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开发人员谈supercell超高淘汰率:从失败中学习值得庆祝

发布时间:2019-01-30 08:57:26 Tags:,

开发人员谈supercell超高淘汰率:从失败中学习值得庆祝

原作者:Rebekah Valentine 译者:Vivian Xue

对于许多《荒野乱斗》(Brawl Stars)制作团队成员来说,这可能是他们在Supercell工作以来第一次正式发行游戏。但对于团队中参与制作过一系列被淘汰项目的成员来说,这次发行更是一次里程碑事件。

工作室成立10年来,Supercell正式发行了5款游戏——包括《荒野乱斗》在内——对于一家如此成功的游戏公司来说,他们的发行量少的惊人。据说,不包含已发行的游戏,Supercell手头正在进行的项目通常有4至6个,有时多达8个,而他们只正式发行了5个游戏,也就是说大部分项目都被淘汰了。

即便是已发行的《荒野乱斗》也曾趟过“鬼门关”。这款游戏于2017年6月在加拿大App Store上测试发行,一年多后才正式发行。游戏主策划弗兰克·凯恩伯格(Frank Keienburg)告诉我,通常情况下超长的测试发行期意味着《荒野乱斗》在许多方面不符合Supercell的游戏标准。它是一个实时对战动作手游,Supercell之前从没做过这类型的游戏,没有标准可循,也没有外部的例子可供参考。在这种非寻常情况下,团队需要转换策略才能使游戏满足正式发行的标准。

supercell dead games(from gamasutra)

supercell dead games(from gamasutra)

“在夏天到来之前,我们必须做出决定,”他说,“但我们感觉还得完成一件事,那就是在安卓上测试发行这个游戏,特别是在亚洲。我们想看看《荒野乱斗》是否有机会在亚洲市场取得成功,之所以选择安卓是因为《荒野乱斗》主要面向年轻玩家。”

“如果你环顾世界上各个年龄段的人,你会发现不是所有人都在用iPhone。你下载了这个游戏,感到很兴奋,找到你的朋友说‘让我们一起玩吧!’因为游戏本就是让人们一起玩的。然后他们说,‘安卓上有这个游戏吗?’然后就没然后了。”
“当我们消除了这个障碍、在两个平台上发行游戏后,游戏开始像病毒一样传播,并且我们做的营销工作非常少,整个夏天我们也没有创造出大量的内容,但我们拥有了一批非常投入的玩家。”夏天过后,我们终于能自信地说,‘是的,我们走对路了。’如果我们丰富游戏的内容,它将成为一个伟大的游戏并受到玩家长久的喜爱。”

在《荒野乱斗》发行期间,凯恩伯格和Supercell的其它员工告诉我像这样的决策——测试发行一个游戏,观望它的表现同时尝试不同的策略,以及最终发行或砍掉它——这些从不是高管或外部人士做的决策,而是游戏团队自己的决定。Supercell的另一款游戏 Smash Land就是如此,这款游戏于2015年4月测试发行,三个月后团队终止了开发。

乔纳森·道尔(Jonathan Dower),Smash Land的开发者之一,受雇加入另外两名对这个项目有想法的Supercell员工。他告诉我Supercell的游戏项目可能会因为各种原因被终止,但就Smash Land而言,一方面是由于游戏成品和最初设想差别太大,另一方面是游戏本身缺乏长期发展的潜力。
“我们的最初想法是做一个‘无战斗的建造游戏’,类似《工人物语》让玩家在里面砍砍柴、过美好的生活,”道尔说。“我们到这里后,我在这里呆了一周帮其它团队做一些角色概念设计,但在项目启动第一天,我们发现了日本的《怪物弹珠》并且我们都很喜欢这个游戏的机制,因此我们决定把它做成这种乒乓式的游戏。”

“在测试发行期间,我们开始改变游戏以获得更高的留存率。结果还行,但没有特别惊人。并且随着我们对游戏做的更改越来越多,游戏开始变得杂乱。游戏的核心偏离了我们最初的设想。我们甚至觉得最好从头开始重做它。同时我们审视了自己,‘我们能在这个项目上做两年吗?’结果所有人都觉得自己丧失了当初的热情。”

终止项目是一个艰难的决定,道尔说,但它是整个游戏团队(大约10个人)达成的一致认识。在公司每周五的例会上,团队向其它Supercell员工宣布了这个决定,并且按工作室的传统,他们开香槟“庆祝”了Smash Land项目的终止。

“有次我们想放松下,一起蒸个桑拿,”他说,“也是在那个时候我们做出了这个决定。我们知道无论如何我们都会这么做,但这是团队的决定。在周五的会议上,我站起来对着麦克风说,‘抱歉,伙计们。’我差点哭了。我拿着香槟。我本打算向每个人敬酒,感谢大家为游戏所做的努力,因为有这么多人参与其中,但我一拿起麦克风,就知道我喝不了,所以我不得不把它放下。这感觉真是糟透了。你很难割舍你正在做的东西“

虽然Supercell的游戏项目淘汰率很高,但道尔和其他人说这没有影响员工的留存。尽管多名员工告诉我,对于项目淘汰后团队成员的转移,公司没有明确的方案,但他们也表示在项目取消后,团队成员似乎都能“找到归宿”。道尔特别提到项目终止后没有专门负责转移成员的人。
Supercell首席执行官埃卡·潘纳宁(Ilkka Paananen)对团队成员的转移方式作了更具体的解释。

“当某个团队决定终止他们的游戏开发后,有时他们会感觉‘其实我们合作得挺愉快的’,于是他们会决定再次合作,做点别的东西。可能他们有了一个新想法,然后就去做了。但有时候成员们会决定各自去不同的团队,大家感兴趣的项目不同,于是团队就散了。“

我采访的所有Supercell员工中,没有人认为淘汰项目是一件容易的事,尤其是那些连续参与了多个被淘汰项目的员工。道尔说,虽然公司没有在决策上为员工提供系统的帮助,但员工们经常会公开讨论自己的纠结和沮丧,这是工作室文化的一部分。

“失败的感觉糟透了,”他说,“我们花了10个月开发Smash Land,最后不得不放弃它。失败的确很糟糕,但能从中学到东西仍是一件值得庆祝的事。我们会为很多事情庆祝,甚至管理团队也会开香槟庆祝他们的一些失败。我们不只是在喝香槟,我不想给人们留下这样的印象。失败很糟糕,并且我们十分严肃地对待它,庆祝的意义在于学习。”

“淘汰项目的一个重要意义在于解散成员可以在公司的其它地方发挥作用。几个原Smash Land团队成员加入了《皇室战争》项目组。他们发挥了非常关键的作用。我也帮忙设计了《皇室战争》中的几个角色,之后我加入了一个新项目,我们把它砍了,接着我又加入了一个新项目,它又被砍了,最终我成了《皇室战争》团队的总策划,已经两年了。”

“这就是淘汰项目的意义。如果我们不淘汰它,我们必须把团队扩增到20人左右才能让这个游戏成为爆款,如果我们把每一款游戏都做成爆款,公司人数需要扩增到上千人,这很容易。但做权衡是一件非常困难的事。我想我们做出了正确的决策,因为结果更好了。”

对于道尔所述的淘汰项目的重要意义在于为其它项目带去经验,凯恩伯格表示赞同,他说这是公司文化的一部分,他还补充道,失败不一定意味着团队在制作游戏的过程中做错了什么。

“即便你什么错误都没犯,也可能失败,”他说,“失败不等同于犯错。有时它根本不在你的控制范围之内。有时你做了一个无所不包的优秀的游戏,但它就是无法成功,因为市场不想要它。这可能是更令人沮丧的事。”

本文由游戏邦编译,转载请注明来源,或咨询微信zhengjintiao

For many members of the Brawl Stars team at Supercell, the game’s launch marked their first full release with the company. But for those who had joined the team after working on a series of killed titles within the studio, it was even more momentous.

Since its founding nearly 10 years ago, Supercell has fully launched five mobile titles including Brawl Stars — a surprisingly small number for such a successful company. I was told that, not including the studio’s live titles, Supercell typically has between four and six games in development at any given time, and sometimes as many as eight. With only five total full launches, that’s a lot of killed games.

Even Brawl Stars had to face the prospect of its own death at one point. The game soft-launched on the Canadian App Store in June 2017, more than a year before its full release. Game lead Frank Keienburg told me that the unusually long soft-launch was a result of Brawl Stars being outside the norm for a Supercell title in a number of ways. It was a real-time action game on mobile, a genre for which Supercell has no internal benchmarks, and few external examples from other studios. This unusual situation required a shift in strategy before the team could call the game viable for full launch.

“Before summer, we needed to make a decision,” he said. “But we really felt we needed to do one more thing, which was launch it on Android, in Asia specifically. Asia to test if Brawl Stars had a chance of success in Asia, and Android because generally Brawl Stars is a game which is played by younger players.

“If you look around the world in this age bracket, it’s not like everyone is on iPhones. So you get the game, you’re really excited about it, you go to your friends and say, ‘Let’s play this together!’ because the game is made to be played together. And they’re like, ‘Is it on Android?’ And then it stops.

“When we took this barrier away and had both platforms together, that really opened up a viral effect and we saw with very minimum marketing efforts from our side, without actually creating a lot of content throughout the summer, we had a very engaged audience. After the summer, that gave us the confidence to say, ‘Yes, this is it, we are on a good track. If we can do more content, if we can ramp up our internal pipeline for content, this can really be a great game and will be played by the community for a long time.’”

What Keienburg and others at Supercell told me throughout the Brawl Stars launch event was that decisions such as these – putting a game in soft launch, keeping it there while trying different tactics, and eventually releasing or killing it – are all made by the game teams themselves, and are never decisions made on high by executives or outsiders. That’s exactly what happened to another Supercell title, Smash Land, which was soft launched in April 2015 and killed three months later.

Jonathan Dower, one of the developers who worked on Smash Land, was hired to join two other Supercell employees who had the idea for the project. He told me that while games across Supercell might be killed for any number of reasons, in Smash Land’s particular case it was a combination of the game changing dramatically from its original vision over time, and an understanding that the title might not be sustainable in the long-term.

“The original idea was to make a ‘build-without-the-battle’ game; more of a Settlers vibe where you just short of chop wood and have a lovely life,” Dower said. “When we got here, I was here for a week and helped out with some other teams doing concepts for some characters, but then we started day one and we saw that game Monster Strike from Japan and we loved the mechanics, so Day 1 we changed it to this kind of ping-pongy game.

“In soft launch, we started changing the game to try to get players to play longer, better retention. It was okay, but it wasn’t awesome. And the more stuff we did to change the game, it started to feel messy. It wasn’t the core that we were originally building. It almost felt like it would be better to start from scratch again. And we just looked at ourselves and thought, ‘Could we work on this for two years?’ And none of us felt like we had that original passion.”

The official decision to kill the game wasn’t easy, Dower said, but it did come from an understanding that the game’s entire team (by soft launch, around ten people) had together. It was on them to take the decision to the rest of Supercell at the company’s regular Friday meeting, and as is tradition for the studio when a team kills a game, they prepared to send Smash Land off with a champagne toast.

“We wanted to have a break from the team room, just to relax and have a sauna together,” he said. “The decision came out of there. We kind of knew we were going to do it before anyway, but it was a team decision. [At our Friday meeting,] I got up at the microphone and said, ‘Sorry guys.’ I was almost in tears. I had the champagne up there. I was going to toast everyone and say thanks for working on the game because so many people were involved, but as soon as I picked up the microphone, I knew I couldn’t drink, so I had to put it down. It sucks. You get very attached to what you’re working on.”

Despite the high number of killed games at Supercell, Dower and others told me that it had not affected staff retention. Though multiple employees told me there was no specific process for members of a killed game’s team to move to other projects, those same employees also said that after a game was cancelled, everyone just seemed to “find their place.” Dower specifically mentioned that there wasn’t anyone he could think of in charge of letting people go when projects ended.

CEO Ilkka Paananen was able to outline the pattern of teams being reabsorbed elsewhere in the company with a bit more specificity.

“If a team decides to kill their game, sometimes the team decides, ‘Actually, we work really well together as a team, so let’s give it another shot and work on something else.’ And maybe they have another idea and they can do that. In other cases, they think, ‘Yeah, this was okay, but let’s all go to different teams,’ and someone’s interested in this game and someone’s interested in another game, and then the team gets separated.”

No one I spoke to at Supercell downplayed the difficulty of killing projects, especially when individuals had been on multiple killed projects in a row. Dower said that while there isn’t any formal support system for employees struggling with these decisions, the studio’s culture is such that this discouragement is frequently and openly discussed.

“Failure sucks,” he said. “We spent ten months on [Smash Land], and we had to throw it away. Failing definitely sucks, but the learnings we get from that are the sort of thing that we’re trying to celebrate. We do it for many things; even the admin team might have champagne to celebrate some failing they’ve done. It’s not like we’re just chugging champagne, I don’t want to give that impression. Failing sucks, and we take it super seriously, but celebrating the learnings is the point of it.

“The most important thing about killing [a project] is that people can actually have impact in the company elsewhere. A couple of the [Smash Land] guys went to Clash Royale to help get it over the line. They were quite crucial. I helped out with some character development on Clash Royale as well, then I jumped on another new game team and we killed that, and then another one, and we killed that as well, and then I ended up as game lead on Clash Royale for two years.

“That’s the whole point of killing stuff. If we kept that going, we’d have to grow the team to maybe 20 people to get it global, and then if we just kept going global for every game we make, this company would be a thousand people, easy. You have to weigh up. It’s really hard to do. I think we made a good call at that time, because we all did stuff that was better.”

Keienburg echoed Dower’s statements on the importance of taking lessons to other projects, saying that this was part of the entire company’s culture, and added that failure didn’t always mean that a team had done something wrong in how they made the game.

“There’s also the realization that you can fail without making mistakes,” he said. “Failing and making a mistake is not the same. Sometimes it’s just not within your control. Sometimes you have a great game, you have everything together, and it still doesn’t work out because the market doesn’t want it. That’s maybe more disheartening.”(source:Gamesindustry.biz

 


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