作者：Benjamin Sun

Gamasutra网站最近有一篇博文指出，“像《Farmville》和《Mafia Wars》这类型的社交游戏其实一点都不具有社交性。真正理解什么是‘社交游戏’很重要，因为大部分社交游戏其实并不能体现出社交性。这些游戏通常都是以单人或多人模式出现在Facebook等社交网站上，以简单易上手的游戏玩法吸引广大游戏玩家。所以这个所谓的‘社交游戏’更像是一个‘病毒式游戏’。”

facebook-games(from face-gamers.com)

当深入研究这些成功游戏的背后时，你将会恍然大悟到为何Facebook能够获得如此可贵的机遇。Facebook为这些游戏提供了一个传播平台，可以说为它们的成功创造了一个捷径。以下我们将对此进行详细分析：

如果用户终身价值大于用户获取成本，那么就可以说这款游戏相当出色。

这是衡量任何一款社交游戏能不能赚钱的基本准则。当我们意识到为什么在Facebook平台上的游戏能够带来越来越多的经济价值时，这种衡量标准就变得有趣多了。我们一步一步来阐述。首先，我们来谈谈用户终身价值（游戏邦注：LTV，指企业在获得新用户后的一段时间内，每一位用户的平均利润净现值）。用户终身价值包含两个关键问题。第一个是用户的留存率问题。游戏开发商为了赚取利润，就应该想尽办法挽留用户，并吸引用户频繁访问他们的游戏。Facebook上一款成功的社交游戏每天能够吸引回15%的月活跃用户，而超级成功的游戏的用户留存率更是高达30%。本身Facebook这个社交网络就是一个高用户留存率的平台。据统计，Facebook平均每个月有270亿分钟的用户访问时间，450亿次浏览量，这也是Facebook迅速成为热门社交平台的重要原因。社交游戏开发者可以与Facebook合作，在这个平台的核心用户界面上绑定Facebook交流功能，例如新消息订阅源，通知或推送信息等功能以提高用户的留存率，这种方法能够帮助他们的游戏在激烈竞争中存活下来。当然了，他们的游戏还必须足够吸引玩家。绑定Facebook用户交流系统与制造一款好游戏同等重要。

实现用户终身价值需要开发者制定出相关策略，从游戏玩家身上获取利润。一款好的社交游戏每个月能够把1%至2%的月活跃用户转变成付费用户，并从每个付费用户身上赚取20美元的收益。这听起来并不是一个较高的转化率，而事实上它确实如果。然而以Facebook平台如此之高的用户覆盖率来看，这种转化率可以迅速累积成可观的数目。如果Facebook支付平台的服务能够向苹果iPhone的支付系统看齐，那就有可能极大提高付费转化率。

按照我自己的估算，一款相当成功的社交游戏的用户终身价值大约是0.4至0.5美元。但是对于一个单独的网站来说，这种情况不太可能出现，因为它的用户获取成本常常高于用户终身价值。但是Facebook却推翻了这一论断，Facebook平台上的游戏用户终身价值明显高于其用户获取成本。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Social Games are Not Social. They should be called Viral Games. Part I

By Benjamin Sun

I recently read a great blog post at Gamasutra that examined how social games like Farmville and Mafia Wars are not really social at all:

“It’s also important to understand something about ‘social games’: Most of them are not social. They tend to be single or multi-player games that use social networks (mostly Facebook) as an easy way to drive player adoption. What the industry is calling ‘social games’ are more accurately described as ‘viral games’. “

When you dig into the success of these games, you realize why Facebook has been such an incredible opportunity.  Facebook offers incredible distribution for these games, making the formula for success much more viable.  Let’s take a closer look:

If Life Time Value of a User > Cost per Acquisition then the game  will be financially successful.

This is the basic formula for the financial success of any social game.  The interesting part about it is when you realize why distribution on Facebook has made the economics so much more favorable.  Let’s break down the components.  The first is Life Time Value of a User (LTV).  This is driven by 2 key factors.  The first is retention of the users.  In order to make money, you need to get that user coming back and coming back often.  A successful social game on Facebook is able to get over 15% of their Monthly Active Users coming back each day.  An extremely successful game gets that stat above 30%.  Facebook is so successful at driving high retention because it already gets their users coming back.  With over 27 billion minutes spent and nearly 45 billion page views per month, Facebook has quickly become for most people, their home on the Web.  You add the fact that as a social game application developer you can integrate your game into the Facebook core UI with communication points such as News Feeds, notifications and wall posts, you have this incredible opportunity to increase your retention rates by folds versus what they would be as a standalone web site.  Of course, you need a game that is also compelling to play.  However as important as good game play, your social game needs to be well integrated into Facebook’s communication system.

Lifetime value of a user also depends on your ability to monetize game players.  A good social game will convert about 1 to 2% of its Monthly Active Users to paid users who spend on average about $20 per month.  It doesn’t sounds like a high conversion rate and it isn’t.  However with such large scale from the massive distribution on Facebook, it can add up pretty quickly.  I think one way that this may improve is when Facebook rolls out its own payment platform to streamline purchases as how Apple has done with apps on the Iphone.

I have estimated that the LTV of a fairly successful social game is somewhere around $.40 to $.50.  That type of LTV is actually pretty hard to make work if you were a standalone web site because of the Cost per Acquisition of that user is usually significantly higher than the LTV.  However in the case of Facebook distribution, the LTV is actually much higher than the incredibly low CPAs that can be found on Facebook.  To be discussed in the next post.（source: bensun）