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业内人士分析游戏开发商应善待盗版现象的原因

发布时间:2011-02-17 09:52:59 Tags:,,,,

游戏邦注:本文作者是Tadhg Kelly,这是他就游戏盗版问题发表的一些看法。

我昨天看到了一个关于游戏盗版行为的视频,看完后得出了一个结论:DRM(数字版权管理)其实没有多大作用,玩家应该做诚实用户,付费玩游戏。

视频中的一些观点很睿智,但其实并无新意。它说共享文件就像是从开发商的口袋把钱刁走,所以开发商就陷入了一个两难的境地:要不然就创收,要不然就停业;如果不增加销量,那就走向破产。

开发商认为他们所经营的是内容业务,内容是价值之所在。但事实并非如此。

游戏行业和所有艺术一样,要不断发现粉丝,并和他们互动,所以关系才是价值之所在。我们正逐步进入后平台和单系列游戏时代,所以了解这二者的区别所在十分重要。

《人的权利》销售启示

通过分享,抄袭和偷窃来增加销量,并非刚出现的行为。只是因特网把它变得更加透明化,这一行为的历史至少可以追溯到托马斯·佩因(游戏邦注:Thomas Paine,英裔美国思想家、作家、政治活动家、理论家、革命家、激进民主主义者) 的《人的权利》这本书。

佩因在1791和1792年撰写了《人的权利》,在当时掀起了轩然大波。他的书宣扬废除国王的权利,为法国和美国的革命精神奠定了基础,启蒙了新一代知识青年的思想观念。这本书在当时的销量超过了25万册(相当于现在脱销了500万册),也让他因此成为家户喻晓的人物。

事实上,佩因的书分成两部销售。第一部是1791年出版的精装版本,第二部是1792年的平装本,后者的销量更大。平装本推高了书本销量,同时也让佩因成为了一个小说家。为什么呢?

奇怪之处在于,很少有读者买到了第一部书,但要看懂第二部,他们必须对第一部的内容有所了解。答案很简单,更多人只是阅读,分享和交流第一部书,只有很少一部分人真正花钱买了这本书。

Halo

Halo

今天的游戏发行其实也是类似的模式,通常是第二或第三版的游戏销量最大。即便是像《光晕》(Halo)这样有故事情节的游戏也是如此。唯一可以解释得通的原因就是,很多人玩过第一版本的游戏,但并没有买下来。

艺术灌输给人们这样一个观点,艺术具有繁衍性。当达米安·赫斯特(游戏邦注:Damien Hirst,新一代英国艺术家的主要代表人物之一)创造了保存在玻璃柜中的鲨鱼这件作品,他就传递给人们这样一个信息:今后还有会有类似古怪的东西出现。他吸引了更多希望观赏,购买和分享这些作品的拥趸。但为了达到这个目的,艺术家得先把作品陈列到展览馆中,只有在这里才可以上成千上万的人免费欣赏作品,从而让其中一部分人转变成消费者和忠实粉丝。

关于一本万利的谬论

许多开发商和发行商从来没想过发行续集,或者只有当第一版本的游戏引起巨大反响,他们才会考虑发行续集。有些开发商和发行商也不懂得如何在发行期间和用户保持沟通,以致无法维系他们和用户之间的联系。

他们以一次性经济模式来运营项目,就像只有一颗子弹的枪,只有一次射击目标的机会。目标当然就是赚很多钱,游戏只能成功,不能失败,它得重磅出击市场,否则开发商可能无法立足。

这又使开发商陷入一味关注ARPU(用户人均收益)的误区。他们关注游戏销量的同时,又要确保售价不能太低。这让开发商进退两难,因为他们既希望游戏销量大增,又不舍得降低价格。

于是就产生了所谓的广告费用。为了让一个大制作的游戏卖得好,你首先得让所有人都知道它的存在。这个过程越短越好,这样才能避免游戏掉价,丧失人气。

这就是游戏行业的普遍想法。许多的独立游戏开发商也这么认为,原因如下:

-别人给予的建议

-约定俗成的观念

-其他更大的行业渗透进来的观念

-几个主流销售渠道奉行的观念

-这是普遍常识

-害怕消费者的心理

关注ARPU的独立开发商与大型发行商之间的唯一区别在于,独立开发商囊中羞涩,他们无法承担巨额的市场营销费用,但为了实现更良好的ARPU目标,又舍不得在价格上让步(游戏邦注:作者认为他们的游戏合理售价应该是5美元,而不是20美元)。

他们这样做也许能暂时守住一小块市场地盘,但很快就发现这个市场的用户其实也很难取悦,开发商不得不为了淘到一粒金沙而疲于奔命,最后总在穷于应对中丧失了开发游戏的热情。

一次性经济多数时候是不起作用的,因为开发商或发行商都错误地认为所有的分享行为都是敌人(游戏邦注:例如二手买卖,出租,租借等),他们认为这些行为阻碍了ARPU实现预期目标。他们所采取的行动其实徒劳的,要知道他们正在对抗的可是最强大的武器:传播。

游戏内容的价值

要知道到你的游戏内容可能毫无价值。你可能在游戏开发上花了好几天,好几个月,甚至一辈子,但你所创造的游戏毫无任何有形价值。

不过千万别沮丧,想想看:Google也没有什么有形价值,Facebook也是如此,Twitter同样也不例外。但是投资者和股票市场都认定他们身价已达数十亿,他们每一者都可以创造数十亿的营收。Google是个市值2000亿美元的企业,它通过开发一个免费的产品而发财致富,这个道理对其他企业来说也是一样的。

上述企业和一些游戏可以在缺乏有形价值情况下创造财富的原因是,他们是通往其他领域的平台。Google以广告赚钱,Facebook通过广告和卖虚拟商品赚钱。这些公司利用大范围内的关系(搜索和社交服务)来赚钱。事实上免费的产品传播很迅速,所以营收也就随之而来。

这并不是说开发商的得开发一个总是免费提供内容的游戏,只对虚拟商品收费。虽然你可以这么做,但这并不是唯一的模式。这里的意思是说作为一个开发商,你得让游戏有这样的理念:与尽可能多的玩家建立联系。你和玩家所建立的联系才是收入和成功的真正来源。我把这个称作单一游戏发行。

假设你开发了一款很酷的策略游戏,售价10美元。你认为它很快会被各种网站抄袭,所以你选择添加DRM技术,防止盗版游戏的买卖,并与破坏DRM的盗版商进行一场无休无止的持久战。

或者你也可以选择无视一切剽窃行为,在游戏中加入社交功能(游戏邦注:最简单的方法就是将游戏链接引到公司论坛),让需要客服的用户购买正版游戏。然后你可以不时地进入公司论坛,告诉用户们第二版本的游戏6个月后就会被淘汰了,他们还得再花10美元购买新游戏。

如果你采用的是一次性经济模式,那就会面临无法在第一时间满足市场需求的风险。所以另一个选择(无视盗版行为)就是直接考虑你所能承受的底线。如果你采用的是基于建立用户关系的模式,那么就不会受到影响。

无论如何,喜欢盗版的人还是会买盗版,但你其实可以把他们转化成真正的消费者,第二个版本的游戏也可以采用同样的方法。用户越多,盗版用户也就越多,社区的参与者也越多,之后就可以推出第三个版本。

你所要做的就是培养这些关系,然后就可以通过这些从用户身上获得积极的回报。不论这些用户来自哪里,合法或者不合法,只要你不让关系断裂,他们最终都会出于支持、兴趣、便利或者其他购买动机而付费。

同样的想法也适用于在线游戏,大型多人玩家游戏和社交游戏。它们之间存在的主要区别只是发行频率和游戏付费模式。它们同样都要通过这种关系,以不同的方式赚钱,关系是它们业务的核心所在。

所有工作的终极目标就是拥有一个关键字。也就是说,你的游戏或者公司成为Google用户日常的搜索词条。创建一个热门的关键词,或者成为某个既有关键词的搜索结果,都可以创造一种“这儿有奖品”的聚集效应。最好的方式就是建立关系,因为这样可以实现链接。链接就是关键词经济领域的货币,越多越好。

警惕交流缺口

据国际唱片业协会最新报告显示,音像行业的销售缺口出现了。报告指出,实体音乐在过去7年中的销量下降了,数字音乐的销量无法填补这一缺口。在此我要声明的是,之前我们只谈分享,粉丝群体也是一种增值途径,现在就要考虑底线问题了,所以让我们现实点,开发商要学会自我保护。

现实情况有两种可能:

1.国际唱片业协会的数据不完整,因为他们没有把新增的个体艺术家考虑在内,这些人没有通过传统的渠道卖唱片。

2.国际唱片业协会的数据是准确的,这一行的销售收入确实下降了。

假设第二中情况的真实性更高一些(游戏邦注:事实上可能是二者的中和),那么销售数据是来自分销渠道中的哪一环呢?答案是发行商。

据游戏邦了解,有人曾发表了危言耸听的推论,即开发商未来将因盗版问题而难以盈利,但事实并非如此。互联网可以很自然地促进艺术家和粉丝之间的分享和联系。在游戏行业中这意味着,分销价格将下降为零。也就是说,随着竞争的加剧,产品价格的底线也就只能不断妥协了。

因销售缺口而造成的收益减少,其实并不会伤害到创作者的利益。这只会逐步让许多发行厂商的员工失业,因为他们已经无足轻重。单一游戏发行模式意味着一次性经济规模将会缩小,变得容易掌控。不论如何,我们已经无法阻止这种发展趋势。

开发商之所以要善待盗版者、分享者、借用者、出借者、二手零售商等,就是因为他们是你的新发行渠道。每个玩你游戏的人,合法或者不合法,都只你业务网络上的一个节点,他们可能传播你的游戏名称,及游戏的市场营销活动,每个人都是你建立用户关系的机会,都有可能转化为真正的消费者,为你宣传布道,让游戏影响力迅速传播。

你需要避免的缺口并非销售缺口,而是交流缺口,即不与玩家沟通和互动,每次开发新游戏都像隐退了好多年等等——这会使得所有建立起来的关系都回归到零。如果你的游戏存在这种缺口,那么你所建立起来的一切关系,不论是正版用户还是盗版用户,都将烟消云散。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,转载请注明来源:游戏邦)

Opinion: Game Developers Should Love Their Pirates

[In this Gamasutra opinion piece, London-based lead designer and producer Tadhg Kelly tackles the issue of making money in the face of piracy, offering tips and examples to help developers earn what they deserve, without the need for restrictive DRM.]

I came across this video from Extra Credits yesterday. It’s about piracy, and concludes that although DRM (digital rights management) never works, players should be good folks and pay for their games.

Their argument is witty, but it’s not new. It paints file sharing as stealing money from developers’ mouths, and so has an either/or perspective. Either we get paid or we go out of business. Either we see sales or we’re bust.

They’re seeing their business as a content business, where the content is the thing that has value. This is not the case.

The games industry, like all the arts, is about finding and interacting with fans, so that value comes from a relationship. As we slowly move into the post-platform, single-franchise future, understanding the difference between the two is crucial.

Thomas Paine

The pattern of sharing, copying and stealing as a way to generate sales is not new. The Internet may make it more apparent than ever before, but it’s at least as old as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.

When Paine wrote his seminal tract during 1791 and 1792, it caused a storm. Framing the ideas of the French and American Revolutions while dis-enfranchising the rights of kings, Paine’s book became a touchstone for a generation of intellectual thought. It also sold in excess of 250,000 copies (which is like selling 5m copies today) and made him a household name.

Paine’s book actually sold in two parts. The first was published as a typical high priced book in 1791, and the second in 1792 in a cheaper edition for wider circulation. It was the second part that drove sales and turned Paine into a storyteller. The question is why.

The curious aspect of this story is that many customers never owned the first part, and yet to understand the second part they would have required at least some familiarity with the first. The simple answer, of course, is that more people read, shared and passed on the ideas in the first part than physically bought it.

We see a similar pattern with many game franchises today, where the second or third edition of the game is the one that actually achieves the maximum potential sales. Even in games that have a story element, such as Halo, this is shown to be the case. Again, the only explanation is that more people must have played the first game than actually bought it.

Art seeds the idea in the audience that there will be more art. When Damien Hirst creates a newsworthy shark in a tank, it seeds the idea that there will be more work of similar bizarreness. He finds a following that want to view, buy and interact with his art for the long term. However in order for that to happen, it has to feature in a gallery. The gallery makes access to the art free, which exposes it to millions of viewers, and some of them go on to become customers and fans.

The One Shot Fallacy

Many developers and publishers never think in terms of sequel potential, or they only think in terms of sequels if the first game that they have made turns out to have been an explosive hit. Many of them also fail to maintain or continue the conversation with their customers between releases, and this means that they fail to maintain the connection that they were building.

They are thinking of their business in the terms of one-shot economics. One-shot economics views their game as a bullet in a gun, and they have only one shot to hit the target. The target is, of course, that the game has to make a lot of money. It can’t fail, and can’t only acquit itself. It must be a hit, or else the developer will be destroyed.

This quickly leads to ARPU (average-revenue-per-user) obsession. The focus is on distributing the game but making sure that every sale is achieving enough to meet revenue expectations. This places the publisher in a state of conflicted ambitions, because they also want to ensure that the game sells many copies.

That’s where advertising costs come into play. In order to make a high price game sell big, you better have the muscle to tell everyone on Earth that it exists. And to do so in as short a time as possible to avoid discounting and dropping popularity.

That’s how the games industry basically thinks. A lot of indies think the same way, for these reasons:

- That’s the advice that they read

- It’s the conventional wisdom

- Some of them come from the bigger industry and learned this there

- Several of the major sales channels are constructed to sell in this way

- It seems like common sense

- They’re afraid of customers

The only difference between indies who think this way and big publishers is just a lack of deep pockets. They can’t afford the big marketing spend, but still charge more than they should for copies of their games (I think the optimal price for indie games is $5, not $20) to get that ARPU.

This works to keep their game in a small niche and frustrated that their customers seem intent on ripping them off. Viewing customers in that manner will drain you of enthusiasm for making games because it feels like continuously fighting a hydra in order to get a shot at a golden fleece.

One-shot economics mostly don’t work because the developer or publisher makes the mistake of thinking that all sharing is the enemy (torrenting, second hand sales, rentals, borrowing in the school playground etc) because these activities take away from the one shot of ARPU that they need. In so doing, they actively work against the most powerful potential weapon in their arsenal: Seeding.

Value

Realize that your game content is entirely valueless. You may have spent days, months or lifetimes working on it, but what you have created has no tangible value. At all.

However, before this makes you commit suicide, consider this: Google has no tangible value. Facebook has no tangible value. Twitter has no tangible value. And yet each of them is considered to be worth many billions by investors and stock markets, and each makes billions in revenue. Google is a $200 billion corporation that has made its fortune on a product that it gives away, completely free, to everyone. The same is true of the others.

The reason that they, and many games, have zero value but plenty of worth is that they are gateways to something else. Google makes money from advertising. Facebook makes money from advertising and sales of virtual goods. What these companies are doing is leveraging relationships (in search and social) on a vast scale in order to make a profit. The fact that the product is free is why it spreads so far, and the revenue comes later.

This does not mean that you have to run a hosted game that gives its content away for free all the time and charge for virtual goods. You can, but it’s not the only way. What it means is that your game, and you as a developer, needs to be built with the idea of forming a connection with players, and to do so with as many players as possible. The relationship that you establish with those players is the true source of revenue and success. I call this single franchise publishing.

For example, suppose you made a cool strategy game and sold it for $10. You expect it to be pirated by various sites quickly. Your choices are to install some DRM to make sure that every copy sold is legitimate, and then have a running battle with pirates who crack that DRM.

Or alternatively you can let the pirating just happen and instead build social features into the game (which could be as simple as links to your company forum) and a requirement that people who need customer service buy a legitimate license. Then you participate in your forum all the time and start telling everyone about version 2 of the game, which will be out in 6 months and cost another $10.

If your model is based on one-shot economics, the risk is that you will not make your sales requirements first time. So the second option (let pirates be pirates) is directly eating away at your bottom line. On the other hand, if your model is based on valuing relationships then it doesn’t matter.

A pirate will likely pirate anyway, but instead you are focused on converting them into a customer eventually. And when the second version comes out, the process is the same. More customers, more pirates, more participants in the community, and here comes version three.

What you are doing is seeding relationships, and then those relationships are yielding positive dividends from customers. Regardless of where the customers come from, legal or otherwise, they will eventually pay you money out of a sense of support, interest, convenience or any one of a dozen other purchase motivators as long as you don’t let the relationship die.

Of course, you can apply the same thinking to online games, massive multiplayer games and social games. The main difference is simply the frequency of releases and the kind of financial model that those games can support. Each is making money from relationships in different ways, but relationships are at the heart of their businesses.

The ultimate goal in all this is to own a keyword. What that means is that your game franchise or company becomes a search term that Googlers use in their day-to-day searching. Establishing a popular keyword, or becoming the top search result for a keyword that already exists, creates a ‘to the winner, the spoils’ effect. And the best way to do that is through building relationships because that will result in links. Links are the currency of the keyword economy. The more you have, the better.

Minding the Gaps

The chief argument leveled against this kind of thinking (such as by IFPI in their latest report) is that sales gaps emerge. They note that in the last seven years, sales of physical music have dropped, and that digital sales have not covered the gap. The accusation is to say that all this talk of sharing and fan clubs may well add value, but it’s about the bottom line. So let’s get real here. We need to protect ourselves.

Indeed. Let’s get real. The reality is one of two situations. Either:

1. The IFPI’s measurements are incomplete because they do not take sufficient account of the increasing numbers of independent artists who simply don’t bother selling through traditional channels.

2. The IFPI’s measurements are correct, and the amount of sales revenue has in fact dropped.

Assuming the second version is more likely to be true (actually it’s probably a combination), what layer of the distribution chain does it come out of? The answer is the publishing layer.

The scare story around piracy infers that in the future a developer will no longer be able to make a profitable living, but this is just not the case. The Internet automates sharing and connection between the artist and his fans. So in games what this means — like in any industry — is that the price of distribution drops to near zero. That also means that the amount of available competition increases, and so the sustainable price of the product also drops.

The missing revenue caused by the sales gap is not hurting creators. What it’s doing is slowly putting a lot of people who work in the publishing factory out of jobs because what they do is simply less essential. Single franchise publishing probably implies that much of the one-shot economy will shrink down to a more manageable size. Right or wrong, there’s not really much that can be done about that, however, as automation of the processes that publishing used to offer is here to stay.

The essential reason why you should love your pirates, sharers, borrowers, lenders, second hand retailers and so forth is that they become your new levers of publishing. Everyone that plays your game, legitimate or otherwise, is another node in your network that may spread the name of your game and its marketing story. Each is an opportunity to build a relationship, convert into a customer, become an influencer on your behalf, and so help your single franchise to spread.

The real gap that you must avoid is not a sales gap. It is a conversation gap. Not talking to your users, disappearing for years at a time to work on your next game, and otherwise simply vanishing off the radar resets all of your relationships back to zero. If you allow that gap to form then you’ve sacrificed the potential of everything that you’ve built for nothing, piracy or no.(Source:Gamasutra)


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