1、心理学家Jamie Madigan也是游戏玩家，他分析了《Journal of Consumer Research》中某文章阐述的问题，称现实中的“单位效应”问题（游戏邦注：“单位效应”指人们往往忽略单位而只关注数值大小，比较时数值越大人们会觉得二者间的差异也越大。）在游戏中同样存在。可以将这个原理运用到游戏设计中，如在玩家为角色选择新技能时以分钟数显示技能冷却时间或以天数甚至小时数公布游戏免费试玩时间。即便换算过来可能完全相同，当玩家在选择游戏时，会认为百分制各游戏间的质量差异比十分制或五分制的大，这值得游戏评价网站借鉴。

Rift

2、Industry Gamers日前独家采访《Rift》执行制作人及Trion Worlds首席创意官Scott Hartsman，谈论该网游为获得良好开局所做的准备。Hartsman解释道，自1年前的内测起公司就当成正式上线来运作，这些日子让他们理清头绪并总结如何合适运营在线服务。通常网游会出现公测时玩家众多而收费后人数开始逐渐下滑的困境，但《Rift》似乎并未面临这个问题。目前该游戏共有99个在线服务器，而且玩家还在不断增加，丝毫没有减少的迹象。Hartsman认为他们已经度过了困难时期。他还提及Trion Worlds决定游戏采用订阅收费模式，他觉得游戏类型及收费模式都应让用户感到满意。

3、分析机构Pearl Research最新数据显示，2010年中国网游市场收益增长25%，资本净值达50亿美元。位居首位的发布商仍为腾讯，该公司2010年总营收为14亿美元，紧随其后的是网易（7.49亿美元）、盛大（6.8亿美元）、完美世界（3.74亿美元）和畅游（3.27亿美元）。报告显示公司合并和收购将成为2010年和2011年的主要趋势，大公司对国内外业务均显示出了极大的兴趣。

4、由Y Combinator支持的《Humble Bundle》推出其第二个官方游戏包，用户可以自行决定购买的价格，该游戏包由独立游戏工作室Frozenbyte单独制作完成。玩家可在游戏包中挑选5个无版权保护的游戏并为随意为此出价，从1美分到6000美元间任意价格均可。选择支付多少费用后，玩家可以决定这些资金分给慈善组织、开发者和《Humble Bundle》的比例。这种新型分销模式十分奏效，同样能获得大笔收益。公司并未透露具体获利的金额，但按玩家选择默认支付5%的费用来计算的话，其不到两周时间内营收已超过9万美元。

入口2

5、Valve出品的《半条命》是最热门的第一人称射击系列游戏，但近7年来我们看到的该系列作品并不多，《半条命2：第二章》的面世也已过去3年。Stardock的Brad Wardell在接受Industry Gamers采访时表示，可能是Steam的成功使公司推迟该系列游戏的研发。他说道：“如果你仔细分析Valve公司在Steam成功前后的游戏开发表现，就会明白确实存在影响，我们当初在做Impulse时也不得不抽调某些主力开发者来确保其顺利运营。”这或许是Valve放慢《半条命》系列游戏开发的原因，但公司并未完全遗忘。（游戏邦注：《入口2》即将发布，估计很快就可以看到《半条命》的下一部作品。）（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

1. Psychologist and gamer Jamie Madigan looks at a recent study about how our perceptions of simple game features can be affected by something as simple as seeing them presented in minutes or seconds.

Presenting people with different units that they can easily convert between shouldn’t influence their choices. An article in an upcoming issue of Journal of Consumer Research suggests otherwise.

In the article, the authors propose what they call a “unit effect,” which says that people often don’t pay attention to the unit in which a figure is presented and can thus be overly influenced by the magnitude of numbers when comparing options.

This has a number of interesting applications to game design and how we as players react to things. As I hinted at above, when it comes time to choose new abilities for your character, cooldown timers should be seen as more attractive if they are presented in minutes rather than seconds. Free trials should be expressed in days (if not hours) instead of weeks or a month. Or if you want to make players feel time pressure, you could do the opposite: the countdown to the military’s arrival in Dead Rising 2 should seem shorter if shown in hours or days instead of minutes.

Now let’s consider game reviews. Say you’re looking at review scores for different games and trying to decide which to buy. The unit effect described above would suggest that review scores on a 100-point scale would be more likely to increase perceptions of quality differences between the two games than would scores on a 10-point or 5-point scale, even if the math is the same. (Source: Gamasutra)

2. It’s hard to launch an MMO these days, with veteran companies like Cryptic, Turbine, Funcom, and Mythic having difficulty in the market. Trion recently released their first MMO, Rift, and the game has seen great success so far. IndustryGamers recently talked with Rift Executive Producer and Trion Worlds Chief Creative Officer Scott Hartsman about preparing for a successful launch.

Hartsman explained that the game’s beta period was a huge help in showing the company how the live service would go.

“The fact is that we started running it like a live service for practice even through our internal testing, beginning about a year ago. So every day between then and now was really a rehearsal for getting the kinks out, getting the process together for how to run a live service,” said Hartsman.

“Instead of having the typical pattern where you get this incredibly positive and huge open beta followed by the numbers going down when people have to start paying for the game, we actually saw them continuing to go up. So, we got 99 servers live right now, more people joining every day and it doesn’t show any signs of letting up. So we’re enjoying the hell out of it right now,” he added.

Hartsman also noted that Trion Worlds decided early on that a subscription model was the only way to go, despite a number of MMO publishers taking their titles free-to-play.

“What it comes down to is the game you’re making needs to match your model. And both of those need to match your audience. And we knew from the start that we wanted this game to be triple-A, MMO, and RPG. It’s aimed directly at that audience,” he said. “And we felt that the opportunity was there and people seemed to enjoy the model, so no need to go innovating in that direction when we had so many places we wanted to innovate in the game itself.” (Source: Industry Gamers)

3. The online games market in China grew by 25 percent in 2010, reaching a new net worth of $5 billion, according to the latest data from analyst group Pearl Research.

The number one publisher in the country remains Tencent, which generated $1.4 billion in revenues in 2010, followed by Netease on $749 million, Shanda Games on $680 million, Perfect World on $374 million and Changyou on $327 million. The report identifies mergers and acquisitions as a major trend in 2010 and 2011, with major companies looking to acquire both local and international businesses. (Source: Industry Gamers)

4. Y Combinator-backed Humble Bundle is launching its second official batch of games that allows users to set their own price for the cost of the download. This time, the package was created by a single developer, indie game house Frozenbyte.

Humble Bundle went through startup incubator Y Combinator, which launched specifically to organize operations after 2009’s Humble Indie Bundle (put on by a group of indie game developers) ended up being a runaway success. The sales let gamers pick up to five games that are free of copyright protection software, and lets them pay whatever they want for them — anywhere from 1 cent to $6,000. After deciding what to pay, gamers can decide what percentage of the fund goes to charity, to the developers and whether to give Humble Bundle a tip for its troubles.

It’s a very effective distribution model that could make a decent amount of money, too. Humble Bundle hasn’t disclosed how much money the company has made off of its sales, but it ended up selling more than $1.8 million worth of game bundles in less than two weeks. If most gamers used the default payment schedule, that means Humble Bundle picked up more than $90,000. (Source: Games Beat)

5. Valve’s Half-Life is one of the most popular first person shooter series in the business, and yet it’s been almost seven years since we’ve seen an actual numbered entry in the franchise and over three years since Half-Life 2: Episode Two hit store shelves. Could something be holding Valve back from working on the next game? Stardock’s Brad Wardell seems to think so.

In an interview with IndustryGamers, Wardell talked about his own experiences working at Stardock and his company’s own digital gaming service, Impulse. While Stardock’s Impulse service has been highly successful and generated a large stream of revenue for the company, it has also required a large portion of the company’s resources to keep running. Wardell suspects that Valve has fallen into a similar treadmill with its Steam service.

“If you were to look at a timeline of games developed in-house by Valve,” says Wardell, “and you look at before Steam and after Steam, it’s definitely had an effect. I don’t argue that that’s a good thing or bad thing, but I do know the effect that’s had on us, where I’ve had to put some of my top developers over the years onto Impulse to make sure it was getting better and better.”

It seems entirely reasonable that Steam’s success has slowed down Valve’s work on the Half-Life franchise, but we’re sure that the company hasn’t entirely forgotten the series. Now that Portal 2 has almost released, hopefully we’ll hear something about the next Half-Life very soon. (Source: Game Informer)