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解析影响用户留存率的社交游戏机制设计要点

发布时间:2011-05-05 12:17:44 Tags:,,,

有许多游戏开发商愿意绞尽脑汁将玩家引进门,但在留住玩家这个环节上却甚少花费心思,传统的游戏市场推广模式几乎没有考虑过如何取悦玩家。

AAA级游戏发行领域最重视发行当天的销售成就,曾有一名主流游戏发行公司的首席财务官自称,他可以从游戏发行首天的销量,预测一款游戏销售的生命周期。由此不难理解,AAA级游戏领域为何如引重视首发当天的市场表现,这也正是他们并不在乎游戏发行后情况的原因——他们每款游戏已向用户收取40美元费用,而且又没有任何后续收益,发行商已经由此大赚一笔,所以他们用不着顾虑用户最后对游戏的看法如何。

需要说明的是,我们关注的并非AAA级游戏领域,如何各位有志于自主发行游戏、开发网页游戏,或者运营互联网项目,就不能不考虑用户的感受。

(游戏邦注:即使是AAA级游戏也已经不同以往,他们也会想法留住用户,以便销售更多的DLC内容)

出于运营考虑,我们还得保证用户频频回访游戏,这就要求我们在设计游戏时就得转变“让用户体验更多东西再走”的思维,采纳“鼓励用户继续光临”的做法。在此我们主要讨论关于保证用户留存率的问题。

留存率的重要性

用户获取成本正在不断攀升,所以用户留存率也因此凸显其重要性。为了实现这个目标,开发商就必须选择在市场营销中付出更多代价招徕用户,或者使用更多高招提高老主顾们的付费意愿和消费水平。

留存率是游戏设计者应铭记于心的关键要素,只有通过成功吸引玩家频频重返游戏,才能实现理想的用户留存率。

下文将以一些典型的社交游戏为例,分析它们实现留存率的游戏机制特点。需要说明的是,这里所举案例并非开发者设计游戏的不二法则,而只是为各位提供参考建议。

提供每日奖励

Daily Spin

Daily Spin

Daily Spin

Daily Spin

最简单的机制之一就是每天都为到访的用户提供奖励,《宝石迷阵闪电战》通过一个老虎机设置让玩家赢取奖励币,而害怕损失的心理正是人的一种天性和本能,所以它可以刺激玩家每天不断回访游戏,以防错过一些免费的奖励币。

增加每日奖励内容

Restaurant City

Restaurant City

也有些用户并不喜欢老虎机的奖励模式,他们更希望获得有价值、罕见的的非游戏虚拟货币奖励。为吸引玩家定期回访游戏,Playfish旗下的《Restaurant City》提供的是持续增加的游戏物品。

这些奖励是随机性的物品,但玩家总能通过持续访问游戏而获得更多奖励。

持续性

多数社交游戏的核心是持续机制,《FarmVille》中的庄稼以及《Millionaire City》的租金就可以说明这一点。

Farmville

Farmville

开发商可采用一个可靠的机制(例如收割庄稼或收租),让玩家自发形成一种他们必须种植庄稼,并在等待片刻后收割庄稼的心理意识。

《Mafia Wars》这类游戏将持续机制发挥到极致:玩家如果能量不足时就得花些功夫等待恢复元气(或者也可以花钱补充能量)。与此同理,社交游戏还应该给玩家一种心理暗示,即他们应该先“歇一会儿”,而庄稼成熟或者能量恢复时,他们就得重返游戏。

另一个例子是《FrontierVille》,它同时采用了种植庄稼和能量恢复机制(但有些人认为,这对玩家来说无异于一种双重麻烦,实际影响了该游戏的可玩性)。

投入性

投入性是持续性的一种更为强大的变体,它与持续性最大的不同点在于,支持玩家按照自己的时间安排重返游戏。

举例说,假如所有庄稼的生长周期都是12小时,那么玩家在某个百无聊赖的下午4点时种植了一些庄稼,那么他们就得将闹钟设置到凌晨4点以便错过收割庄稼。有些极为狂热的游戏玩家可能无所谓,但对一般玩家来说则不然,他们并不喜欢这种设置,并认为“这种催人三更半夜起床摘菜的游戏太没水准了”,这种设置很有可能成为玩家丧失游戏热情的杀手。

Farmville crops

Farmville crops

而《FarmVille》和《Millionaire City》这类游戏却为玩家提供了何时重返游戏的选择,玩家在《FarmVille》中可自主选择种植树莓(生长周期为2小时)还是洋蓟(需生长4天才能收割)等多种农作物。如果玩家在某个无赖的下午想打发时间时,就可以选择种植只需要数小时就能收割的庄稼,或者某周需要外出时,就可以种植周一回来再收割的庄稼。

这种灵活有弹性的设置更有利于培养玩家对游戏的情感依赖——因为这种“定时收割庄稼”的安排完全由用户自主决定,所以它就会在潜移默化中被列入用户脑海中的日程表,从而增加了用户返回游戏的机率。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,转载请注明来源:游戏邦)

ARM yourself: Keeping your customers is the secret to success

It’s amazing how many games companies don’t think like this. How much effort they put into getting customers through the door, and how little they put on keeping them when they arrive.

Actually, when you think about it, it’s not amazing at all. Games companies have never cared about satisfying their customers.

The traditional marketing model for the games industry has put zero thought into satisfying customers. Literally zero.

AAA publishing is about the release day. The CFO of a major games publisher once told me that he could predict the lifetime sales of a game, down to the nearest ten thousand units or less, based purely on day one sales. No wonder AAA marketing is focused so intently on initial launch, and has no interest at all about what happens after that.

This isn’t surprising either. When the business model consists of charging a user £40 for a game, with no recurring revenue, it really doesn’t matter if the user hates the game. You’ve already got their money.

We’re not in KAAAnsas any more, Toto

We’re not focused on AAA games any more. If you are reading this, you are interested in self-publishing, or web games, or Internet business in general. Unlike traditional games publishers, we care about our customers.

(Even AAA games aren’t like that anymore. Keeping users interested means you can sell them more DLC, or just stop them from trading the game in at a retail store.)

We also care, for commercial reasons, about making sure that they keep coming back. I’ve already written about the changing nature of game design, moving from “one more go” to “come back tomorrow” (and more about that in the Monetisation post). In this post, I want to talk about Retention.

Why does Retention matter?

Retention matters because customer acquisition costs are going up. To compete, you need to either outspend customers on marketing, or get smarter at making the customers that you do get stay with you longer and become more profitable.

The great news for game designers is that Retention is at the core of what you do. Retention is about giving players good reasons to want to keep coming back to your game. And you want to do that anyway, right?

What follows are some examples of games that have used a variety of gameplay mechanics to encourage retention. Note that this is not an exhaustive list, and I’d like you to think of them as firelighters to ignite your design imagination, not as a template to follow.

Most of these examples come from social games, where the need to drive Daily Active Users is well understood. As I’ll discuss in a later post, the ARM yourself framework applies to many games and many situations, but is often most easy to explain in the context of Facebook games.

Daily rewards

The simplest mechanism is to give people an opportunity to get a daily bonus simply for turning up. Bejewelled Blitz does this by offering a one-armed bandit that you spin to win bonus coins. Since the fear of loss is a strong human motivator, the fear that “if I don’t come back, I might lose out on some free coins” brings players back every day.

Increasing daily rewards

I am not a fan of simply harnessing slot-machine psychology to win coins – I much prefer mechanisms that give users a sense that they have got something valuable and rare, not just in-game currency. Restaurant City from Playfish does just this, by rewarding players with an increasing number of ingredients if they come back regularly.

While this is part random (the exact ingredients), players can increase their rewards by returning regularly,

Maintenance

The heart of many social games is a maintenance mechanic. Think the crops in Farmville or the rents in Millionaire City.

By using a believable process (like harvesting crops or collecting rents) you build an expectation in your players that they have to plant crops, wait a while and then harvest them.

Games like Mafia Wars turn maintenance on its head: you have scarce energy which takes time to replenish (or you can pay to top it up). It’s the same broad principle of giving players a reason to believe that they have “finished” playing for a while, and should return later, once their crops have grown or their energy has been replenished.

Frontierville combines both. It has a crop-growing mechanic AND an energy mechanic. (Personally, I find the double whammy too much, and find Frontierville close to unplayable as a result. However, it is Zynga’s second most successful game with nearly 30 million according to Appdata, so the combination clearly works for some people.)

Commitment

Commitment is a much more powerful variant of maintenance. The key difference – and this is crucial – is that the player sets when they need to come back.

Let’s take, for example, a harvest mechanic in which all plants take 12 hours to grow. If I plant crops at four in the afternoon during a dull lull at work, I would have to set my alarm for 4am to get out of bed and harvest them. While some extremely committed players might do this, I wouldn’t. What’s more, I am likely to think “bloody stupid game trying to get me to get up in the middle of the night” which is the beginning of the end of my emotional commitment to your game.

Instead, games like Farmville and Millionaire City give the player the choice of when he or she needs to come back. Farmville offers the option of raspberries (which take two hours to grow) and artichokes (which take four days) – and almost everything inbetween. As a player, I can say “it’s a boring day in the office, I can come back in a couple of hours” or “I’m going away this weekend, I’ll plant some crops I can harvest on Monday”.

Not only does it give me flexibility, but because I made a mental and personal commitment to the game – because the timing of when I need to come back seems like it was my decision – the job “harvest crops” goes on my mental to-do list, increasing the likelihood that I actually return.(source:gamesbrief


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