游戏盈利模型设计师Ramin Shokrizade谈如何吸引鲸鱼用户

原作者：Ramin Shokrizade 译者：Vivian Xue

过去的两年，我一直在为Wargaming.net公司制作游戏盈利模型，比如《坦克世界：闪击战》和《战舰世界》。我参与的项目都有一个共同的目标：最大化产品的终身价值（LTV）。为此我们致力于提升产品的吸引力，产品至少能吸引用户一天，一年以上更好。公司的成功之处正在于其产品使用户产生了忠诚感，并且能够满足用户对游戏耐玩性的要求。

当我离开公司后，我发现自己仿佛从一块绿洲跳入了沙漠，行业内的绝大多数公司都转向了一种“规模更小、速度更快、内容更浮夸、方式更激进”的开发战略。是什么使他们认为这是一种必胜策略呢？

1.这些不是他们在找的鲸鱼用户

迄今为止，绝大部分“绿洲之外”的公司公认的一点是，用户的拒绝付费率大约是99%。（我无法透露绿洲之内的数据，它们“很”不一样就是了）在我看来，这是近乎彻底的失败，不是什么值得骄傲的事。

人们似乎认为鲸鱼玩家是那些好骗又冲动的人，氪起金来壕无理智。还有一种观点是如果你能让玩家进行第一笔消费，他们将更有可能继续消费。如果说这两点曾经是正确的，它们现在也过时了。让我用一下数据来说明为什么按如今的行业标准做游戏，失败率将是99%。

whales(from businessweek.com)

52%的消费者只会为产品付费一次。这意味着一旦玩家花了钱，他们就不太可能继续消费。

鲸鱼玩家进行第一笔消费平均耗时18天，海豚玩家为12天，而小鱼玩家为8天。这表明高消费玩家根本不像我们所想的一样冲动。他们十分谨慎，经过深思熟虑后才会付款。孩子们的确经常冲动消费，所以很多游戏把他们当作目标玩家。但在如今诸多的力量（家长、平台商、监管者等等）的共同反对下，这一策略越来越难实施。因此，如果你的策略是哄骗孩子们消费，那么你不会取得更大的成功。

52%的玩家是女性。

尽管没有数据支撑，但我还是要补充一句，中年玩家是游戏预算最高的群体，大概也是最没时间玩游戏的群体。

因此，就你的上一个或正在进行的项目，问自己几个问题：它是性别中立，还是面向某一性别玩家？它的目标玩家的年龄范围是什么？你是否在游戏的前几个小时内尝试从玩家身上盈利？玩家能否在16天内（假设一共玩了30小时）体验所有的游戏内容？

无论你的商业智能化团队规模多大、耗资多高，或是你读过多少份EEDAR报告，你都有可能在这些问题上犯错。

为什么会这样呢？我想是时候就这个问题进行一场公开对话了。

2.鲸鱼无法在沙漠中游泳

在过去的三个月里，我拜访了二十多家公司。下面是一些通常让访问终止的对话。

公司：“为了使我们目前的产品取得商业上的成功，你会改进哪些数据？”

我：“你的产品设计无法满足消费者的需求，特别是鲸鱼用户的需求。这与你的产品数据无关。“

公司：“好吧……但是你会改进我们产品中的哪一点？”

我：“把它做成一个性别中立的游戏。”

公司：“非常感谢您的时间。”

下面这家公司，我们进行了两个月的谈判：

我：“这是一个模型样本，我认为它非常适用于您的产品。”

公司：“等等，前50个小时内几乎没有可以让玩家花钱的地方？！？！”

我：“是的。”

公司：“这永远不可能成功。”

最常见的问题大概是：

公司：“你能提供绿洲中的数据来证明我们应该改用你们的模型吗？”

我：“不能。”

公司：“@#￥%……&”

你不需要到沙漠之外寻找你所需的数据，它们就在那里。这个信息时代最大的问题之一就是信息过载。你需要的所有信息都在公共空间里，并且是免费的。你聘请专家是让他们确定哪些数据对你有意义，以及为什么。这就是为什么聘请一位专家比聘请一个外行便宜得多。

试图把方钉插入圆孔是一个不明智的策略，尝试用英语和猫沟通99%会失败，而试图把一只鲸鱼拖到沙漠中让它们消费也是一种99%会失败的方法。

既然如此，为什么不为你的鲸鱼造一个绿洲呢？这个想法有什么奇怪或可怕的吗？

3.内容：只要你造出了绿洲，他们就会向你游来

过去，游戏开发者制作内容是为了给消费者带来乐趣。各大公司竞相制作内容宏大的游戏。像《无尽的任务》、《星战前夜》和《魔兽世界》这样的游戏证明了消费者对在线、内容宏大的游戏的巨大需求。

问题在于，当鲸鱼用户准备消费时，这些游戏并没有为他们提供任何可消费的内容。于是第三方代理(“打金者”)出现了并为这些为鲸鱼玩家提供服务。这些服务往往破坏了游戏环境，降低了所有玩家的体验质量。在这种环境下，许多内容宏大的游戏失败了，甚至我前面特别提到的三个游戏在收入上也表现极差。它们在设计上就不够吸金。

一些开发者经历过这样一个痛苦的过程，他们试图通过降低现有内容的质量，将他们的订阅游戏转成F2P游戏，从而迫使非付费玩家消费。

如今F2P游戏中使用的“付费获胜”或者“Fun pain”机制依靠营造危机感刺激玩家付费。但这种危机感也带来了一个问题，它破坏了玩家对游戏建立的依赖感。而这种依赖感是令剩下99%的玩家打开荷包的关键。在绿洲内的游戏中，你不会产生任何的危机感。而在沙漠中，它已不是偶然现象，而是一种常态。

那么如何解决这个问题呢？制作迎合消费者需求的内容，并结合一个不存在危机感的F2P模式。就这么简单。

建立社交功能是另一个关键。因为如果玩家们知道有人在在期待他们，他们更有可能回到游戏。PVP模式，除非你小心地平衡它(不容易，且通常耗时)，否则它对于社交更经常是有害无利。

你的游戏有300个小时以上的流程吗？我说的流程指玩家在这段游戏过程中能够实现等级或者排名的提升。当《魔兽世界》问世时，我花了160小时就刷完了游戏内容。目前沙漠中的顶尖F2P游戏长度大大超过300个小时。内容的质量可能要低于《魔兽世界》，但至少玩家不觉得他们已经到达了游戏的“结局”。

绿洲内的游戏都有300个小时以上的进阶内容（progression content）。我希望我的3A F2P游戏能达到将近1500个小时。为什么?如果你是一名鲸鱼用户，在100小时游戏之后，你决定投入100美元，或者1000美元。如果你知道你还有1400个小时的游戏内容，那么你就会好好地利用你投入的资金。如果游戏在第150小时变得无聊，你为什么要在100小时时消费呢？

请注意，游戏流程和和内容不是一回事。聪明的游戏设计可以将100小时甚至50小时的内容转化为数百小时的游戏流程，通过寻创造性的方法来循环内容，不让消费者感到重复。我参与制作的那些非常成功的游戏都没有特别大的预算。

4.离开沙漠

根据目前的估计，每年有50万新移动产品到达消费者手中，这片沙漠正在不断扩大，你的产品很可能从大众的视野中消失，除非你肯花大价钱营销，这有时要花掉你几倍于开发成本的资金。想使用传统营销，钱不是问题？可以像Machine Zone那样请Mariah Carey做游戏代言人。

或者，你可以听从我的建议离开沙漠。当然你将面临多方的挑战，试图阻止你英勇的团队向绿洲进发。这些挑战大多来源于你的公司内部。现在，绿洲里也许有两家公司，就是我在2012年的论文《优势产品》中提到的那两家。如预料的那样，他们还在这里。竞争的空间很大。

造绿洲的过程是漫长的，同时将耗费很多资金。但是鲸鱼用户们会互相交流。一旦你造出了绿洲，他们就会向你游来。鲸鱼用户还会带来其他的鲸鱼用户，不需要请Mariah Carey代言。你只需要满足鲸鱼玩家的需求，大大超过16天。制定一个300至1500个时之间的内容制作计划。显然只有两个小时时长的游戏不可能满足鲸鱼们的需求。不要像上周一家大公司那样解雇你的游戏设计师，除非你已经听天由命了。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

For the last two years I have lived in the gaming oasis that is Wargaming.net, building monetization models for games such as World of Tanks: Blitz and World of Warships. The focus on all the products I worked on was to aim at maximizing life time value (LTV) by focusing on creating and charging for products that will keep the interest of consumers for at least a month and preferably a year or more. The success of this company comes from building products that generate customer loyalty and continue to meet their needs for long durations.

When I stepped out of the oasis I found myself in a desert where the vast majority of the industry had moved to a “smaller, faster, flashier, more aggressive” strategy of game development. What makes them think this is a winning strategy?

These Are Not the Whales You Are Looking For

By now it is common knowledge that for games outside the oasis (I can’t talk about the numbers inside the oasis, other than to say they are VERY different) the consumer conversion rejection rate (100% – conversion rate = consumer conversion rejection rate) is about 99%. In my world, that is a 99% failure rate, and not something I would feel proud about on my resume.

There seems to be this idea that whales are gullible and impulsive people who can’t help themselves when it comes to spending. There is also this idea that if you can get a player to spend that first dollar, they are much more likely to keep spending. If either of these two concepts were ever true, they are not true now. Let me drop a few statistics that will explain why the industry standard is a 99% failure rate.

[Disclaimer: These numbers are different than they were two years ago, and will be different next year. If things continue in the desert the way they have been, the trend will stay true]

52% of spenders spend once in a product and then don’t spend again. This means that once a player spends, they are unlikely to spend again.

Whales take, on average, 18 days to make their first spend. “Dolphins” take 12 days. Minnows take 8 days. This suggests that big budget players are not impulsive at all. They are very careful and deliberate about where they park their brains and their budgets. Children do often spend impulsively, and a lot of games have been aiming at getting children to impulse spend. All the forces (parents, platform holders, regulators, etc) that could check that strategy are currently mobilizing in force to make this harder for you, so if tricking children into spending is your strategy, it’s not one that is going to have much more success.

52% of gamers are women.

While not a “statistic”, I should add that middle aged players have the largest gaming budgets, and probably the least amount of time available for play.

So ask yourself a few questions about your last or current project. Is it gender neutral, or is it likely to appeal to only one gender? What age range is it aimed at? Do you try to monetize your players within the first couple hours of play? Is most of your game content experienced before day 16 (let’s assume 30 hours) of play?

Chances are, no matter how large and expensive your business intelligence unit is, or how many EEDAR reports you have read, you are probably on the wrong end of some or all of these questions.

Why is that? I think it is time for a public dialogue on this.

Whales Do Not Swim in the Desert

I’ve interviewed some two dozen companies in the last three months. Here are some examples of dialogue that generally ended the interviews:

Company: “What numbers would you change in our current product to make it commercially successful?”

Ramin: “Your product is not designed to meet the needs of consumers, and especially whales. It has nothing to do with the numbers in your product.”

Company: “Okay…but what one thing would you do to improve our current product?”

Ramin: “Make it gender neutral.”

Company: “Thank you very much for your time.” [TYVMFYT]

Next example, two months into negotiations:

Ramin: “Okay here is a sample model that I think would work well with your product.”

Company: “Wait, there is almost nothing to spend on in the first 50 hours?!?!”

Ramin: “Yes.”

Company: “That will never fly. TYVMFYT”

And probably the most common question:

Company: “Can you give us numbers from the oasis to prove we should switch to using your models?”

Ramin: “No.”

Company: “TYVMFYT”

You don’t have to leave the desert to get the numbers you should be looking at. They are out there. One of the biggest problems in this age of information is information overload. All the information you could possibly need is out there in the public space, and it is free. The reason you hire an expert is to let them determine which numbers have meaning to you, and why. This is why hiring an expert is a lot cheaper than hiring an amateur.

Trying to force a square peg into a circular hole is not smart strategy. Trying to talk to a cat in English is a process with a 99% failure rate. Trying to drag a whale into the desert to make them spend is an approach with a 99% failure rate.

So why not build an oasis for your whales? What is so alien or terrifying about this concept?

Content: Build it and They Will Come

It used to be that game developers made content for the enjoyment of consumers. Companies competed to produce the most grand content. Games like Everquest, EVE Online, and World of Warcraft proved that there was tremendous demand for online gaming, and games with huge amounts of content that consumers could swim in.

The problem was that right about the time the whales were primed to spend, these games provided nothing for them to spend on. So third party agents (“gold farmers”) came in and offered services to the whales. These services often degraded the game environment for everyone, and poisoned the waters. Many large content games failed catastrophically in this environment, and even the three titles I mention specifically here did a very poor job of capturing revenue. They just were not designed to do so.

Some developers went through the painful process of attempting to convert their subscription games to F2P games by reducing the quality of existing content to force non-payers to spend.

Pay to win or “fun pain” mechanisms commonly used in today’s F2P games rely on threat generation to force spending. The problem with threat generation is that it interferes with the consumer’s ability to build attachment to a game. This sort of attachment is necessary before that 99% is going to open up their purses. You won’t find any of this sort of threat generation in the oasis. This not accidental. The desert is threatening, it has earned that reputation.

So what is the solution? Build content that meets the needs of your consumers. Link it with a F2P monetization model that does not rely on threat generation. It’s that simple.

Permitting social interaction is also key, because a player is much more likely to log back in if they know people are expecting them. PvP, unless very carefully balanced (not easy, and generally time consuming), is more often anti-social, not social.

Does your game have 300+ hours of progression content? By progression content I mean the player is advancing through levels or tiers or such during this time. When World of Warcraft came out I ran out of progression content in 160 hours. Current F2P leaders in the desert have way more than 300 hours of progression content. It may be lower quality content than that offered in WoW, but at least the player does not feel like they have hit “an end”.

Games in the oasis have 300+ hours of progression content. All of them. I prefer to aim for closer to 1500 on my AAA F2P titles. Why? If you are a whale, and after a 100 hours in you decide to throw down $100. Or $1000. If you know that you are going to be advancing for another 1400 hours, then you will get good use out of your investment. If the game gets boring at the 150 hour marker, why would you throw down money at hour 100?

Note that progression content and content are not the same thing. Clever game design can turn 100 or even 50 hours of content into hundreds of hours of progression content by finding creative ways to loop that content that do not feel repetitious to the consumer. None of the highly successful games I have worked on had particularly large budgets.

Leave the Desert

With current estimates indicating 500,000 new mobile products reaching consumers yearly, the desert is really becoming an apocalypse where your product is most likely to die unnoticed by the general public, unless you spend massively on marketing. Often, several times what you spent on development. Conventional marketing not cutting it? Break out Mariah Carey (as Machine Zone did recently).

Or, you could follow my advice and leave the desert. Sure there will be all sorts of challengers, trying to stop your heroic caravan from ever reaching the oasis. Most of them will be in your own company. Right now there are perhaps two companies in the oasis. The same ones I discussed in my 2012 Supremacy Goods paper. They are still here, as predicted. There is plenty of room for competition.

It won’t be cheap. It won’t be fast. But whales talk to each other. Once you build it they will come. Whales will bring in other whales, without the need for Mariah Carey. You just have to meet the needs of whales, for a lot more than 16 days. Plan for between 300 and 1500 hours. Obviously you can’t do that by approaching games like you would movies that only provide 2 hours of content. And don’t fire your game designers, as one major company did last week, unless you are resigned to the apocalypse. (source：Gamasutra ）