独立游戏的未来：四大海外独立游戏发行商的品牌营销策略

原文作者：Graham Smith 译者：Vivian Xue

如今的游戏市场竞争日益激烈，每天都有数十款新游戏发行，这些游戏大部分是由一些玩家们从未听说过的开发者制作的，而他们的背后是一群新兴的“精品”独立游戏发行商（boutique indie publisher）。这些发行商除了为开发者们提供常规的资金支持、本地化服务、质量保证和营销指导之外，还拥有自己的定位明确的品牌，他们旗下的游戏不仅是高质量的代表，更具有独特的美学内核。

I．Annapurna Interactive

Annapurna Interactive 2016年成立时，他们称将致力于开发“人性化的、富于情感的、原创的”游戏。迄今为止，这家公司签约和发行的游戏涵盖了多个类型，包括第一人称叙事游戏《伊迪丝·芬奇的记忆》（What Remains of Edith Finch）、脑洞大开的手绘解谜游戏《画中故事》（Gorogoa）和2018年即将发行的《甜甜圈都市》（Donut County），在这个游戏中玩家将扮演一个能吞噬东西的地洞。

这些游戏的设计和玩法无一类似，然而它们却有许多共同之处。它们都符合该公司对于游戏人性化、富于情感和原创的初衷。如今 “Annapurna game”已经成为了某种象征。

“尽管Annapurna只发行了几款游戏，但玩家们已经在寻找这些游戏的关联性，”《画中故事》的设计者Jason Roberts说，“他们谈到这些游戏都来自于同一家发行商，并由此开始对这个发行商的话语和风格做出定义。”

Annapurna Interactive（from gamesindustry.biz）

“与四年前相比，当前拥挤的市场和一些其他的因素导致成功的机会越来越少。如今玩家拥有非常广阔的选择空间，我认为他们正在寻找一条可以遵循的线索，任何一条能引领他们找到他们想要的游戏的线索。”

Roberts认为Annapurna最终会成为游戏营销中不可忽视的存在，他们会在游戏宣传片头中加入“xxx出品”这样的字眼。“这种电影营销的惯用手法对我们也很适用。”

当谈到这一营销特色时，Annapurna的执行官Nathan Gary说他们“更愿意让开发者和产品为他们代言”，之前我采访的其它几个发行商也发表过类似的言论，尽管他们的处理方式各不相同。

II．Devolver Digital

“新闻报道中经常会出现这些情形：一种是引用开发者的言论，但如果你真的去让那些开发者做个评价什么的，他们在大多数情况下都会很懵逼地表示‘我到底要说啥？’” Devolver Digital的创始人Nigel Lowrie说，“另外一种是，你会看到Devolve Digital（或者某某公司）的人说这个游戏有多棒之类的话。但是我们真的说过这句话吗？我们的想法本是保持低调，但媒体们总有办法赖到某个人身上去。”

对于一个精品游戏发行商来说，营销不仅仅是为了售卖游戏——他们的风格和话语基调从某种程度上在传递着这个公司的价值观。Fork Parker就是由此诞生的。它是Devolver虚构出来的一个游戏发行商主管形象，定期在Twitter上发布公司的产品动向和一些行业观点。比如在《时空之轮》（Chrono Trigger）PC版移植出现问题时Fork Parker评论道“现在变成《时空错乱》了对吧？（More like Chrono Triggered am I right nerds?）”；在EA遭受粉丝抵制而取消《星战前线2》（Star Wars Battlefront II）微交易选项后评论道：“仿佛百万的美元惊恐地大喊后突然消失了。”

“我们总是能看到很多业界精英——往往是一些老人们，他们会告诉你这是怎么一回事那是一怎么回事，” Lowire说，“于是我们想做点有意思的事，站在老人们的角度对我们自己和这个行业批判一番。”

Devolver是借助独立游戏而兴起的游戏开发商之一，并且成为了后来的精品发行商的模板。尽管该公司已经发行了数十款独立游戏，他们的风格却始终没有偏离2011年起设立的风格。从《英雄萨姆：随机遭遇》（Serious Sam：The Random Encounter）和《火线迈阿密》（Hotline Miami）到2017年的《轰炸》（Strafe）和《堕灭暴徒》（Ruiner）。Devolver发行的游戏都具有反抗性和一点朋克精神、通常是暴力的还经常很搞笑。而Fork Parker就是公司风格拟人化后的产物。

精品发行商们会和他们看中的游戏签约，但同时他们也注重取舍。仅发行你认为好的或能卖得好的游戏是不够的; 任何偏离都可能会稀释品牌。

“当我们看到某些类型或风格时，我们肯定会告诉开发者‘这真这是一个好主意，伙计’。但有一些创意尽管非常有趣，我们却不会选择去实现它。” Lowrie说。

当被问及Devolver签约游戏时都注重哪些方面时，Lowrie说他们一直在试图表述这一点，但这种东西很难描述，他能给出的最佳答案是，我们可以彼此分享的游戏，并且能让人产生“Wow，我之前从没见过”的感慨。

答案的关键可能在于更具体的一些细节上：尽管Devolver去年发布了16款游戏，但该公司仍然只有12名全职或兼职人员。 “大多数人认为我们的规模要大得多，但这就是我们的做法。” Lowrie说。 他说，扩大规模会导致他们“失去与开发者的亲密关系”，一个相对小的团队更能够保持凝聚力，成员们的个人品味能够结合为一体并做出正确的选择。一旦规模扩大，大家将很难彼此分享游戏并一同感到兴奋。

III. Raw Fury

Raw Fury是一家规模更小的发行商，成立于2015年，2017年发行了三款游戏。“我们确实拥有一些共同的核心价值观，”Callum Underwood说，他在公司主要负责寻找新游戏。“我们关心游戏，同时也关心玩家们，我们不是为了制作F2P游戏，从蒙昧无知的年轻游戏玩家身上捞钱。之前有几款游戏被我们拒绝了，因为它们的主题与我们的道德观相冲突。”

Underwood认为他们才刚刚起步，还无法形成自己的风格。但像Devolver一样，他说：“我们只想专注于我们喜欢的游戏，以及和我们有联系的开发者合作”。我们经常会否决掉一些可能会带来极大收入的游戏。‘这款游戏能卖得好吗’的确是我们在做决定时会考虑的因素，但是有一些其它更为重要的因素。”

他补充道：“很多时候我们靠直觉做出选择。我想随着时间的推移，我们发布的游戏类型中将渐渐出现一种模式， Raw Fury也将形成自己的风格。”

目前，Raw Fury在大众心中的定义主要来自于他们的公开宣言。 2015年4月，该公司发布了一篇博文，称自己为“UnPublisher”，表达了他们 “打破传统发行商的工作方式”的心愿。Underwood举了一个例子，Raw Fury在提供资金方面，他们不采取“里程碑”的方式（开发者达到或超过原定目标，投资者再进行下一轮投资）。“我们计算出开发者的资金消耗率，按月支付这笔费用，几乎就像工资一样。”

Raw Fury在2015年发布了第二款游戏《凯西瑞恩的冒险》（Kathy Rain）时，就是这种情况。该游戏发行后销量一度低迷，这威胁到了开发者的生计。 为了阻止这一趋势，Raw Fury于2016年5月承诺向开发者们无条件支付12个月的薪水，以便他们继续创作。此举得到了回报，Raw Fury后来的发文宣布《凯西瑞恩的冒险》于2016年11月开始为开发者创收。

Raw Fury仍然处于起步阶段，并且在追随Devolver的脚步。 （当我向Devolver的Lowrie提到这一点时，他表示 “但愿他们正走在一条正确的路上”。）这家公司树立的良好品牌形象也成功帮助他们挽救了一款游戏。

在2017年的微软E3大会上， Raw Fury展示了他们即发行的游戏《最后一夜》（The Last Night）的预告片。美丽的像素艺术和赛博朋克（cyberpunk）风格的城市景观立即吸引了大批人的关注，以至于在15分钟内游戏的首席设计师Tim Soret的一些旧推文就被挖出来了。Soret在2014年的那些推文中说他支持 “玩家们事件”（Gamergate movement）并表示他“反对女权主义”。

Soret在同一天晚些时候做出了道歉，但Raw Fury发表了自己的声明，表达了他们对平等和女权主义的信仰。Raw Fury还在6月12日的一份声明中以公司的声誉作保证： “希望各位看到此文的对Raw Fury有认识的业内外人士能了解，如果Tim真的是当前网络上说的那种人，我们不可能会容忍与他共事。” 无论你是否可以原谅Soret或者相信他真的改变了自己的观点，Raw Fury借助其良好的声誉为他辩护，并成功缓和了一部分人们对他的不满。

IV. Double Fine

与只有几年的发展史的Raw Fury相比，Double Fine从2000年就开始致力于游戏研发。该公司通过《疯狂世界》（Psychonauts）、《破碎时光》（Broken Age）和《套娃大冒险》（Stacking）等游戏树立了自己的品牌，并且当它在2014年开始发行独立游戏时，它一直致力于寻找符合当前品牌风格的游戏。

Double Fine的业务发展副总裁Greg Rice表示：“我们想寻找的是那些由创意驱动、具有艺术感的游戏。”他指出这并不意味着游戏的画风都是相似的。 “很多其他发行商都倾向于某一明确的艺术风格或类型或类似的东西，幸运的是，Double Fine旗下的游戏几乎涵盖了所有类型和几十种不同的艺术风格，这使得我们可以探索不同的领域。”

尽管如此，Double Fine发行的游戏的还是有着有明显的共同点。从游戏《山》（Mountain）（游戏邦注玩家将扮演一座会思考的山）到结合种植和精灵收集为一体的游戏Ooblets，Double Fine的游戏总是色彩丰富、有点蠢萌、几乎没有暴力元素并且很有趣。

和用虚构人物来塑造公司形象的Devolver不同，Double Fine公司的最佳代表是Day of Devs，这是Double Fine 公司发起的一日游戏展，起初是为了展示他们在Kickstarter上的众筹项目《破碎时光》以获得更多支持者。由于当时他们租了一个足够大的场地，于是决定邀请一些朋友过来展示他们自己的游戏。

Dev Of The Devs发起至今已有五年历史，上一届2017年11月的展览展出了 70个游戏，参展人数达到了7000人。由于赞助商的资助，展会对开发商不收任何费用，对公众也是免费开放，甚至还为来看展的家庭提供免费托儿服务。

Rice说：“这个展会和Double Fine Present的工作以及工作室的成果是联系在一起的。它试图向人们展示游戏行业内发生了多少有趣的事情、他们可以成为什么样子以及这个领域正在发生的事。”对于Double Fine这样风格的公司来说，这是一场完美的活动。

和一个拥有强大品牌的游戏发行商合作将降低发布游戏过程中的可能发生的问题。即使人们没听说过游戏的开发者，他们也可能听说过游戏的发行商。在同一天发行的大量游戏中，一个有名气的发行商品牌可以大大提高游戏的竞争力。一个强大的品牌甚至可以，至少从某种程度上，弥补一个游戏本身在质量或者营销方面的弱势。

市场上的独立游戏越来越多，发行商的数量也与日俱增。如果你浏览这些“精品”游戏发行商的网站，你会发现他们和其他发行商很不一样，因为他们不会把创作者的IP据为己有，并且他们会动用自己的人脉为开发者提供营销支持。然而，这些对于那些历史悠久的大型发行商来说并没有什么了不起。

Devolver Digital、 Raw Fury、 Double Fine、 Annapurna Ineractive以及一些其它的独立游戏发行商像Chucklefish和Adult Swim，他们已经为这个行业设立了一个新标杆。如果玩家们无法基于你的游戏或营销方式对你的品牌产生认知，那么你就无法为合作的开发者提供最佳服务。和这些“精品”发行商合作最大的优势是他们不会轻易被游戏行业内迅速变化的趋势所影响。

“就算一切进展顺利，但在变化如此之快的环境下，你无法得知一个成功的游戏模式是否会继续奏效，”Devolver的Nigel Lowrie说。“回归经验，在尽可能最恰当的时机，发行最合适的游戏，这是我们唯一能做出的保证。”

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

In an increasingly crowded marketplace where dozens of games are released every day, most of them from developers players haven’t heard of, a breed of ’boutique’ indie publishers has emerged. They offer developers the same assistance with funding, localisation, QA and marketing that publishers always have, but they also have a clearly defined brand of their own. The association of a boutique publisher with a game isn’t just a mark of credibility or even quality: it suggests something more about the aesthetic values at the core of those games.

When Annapurna Interactive launched in 2016, the company explained that it would focus on developing games that were “personal, emotional and original.” The games it has signed and published since span across genres, and among others include first-person narrative in What Remains of Edith Finch, brain-bending pencil-drawn puzzler Gorogoa and, coming later in 2018, a game called Donut County in which you play as a hole.

None of these games look or play alike, and yet they share plenty in common. They fulfill the announced remit of being personal, emotional and original, and already an ‘Annapurna game’ has come to mean something.

“Even though Annapurna has only released a few games, I already see people online connecting the dots between Edith Finch, Gorogoa, and [mobile narrative game] Florence,” says Jason Roberts, Gorogoa’s designer. “They remark on the fact that all these games come from the same publisher, and they’re beginning to triangulate the publisher’s voice or style.

“A very crowded marketplace and other factors mean that fewer games succeed now than they did four years ago. In such an endless wilderness of game choices, I think players are looking for any thread they can follow that might lead them to what they want to play.”

Roberts thinks Annapurna will eventually become a more visible presence in the marketing for the games they publish, putting “from the publisher of…” at the beginning of trailers. “Movie marketing does this all the time, and it works on me,” he says.

When contacted for this feature, Annapurna executive Nathan Gary said that they “prefer to let the developers and the products speak for us.” This was a common comment from the publishers I spoke to, though some have solved the problem in different ways.

“One of the things you always see in press releases is a quote from the developer who, often times, they’re like, ‘What the hell am I going to say?’” says Nigel Lowrie, co-founder of publisher Devolver Digital. “So the other one was, is there a quote from the publisher? Here’s a quote from Devolver Digital about how great this fucking game is. The thought was, none of us wanted to take credit. Let’s just make up somebody.”

For a boutique publisher, marketing doesn’t just sell the games – its style and tone is part of communicating the publisher’s own values. This is how Fork Parker was born, a fictional publishing company executive who comments on Devolver’s releases and sounds off regularly on Twitter. “More like Chrono Triggered am I right nerds?” the account tweeted in response to Chrono Trigger’s troubled PC port. “It’s as if millions of dollars suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced,” was the account’s response to EA removing microtransactions from Star Wars Battlefront II after a fan backlash.

“You see a lot of industry luminaries, if you will – older white men – telling you how it is,” says Lowrie. “And it was a response to that: have some fun being able to poke at ourselves and at the industry a little bit, from that old white man point of view.”

Devolver was one of the first games publishers to capitalise on the rise of indie games and set the template for the boutique publishers that followed. Despite publishing dozens, the company hasn’t deviated much from the style of indie game it started with in 2011. From Serious Sam: The Random Encounter and Hotline Miami through to Strafe and Ruiner in 2017, everything Devolver publishes is irreverent, a little bit punk, usually violent and often funny. Fork Parker has come to personify the company’s style.

As important as the games a boutique publisher signs is the games they don’t. It’s not enough to just publish games that you think are good or will sell; any deviation has the potential to dilute the brand.

“There’s definitely things – I guess genres or gameplay styles – that we look at and we’ll tell the developer, ‘Man, this is a great idea. There’s something that you are on to here that’s really interesting but we’re not the team to make this happen,” says Lowrie.

When asked what Devolver looks for in the games they sign, Lowrie says they’ve been trying to put the same thing into words internally. He says it’s obtuse, but the best answer he can give is that they’re looking for games “that we share with each other, and it’s that moment of, wow, I haven’t seen that before.”

The key might lie in a more specific detail: although Devolver published 16 games last year, the company still only employs twelve full-time or part-time people. “Most people think we’re much larger but this is how it works we think,” says Lowrie. He says that growing any larger would cause them to “lose that intimate relationship” with developers, but the relatively small team size might also be what allows the personal tastes of the people who work at Devolver to be cohesive and come through in the games they select. Any larger, and it wouldn’t be so easy to share games with one another and become collectively excited by them.

Raw Fury is an even smaller publisher, founded in 2015 and the publisher of three games in 2017. “We definitely have some core values that we all share,” says Callum Underwood, whose main role for the company is to scout for new games. “We care about people, we care about games; we aren’t in this to make free-to-play games that suck money away from uninformed young gamers. We’ve turned down a couple games before because the theme or subject matter jars with what we as people ethically think.”

Underwood believes the company is too new to have a “Raw Fury style,” but like Devolver he says that they “only want to work on games that we love, and developers that we connect with. Often we pass on games that are likely to be a financial success. ‘Can we sell this game?’ absolutely factors into our decision, but it does not outweigh other factors.”

“When looking at games that get pitched, a lot of it is gut feeling,” he adds. “I imagine over time a pattern will emerge in the types of games we publish, and we’ll be able to talk more about what a ‘Raw Fury game’ is.”

For now, Raw Fury has been defined mainly by its public proclamations. In April 2015, the company published a blog post in which it described itself as an “UnPublisher”, in reference to the desire to “dismantle how publishing traditionally works.” As an example of that, Underwood tells me that Raw Fury “don’t do milestones” when it comes to how it funds developers. “We figure out the burn rate of the developer, and we pay this each month, almost like a salary.”

This was the case when Raw Fury published its second game, the adventure title Kathy Rain, in 2015. The game launched to lacklustre sales, which threatened the existence of its one-person developer’s business. To stem the tide until the game could start earning, Raw Fury promised on May 2016 to pay the developer a no-strings attached salary for 12 months so that they could continue creating. The move paid off and, in a later blog post, Raw Fury announced that Kathy Rain started generating income for its developer in November 2016.

Raw Fury is early in its journey as a publisher, and clearly walks in the footsteps of Devolver. (“They’re walking in good footsteps, hopefully,” said Devolver’s Lowrie, when I put this to him.) And the goodwill associated with the company’s brand has already helped to protect one of its games.

At Microsoft’s E3 conference in 2017, a trailer for one of Raw Fury’s coming games, The Last Night, was shown. The beautiful pixel art and cyberpunk cityscapes caught people’s attention immediately – so much so that it was all of 15 minutes before some old tweets by the game’s lead designer, Tim Soret, resurfaced. In those tweets from 2014, Soret expressed support for the abusive and harassing Gamergate movement and said that he was “against feminism.”

Soret apologised later the same day, but Raw Fury released its own statement in which it affirmed its belief in equality and feminism. It also lent on its reputation, saying in a statement from June 12th that it “[hopes] that everyone reading this who knows us at Raw Fury on a personal and professional level knows that we wouldn’t tolerate working with someone who portrays the caricature of Tim going around the internet right now.” Whether or not you can forgive Soret or believe that he’s genuinely changed his views, Raw Fury vouching for him with its good reputation successfully cushioned the developer against at least some of the criticism.

Where Raw Fury is just a few years old, Double Fine has been developing games since 2000. The company defined its brand through games like Psychonauts, Broken Age and Stacking, and when it branched into publishing indie games in 2014 it aimed to find games that fit the existing Double Fine brand.

“That tends to mean things that are artistically driven by a creative vision,” says Greg Rice, Double Fine’s VP of business development, who notes that this doesn’t mean the games share much in terms of their appearance. “I think a lot of other publishers are tending to look at specific art styles or genres or things like that, but luckily the Double Fine suite of games has been pretty much every genre and dozens of different art styles, so it lets us have a different playground to explore.”

Still, there is a clear overlap in style between each of Double Fine’s published games. From Mountain, which is about a thinking mountain, to the farming and creature collection of Ooblets, everything Double Fine publishes is colourful, silly, rarely violent and always playful.

Rather than personify the company via a fictional character as Devolver has, Double Fine is perhaps best represented by Day of the Devs. The one-day games exhibition was started by Double Fine when it needed to show Broken Age to backers of the adventure game’s Kickstarter. It hired a space big enough to hold everyone, and then decided it may as well ask some of its friends to come along and demo their own games, too.

Day Of The Devs has now been running for five years, and the last event in November 2017 featured 70 games and was attended by 7000 people. It’s completely free to the public and to developers thanks to funding by sponsors, and even offers free childcare to families who come along to see the games.

“It all ties together with what we’re doing on Double Fine Presents, and what’s being done in the studio,” says Rice. “I think it’s trying to show people how many interesting things are happening in games and what they can be and how there’s just so much happening in this space right now.” It’s the perfect event for a company that makes games that are colourful, silly and always playful.

Publishers having a strong identifiable brand of their own helps ameliorate against all the other things that can go wrong on the journey of releasing a new game. If no one has heard of the developer, they’ve probably heard of the publisher. If lots of games are released on the same day, a recognisable publisher can lift you above the competition on name alone. A strong publishing brand can even – at least to some extent – cover for a game that’s otherwise poor or poorly marketed.

Just as the marketplace has become crowded with indie games, it’s also become crowded by indie games publishers. Visit these publishers’ websites and you’ll often read that they’re ‘not the same as other publishers’ because they won’t take creators’ IP rights, and how they’ll help with marketing using their 1000-name mailing list. These things aren’t enough. It doesn’t even matter if you’re a big publisher with decades of experience.

Devolver Digital, Raw Fury, Double Fine, Annapurna Interactive, and a handful of other indie publishers such as Chucklefish and Adult Swim, have established a new benchmark. If players can’t work out what your brand is about based on the games you publish and the way you market them, then you’re failing to best serve the developers partnering with you. The ultimate advantage of these boutique publishers is that they’re unusually protected from the shifting winds of the always-changing game industry.

“Even with everything going right, in the end everything is changing so rapidly that you don’t know what works for one game is really going to work for the next one,” says Devolver’s Nigel Lowrie. “So it’s about falling back on experience and being able to put [a game] in the best possible situation for success. That’s all we can promise anybody.”（source：Gamesindustry.biz ）