作者：Paul Philleo

随着网游在朋友间共享的病毒式营销技术逐渐没落，另一个技术显得日渐重要，那就是游戏检索。此技术让游戏可以自行发现游戏，并充分享受这个过程。这便是游戏曝光率的指导思想，此类想法于LOGIN 2011这个充满游戏小组的世界中成功树立。Jennifer Bartlett和Lee Clancy两个从业者深入阐述该机制，让游戏检索在这个充满竞争性的网络社交游戏世界中发挥作用。

PAUL PHILLEO：Jennifer和Lee，你们好。很高兴你们能抽出时间接受我们的访谈。谈谈你们公司的情况，以及你们在游戏业中的概况。

JENNIFER BARTLETT：我是Sometrics旗下Game Coins的总监，这是个在线游戏检索和用户获取平台，将游戏发行商与数百万个使用虚拟货币的高参与性玩家联系起来。我负责功能和用户体验，通过有意思的游戏检索行为让发行商有机会获得付费玩家。

LEE CLANCY：IMVU是个在线社交娱乐站点，成员使用3D模拟与他人见面、交谈、制作和玩游戏。IMVU的注册用户超过5000万，每月独立访问者超过1000万，每年营收可能逾4000万。

IMVU有着世界上最大的虚拟商品市场，总商品数超过600万件，每天新增道具将近7000间，其中绝大多数出自IMVU成员之手。虚拟商品遍涉二维和三维领域，有虚拟珠宝、服侍、假发、汽车和其他有趣的道具，帮助IMVU成员创造独特的体验。

IMVU

只要我们在游戏业的努力仍受关注，我们就同其他游戏入口相同，IMVU成员可以在网页和3D聊天软件中同他们的朋友玩游戏。我们目前正在同OMGPOP和Viximo展开合作，为IMVU提供更多更有质量的休闲和社交游戏（游戏邦注：这些游戏包括《Ravenwood Fair》、《Backyard Monsters》和《Resort World》等。）。对IMVU成员来说，游戏是另一个娱乐和结交朋友的方式。对IMVU这个公司来说，游戏可以增加虚拟货币的出售量。我们的成员可以花费IMVU Credits购买虚拟商品和休闲及社交游戏中的道具，就像Facebook用户使用Facebook Credits购买Zynga或Crowdstar中的虚拟商品。

就你们的经验来说，什么可能是创造游戏曝光率的最佳方式？

JENNIFER：以我在Game Coins的工作经验来说，我们给玩家提供集中性、个性化、社群和娱乐，成功实现了游戏曝光率。游戏曝光率的目的在于通过竞争者间的交谈让游戏吸引当前或潜在玩家的注意力，不花费一分钱。这不是件容易的事情，尤其是当市场竞争变得如此激烈。让玩家找到适合自己的游戏，这才是关键。

确保目标用户发现你想让他们知道的游戏，你就需要让这个过程变得简单，还得让发现过程变得有趣。集中所有精力，创造一站式服务，为用户寻找他们感兴趣的游戏和内容。如果你个人没有足够的资源创造出此类产物，寻找能够做成的合作伙伴（游戏邦注：如Game Coins之类的公司。），对他们如何帮你获得新用户有更深的了解。此类站点应该涉及多个层面的内容，包括社群互动，玩家个人兴趣相关方面等等。

LEE：重要的是，要从游戏开发商和游戏发行商两个角度考虑这个问题。对希望让游戏被用户所发现的开发商而言，他们当然应该找到从逐渐增加的游戏中杀出重围的方法。对那些已经用某些游戏确立牢固用户基础的开发商来说，用老游戏来推销新游戏是个很简单的方法。比如，Zynga用《Farmville》的用户基础使得《Cityville》的用户急剧增长。但是，多数开发商并没有那种背景，因此需要采取其他战略。Playdom和LoLapps之类的开发商已经成功实现的措施是个很重要的方法，就是在Facebook外的其他社交平台（游戏邦注：如IMVU、Hi5和国外市场上许多小型本地社交平台。）推广游戏。

Farmville

对于发行商来说，游戏曝光率是个需要7天24小时关注的行为。游戏发行商和平台可以做很多工作使得他们的游戏尽快在玩家间风行。对IMVU上的新游戏来说，用户跟用户间的交流是个重要的资源，包括称为“Pulse”的Facebook式状态更新系统、特别游戏用户论坛、同趣用户群体、主要社交网络间的共享和用户间的异步和实时消息。作为游戏曝光率平台，我们还为开发商提供了大量驱动游戏曝光率的推广资源，如邮件简报、IMVU给用户的短消息、与站点同宽的推广条、网站和3D聊天软件导航对新游戏的推广和给每个IMVU用户提供实时消息和推广的“蓝条”。就像刚才提到的那样，其他平台也能给你提供有效的推广渠道、更多的用户和更好的盈利，或许比大型平台来得好。对发行商来说，游戏曝光率必须要有的是游戏“大厅”，可以向所有访问的用户营销新游戏和流行游戏，而且重要的是要让游戏大厅中的内容频繁更新。

你们认为游戏检索与病毒性机制属于何种关系？他们之间是互补还是存在竞争性？

JENNIFER：游戏检索和病毒式营销是互补关系，不幸的是，病毒式营销获取和维持的难度较大。病毒式传播的门槛非常高，竞争产品数量众多。就Facebook的严格性来说，其逐渐限制开发商与受众在社交网络中的交流空间。许多病毒式营销之所以没有成功，是因为没有足够的运气或金钱来获得成功。

从某种程度上来说，成功的游戏检索能够铸造病毒式营销。我们的Game Coins控制销售方式，确保我们发出的短消息能够让那些准备尝试新游戏的玩家看到。通过奖励行为和增加发现过程的有趣性来帮助人们发现新游戏，可以很自然帮助游戏增加其病毒式营销的可能性。如果将这些过程与Facebook共享、Twitter和各种其他游戏社群功能联系起来，效果特别明显。

LEE：对游戏检索来说，病毒式营销具有两面性。优秀的病毒式机制可以让新游戏迅速获得大量用户，但此类游戏可能因更新游戏的出现而使得用户数急剧减少。随着游戏拥有更多用户和盈利，开发商便有足够的资金投入市场来加速病毒式营销。Zynga的做法就是个明显的例证，此类顶级开发商可以通过跨游戏营销加速病毒式推广，掠夺游戏玩家花在其他小型开发商的作品上的时间。

对于那些不具有大型开发商和发行商资源却想要实施游戏曝光率的开发商而言，有何建议呢？

JENNIFER：对于那些无法与Zynga相比的开发商而言，跨游戏营销、社交媒介（游戏邦注：包括Twitter等。）、Game Coins和TeePee之类的平台和社群以及专注于你所钟爱的平台的类似服务（游戏邦注：如以Facebook为目标的Appstrip。）都是帮助带动游戏曝光率的优良选择，开发商应该适当使用这些选项。

Zynga

对拥有一款以上游戏或服务的开发商来说，跨游戏营销可能会很有效。以iTunes的App Store为例，那里每月有数千款新应用发布。最成功的开发商是那些可以让现有用户传播新游戏的人，即便只是通过下载来传播。找到使用这些营销手段的方法对在线游戏世界不无裨益，利用现有和新合作伙伴及相关的广告等等。

LEE：对开发商来说，让用户通过他们的游戏结交同趣玩家是个很好的选择。让玩家在游戏中结交新朋友可以使游戏受众增加，因为这可以使病毒式传播在社交网络外发生。也就是说，让用户邀请三个现实中的朋友玩游戏带来的病毒式营销效果可能比较差，如果用户在游戏中结交三个新朋友，其中每个人在个人社交圈子中共享游戏信息并如此循环，效果可能更好。比如，我们将“添加朋友”融入到IMVU某些游戏中，使这些游戏获得更高的曝光率。

我们还未在IMVU上实施的潜在选择很多，游戏开发商可以用这些工具来影响现有的病毒式渠道，增加用户基础。比如，当开发商在IMVU上创建了某种虚拟商品并通过我们庞大的虚拟商品系统出售给用户后，可以通过站点短消息追踪用户的个人反馈。这种开发商与用户接触的方法可以吸引用户，也能够增加其未来购买更多该开发商新道具的可能性。此类开发商与用户间的交流每天都在IMVU中上演，IMVU同样也能够受益，因为开发商在推销虚拟商品方面比IMVU员工做得更好。即便在今天，有胆识的游戏开发商也可能利用IMVU中这些免费的推广渠道来为游戏检索提供支持。

衡量游戏检索成功与否并使其盈利的最佳方法是什么？

JENNIFER：我们认为不应该只看重下载量和注册用户数，应更多地考虑用户参与度。在与合作伙伴的工作中，我们主要关注渠道的DAU和LTV等传统数据。比如，用户如何发现游戏，用户发现某种题材或某款游戏的频率如何，某种发现机制的费用如何，用户通过某种特别发现机制找到游戏后玩的深入程度和时间长短，用户在某段时间内花费几何等等。这帮助我们让游戏发行商决定何种做法最适合它们的游戏和目标用户，不仅可以让他们优化发现行为来改善获取用户数，还能获得真正的付费玩家并从中盈利，而不是只获得免费玩家。

LEE：从游戏发行商的角度来看，你需要认识到游戏曝光率对整个游戏经济的影响力。尽管你应该确保用户能够发现可能满足他们诉求的新游戏，但平台所有者考虑游戏检索和总体费用的关系同样非常重要。以IMVU为例，我们近期挑出许多表现不佳的游戏，为的是给用户提供更成功的游戏，这增加了Credits的整体使用量，因为更多用户在设计精巧的游戏中获得更好的体验。

LOGIN 2011

你们希望在今年的LOGIN 2011上讨论何种话题？原因是什么？

JENNIFER：我对A/B测试、游戏设计和度量分析特别感兴趣，因为我乐衷于更深入地理解用户的行为，只是为了继续为玩家做出更好的产品和社区。我也希望能够接触其他小组共同讨论社交和手机游戏，很显然这是行业的发展方向，我们都对此类游戏的各种运营方式以及某些传统玩家在这个新兴市场的表现感兴趣，尤其是游戏检索方面的内容。

LEE：供我选择的东西很多，但是有些内容特别适合IMVU的运营，包括：游戏服务呈现出的趋势（ThinkEquity的Atul Bagga）；2011年Kontagent主要社交度量和基准（Kontagent的Aaron Huang）；浏览器与基于用户的免费MMO游戏的比较（Interpret的Michael Cai）；Entropia全球现金经济（Mindark的John Bates）。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Game Discovery — Being Found in a World Filled With Games

By Paul Philleo

As viral techniques for having online games shared between friends become fewer, one of the techniques that have become becomes more important over time is that of game discovery, which allows games to find the games themselves — and enjoy the process in doing so. This is the central topic for the Game Discovery — Being Found in a World Filled With Games panel at LOGIN 2011. Two of the panelists, Jennifer Bartlett with Sometrics and Lee Clancy with IMVU, offer an in-depth view into the mechanisms that make game discovery work in the competitive world of online social games.

PAUL PHILLEO: Hi Jennifer and Lee, we appreciate the time you’re giving us for this interview. Tell us a little about your companies and the work with the game industry you do through them.

JENNIFER BARTLETT: I’m the director of Sometrics’ Game Coins, an online games discovery and user acquisition platform that connects game publishers with millions of highly engaged players using virtual currency. I’m responsible for the features and user experience of the destination, which provides publishers an opportunity to acquire paying gamers through fun game discovery activities and a universal Game.

LEE CLANCY: IMVU is an online social entertainment destination where members use 3-D avatars to meet new people, chat, create, and play games with their friends. IMVU has more than 50 million registered users, more than 10 million unique visitors per month, and a $40-plus million annualized revenue run rate.

IMVU has the world’s largest virtual goods catalog of more than six million items with approximately 7,000 new items added every day — almost all of which are created by IMVU’s own members. The virtual goods catalog consists of everything from 2-D stickers to detailed 3-D items like virtual jewelry, clothing, hair, cars, and other fun items that help IMVU community members create an IMVU identity as unique as their own.

As far as our work with the games industry is concerned, we are similar to other leading game portals in that IMVU members can play games with their IMVU friends on both our website and in our 3-D Chat software. We currently have an ongoing partnership with OMGPOP and Viximo to offer a wide range of quality casual and social games to the IMVU community (e.g., Ravenwood Fair, Backyard Monsters, Resort World, Big Business, etc.). For IMVU members, games are another way to have fun and meet new people. For IMVU as a company, games are (with our virtual goods catalog) another driver of demand for our virtual currency (“Credits”) and a significant “sink” of that currency in our virtual economy. Our members can spend IMVU Credits to purchase virtual goods and power-ups in these casual and social games, not unlike how Facebook users can use Facebook Credits to purchase virtual goods in Zynga or Crowdstar games on Facebook.

Through the filter of your background and respective experiences, what do you feel some of the best means of creating game discovery might be?

JENNIFER: In my work with Game Coins, we’ve seen success in game discovery by providing players with centrality, personalization, community, and fun. The goal in game discovery is to find a way to rise above and beyond the constant chatter from competitors to catch (and keep) the attention of current and potential players without spending a fortune. This isn’t easy, especially as the market becomes ever more competitive. Being able to match players with the right games, based on behavior and demographics, is key.

To make sure target users discover the games you want them to, you have to make it easy and fun for them to do so: Provide a single location to centralize the experience and create a one-stop-shop for finding games and game material that they’ll enjoy. If you personally don’t have the resources to create such a destination, look to other partners who do (such as Game Coins), and find out more about how they can help you to engage and acquire new users from its established audience. Such destinations should include content that is engaging on multiple levels — whether that involves interacting with a community, aspects related to players’ personal interests, a recommendations engine that responds to a visitor’s preferences, or just plain old fun.

LEE: It’s important to consider this question from both the game developer and game publisher/portal perspective. For developers looking to get their games discovered by users, they clearly have to find ways to stand out amid an increasingly crowded shelf of games. For those lucky enough to have established large userbases for some of their games, cross-promoting your newer games to users of your past games is a no-brainer. For example, Zynga powered Cityville’s massive ramp by driving trial of Cityville among its huge legacy Farmville base. Most developers don’t have that luxury, however, so other strategies come into play. One important approach that developers such as Playdom and Lolapps have pursued successfully is distribution on alternative social game platforms beyond Facebook (like IMVU, Hi5, and a host of smaller indigenous social networks in foreign markets). That is, being a bigger fish in a smaller or less-crowded pond can be a lucrative strategy for getting your game discovered.

From the publisher or portal perspective, fostering game discovery is a 24/7 activity. It goes without saying that most consumers hear about new games via good old word-of-mouth, but game publishers and platforms can do plenty to make that word of mouth travel as quickly as possible for their games. On IMVU, important sources of user-to-user lighter fluid for new games include a Facebook-style status update system called Pulse, game-specific user forums, interest-based groups, sharing options for major social networks, and both asynchronous and real-time messaging among users. As a platform, we also offer developers a vast set of promotional resources for driving game discovery such as email newsletters, IMVU-to-user messaging, sitewide promotional banners, highlighting of “new” games in the navigation bar of both our website and 3-D Chat software, and high-click-through “blue bars” that blast timely news and promotion to every IMVU user with every page view. And as mentioned above, alternative platforms can give your game affordable promotional channels, more engaged users, and better monetization than larger platforms. A final must-have game discovery feature for portals and publishers is a games “lobby” or destination that merchandises new and popular games in one place to all visiting users, and it is important to keep content in the games lobby fresh and updated frequently.

What role do you feel game discovery has in conjunction with the mechanisms of virality? Are they complementary or competitive influences?

JENNIFER: Game discovery and virality are complementary; unfortunately, virality is hard to obtain and sustain. The threshold for success in “going viral” has become tremendously high, with a huge number of competitive products fighting for attention and, speaking strictly about Facebook, increased restrictions on how developers may communicate with an open audience within the social community. Many viral campaigns barely leave the ground because they don’t get the incredible luck — or money — required for success.

In some ways, successful game discovery is manufactured virality. Our Game Coins controls the method of distribution, making it easier to ensure that a message we send out reaches interested ears of players who are ready to try a new game. Helping people discover new games by rewarding them for their actions and driving excitement about the discovery process helps to naturally increase virality as a result, especially if such processes also tie in some social hooks such as Facebook sharing, Twitter, and various other game-centric community features.

LEE: Virality is a double-edged sword for game discovery. Good viral mechanisms can get new games lots of users quickly (even in an era of more stringent communication policies on Facebook), but games that get viral quickly and grow can crowd out viral activity around newer games. As entrenched games garner more users and monetization, their developers typically can afford to spend marketing dollars to accelerate virality. Similarly, the Zynga bar is an obvious example of how a leading developer can help virality along via cross-promotion and try to steal a bigger share of gameplayers’ time spent to the detriment of smaller developers.

Can you identify a couple of options available to developers who want to encourage discovery of their own games but lack the resources available to major developers and publishers?

JENNIFER: For anyone who can’t develop their own RewardVille — cross-promotion, social media (Twitter, fan page, etc.), platforms/communities like Game Coins and TeePee, and similar services that specialize on your preferred platform (such as Appstrip for Facebook) are all great ways to help drive discovery of games, and developers should use a healthy mix of all their options.

For developers with more than one game or service, cross-promotion can be very effective. Consider the iTunes App Store, in which thousands of new apps are released every month. The most successful developers are those who are able to build and leverage existing users to spread the word about a new game — even if only through downloads. Finding ways to adapt these methods can be very beneficial in the online games world as well — look to use new and existing partnerships, relevant ad-buys, etc.

LEE: One basic yet powerful option for developers is to allow users to meet new people via their games by connecting like-minded players. Adding ways for players to make new friends within the game can extend the game’s audience because the viral spread occurs across otherwise disconnected social graphs. That is, if a user plays a game and invites three of his real-world friends to play, then the viral coefficient on sharing game activities is probably lower than the case in which a user makes three new friends playing the game, each of whom shares game activities to their individual social graphs and becomes a vehicle for game discovery. For example, in some of our partners’ games on IMVU, we’ve integrated the ability for an IMVU user to “add a friend” to their IMVU friend graph from within the game, which helps drive overall connections on IMVU and expose the game to more users.

One potential option that we haven’t yet fostered on IMVU is more tools for game developers to leverage the existing viral channels on IMVU to grow their userbases. For example, when a content “creator” on IMVU creates a virtual good and then sells that item to users via our immense virtual goods catalog, the creator typically follows up with that user personally via on-site messaging. This high-touch activity not only engages that user, but also increases the likelihood that the user will purchase new items from that creator in the future. Such outreach between creators and users happens naturally on IMVU every day, and IMVU benefits as a company because creators often do a better job of merchandising the virtual goods in our catalog than IMVU employees could ever do. Even today, enterprising game developers could probably harness these free promotional channels within IMVU’s thriving economy to support game discovery. For example, they could incentivize creators to become mini-affiliates by mentioning their games to users or promoting them on creator homepages or product pages.

What are the best ways to measure the success of game discovery mechanisms — and monetizing them?

JENNIFER: We believe in going beyond installs and registration metrics and like to think more in terms of user engagement. In working with partners, we’ll typically look at traditional statistics such as DAUs and LTV from a particular channel. For instance, how a user discovers a game, how often a user performs a discovery activity associated with a specific genre or title, what kind of spending a particular discovery mechanism yields, how deep and long does a user play as a result of a specific discovery mechanism, how much do they end up spending over a period of time after following a discovery pattern, etc. This helps us help game publishers determine what works best for their games and target audience, and enables them to not only optimize discovery campaigns for improved acquisition tactics, but also to gain and monetize actual paying gamers, as opposed to just acquiring free gamers.

LEE: From a game publisher or platform perspective, you need to be cognizant of the overall impact of game discovery on your overall “economy.” While it’s obvious that you should make sure that users can find new games that may appeal to them, it’s also important for platform owners to consider the impact of game discovery on overall time/money spent. For example, in IMVU’s case, we recently culled various lower performing games from our service in order to channel users into more successful games, which increased the overall volume of credits spent because more users were having a better experience with the higher-performing games than with those that performed poorly.

To wrap up, what other talks do you hope to catch at LOGIN 2011 this year, and why?

JENNIFER: A/B Testing and Game Design and Making Metrics Work for You in particular, as I’m interested in understanding user behavior more in order to continuously make a better product and community for gamers. I’m also hoping to catch one of the panels discussing social and mobile gaming — that’s obviously a direction the industry is moving in, and we’re always interested in hearing about the various business approaches to this exploding category of games and how some of the traditional players are trying to get a handle on this evolving marketplace, particularly in terms of game discovery.

LEE: There’s lots of good stuff to choose from (including IMVU’s own Brett Durrett speaking on real-time learning using A/B testing and continuous deployment), but here are a few picks that are a strong fit with IMVU’s business and processes: Emerging Trends in Games as a Service — Atul Bagga from ThinkEquity; Kontagent’s Top Social Metrics & Benchmarks for 2011 — Aaron Huang from Kontagent; Browser vs. client-based free-to-play MMOs panel (with Michael Cai of Interpret); Entropia Universe Real Cash Economy — John Bates, Mindark. (Source: Login News)