软文颂扬下的另一面：任天堂手游业务不如意的一年

(事实证明，手游对于任天堂来说是个不小的挑战，他们的问题不仅仅在于F2P模式的应用失败)

原作者：Rob Fahey 译者：Willow Wu

如果有本记录册起名叫做《游戏行业复杂而快速的发展本质让大多数试图分析或预测它的人看起来有点傻》的话，这里我又要增加条目了。在财政年度即将结束之际，任天堂终于满足了分析人士多年来的谈资需求，在移动平台发行了一些顶级IP游戏。然而，跟任天堂最新家用游戏主机的成功规模相比，手游业务的惨淡表现大概只配做这一辉煌历史的注脚。

我这么说不是想取笑那些一期盼着任天堂进入手游领域的分析人士（好吧，有一点），而是要强调超出人们预期的不只有Switch的爆炸性成功，还有任天堂在手游领域的表现，虽然是以相反的方向。

nintendo mobile（from gamezebo.com）

当然，有人会说任天堂需要花点时间在手游这个完全不一样的领域站稳脚跟，但是在发行《Miitomo》这个奇怪的试水产品之后，任天堂就开始向移动领域大举迈进——他们先后发行了《马里奥》《火焰纹章》以及《动物之森》IP手游，而且据说《马里奥赛车》和《塞尔达》IP手游也在开发了。显而易见，这都是任天堂最有价值、最成功的IP，然而从目前的表现来看，大部分产品还是挺让人失望的。

我说“大部分”是因为有个优秀手游不提出来有点说不过去——《火焰纹章：英雄》，据手游数据公司Sensor Tower估算，《火焰纹章：英雄》首年收益就达到了2.95亿美元，相当可观了，让其它两个游戏相形见绌。但这个对比也体现了任天堂在手游业务上存在着不小的问题——《火焰纹章》系列可以说是三个手游中知名度、受欢迎程度最低的IP，也不像其它两个游戏那样有资本可以宣传，但它却是唯一一个成绩不错的产品。从另一方面来看，花了那么多人力物力推广的《超级马里奥跑酷》和《动物之森：口袋露营》表现实在是太差了。

对于任天堂的手游失败，很多分析文章的焦点都集中在商业模式上。《超级马里奥跑酷》的游戏团队有意避开F2P模式，这很良心没错，但是策略方向不大对。而较为成功的《火焰纹章：英雄》则采用了普通的F2P模式（但是处理得非常好）。搞清楚如何才能将商业模式与IP完美契合，同时又不损害它们的价值，这并不容易。说实在的，任天堂并没有成功完成这项任务，而且可能还在为一些相关决策犯愁。

《动物之森：口袋露营》采用的也是F2P模式，尽管它处理方式与《火焰纹章：英雄》不太一样，但它衰落得也太快了——Sensor Tower估算它的收益只有《火焰纹章：英雄》同阶段的1/5左右。这就是难题所在——你不能直接总结说任天堂手游产品失败是因为他们没能很好地利用F2P模式，这意思好像就说如果他们就照着最典型的F2P模式设计，一切问题就能迎刃而解。当我们只有两个数据点的时候，这个说法看似成立——《超级马里奥跑酷》不是F2P游戏，它失败了；《火焰纹章：英雄》是F2P游戏，它的成绩就挺好的，但是第三个数据点又把人们弄迷糊了。

进一步研究任天堂的手游产品，你会发现一些更深层次的问题：虽然他们已经抓住了核心概念——不仅是要给游戏冠上IP，还要将游戏中受欢迎的部分提炼出来，转换成适用于移动设备的形式，实际上任天堂还不太擅长这一工作。任天堂目前的手游产品都是经过精心打磨和完善的，但它们就是缺乏吸引力，没办法长时间地留住玩家。《动物之森：口袋露营》就是个非常典型的例子，说真的它不怎么有趣。

《超级马里奥跑酷》的开发团队相对比较聪明，他们把马里奥系列的操作流畅性保留了下来（游戏邦注《马里奥》系列的核心DNA），主机平台也非常注重这点。但是，《超级马里奥跑酷》完全抛弃了metagame中所包含的探索以及解谜部分，再加上不合理的定价策略，体现了任天堂对移动平台有着根本性的误解：他们没有意识到如果真的想让玩家时不时地回到游戏中，那么游戏的meta部分是至关重要的。《动物之森：口袋露营》会失败也是因为人们存在着一定误解：任天堂似乎忘记了当初这个IP为什么会如此成功，把这些因素都抛到脑后去了。主机平台上的《动物之森》针对用户留存设计了多个游戏系统，能让玩家们每天都回到游戏中，甚至能保持好几个月。而手游开发团队则是对这些系统进行了大量删减、修改，结果就是他们一直在为用户留存而苦恼。所以一开始的时候为什么要那么做呢？

从另一个角度来看，《火焰纹章：英雄》的成功不仅仅在于F2P的合理应用，跟上述两个产品相反，开发者们将《火焰纹章》系列的精华保留了下来，并且跟移动平台十分契合，这才是重点。虽然大家都知道手游体验肯定会有所精简，但是游戏中所设计的短时回合制战斗加上丰富的metagame，这种结构对于移动平台来说是近乎理想化的，而且也是其它产品所欠缺的。

当然，有人可能会问：对于Switch这么厉害的家用游戏主机来说，这种设计真的有那么重要吗？任天堂难道没有更大的鱼要钓？这就问到点子上了，目前的任天堂很有可能也在思考这个问题。我相信任天堂还是会继续致力于将IP手游开发，他们的手游合作伙伴DeNA肯定也在全力以赴，毕竟他们之间的合作关系也快结束了。任天堂社长君岛达己（即将退休，由谷川俊太郎接任）似乎这是这么想的，对于手游业务，任天堂最希望的就是它能够为公司提供稳定的持续收入、平复公司财务上经常出现的高峰和低谷，这对有财政头脑的君岛来说非常有吸引力。

但是，任天堂现在有谁会呼吁说公司的精英们应该集中去解决手游的设计问题？Switch是现在的当红明星，玩家们对新游戏和新体验的需求对任天堂来说就是一棵巨型摇钱树。手游可能会在未来的某个时候成为公司的重要收益来源，但是现在谁敢把Switch的开发人才拨过去呢？

因此，不要对《马里奥赛车》和《塞尔达》手游抱有太高的期望，这两个游戏做完后，DeNA和任天堂的这份合作合同也该结束了。但是也不难推测双方八成已经在商讨续签意向了。这两个最知名的游戏IP近期在Switch平台上也大获成功。毫无疑问，《马里奥赛车》和《塞尔达》登陆移动平台是件大事，任天堂肯定也会进行大规模的宣传，但是我认为从任天堂之前的手游成绩或者是他们目前对手游业务的态度来看，这两个产品并不能为任天堂带来显著利益，无法发挥它们的品牌效应。

对于任天堂来说，手游业务的前景还是比较乐观的，但是扩大规模需要花费很多时间和精力。如果Switch的热度依然不减，那么也许会有很多任天堂员工会对手游业务产生疑问——它到底值不值得我们投资呢？未来还真不好说。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Here’s another entry for the very, very long annals of “times when the complex and rapidly evolving nature of the games business left most people who try to analyse or predict it looking a bit daft”; we’re reaching the end of a financial year in which Nintendo finally did what analysts have been shouting about for years and launched some of its top franchises on smartphones… And lo, the relatively miserable performance of that sector is going to be a mere footnote to the stunning success of its latest home console. “Oops”.

I don’t say this to dunk on the analysts who have demanded Nintendo’s entry into smartphones for so long (well, okay, maybe a little bit), but rather to underline the fact that it’s not just the soaring success of Switch that has defied expectations; the company’s fortunes in the mobile space have been equally surprising, just in the opposite direction.

Of course it stands to reason that any firm will take a little time to find its feet in a market as radically different as smartphone games, but after the peculiar toe-in-the-water experiment of Miitomo, Nintendo has not been shy in its approach to mobile – it’s launched games based on Mario, Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing, with Mario Kart up next and a Zelda title reportedly in the works. That’s a pretty solid cross section of one of the most valuable and successful libraries of IP in existence, and yet the performance of the games released so far has been downright disappointing for the most part.

I say “for the most part”, because it would be churlish not to mention the bright spot – Fire Emblem Heroes, which mobile intelligence firm Sensor Tower reckons has raked in a reasonably solid $295 million in revenue in its first year, absolutely dwarfing the performance of the other two games. Yet this in itself points to the depth of Nintendo’s problems on mobile; Fire Emblem is arguably the least recognisable and popular franchise among the three thus far launched, it was certainly the game that appeared with the least fanfare, and yet it’s the only one doing decent business. The performance of the hugely hyped Super Mario Run and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, on the other hand, have been extremely poor given the relative strength of their franchises and the huge marketing push that went behind them.

Most analysis of what’s happened to Nintendo on mobile focuses on the business model, and yes, it’s absolutely true that Mario Run was a noble but misguided attempt to avoid F2P entirely, while the more successful Fire Emblem Heroes uses the more common F2P monetisation (albeit a commendably light touch version). Figuring out how to fit a business model to its franchises in a way that doesn’t end up devaluing the IP itself is a tricky task and it’s fair to say Nintendo didn’t get it right out the gate, and is probably still struggling internally with some of the decisions involved.

Yet Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp employs a F2P system that’s not notably more “light-touch” than Fire Emblem’s, and it’s flopped fairly hard nonetheless – Sensor Tower reckons its revenues are running at just over a fifth of Fire Emblem’s for a comparable post-launch period. This is the crux – you can’t just say that Nintendo’s mobile problems are down to its failure to adapt to F2P business models, as if an embrace of that paradigm would be a magical cure-all for its issues. That notion almost held together when we only had two data points – Mario Run wasn’t F2P and it flopped, Fire Emblem was F2P and did okay – but the addition of a third data point has confounded the problem.

When you look a bit more closely at Nintendo’s mobile titles, you start to see a deeper issue; while the company has grasped the core concept of needing not just to slap its IP on any old title, but rather to distil the key things that people love about its games into a form that works on mobile, it’s actually not very good at that process yet. Nintendo’s mobile games to date have been exceptionally polished and accomplished, but they just haven’t really been compelling to play for very long. In the even more inexcusable case of Animal Crossing, they haven’t actually been very much fun.

Mario Run was a pretty clever effort at translating some of the joy of Mario onto a smartphone – the fluidity of movement, more than anything else, being the core DNA it shares with its console brethren – but it entirely amputated the sense of discovery and puzzle solving that creates a meta-game for Mario titles. That, as much as the ill-advised pricing strategy, suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of how mobile works; that long-term meta-game is absolutely crucial when your game is really all about getting people to come back for a few moments here and there for weeks or months on end. Animal Crossing, too, seemed to miss out on a great deal of what actually made Animal Crossing into such a phenomenon; here, even more bizarrely, the game pared away many of the systems that encouraged console players to come back day after day for months on end, precisely the goal towards which smartphone developers have been struggling since day one.

Where Fire Emblem Heroes really worked, on the other hand, was not just in its adoption of F2P. I’d argue that this was actually secondary to the fact that it made a far better fist of translating what’s great and appealing about Fire Emblem into something that works on a smartphone. That it’s a stripped down experience is a given, but the structure of it – short battles that last a few minutes with clearly defined end points, backed up by a meta-game that permits plenty of fiddling and tuning – is damned near ideal for mobile in a way that the other titles simply were not.

One might reasonably ask, of course, just how important this stuff is given the stellar performance of the Switch. Doesn’t Nintendo have bigger fish to fry? Yet that’s really the point – that self-same argument is almost certainly being repeated within Nintendo at the moment. I don’t doubt that Nintendo remains committed, at a management level, to making its franchises work on smartphones. And I don’t doubt that its mobile partner DeNA, for whom the Nintendo deal is close to make-or-break, is throwing every ounce of its weight behind making this work. Tatsumi Kimishima, Nintendo’s president, also seems committed – which is perhaps unsurprising, as the biggest promise of a successful mobile business for Nintendo is that it will provide steady ongoing revenue to smooth out the often steep peaks and deep troughs in the firm’s financials, a benefit with enormous appeal to the fiscally-minded Kimishima.

At the same time, though, who within Nintendo right now is going to make the case that the company’s best minds need to be focused on fixing its enormous design approach problems on smartphones? The Switch is a runaway hit with an audience that’s ravenous for new games and experiences; smartphones might pay off in important ways down the line, but who’s going to pull talent away from Switch development to focus on that sector?

As such, it’s hard to have high expectations for Mario Kart and Zelda, the two games that will supposedly complete Nintendo’s existing contract with DeNA, though negotiations regarding a future relationship are undoubtedly already underway. These are two of the biggest franchises in gaming, and both of them are riding high on the success of recent Switch titles. Their appearance on smartphones should be major events, but while I don’t doubt that the hype for them will be immense, I don’t think Nintendo’s track record or its present attitude to mobile games suggests that they’re going to make remotely the dent in the company’s bottom line that their brand names might suggest.

There’s still a bright future for Nintendo on smart devices, if the company chooses to seize it – but it’s going to take a lot more time and effort to get there, and if Switch continues to perform well many within the company may ask if it’s an investment worth making.（source: gameindustry.biz ）