story is one of a relatively traditional user acquisition strategy. Make good games, build a reputation, and focus on taking players from one game to the next, developing quickly and at quality to meet demand and keep players happy. One popular release can be simply used as a place to promote you next, building a virtuous cycle of acquisition that grows with studio status and reputation.

It’s reassuring that such a strategy can attract 80 million downloads of decidedly core games, but it is one that favors those with a catalogue of games under their belt, or time to evolve organically. But what about if you haven’t got a previous mobile title from which to harness community?

Jelly Button hail from Israel, home of a burgeoning tech start-up scene, and have with their first mobile game rapidly secured some impressive stats. Their debut on iOS and Android Pirate Kings is a simple and polished Unity creation that began life on Facebook. Effectively a ‘one-button’ game of spinning a wheel to gain loot and abilities with which to attack other players’ own pirate-flavored islands, in a handful of months it has reached daily active users numbers of over 1.7 million. 40,000-to-80,000 new players are downloading the game every day, with close to 5 million installs already reached.

The team is made of around 20 staff, making it a decidedly small operation. So just how are they attracting such vast numbers? “Of course it starts with a good game, and a sense of perfection and a lot of time working on the game,” offers Mor Shani, Co-Founder and Product Designer at Jelly Button. “But we are careful to design in viral loops that encourage our players to share the game and bring their friends to our game.

“That is very important,” continues Shani. “The viral loops can get crazy as they grow. We are a smaller team, and we’re now seeing 90 million invites a day sent from our users encouraging other players to try the game.”

Even with that DAU of 1.7 million players, 90 million invites in 24 hours is hugely impressive, and clearly a robust foundation for a free-to-play success on mobile. And all it took was some elegant design around rewarding existing players for getting other users on board.

“Regarding Unity specifically in terms of our growth and user acquisition, one of the things that was really interesting to see was that, as we started on iOS only, we reached this plateau of users early on,” says Shani’s colleague Jelly Button CTO Ron Rejwan. “At that point the invites were going out in various ways, including over Facebook. That meant reaching Android users, and at that point we didn’t have an Android version.”

The Jelly Button team could see what was happening. A powerful user acquisition drive was meeting players who couldn’t play their game. The outfit saw player numbers where level out at around 30,000 daily active users; a fairly small number by free-to-play mobile game standards. They needed to get the game to Android, and fast, before the critical mass was lost. Which is where Unity’s strengths mattered most to the team.

“Using Unity it took us maybe a month-and-a-half to move the game to Android,” adds Jelly Button Creative Director Moti Novo. “That ability for a smaller studio to quickly move to another platform when it mattered was really important, and it allowed us to get to those Android users. Then we launched the Android version, and in matter of days we leapt from 30,000 to about 120,000 or 130,000 daily active users. That was the start of the growth we’re seeing now, and so really moving to a new platform fast was very important to our success.”

Jelly Button’s story is an impressive one, and with everyday that passes they are inching closer and closer to joining the mobile gaming space’s big league.
But for some, even a team of 20 can feel like a distant dream. Fortunately, even Unity-using teams with headcounts you can register on one hand are finding ways to attract impressive players.

Lonely Few is a two-man team, comprising of developers and co-founders Yeong-Hao Han and Rod Green. Yet despite their slender size, they’ve seen their puzzle game rub shoulders with the mobile goliaths on iOS and Android since its release back in 2013. It has continued to attract players, and succeed, buoyed up by an initial wave of critical praise.

But for Lonely Few, it almost didn’t happen. “Initially we just released the game, we didn’t do any real announcement or press push,” admits Green. “We emailed a few places but weren’t expecting much. After a month or so we started working on our next project assuming Blendoku was done.

Fortunately for Green, he noticed the unusually high number if five-star reviews Blendoku was getting across the app stores, and was inspired to give his creation a second chance.
“What [those reviews] said to us is that even though there wasn’t a huge amount of downloads, people who found the game really liked it, since the reviews were all glowingly positive,” continues Green. “So we figured that maybe there’s more to this game than we expected.”

The Lonely Few duo quickly returned to the game, and began to promote it off their own backs. “We went into PR mode; we emailed, tweeted, anyone and everyone who we thought might be interested. We emailed the stores – Apple, Google, Amazon – and worked our way through the chain till we found someone who could give Blendoku a chance to shine.”

With that persistence, Green and co-founding colleague Yeong-Hao Han made it through to the store holder’s editors; proving it can be done. And those editors saw something in Blendoku. Soon it was featured across the world. Being featured, of course, is the Holy Grail of user acquisition, and through persistence and determination, a two man studio had done with their Unity game what many spend a fortune failing to achieve.

“Something clicked,” offers Green. “We hit a critical mass. Currently we’re at about 4.5 million downloads worldwide.” Lonely Few’s story proves that two developers armed with an email account and a twitter profile can attract numbers that, when there are only two staff wages to pay, can do more than keep the studio alive.

For those prepared to invest, however, the user acquisition rewards can be ample, and one route worth considering is that of another traditional medium; advertising, which can work out relatively cheaper that straight up paid for UA platforms.

Not so long ago Pocket PlayLabs was struggling financially. Today it has its most successful mobile game published by the mighty Rovio under the Rovio Stars initiative. Free-to-play tile-puzzler Juice Cubes has been downloaded 25 million times, and presently courts around 2 million daily active users, many of whom are paying to get the most from the game.

“We have always been a fully self-funded studio, but after over a year with 20 guys on the payroll, we were also struggling financially,” confirms Pocket PlayLab Co-founder and CEO Jakob Lykkegaard.

The team had invested “a few million” in advertising their game across various channels, and the future was uncertain.

“A small soft launch in Australia changed all that,” adds Lykkegaard. “We could finally see that the game hit the right numbers and that the money spend on advertising actually came back in in-app purchases. That meant that Juice Cubes more than sustained our development costs even before it was launched. That was also about the time Rovio Stars among other publishers started contacting us.”

That oldest, most established form of user acquisition – namely advertising – can clearly work, then. And while a ‘few million’ might seem an intimidating amount to some, if you can find a way to secure the cash then the rewards can be bountiful.

But just like all their contemporaries, the Pocket PlayLab team will tell you it all starts with a good game. And for the studio able to attract support from the outfit behind Angry Birds, that all starts with Unity.

“[Adopting] Unity was a huge relief for us as we suddenly only had to focus on making the game entertaining, and most of our developers actually learned Unity while building Juice Cubes. It also enabled us to build prototypes and make rapid releases. Plus, we suddenly didn’t have to plan for what platforms we should release on, as we could just release on them all, including mobile and web.”

Ultimately, Juice Cubes, Blendoku, Pirate Kings and the Dead Trigger titles are all very different games, from distinct studios that took their own route to acquiring users. But they also share two things in common. They all wrote their own mobile success stories, and they all did so using Unity.（source：unity3d）