Space Ape运营者谈如何利用广告让游戏收入翻番

原作者：Haydn Taylor 译者：Vivian Xue

半年前，《疾速快线:复仇之路》（Fastlane: Road to Revenge）拥有20万日活跃用户，每日的广告收入和内购收入之和约为4万美元。2017年5月的首次发行没能达到开发商Space Ape Games的预期，自那时起，《疾速快线:复仇之路》损失了约30万日活跃用户，日总收入约为3.5万美元，运营团队也只有区区两个人。

然而，在游戏发行将近一年后，安装量却超过1600万，拥有70万日活跃用户，成为了Space Ape最赚钱的游戏。每日单从广告中就能获得4.5万美元收入，加上游戏内购收入，每日收入总和大约8万美金。

由于约50%的收入来自广告，《疾速快线:复仇之路》在众多F2P手游中是一个特殊的存在。以《变形金刚：地球战争》，Space Ape收入最高的游戏为例，游戏中没有任何的广告，此外这家开发商的另外两款大型游戏，《武士围攻》（Samurai Siege）和《竞逐之国》（Rival Kingdoms）的广告收入至多5%。

虽然完全依赖于广告盈利模式运营的F2P游戏越来越多，但是即便它们中表现最优秀的游戏仍然无法超越一个成功的内购游戏，Nicolas Boulay，Space Ape用户增长业务主管说道。

Space Ape Games(from pocketgamer.biz)

Boulay，以及公司的首席运营官Simon Hade，同GamesIndustry.biz的人谈论了Space Ape是如何通过重新设计广告收入方式来扭转游戏的命运。

“广告的实际状况是，广告商不会为了给人们留下印象而掏钱，”Boulay说。“他们花钱的目的是获得安装量，与广告进行互动的用户。如果你向一千名观众展示广告，但没有人点击或下载被推广的东西，那么你将获得的收入很可能接近于零。”

这就是移动游戏广告收入的问题所在。用户不仅需要点击广告，还得下载程序，这也引发了一个忧虑，因为实际上《疾速快线》中出现的广告往往是跟它的竞争游戏有关。

鼓励自己的玩家下载竞争对手的游戏似乎违反常理，但是正如Boulay解释的那样，广告世界中存在很多看似违背逻辑的事物。把自己的玩家推向竞争对手的游戏似乎让玩家回归自己的游戏变得更为困难，但它却成为了《疾速快线》成功的关键因素。

Boulay说，当用户增长团队刚开始尝试这种新模式时，Space Ape对于在游戏中为竞争对手打广告是惧怕的，出于同样的原因，他们也不愿在《武士围城》和《竞逐之国》中做战略游戏的广告。

“老实说，这对于我们来说是一段漫长的经历，”他补充说，“曾经我们对广告的看法非黑即白，我们以为人们看到这些广告，就会开始玩别的游戏并且再也不会回来。但我们对《疾速快线》采取的策略基于经验和以往的教训。人们无论如何都会被这些广告轰炸，而事实是当我们在进行设计的时候，我们的着眼点是用户的留存。留存率是我们进行优化时很重要的一个指标。”

“我们发现即使在推广竞争对手的游戏、或者向所有广告商开放在我们的游戏中显示广告时，留存率并没有下降，而（广告收入）上升了。”

《疾速快线》是一款追求短暂爆发的游戏，一旦玩家耗尽了燃料（一种游戏内的资源）他们将不能继续比赛，直到资源重新生成或者通过购买获得。用户增长团队发现，每一游戏环节结束时是鼓励用户下载另一款游戏的最佳时机。通过让用户观看广告向他们提供一些游戏奖励，比如缩短燃料再生的时间，这样Space Ape能够鼓励用户下载另一款程序，但当他们的燃料恢复后，他们又会返回游戏。

“你必须找到一个正确的平衡点，让你对自己的游戏拥有足够的信心，即便鼓励人们尝试其他游戏，当他们的精力恢复或任务完成后他们还会回来。事实上你希望人们去玩另一款游戏是为了从广告中赚钱，“Hade说。

Space Ape重新改变的不仅是他们的开发过程，他们也彻底重塑了对广告的看法。

在这一过程中，Space Ape形成了广告设计的四大核心理论：广告能对玩家产生效果，为玩家提供理想的奖励，这些奖励能够为游戏核心循环增色；广告应插入在游戏阶段中适当的位置才不会对留存产生负面影响；广告插入的设计和实施应和游戏本身设计融为一体，让玩家在观看广告时感到自然；最后，广告必须能够驱动安装。

SpaceApe通过应用这四大核心理论获得了几个关键的发现。

首先，如果玩家可以选择观看广告而不是被迫观看，它将不会损害留存率。正因如此，85%的广告收入来自这些奖励广告。用户增长团队还发现，为了鼓励用户与广告互动，游戏环节结束后的奖励视频的千人成本要比游戏开始前可选择观看广告的千人成本高25%。

此外，给予观看广告的玩家重大的奖励可以提高游戏的参与率，同时不会蚕食IAP的收入。

SpaceApe得出了一个结论，观看广告是一种明确的价值交换，并且他们利用广告时抱着的想法是玩家应该希望看到广告。测试发现，当广告被整合成为游戏美感的一部分时，它的实际价值比付费去除广告更大。

Hade解释道，秘诀在于让奖励广告和内购功能并存。

“人们在运用广告的过程中犯的一个常见错误就是之后才把广告添加进游戏中，”Hade说，“我们本可以从购买燃料的玩家那获得比如百分之10的收入——我们创造条件促使人们购买——但接着我们推出了免费赠送燃料的广告，或许你可以通过广告挣到额外的钱，但是内购收入会因此受到冲击。”

“从一开始就把经济分成不同的模块是很重要的。观看广告获得的奖励和通过内购获得奖励应有显著的区别。你真正用钱买的东西和从广告中获得的是不同的，而从广告中也能获得一些你买不到的东西。”

Hade指出，虽然广告的运用是FastLane增长的关键，但光靠广告本身是不够的。

“另一部分原因是我们也正在花费大量资金获取用户，”他说，“在此之前，我们会在Facebook、谷歌和其他网络广告商上投入资金获取用户，基于他们会花费多少钱。当你制作《变形金刚：地球战争》这样的战斗游戏时，这么做是有一定道理的，因为在这个游戏中，你的用户确实会花很多钱，并且不太可能让广告变现。

《疾速快线》的突破之一就是能够让用户贡献广告收入。用户增长团队发现，在游戏中消费更少的用户创造了更多的广告收入。通过提高他们在其他游戏中的广告投入来获取用户，他们能够获得更高的广告收入。

“那些因另一个游戏中的广告而发现你的游戏的玩家，更有可能在你的游戏中点击广告，”Hade补充道，“将我们的用户获取预算花费在各个用户获取渠道上，而这些用户将产生更多的广告收入，这是我们成功的一个原因。这样做使得我们能够在扩大支出的同时获取利润。然而如果我们没有考虑通过用户获得的广告收入，并充分利用它，我们将会忽视这一点。”

行驶在成功的疾速快线上的Space Ape如今正在研究如何将这些经验运用到其他游戏中。然而，这有一定的限制，因为这些游戏毕竟不是一开始就使用这种模式，简单地投入广告是没有效果的。

Boulay说：“我们在前几个游戏中也犯了这个错误，但是我们看到了《疾速快线》的一个明显的特殊之处，广告融入了游戏世界，并且为之带来了更多的东西。”

然而，该工作室最近改造了他们的整个游戏设计过程，致力于开发能够成为某类型游戏的典型标杆的产品，目前还有七个游戏正在开发中。尽管Hade指出，仅仅依靠这一模式获得10亿美元的成功是不太可能的，但他能够看到广告收入是“就算不是绝大部分，也至少是我们推出的大部分游戏”的来源，他表示这一比例可能高达60%。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao
Six months ago, Fastlane: Road to Revenge had 200,000 daily active users and was generating around $40,000 a day from ad revenue and in-app purchases combined. Since its initial launch in May 2017, which fell short of developer Space Ape Games’ expectations, Fastlane had lost roughly 300,000 DAUs, $35,000 a day in combined revenue, and ran on a skeleton crew of two people.

Nearly a year after it first released, however, Fastlane: Road to Revenge has over 16 million installs, 700,000 DAUs and is Space Ape’s most profitable game, pulling in $45,000 a day from ads alone, with combined IAP and ad revenue of around $80,000 a day.

With around 50 per cent of revenue being generated from ads, Fastlane: Road to Revenge is an anomaly in the sphere of free-to-play mobile games. Transformers: Earth Wars for example, Space Ape’s highest revenue game, doesn’t feature any ads whatsoever, while the developer’s other two big games — Samurai Siege and Rival Kingdoms — reach about five per cent ad revenue.

Although there is a growing number of free-to-play games that operate entirely on an ad-based model, even the highest performers are still lower than a successful IAP game, says Nicolas Boulay, head of growth at Space Ape.

Joined by COO Simon Hade, Boulay discussed with GamesIndustry.biz how Space Ape was able to turn around the game’s fortunes by redesigning its approach to ad revenue.

“The reality in ads is that advertisers are not buying an impression,” says Boulay. “What they are buying is install, a user interacting with the ad. If you show an ad to a thousand of your viewers but none of them are clicking on it or downloading anything that’s being promoted, then it’s very likely that the income you’re going to get is close to zero.”

Therein lies the inherent problem with ad revenue in mobile games. A user must not only click an ad, but also download the app, a concern only worsened by the reality that ads which commonly appear in Fastlane are for directly competing games.

Encouraging your own users to download and play a competitor’s game sounds counterintuitive, but, as Boulay explains, there is a lot about the world of ad revenue that appears to defy logic. Balancing this idea of pushing users toward a competitor’s game while also ensuring they returned to Fastlane was one of the more difficult challenges to overcome for Space Ape, but also an integral part of its newfound success.

When the growth team first began experimenting with the new model, Boulay says, Space Ape was afraid of advertising competing products in its games, and wouldn’t run ads for strategy games in Samurai Siege and Rival Kingdoms for that very reason.

“To be honest that’s been a journey for us,” he adds. “We thought people would see those ads and start playing and not come back. We had this very black and white vision of ads. But the approach we had for Fastlane was based on experience and learning from the past. People are bombarded with these ads anyway, and the reality is when we reiterated on the design, we looked at retention. Retention was a big part of the metric that we optimised against.

“We saw that actually even when we were promoting a competitor’s game, or when we were opening to all advertisers to show ads in our game, retention wasn’t dropping but [ad revenue] was increasing.”

Fastlane is designed to be played in short bursts, and once the player runs out of fuel — an in-game resource — they cannot continue playing until it has regenerated or they have purchased more with real money. The growth team discovered that the end of a session was the perfect time to encourage a user to download another game. By offering them an in-game reward for watching the ad, such as faster fuel regeneration, Space Ape was able to push users toward downloading another app only to return when their reward was ready.

“You’ve got to find this right balance where you’re confident enough in your own game that you can encourage people to try other games, knowing they will come back when their energy refreshes or their mission has finished. You actually want people going to play other games in order to make money from ads,” says Hade.

Much in the same way that Space Ape has rebuilt its development process from the ground-up, so too has it completely reshaped how it thinks of ads.

During the process, Space Ape developed the four pillars of ad design: ads need to work for the player, offering desirable rewards that compliment the core gameplay loop; ads should be placed at the right moment during a player’s session, so as to not negatively impact retention; design implementation should be part of the game world and feel natural for the player to watch; lastly, ads must drive installs.

Applying these four pillars of design, Space Ape came away with several key findings.

Firstly, if the player is given the option to watch an ad rather than forced, it doesn’t hurt retention. As a result, 85 per cent of ad revenue came from these rewarded ads. The growth team also found that in order to encourage ad interaction, rewarded ads at the end of the session generated 25 per cent higher cost per thousand impressions than the option to watch an ad at the start of a session.

Additionally, giving significant rewards to players for watching an ad was found to increase the engagement rate while also not cannibalising IAP revenue.

Space Ape concluded that watching ads is a clear value exchange, and approached ads with the idea that players should want to watch them. Testing found that when integrated as part of the game’s aesthetic, it actually proved more profitable than offering the option of paying to remove them.

Offering ads that provide value to the player through rewards that can coexist with IAP bundles is the secret, explains Hade.

“A common mistake that people make when they implement ads is that they add them afterwards,” says Hade. “We might be making say ten per cent of our revenue from people buying fuel — and we condition people to buy fuel — but then we implement an ad where we give away free energy, you might make some more money on the ads but you cannibalise the IAP.

“It was very important for us from the beginning to design the economy as separate modules. The rewards and motivations for engaging with ads are very different from the rewards and motivations you get from IAPs. A lot of things you buy with real money are not things you get from interacting with the ads, and the things you get from the ads are things you can’t buy.”

While ad implementation was key to Fastlane’s growth, it would not have been enough on its own to inject such growth, notes Hade.

“The other part of that equation is that we are also spending money to acquire users into Fastlane,” he says. “Previously what we would do is bid on Facebook and Google and other ad networks to acquire users into Fastlane based on how much money they would spend. That made a certain amount of sense when you build a battle game like Transformers: Earth Wars, where you have users who do spend a lot and it’s not possible to monetise an ad.”

Part of the breakthrough with Fastlane was being able to attribute ad revenue down to the user level. The growth team could see that users who spend less typically generated more ad revenue. By increasing their user acquisition budget on ads in other games, they were able to earn more ad revenue.

“The sort of people who discover your game because they clicked on an ad in another game are more likely to be tapping on ads in your game,” Hade adds. “Being able to spend our user acquisition budget on channels for acquiring users who are going to generate more ad revenue was part of the equation. So that was what allowed us to scale up the spend in a profitable way. Whereas if we weren’t looking at the ad revenue from the users and optimising for that, we would be blind.”

Riding high on the success of Fastlane, Space Ape is now looking at how it can apply these lessons to other games. This comes with a certain restriction, however, which is that simply putting ads in a game that isn’t designed from the very beginning to facilitate the model doesn’t work.

“We’ve made that mistake in our previous games as well, but we saw a clear difference in Fastlane when the ad is something that fits into the world and it adds to the world,” says Boulay.

However, the studio recently reshaped its entire game design process around chasing a genre defining hit, and currently has seven other titles in production. Although Hade notes it would be unlikely to find a billion-dollar success solely off the model, he could see ad revenue generate “if not the majority, then at least a big part of the games you will see coming from us,” suggesting that it could be as high as 60 per cent.（source：GamesIndustry.biz  ）