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游戏设计者分析《CityVille》功能设置原理(上篇)

发布时间:2010-12-30 09:15:33 Tags:,,,,

游戏邦注:本文作者为游戏设计者Tadhg Kelly,他深入分析了Zynga近期推出的热门游戏《CityVille》大获成功的设计原理。全文分为上下两篇,以下是上篇内容。浏览下篇请点击:游戏设计者分析cityville功能设置原理下篇

只要查看一下Appdata最近公布的数据,就会知道Zynga公司开发的《CityVille》这款本月初才问世社交游戏的月活跃用户人数已逼近7000万,而同样涉足社交游戏领域的英国ETV电视传媒公司推出的《Corrie Nation》却只能惨淡经营,Zynga究竟使了什么法术,居然能让《CityVille》登场一周就虏获1200万粉丝?

不止是Zynga,其他顶级开发商也都有各自的游戏设计妙招,成功让旗下游戏成为同质化市场中最具影响力的大作。

但并非所有的大牌开发商都深谙此道,比如育碧(Ubisoft)公司的《CSI: Crime City》用户人数才区区120万人而已,而另一款名不见经转的游戏《Crime City》(它与前者没有关联)的用户却多达640万人。

下文是游戏邦编译Tadhg Kelly针对《CityVille》所作的分析,详细说明了这款游戏受到追捧的原因,以及如何进行改良的一些建议,希望对诸位的社交游戏开发有所帮助。

cityville

cityville

关于《CityVille》

《CityVille》是一款最近两周刚刚登陆Facebook但已经十分火爆的城市建设游戏,是Zynga的模拟类游戏大家庭的又一新成员(游戏邦注:之前的《FrontierVille》、《Café World》以及赫赫有名的《FarmVille》都属于这种类型),它和《Social City》、《Millionaire City》、《City of Wonder》、《My Empire》等游戏的风格类似。

Zynga开发这款游戏确实颇费了一番功夫,但至少这次已经不再像自己以前那样,或参照其他开发商刚起步时,直接照搬别人的模式推出新作,而是充分运用自身的智慧和资源,向市场推出了这款叫好叫座的游戏。

用户进入《CityVille》后的首要任务是建造房屋和街道,系统会引导用户一步步完成不同的操作(比如种植庄稼、建造面包店、铺马路等等)。它不支持用户一鼓作气完成所有的事情,而是分散游戏挑战,会不时要求玩家拾取东西、搜集物品、拜访好友等。

用户要完成任务,就要频繁点击鼠标才能实现相关操作。比如建造一座房屋,可能就会需要3到4个步骤才能完成,用户点击一次鼠标只能完成房屋建设的一部分,系统不会自动完成剩下的工程。完工后的房屋会为主人创造一些收入,也会产生新的物资需求,或者要求主人种植庄稼,但系统不会自动完成这些操作,用户必须亲力亲为,通过手动操作搜集金币、传送箱子、拾取奖品、种植或收割庄稼等等。

游戏系统中有不同的计时器分配玩家的游戏任务。例如,你每隔X分钟就能从一座建筑中获得一些金币,这种操作有助于刺激玩家每天都来游戏逛逛。游戏系统还会根据能量值,来监视玩家的所有操作过程,玩家如果已经耗尽精力,就只能等恢复元气之后再接着完成任务,或者用虚拟货币购买更多精力。

用户完成的任务越多,积累的经验值(或称为XP)也就越多,游戏级别也就越高。用户升到更高的级别,就可以建造更多房屋,获得更多奖励,也就需要建设更多的配套设施,最大化自己的能量值。用户每高升一级,就会自动获得原来耗损殆尽的能量。

这款游戏还支持玩家之间互访对方的城市,如果你去拜访友人的城市,系统会奖励你更多能量和动力,也会提供一些任务让你完成。如果帮朋友收割庄稼,你可以获得经验值、威望值和虚拟货币cash之类的奖励。你还可以申请在朋友的城市中经营商店,和他们互赠免费的礼物(比如免费的能量)。

《CityVille》要求你完成的游戏任务很简单,但都会包含3到4个步骤。比如说拜访三个朋友,建设一个面包屋,采集十颗草莓之类的操作。你可能在同一时间里接到多个任务,但游戏系统会自动监视你的任务完成情况,而且这些操作也并非同时完成不可。相反,它们之间存在前后联系,完成了这一任务,才可能开启另一个任务。

如果用户完成了相关任务,游戏界面就会出现一个祝贺对话框,告知你已获得相关奖励,鼓励你将自己的成果晒到Facebook上,与其他好友共同分享。

另外,你还可以自由选择落户地点,而其他典型的模拟类游戏往往会强制要求你必须在哪建设城市。而且你也不需要考虑城市的布局是否合理,道路交通等公共资源的分配情况如何,城市中漫步的居民和种植的花花草草,纯粹只是点缀而已。也就是说,玩家可以自由设计城市的布局,而且大部分用户也确实更愿意这么做。

上文所述即是《CityVille》这款游戏的总体设计元素,多数成功的社交游戏遵从的设计法则都与此类似,只不过主题有所变化而已。但Zynga是怎么让这款游戏从同类竞争者中脱颖而出的呢?

曝光率

不少人认为,Facebook的社交功能和病毒式营销渠道是这些游戏吸引用户的最大优势,但我认为这种说法其实夸大了这两者的作用。当然,社交功能和病毒式营销渠道对游戏的推广确实提供了一定的帮助,但作用其实很有限,Facebook为社交游戏带来的最大好处应该是曝光率。

Facebook的界面并不引人注目,也没有为新游戏、应用产品制造什么露脸的机会,不像苹果App Store那样会开辟一个产品推荐专栏,所以对大多数开发商来说,社交游戏要在Facebook界面赚取更多眼球难度还真不小。

另外,Facebook现在又关闭了不少免费广告渠道,这个举措对开发商来说也是一个雪上加霜的打击。Facebook早些时候的竞争环境还相对公平,任何开发商都有可能从中获益,但现在的Facebook已经成为一个适者生存的竞争平台,强者愈强,弱者愈弱,大型开发商掌握了最多的资源,小型开发商却只能艰难求生。

Facebook上的用户之争,好比是电视节目的收视率大战,所有的大型开发商都已经意识到了这一点,他们所采取的四个对策如下:

App Banner

App Banner

应用横幅:对社交游戏来说,Facebook上的应用横幅极其重要,因为它可以有效加强用户的注意力。Facebook的白色文本形式界面如果出现了一条应用横幅,就很容易加深用户对游戏的印象,而且又不会让他们的页面超载。应用横幅是交叉推广的关键手段,所以开发商旗下的每一款游戏都是另一款游戏的重要推广渠道。

最近流行的是Applifier等形式的横幅广告,支持小型开发商联合作战,实现彼此游戏的交叉推广。这种方法非常管用,但第三方应用横幅的生命周期很有限,因为越来越多人都开始采用这种形式,而且还有不少开发商都在创建自己的交叉推广渠道,市场竞争形势也就更加严峻了。

Decanting

Decanting

移注方式:上图是《FarmVille》的一个截图,它也是一种交叉推广的方式,我将它称为“移注”。从字面上理解,移注就是指将一款游戏的用户像倒酒一样,倾注到另一款游戏中。这个概念很简单也很实用。如果你的游戏也像《FarmVille》一样,每月都可以坐拥5300万的活跃用户,为什么不借机向这些用户推荐他们可能会喜欢的游戏呢?为什么不在这款游戏中提供另一款游戏用得到的奖励呢?

如果移注成功的话,这些用户就会成为最有利可图的玩家,他们不但会热衷玩你的另一款游戏,而且还会继续为原来的游戏掏钱。所以你的新游戏不光能成功吸引眼球,而且还能提高用户留存率,久而久之,这些用户也就不愿意再冒险离开你创建的游戏环境,尝试其他竞争对手的游戏了。

Advertising

Advertising

广告推广:许多大型开发商都会早早地融资,然后将这些资金用于开发、宣传自己的游戏,社交游戏在这一点上就做得非常到位,Zynga正是这一领域的先驱。

SGN、Playfish、Playdom以及Crowdstar这类竞争对手一度笃信病毒式营销是最有力的推广渠道,对广告推广不屑一顾,Playfish甚至吹嘘自己不用花大价钱,光凭游戏本身的号召力就能吸引大量用户。而Zynga却另有想法,他们在Facebook平台及其他游戏中狂打广告。以上是《Soccer Stars Football》的交叉广告截图,表明Zynga直到今天仍在不停地通过其他游戏推广自己的作品。

这些广告的作用与应用横幅一致,都可以为Facebook苍白的界面增色,让用户为之眼前一亮。Facebook的广告解决方案可以根据用户年龄、国籍、喜好等因素进行富有针对性的推广,Zynga很好地利用了这一功能大力推广旗下游戏,据称每年在广告上的投入超过5000万美元,很可能是Facebook上的头号广告客户。

Publishing

Publishing

发布功能:社交游戏经常鼓励玩家发布自己的活动情况。最基本的一种形式是“高分”发布功能,玩家通过这种途径,可以告知好友自己又赢了多少分,高升到了哪一级,获得了什么游戏成就。

这种发布功能刚出炉的18个月一直很可行,像《Chain RXN》这类休闲游戏就是通过这种方式一夜成名,但现在这种功能已经失效了。许多用户只要看一眼就会跳过去,况且Facebook最近又封锁了这类游戏宣传渠道,只允许用户向其他已安装游戏应用的玩家发布这种信息。

《CityVille》这种社交游戏一般都会通过发布功能向玩家赠送礼物或奖励,如上图所示,我发布的消息是自己的游戏成就,同时也向点击这款游戏的友人提供免费的经验值。许多用户往往会因这些奖励手段所诱惑,频频返回游戏中领取奖品,而发布消息的玩家(比如说我)则希望通过这种途径实现双方的互惠互利。

除非你的游戏拥有大量的粉丝,不然这种策略还是行不通。它无法召唤新用户,但却可以再度强化交叉推广、移注和广告推广的效果,而且可以让心生厌倦的用户回心转意。与多数市场营销手段一样,这几种方式都有助于增加游戏曝光率。越多好友体验这款游戏或者发布消息,用户就越有可能关注该游戏,重新归队的机率也就越大。

许多广告推广的目的都是持续增加产品曝光率,社交游戏的发布功能也不例外。

曝光率是一个数学方程

上文所提到的四种推广方程式相互交织的结果就是一个数学方程。根据麦特卡夫定律(Metcalfe’s Law):网络价值同网络用户数量的平方成正比,即N个联结能够创造N x N的效益。也就是说,游戏用户越多,游戏推广的曝光率就越高,新增用户也将以指数方式成倍增长。

在Facebook社交游戏早期发展阶段,大多数开发商都是以狂轰滥炸式地乱塞广告引诱用户,Zynga也是其中之一。但他们还是摸着了门道,对这种推广方式进行改良,实现游戏之间的交叉推广,通过各种推广手段创造更多曝光率。

Zynga的这种操作确实形成了麦特卡夫效应,因为他们创建了多种推广渠道,所以新游戏才可以在短时间内一呼百应,笼络大量的玩家。

只要方法使用得当,一款游戏的成功必将带动其他游戏的成功,让用户数量成倍增长,这正是《CityVille》这款新游戏在一周内就增加了1200万用户的奥秘。Zynga能取得今天的成就是理所当然的,因为他们早就认识到社交游戏的本质就是通过交叉推广,在Facebook平台上创建一个游戏应用虚拟网络,这样才能保持自己的领先优势。

另一个重要的问题就是:新用户大批涌入后,Zynga是通过什么手段留住玩家呢?现在我们就来讨论一下《CityVille》的黏性。

对大部分玩家来说,社交游戏的魅力在于娱乐性,所以成功的开发商都很重视增加游戏的黏性。用户留存率也因此成了开发商衡量游戏市场表现的一个重要参数,用以考察玩家返回游戏、抛弃游戏,以及每周或每月平均留存的用户人数等情况。对《CityVille》这类社交游戏而言,留存率与游戏的稳定发展和大量创收密不可分。

但留存率的具体优势到底体现在哪?

DAU/MAU

如果想比较全面地了解一款游戏是否受到欢迎,那就无法回避每日活跃用户(DAU)以及每月活跃用户(MAU)这两个概念。

Appdata之类的追踪服务工具可以搜集到这些数据,还能计算出DAU与MAU之间的比例。我发现DAU/MAU所得的结果是判断游戏人气的最有说服力的数据。

不管这两者之间的比例是大是小,所得的结果均可说明一款社交游戏对用户的实际吸引力,用户究竟是拿它消遣打发时间,还是沉浸其中乐不思蜀(甚至是将它视为与人互动沟通的桥梁,,不过这种情况也比较罕见),由此我们也就可以推断该游戏的生命周期到底长不长。

《CityVille》的DAU/MAU比例出奇地高,这种现象并不鲜见,毕竟这款游戏才刚刚亮相,许多用户可能只是图个新鲜来凑凑热闹,更何况它发行还不足一个月,所以它的MAU统计数据根本不完整。在此我们仅以《FarmVille》这款参数更稳定的游戏为例(如下图所示)。

FarmVille DAU as percentage of MAU

FarmVille DAU as percentage of MAU

《FarmVille》一直是大型社交游戏中的佼佼者,最近的DAU/MAU已上升到30%大关,其他许多优秀的社交游戏的这一比例约20%,还有一些跌到了10%至12%;那些带有测验元素的社交应用比例则仅在3%至5%之间。

在大型开发商中,Zynga旗下游戏的DAU/MAU平均值最高,约23%;Crowdstar不过11%,Playfish/EA有18%;Six Waves自产的游戏有8%,但它所发行游戏的这一比例却高达18%;迪士尼旗下的Playdom有11%,Digital Chocolate有16%,RockYou仅有8%,Wooga有18%。

形成这种局面的原因有三:

1、测验元素:Crowdstar在这一环会处于下风是因为它有一款很受欢迎的应用是个测验引擎。它的市场营销策略非常靠谱,虽然MAU值很高,但DAU值却偏低。测验引擎经常会让人误判一家公司在社交游戏领域中的实际份量。Zynga目前仍没有测验引擎。

2、曝光策略:这一点与前文所述颇有重叠之处,但消息发布功能的覆盖范围越大,就越有助于召回那些三心二意的玩家。Facebook上的玩家指数增长方式,也适用于考察留存率。

3、游戏活动:Zynga究竟是如何设置游戏功能,并根据计时性原则不断鼓励玩家重返游戏世界,这是我将在下文提到的重点内容。

相关背景

Playfish在去年底发布了两款游戏,一是《Poker Rivals》,二是《Gangster City》,结果证明Playfish的这一举动真是吃力不讨好,它们在Zynga旗下的《Texas Hold’Em》和《Mafia Wars》这两者的光芒面前双双败下阵来。

他们得到的教训并非千万别跟Zynga斗,而是要看清形势再下手。

要知道,Crowdstar旗下的《开心水族馆》(Happy Aquarium)可是打败了Zynga的《FishVille》,而《PetVille》也终究没能撼动Playfish游戏《Pet Society》的地位,《PetVille》现在的用户人数还不及后者的60%。

保证用户留存率的决定因素在于,用户是否是首次接触这种类型的游戏。许多Facebook游戏之所以能让玩家依依不舍,原因就在于玩家不会去区分它们之间到底有何异同。所以要获得较高的用户留存率,最重要的是让自己的作品开创先河,与一般用户所见过的游戏划清界限。

这一点《CityVille》必须引以为诫,因为现在多数城市建设游戏都不免落入同样的俗套,《CityVille》虽然还是有自己独特的一面,但也很难说会不会步《FishVille》或《Gangster City》的后尘。

下面我们就来谈谈游戏活动的设置吧。

鼠标点击

《CityVille》最核心的操作动力就是点击鼠标,用户需要通过点击,完成造房、拾取物品、种植庄稼、传送物资等游戏活动。这种设置不禁让人联想起PC游戏《Black and White》,虽然你是这个城市的主宰者,却必须身体力行地完成所有事情。

这些点击操作实在很能激发玩家的兴趣,玩家并非事无巨细都要亲自点击鼠标才能完成(可以设置为自动拾取状态,拣起遗落在路面的道具),但这种设置具有交互性,的确更容易让玩家通过不断的点击操作(虽然他们很可能只是清理了一块地皮而已),产生成就感和满足感。

不过这种点击操作也有一个弊端,游戏规模扩大后,它就不再那么可行了。我在《CityVille》中建设的一座城市目前只有几条街道,但如果哪一天我扩张了城市版图,可能就会发现如此频繁的手动点击操作其实很烦人,很无趣。

双重计时器

计时器的作用是避免用户无休无止地点击游戏内容。我之前曾说过,《CityVille》这类社交游戏一般都会设置两种计时器:针对造房和庄稼的专门计时器,监测玩家能量的普通计时器。

在第一种计时器的监管下,草莓生长周期是5分钟,而玉米的生长却需要24小时,每栋小屋每隔一小时才会有收入。这就是系统鼓励玩家重返游戏的一个设置,《FarmVille》也运行同样的管理系统,玩家半夜三更起床摘菜的新闻已经是屡见不鲜。实际上,早些时候的《Planetarion》这款游戏就已经植入了这种计时系统,所以它并不是什么新鲜奇特的功能。

get energy

get energy

管理玩家能量值的计时器设置则有所不同,它规定了玩家在一小段时间内所能执行的点击次数。有些点击操作会耗损一定的能量值,比如搜集物品,但供应物资则却不会,造房会消耗能量,铲除死亡的庄稼却不会。每隔5分钟,系统就会为玩家添加一个分值的能量,如果玩家升到更高的级别,系统就会自动加满能量值。

这种双重计时器极其管用,因为它们为玩家设置了一些小小的矛盾,当玩家等待完成某项任务时,可以利用这段时间去完成其他的事情。与《Planetarion》的统一计时性不同,这种多重计时器为玩家创造了更丰富的游戏体验,让他们感觉自己一刻也没闲着,在游戏中的生活很充实。

在玩家等待完成某项任务的过程中,《CityVille》的计时器还会推荐玩家做其他有意思的任务(如上图所示)。这款游戏的主要创收途径之一,就是鼓励玩家购买更多能量。玩家有了更多能量,就可以完成更多活动,获得更多点击次数。

游戏奖励1:道具

《CityVille》有两种奖励方式:道具和新功能。道具一般指玩家从建筑中搜集到的,或者收割庄稼时出现在地面的东西。

主要包括:

*XP星星:可以增加经验值,与玩家的升级相挂钩;

*金币:游戏中最容易赢取的虚拟货币;

*能量棒:免费的能量值,每点击五到十次会在地上出现一次;

*威望之心:如果玩家帮助了好友,就会收到一颗威望之心;

*Goods:收割庄稼的时候会出现;

*Sets:有时候是一块蛋糕、一串项链或者其他小玩意儿,它们属于同一个集合,如果你搜集到了整套集合,就可以赢得特殊的奖赏。

道具奖励的主要用意是让游戏有效运营(金币、经验值、虚拟商品这三者对《CityVille》来说必不可少),游戏系统可以偶然掉下什么道具作为玩家的幸运之奖,但频率不能太高,毕竟玩家普遍都有靠自己双手勤劳致富的心理,并不希望遇到太多意外之财,否则游戏设置就显得有失公正。

如果说还有另外一种奖励道具的话,那应该就是开心。用户在快乐的游戏环境中成为幸运玩家,是一件很开心的事情。汤姆·查特菲尔德(Tom Chatfield)曾在TED大会上提到游戏取悦用户大脑的七种方式,认为真实偶然与刻意偶然是两码事。比如说,玩家一般都会在快要搜集到所有的系列道具时,产生游戏系统刻意不让他们找到最后一件道具,自己遭到不公待遇的想法。所以,许多游戏就增加了系列道具中最后一样东西出现的机率。

这种设置让《CityVille》看起来更加可亲可近,而不是一个单纯的功能工具箱,这些道具奖励大大激发了玩家的兴趣。

游戏奖励2:新功能

新功能是一项更长期更持久的奖励,每一项新功能都可以引导将玩家进入一个新界境,支持他们做一些以前想做而不得的新任务,同时还会调整他们的经验值。新功能可以扩展游戏内容,避免玩家对游戏产生倦意。

一般来说,《CityVille》共有三种新功能:级别(Levels)、大门(Gates)、任务树(Task Trees)。

Levels

Levels

级别:这是检验玩家游戏表现的最普遍标准。玩家通过完成任务获得XP值时,就可以向更高的级别发起挑战。当玩家进入新级别时,系统会自动更新他们的能量值,奖励1个单位的虚拟货币cash(该游戏中最难获取的虚拟货币),让他们开启新的游戏任务。这些新任务可能包括建造新型房屋、种植新品种庄稼,或者是获得进入新区域的资格(比如乘船航海)。

Gates

Gates

大门:它是一个很独特的设置,如果你没有玩成相关的社交任务,或者支付一定的cash,那就休想此门开。如上图所示,我想最大限度地增加城市人口,所以就得建造更多的社区公共建筑,警局就是其中之一。但要完成建设任务,我得招聘更多警员来填充这个建筑。实现这个操作得支付一些cash(意味着我得用信用卡付费购买cash),或者向朋友求助,让他们为我提供人力资源。因为有不少游戏将它作为强制性的病毒营销手段,所以这种设置一度遭到Facebook政策的禁止,但现在包括《CityVille》在内的多数游戏只是将它作为一个自由选项,不会让它影响整款游戏的大局。

Task Trees

Task Trees

任务树:它主要为玩家提供新的挑战目标,但会隔开任务的完成时间。我在上文中已经提到,《CityVille》会稳定为玩家设置一些目标,提示玩家先完成某项任务才能接受下一项工作。任务树会向玩家提出一些要求,比如建造一个面包房或搜集20个蛋糕等,同时会向玩家提供任务中期奖励。任务树可以强化玩家总有事情要做的充实感受,提醒玩家某处会有惊喜奖励,它是这款游戏最富吸引力的元素之一。

每日奖金

Daily Bonus

Daily Bonus

它相当于玩家的出勤奖励,在早期的社交游戏中,每日奖金只是一些很普通的奖励或者幸运奖品。但现在的社交游戏出勤奖励机制就有所不同了,如果你每天都要来访问这款游戏,《CityVille》不但可以显示你每天获得的奖金,而且还能指出奖金的增长潜力。这一点可能有点庸俗,但玩家都已经深会其意,知道只要自己每天都来逛一圈,一定会收获许多意想不到的东西。

开环效应(Open Loops)

游戏邦认为与留存率最相似的就是餐厅服务生伺候客人进餐的情形。服务生在同一时间里要处理收回菜单、客人点餐、添加酒水、擦拭桌面、客人买单、收取小费等好多桩琐事,这一连串的动作可以用一种现象来形容,那就是“开环”。

作为一个人,我们的记忆和注意力能不能有效运转,主要取决于我们的“开启”和“关闭”状态。我们可能出于兴趣使然,主动尝试关闭一些打开的东西,娴熟地完成整件事情,就像服务生伺候客人买单、收取小费一样。

开环现象遍及生活的各个角落。《CityVille》这类社交游戏熟谙这种操作,它们创造了一系列没完没了的开环。无论你玩的速度有多快,花了多少钱,游戏任务总是无休无止,你总是得不断开启一些新的大门、完成一些任务树、搜集每日奖金、收割庄稼、升到更高级别等等。这些任务彼此之间也是环环相扣,就算你花光了所有钱,耗尽所有能量,也还是有事可做,只是不能扩展游戏内容而已。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,转载请注明来源:游戏邦)

In the first of a two-part series, design veteran Tadhg Kelly draws from his What Games Are blog to explain the rise to power of Zynga’s massively successful social game CityVille. (UPDATE: Part 2 now posted.)]

Check out the latest Appdata graph for Zynga’s Cityville – that’s right, it now has nearly 70 million monthly active users, and the Facebook game only launched in early December.

I know what many of you are thinking: How does Zynga keep doing this?

At the Getting Social event at BAFTA (In London) a few days ago, this was the question that everyone was asking. While TV companies in the UK have dipped their toes into social games, such as Corrie Nation, they have had pretty miserable success rates.

And yet here comes CityVille, another Zynga game that looks quite a lot like other developers’ games, they waltz in, do their thing, and boom! 12 million users in a week, and multiples of that shortly afterwards.

It’s not just Zynga. Although clearly the most successful, the other top developers also manage to up-end the natural order of things as most media people understand it (which is to say, brands).

At the same time that Ubisoft have managed to scrape together 1.2 million users for their CSI: Crime City title, another game more generically named Crime City (no relation) has acquired 6.4m users, with no brand at all.

I decided to write an article about how games like CityVille manage to be successful. This article, which will come in two parts, goes into the specific features and explains what they do, why they work, and what I think they could be doing better. Hopefully it will give you some idea not just of what social games are doing right, but also why players might play games of this type.
What is CityVille?

CityVille is the latest in a series of city-building games on Facebook, and was released about two weeks ago. It is the latest in Zynga’s range of light sim-style games (FrontierVille, Café World and of course FarmVille being the main examples), and very much in the same vein as other titles like Social City, Millionaire City, City of Wonder, or My Empire.

It has taken Zynga quite a while to get in on the city-building game theme, but they have taken the time to build out their own game with their own mechanics rather than the more direct copying that they and many developers practised in the very early days.

Starting with a couple of streets and buildings, the game guides you through various tasks that you can perform (sowing crops, building bakeries, laying road, etc.) in bite-sized chunks. Rather than throw all of this detail at you at once, the game intersperses it with challenges, things to pick up, collect, friends to visit and so on.

It is click-heavy, meaning that to build a building you don’t just place it and let it be built. Each click builds a phase of the building, and there may be three or four stages before a building is actually finished. As buildings generate revenue, need supplies, or crops are grown, the game does not automate those actions. Instead you manually collect coins, deliver boxes, pick up prizes, click to plant crops, click to harvest crops, and other actions.

This activity all proceeds a-pace until you run into timers. You can only collect coins from a building every X minutes, for example, which encourages you to check into the game one or more times a day. And, globally, the game monitors all your actions with an energy statistic that either regenerates over time, or you can buy more of with the game’s cash.

As you do these activities more and more, you earn experience points (or XP), which increase your level. Levels unlock more buildings and rewards, which in turn let you make more stuff, increasing your maximum energy. And for a bonus effect, your energy recharges every time that you gain a new level.

You can also visit other player’s cities. This has the effect of immediately giving you energy awards and boosts, as well as offering activities that you can do. You can harvest other players’ crops for them, which generates mutual awards, such as XP, reputation points and game cash. You can apply to other players to let you set up franchises of your businesses in their cities. You can also send them gifts which cost you nothing (such as free energy).

The game continues to guide you with tasks. A task is usually quite simple, involving three or four steps. Steps might be include visit three friends, build a bakery, collect ten strawberries or that kind of thing. You may have several tasks on the go at the same time, as the game monitors whether you’re completing steps or not, but not all tasks are immediately available. Instead, the game chains them along, with completion of some tasks opening up other ones.

Task completion generates congratulation windows, rewards, and also the opportunity to share your achievement on Facebook.

Lastly, you are largely free to lay out your city as you choose. Unlike many classic sim-strategy games (or Restaurant City, arguably the grand-daddy of these types of games), optimal layout doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to maintain equitable balances of components in certain areas, efficient road networks or anything like that. All of the people wandering around, as well as the plants and trees are purely decorative. This means players are free to create whatever layout they desire, and many do.

And that’s the basic game design. Most successful social games are much the same, but with variations of theme. So why does this work so well for Zynga, if many of the games are the same?

Visibility

A lot of the talk around Facebook enthuses wildly about the social graph and virality as being great drivers of engagement, but I believe these effects are being wildly over-estimated. They exist, and are a factor, but actually only a small factor in how games spread. How Facebook really works is visibility.

The Facebook interface induces a high degree of user blindness. It does not do a great job of exposing new games and applications, and lacks a directory or a ‘Featured in the App Store’ style of editorial (as Apple does for the iPhone), which means that for most developers there are huge problems in getting their games in front of users’ eyeballs.

Game Advertising Online

With all of the free advertising channels on the platform now constrained or dead, this has meant that the Facebook economy has been acquiring an increasingly Darwinian shape.

Where it used to be an egalitarian environment in which any developer could strike it big, over the last year it has become top-heavy with larger developers accruing exponential success, and cutting off oxygen to smaller companies by default.

And to the winner very much go the spoils. The Facebook economy, like the television economy, is all about dominating and converting attention rather than meritocratic-ally acquiring it, and all of the big developers on the platform have realised this. There are four basic ways that they do this.

App Banners: App banners are immensely important to have on Facebook because they solve the user blindness problem. An app banner presents the player with images that they notice amid Facebook’s white, text-heavy interface, but at the same time do not overload them with thousands of available choices. App banners are the core of cross-promotion, so each game from a developer becomes a marketing channel for every other game by that developer as well.

A recent trend in app banners has come in the form of Applifier, and some others, which offer a way for smaller developers to band together and cross-promote to each other. While useful, and in some cases very much so, third party app banners probably only have a limited shelf life before there are too many of them, or developers start making their own, such that Metcalfe’s Law will start to work against rather than for them.

Decanting: The above image is captured from FarmVille, and it shows a form of cross-promotion that I call decanting. Decanting literally means pouring your users from one container into another, like wine. The idea is simple, but extremely powerful. If you are sitting on an ageing 53m monthly active users in FarmVille, as Zynga are, why not show them something else that they can play? Why not offer them rewards or challenges from one game to the next?

Each user that does this becomes a more invested customer, more likely not only to play your next game, but to still keep playing and maintaining their existing game. So you not only have their attention, you’re keeping it, and the user is unlikely to venture outside your application’s sphere to try something from a competitor instead.

Advertising: Often forgotten in the rush to praise social gaming as a new kind of business model is that most of the big players got funded very early, and used that money to develop and advertise their games.

Zynga was very much at the forefront of this. When SGN and Playfish were their early competitors, and later Playdom and Crowdstar came along, all of them trusted in the then-viral aspects of their games. Advertising was seen in some quarters as muddy, and Playfish in particular would boast that they had never had to tap much into their investment funds to acquire their users, but instead did it with great gameplay.

Zynga took the other view: They advertised like crazy, on Facebook itself, and in other games. The example picture above is take from Soccer Stars Football, and shows that Zynga still advertise in other games to this day.

Advertising works for the same reason that app banners work: They show images against the otherwise bare Facebook interface. They are also eminently target-able along many lines, and very easy to experiment with to increase yield. Facebook’s advertising solution allows you to target players by age, nationality, likes, dislikes and lots of other factors, and Zynga use this functionality expertly to promote their games, spending a rumoured $50m or more a year on advertising and probably being Facebook’s single largest advertiser.

Publishing: Social games ask users to publish their game activity a lot. The basic form of publishing is the High Scores publish action, where the player brags that they scored more points, attained a new level or acquired an achievement in a game.

These kinds of publish action were very effective when they first came out 18 months ago, and some casual games like Chain RXN exploded in users overnight because of them, but they’ve become pretty ineffective these days. Users instantly recognise them and ignore them, and recently Facebook has constrained the reach of game-published stories, limiting them only to players who have already installed a game.

Games like CityVille have started using publishing as a way to offer gifts and incentives. As you can see in the image above, my published story is bragging about my achievement, but also offering free experience points to other users who click through. A variety of such incentives encourage users to come back into the game to collect their prize, and the hope on the part of the publishing player (me in this case) is that those players will in turn show me reciprocity.

This strategy only really works if you have a critical mass of players though. It doesn’t acquire fresh users, but rather re-interrupts the attention of cross-promoted, decanted and advertised customers. It also re-acquires lapsed customers. All of which is dependent, like most kinds of marketing, on repeated exposure. The more friends you have playing and publishing, the more you will notice that game, and the more likely you are to re-enter it.

Most advertising works on that sort of constant-exposure basis, and social game publishing really is no exception.

Visibility is Geometric

All four parts of the promotion equation feed into each other and produce geometric results. As we know from Metcalfe’s Law, the value of a network corresponds to the square of the individual members, and so the more users you have, the exponentially further reach you have.

In the early days of Facebook many developers practised seedy, spam-laden tactics to acquire users, and Zynga certainly was one of those. But what they’ve done with that attention along the way is figured out how to move it around, shift it from game to game, and keep using those opportunities to expand their reach further and further.

The result, as with all successful companies on the web, is that they’re now tapping into Metcalfe-style effects. Zynga are able to add a tonne of users very quickly into a game because they have built the channels to do so.

Success follows more success, allows exponential expansion if you manipulate it in the right way, and that’s why they’re now the company adding 12m users in a week to their new game. Zynga are where they are today because they’ve realised that social gaming is actually about building a virtual network of applications inside Facebook through cross promotion, and they raced faster than anyone else to do so.

The next question is: What are they doing with those customers when they show up?

Now let’s talk about how CityVille keeps users engaged.

Most social games are considered amusements for the majority of players, so successful social game developers focus on delivering that kind of engagement. They are obsessed with retention, a commonly-used term to describe whether players return to a game or bounce from it, and the period of weeks or months that the average retained customer spends in the game before boredom finally sets in. Understanding retention is essential to achieving sustainable growth and revenue in a social game like CityVille.

But what are the levers of retention?

DAU over MAU

In order to understand what’s really going on with a game, you need to look at the daily active users (DAU) as well as the monthly active users (MAU).

Tracking services like Appdata provide useful summaries of these statistics, as well as a calculation of one over the other. I find that the resulting percentage of DAU/MAU is the best underlying number to really know what’s going on with a game.

Whether big or small, the DAU/MAU percentage tells me whether users are playing a social game as a distraction or an amusement (or even a connection, though that’s pretty rare), and so gives me an inkling as to the application’s true long term potential.

The percentage for CityVille started off extremely high. That’s not unusual in the first week of a game’s launch however, because everything is new, users are only discovering it for the first time, and the MAU figure has not had a full month to build up. A more stable example is FarmVille:

FarmVille has long been a standard-bearer for engagement on big games. These days it hovers around the 30% mark, which is fantastic, whereas many successful games exist around 20%, and some others drift down toward the 10-12%. Social applications that share quizzes and the like commonly only achieve 3-5%.

Zynga maintains one of the highest overall rates among the big developers at approximately 23%. Crowdstar has only 11%. Playfish/EA has 18%. Six Waves has 8% for its own games and 18% for games it publishes. Disney Playdom has 11%. Digital Chocolate has 16%. RockYou has 8%. Wooga has 18%.

You get the picture. Why this is so has three reasons:

1. Quizzes: The reason why Crowdstar in particular has a low percentage is because one of their most popular apps is a quiz engine. The quiz marketing tactic is a perfectly valid one, and it tends to award high MAU numbers, but low DAU. This often gives a skewed impression of how important a company might actually be in the social game space. Zynga has no quiz engine (that I’m aware of).

2. Visibility Strategy: This is a bit of a repeat from the first part of the article, but the prevalence of publishing options in particular creates more hooks for lapsed players to return to a game. The Facebook economy works geometrically and exponentially, and that applies to retention as well as initial interest.

3. Game Activity: How Zynga structures its games, particularly with respect to time- and click-based dynamics, encourages players to remember to come back and play some more. That’s what I’m going to talk about mostly in this article.
Context

Late last year, Playfish released two games that they probably shouldn’t have. One was Poker Rivals and the other was Gangster City. Each was, in its own way, a better execution of the incumbents in their genre, Zynga’s Texas Hold’Em and Mafia Wars, and yet each has proved to be a failure.

The lesson is not that you can’t fight Zynga.

Crowdstar faced off a challenge from Zynga trying to eat its Happy Aquarium market with FishVille, and while both are well past their heyday, FishVille proved to be the loser. Similarly, PetVille tried to take on Playfish’s Pet Society, but now has no more than 60% of Pet Society’s users.

The lesson is that context matters.

A hidden, but determining, factor for retention is whether this is the first time that players have encountered that game type. As most Facebook games fall into the category of amusements on the Engagement Hierarchy, players don’t distinguish them. It’s therefore important to be the first one of that type that the average user sees.

Interestingly, this may have significant consequences for CityVille. After all, social city-building games have now been around for a while, and although CityVille is doing some things differently, the game may end up falling into the same trap as FishVille or Gangster City. It’s far too early to tell.

So let’s get on to talking about the game activity.

Click Click!

The core game dynamic of CityVille is click-to-do. Click to build, click to collect, click to plant, click to harvest, click to deliver supplies. It’s reminiscent of the PC game Black and White in that although you are ostensibly the manager of the city, you actually do a lot of manual labour.

So much clicking is oddly compelling. The player doesn’t actually have to click to do everything (collected items will self-collect if left on the ground for example) but there’s a nice feeling that comes from such activity. It’s interactive, and that in turn makes the game mildly immersive by making the player feel like they are doing something, even if that something is essentially just sweeping up.

Click activity on this scale also has a downside, which is that it doesn’t scale well. My current city in CityVille is only a couple of streets in size, but when I do expand it out significantly, I think I might find the extent of such manual maintenance becomes boring.

Dual Timers

Timers prevent endless clicking. As I described in the previous post, social games like CityVille employ two kinds of timer: Specific timers on buildings or crops, and general timers in the form of energy.

Timers are deliberately staggered. Planting strawberries takes 5 minutes for them to grow, a cottage generates coins once per hour, and corn takes 24 hours to grow. So you can see why these activities encourage repeated visits. With FarmVille (which uses the same system) there are many apocryphal stories of players getting up in the middle of the night to harvest their virtual beetroot. In fact this sort of timed game dynamic goes at least as far back as the Excel-in-space game Planetarion.

Energy works another way. It is a limit on the amount of click actions that you can take in a short space of time. Some clicks, but not all, dock the player a point of energy. Collection docks energy, for example, but supplying doesn’t. Constructing a building docks energy, but clearing dead crops is free. Energy is resupplied on its own timer at a rate of one point every five minutes, or replenished if the player attains a level.

Timers used in this dual fashion are incredibly effective. What they do is to deliberately set up a conflict whereby players have to wait to do everything they want, but in the mean time can do some of the things that they want. Rather than use one global timer, as Planetarion did, the use of multiple timers creates the sensation that there is always something to do while waiting.

The mix of the two is highly compelling. While players enjoy the click activity (see above), timers essentially introduce delayed gratification, and then CityVille offers premium ways to circumvent some (but not all) of that delay. One of the foundations of monetisation in CityVille is buying more energy, for example. This gets you more activity and more clicks.

Pellets

The sheer number of rewards in CityVille is intriguing. There are two kinds of reward in the game, let’s call them pellets and unlocks. Pellets are basically any object that appears on the ground when you collect from a building or harvest from your crops.

They include:

* XP stars: Experience points, which go toward increasing your level.

* Coins: The more disposable of the game’s two currencies

* Energy Bolts: A free energy point. These drop about once every five to ten clicks

* Reputation Hearts: When you help friends, you receive reputation hearts

* Goods: When you harvest crops.

* Sets: Sometimes a cake or a jewel or some other trinket appears. These items belong to sets, and if you gather complete sets then you gain special awards

The trick with pellets seems to be that the fundamentals required for the game economy to function (coins, experience and goods in CityVille) need to be constantly available. The game might occasionally reward an extra drop of one of these pellets as a part of a regular click action, but the player expects a baseline for their hard work. Otherwise the game feels unfair.

The other kinds of pellet thus become delights. A delight is a reward of happy circumstance and the perception of luck. In a TED talk by Tom Chatfield, he describes seven ways that games reward the brain, and he talks about how the perception of randomness and actual randomness are two different things. Often when players are close to completing a set, for example, they start to feel as though the game is denying them the last piece unfairly. So games (perhaps CityVille is one of them) increase the likelihood that the last couple of items in the set will drop.

Delightful pellets make a game like CityVille feel like more than just a box of functions. They’re trying to add a little layer of thauma into the game by saying ‘This is more than just a dry simulation. Have a cake!’. Delightful pellets make the game seem more charming, and they become compelling in their own right.

Unlocks

Unlocks are a more long-term kind of reward. An unlock opens up new areas of the game permanently for the player, allowing them to do new things that they could never do before, and altering their game experience. Unlocks extend the game dynamic, or in some cases add whole new dynamics, and extension is one the core ways to prevent games (especially amusements) from becoming boring.

CityVille has, broadly speaking, three kinds of unlock: Levels, gates and task trees.

Levels: Levels are a global monitor of how well the player is doing in the game. As the player earns XP from his activities, this goes toward attaining his next level. When he attains his next level, the game replenishes his energy, increases his maximum energy, gives him 1 game cash (the much harder-to-earn game currency), and unlocks new parts of the game. Unlocks might include new kinds of building, new crops or new whole areas that you can access (such as shipping).

Gates: Gates are specific parts of the game that will not permit you to progress unless you complete either a social action or you spend game cash. In the example picture, I have maximised the available population in my town and am required to build some community buildings. One of those community buildings is a police station, and to complete the building I must staff it. Staffing the building requires game cash (which basically means I need to buy some with my credit card) or inviting my friends to staff my station for me. Gating used to be a policy violation in Facebook games because the games used them as compulsory viral mechanisms, but these days games like CityVille use gating as an optional thing to do rather than basing the entire game around it.

Task Trees: Task trees give new goals to the player to complete, but space them out. As I described in the first part of the article, CityVille gives goals to the player in a steady fashion, monitoring a few at a time and requiring that they complete them before moving on to the next. The use of task trees creates quests in the game, such as a quest to set up a bakery or collect 20 cakes, and they ensure a steady supply of medium term rewards. Task trees are a significant part of reinforcing to the player that there is always something to do, or some new delight around the corner. They contribute significantly to making sure that the game does not feel sterile.

Daily Bonus

Lastly, there is the daily bonus.

The daily bonus is a simple reward for showing up. In early social games, daily bonuses were either flat awards or lucky draws. More recently, they have become chaining mechanisms. CityVille shows not only today’s reward, but if you come back every day it shows you that the potential reward increases. It’s a bit crude, perhaps, but players get the point. Anything that brings them back increases the chance that they will play that day, which in turn opens up all the other possibilities.

Open Loops

The closest analogy that I can think of for how retention works is waiting tables. A waitress is commonly juggling many tasks at once. There are orders to collect, orders to serve, drinks to refill, spills to clean, bills to serve, tips to collect and many other miscellaneous tasks in a live restaurant. All of which combine to create a constant flow of activity and a phenomenon called the open loop.

As humans, much of how our memory and attention works comes from whether we have left something open or closed. We are compelled to try and close what is open, to neatly finish off, collect the bill and receive a tip as a waitress does. Such accomplishment is of innate pleasure to us.

Open loops exist in all our lives. Writing this blog post is an open loop that I must close. Buying Christmas presents is an open loop not yet completed. Checking my inbox closes a habitually open loop. Sending that email I meant to send yesterday closes a loop. Splitting this article into a series creates an open loop in some of my readers’ minds too. Maybe even yours.

Games tap into our need to close loops. Social games like CityVille are expert at doing so because what they create is a never-ending series of open loops. No matter how quickly you play or how much money you spend, there is always something to do, some gate to unlock, some task tree to complete, some daily bonus to claim, some new set to gather, some crop to harvest or some level to attain. It never really ends, and it overlaps various loops over one another such that even if you have run out of cash or coins, there is always something to do – but not for extended sessions.

The loops that the game creates in your mind cannot be closed until you come back later. In the mean time, have a cake!(source:gamasutra)


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