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解析游戏设计如何影响虚拟商品交易

发布时间:2011-05-28 10:36:48 Tags:,,

游戏邦注:本文作者为Donghee Yvette,她是密歇根州立大学的博士生导师。她根据对自身社交游戏所做研究撰写了这篇文章。Wohn同时还是Play as Life的编辑,Play as Life博客主要研究游戏所产生的文化影响。

2年前,我参加了某个以虚拟世界为主题的会议,大家当时主要讨论微交易能否成为可行商业模式。很多人对把亚洲成功的虚拟交易模式移至北美持怀疑态度。如今很少有人讨论微交易是否可行,而是更多讨论是什么因素促使其获得成功。

行业数据表明,社交游戏用户的确有在游戏中掏钱。但是数据也显示,掏钱用户的比例极小。从研究角度看,我们很难发现这些消费者的特性,因为我们很难获得足够的样本数量进行相关分析研究。

为了获悉更加广泛的用户群,我和义塾大学的同事共同探讨了《Puppy Red》(游戏邦注:这是款南非社交游戏),目的是收集无法确定的测试数据。这款游戏主要瞄准儿童和吞世代(游戏邦注:这个词由teens和ween组成,形容穿着时髦,迷恋音乐的小孩)族群,和《Club Penguin》大同小异。

我们收集了那些从2009年11月-2010年1月这3个月期间至少访问网站1次用户的相关数据。在对缺失数据和数据异常用户进行筛选之后,资料的获取对象集中在22.4827万名用户。在这一群体中,6.4076万名用户(不到总活跃用户的28.5%)至少在游戏中消费一次,而只有1.775万名用户(不到活跃用户的8%)在上述3个月期间为游戏掏钱。

下图显示付费用户的人数规模及他们的消费总额。我们从中可以发现在1.8万名用户中,仅2000名用户就占据近一半(游戏邦注:46%)网站总消费额。

Graph from insidesocialgames.com

Graph from insidesocialgames.com

促进消费的因素

我们随后研究了那些促进消费的因素,从中发现了几大积极因素:体验时间、会员资历和总道具数量。但是,我们发现获得越多免费道具的用户消费的资金就越少。这个观点很有趣,因为很多营销研究表明免费道具能够促进用户购买更多道具。但我们的研究表明过多免费道具会降低消费可能性。

Factors from insidesocialgames.com

Factors from insidesocialgames.com

馈赠带给消费的影响

我们发现的更有趣结论是关于“社交”元素。例如,接受和赠送虚拟礼物同消费行为之间存在积极联系。虽然好友数量无法判定购买虚拟道具玩家消耗的资金是否比其他玩家高,但游戏消费者的好友数量确实比非消费者要多得多。这表明虽然更多好友不会带来更高消费金额,但没有好友的玩家完全不会为游戏掏钱。

研究意义

对于那些想靠微交易赚钱的开发者来说,研究提供以下启示:

1. 提供众多虚拟商品,这样玩家才能定制自己的游戏空间和角色。

2. 限制免费商品数量。

3. 鼓励玩家之间的各种交流行为。我们所做的第2个调查表明社交玩家的消费金额更高。

4. 鼓励交朋友。朋友可以增加体验时间,推动社交互动,同时创造促进消费的竞争元素。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

How Design Choices Impact Virtual Goods Purchases in Games

[Donghee Yvette Wohn is a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University; her post, below, is based on research she is doing in social games. Wohn is also editor of Play as Life, a blog examining the cultural impacts of gaming.]

Only two years ago, I was attending a conference on virtual worlds and people were discussing whether or not microtransactions would be a viable business model. Many people were skeptical about whether the success of microtransactions in Asia would translate to North American users. Now, there seems to be less talk about whether or not microtransactions work, and more talk about what makes them work.

Industry stats show that yes, people are spending real money on social games. That said, however, the percentage of players who actually spend money is extremely small. From a research standpoint, it has been difficult to find out the characteristics of these spenders because of the difficulty in getting enough people to provide a sample size large enough to derive results that we could generalize.

To look at a larger population, my colleague at Keio University and I collaborated with Puppy Red, a social gaming service in South Korea, to collect de-identified log data. The game that we looked at was for children and tweens, similar to services like Club Penguin.

We collected the data of users who had accessed the site at least once during three months from November 2009 to January 2010. After conducting filtering process on missing data and outliers, the dataset showed 224,827 users. Among this population, 64,076 users (less than 28.5% of total active users) had spent real money at least once and only 17,750 (less than 8% of active users) had spent real money during the most recent three months.

The below graph shows the number of paying users and their cumulative spending. You can see that 2,000 of 18,000 users accounted for nearly half, 46 percent, of the total money people spent on the site.

Factors that contribute to spending real money

We looked at factors that contribute to spending real money, and found several positive predictors: time spent playing the game, length of membership, and overall number of items. However, players who had received more free items spent less real money. This point was interesting, because a lot of marketing research shows that free items are good for getting consumers to purchase more items. Our research suggests that too many free items can decrease the likelihood of spending.

Impact of Gifting on Spending

Perhaps our more interesting findings were those on “social” factors. For instance, giving virtual gifts and receiving virtual gifts were positively associated with the spending of real money. The number of friends did not determine whether one player who purchased virtual goods spent more money than another, but spenders did have significantly more friends than non-spenders. This implies that while more friends don’t lead to higher spending, players without a lot of friends may not spend any real money at all.

Implications

For those who want to cash in on microtransactions, our research suggests the following:

1. Provide a lot of virtual goods so that players can customize their game space and avatar.

2. Limit your amount of free virtual goods.

3. Encourage multiple types of exchange behavior between players; this is the second study we’ve done that implies that social players spend more

4. Incentivize having friends. Friends can increase playing time, encourage social interaction, and create competitive elements that contribute to spending. (Source:Inside Social Games


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