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分析Facebook成为热门游戏平台的原因

发布时间:2011-06-30 17:39:04 Tags:,,,

作者:Nicholas Lovell

2009年9月份世界上最流行的游戏不是《魔兽世界》,也不是《吉他英雄5》和第一人称射击游戏,而是一款农场游戏。

《Farmville》的增长速度在游戏史上前所未见。这款游戏由社交游戏发行商Zynga于2009年6月19日发布,玩家数在两个月内便超过3300万。《Farmville》改变了外界对社交游戏的看法。或许它也标志着Facebook的使用方式正发生根本性改变,社交网络未来将成为游戏平台。

以下是为何Facebook游戏在整个行业中日益突出的6大原因:

facebook-games(from face-gamers.com)

facebook-games(from face-gamers.com)

1、Facebook拥有大量用户

《Farmville》的成功显然是因为Facebook当时已有逾3亿用户,而同一时期使用任天堂DS的用户数只有1亿,而PS3的用户数仅2500万,与Facebook相差甚大。游戏开发商都会努力将他们的作品投放到有大量用户的平台,单从数据上看,Facebook绝对是赢家。

但庞大的用户数并非唯一原因。使用iPhone和iPod Touch的用户至少有4000万,相同渗透比例下游戏的用户数应该是《Farmville》的10%-15%,也就是说游戏要卖出500万套左右。现在,能有如此高销售量的手机游戏并不多。

2、Facebook游戏免费

众所周知,iPhone游戏需要玩家付费购买(游戏邦注:除了那些简化版游戏)。然而,Facebook游戏是免费的。免费是股吸引新用户的强大力量。Facebook游戏模式允许用户长期免费体验游戏。这种做法最大的好处在于,不用花费大量营销资金来说服用户为游戏付费。

然而,免费游戏不一定都能获得用户。Facebook上有很多好游戏,杀出重围仍然极为艰难。Zynga是Facebook十大广告商之首,该公司至少已花费200万美元助《Farmville》获得成功。

3、Facebook游戏能够产生盈利

免费并不意味着毫无盈利。Facebook用户已逐渐习惯于游戏的免费增值模式,他们可以选择付费购买虚拟商品,这些东西可提供超能力、加速升级或表达自己的个性。Facebook游戏的具体数量目前还不知晓,但网站上许多免费增值游戏的ARPPU(游戏邦注:即“每付费用户平均收入”)都在20美元左右。有些用户每月在游戏中的花费达数百美元。

与订阅相比,微交易模式的优势是用户花在游戏中的金钱数没有上限。在种模式下,玩家并非在不付费或支付4.99英镑两项间做出选择,付费金额可以是任意数值。比如,有些用户在《黑暗轨迹》之类的网页游戏中,每月花费逾1000美元购买虚拟物品。这种模式的缺点在于,盈利的可预测性不如订阅。但是,如果你是个优秀的游戏设计师,应该可以利用微交易赚取比传统订阅更多的金钱。

Playfish和Zynga之类的公司都能盈利,而且几乎从游戏发布之初便开始盈利。

4、Facebook游戏具有可跟踪性

在伦敦召开的Games Gone Wild大会上,Playfish、Jolt Online、Mind Candy、CyberSports和eRepublik等社交和休闲游戏公司首席执行官异口同声称度量数据是此类游戏成功的秘诀。Playfish的Kristian Segerstrale表示,现在最难雇佣到的人便是能分析公司游戏每天产生的3-4亿数据点的分析师,分析数据将有助公司改善游戏可玩性、粘性以及最为关键的付费用户转化率。

Facebook游戏面临的困扰永无休止。开发商尝试不同颜色的按键或对文字做轻微改动,以期能够提高转化率或ARPPU。对拥有5000万用户的游戏而言,只需提升不到1%的转化率就可能带来意想不到的成果。

5、Facebook游戏实为“游戏原型”

事实上,Facebook游戏在发布时只完成20%。这种开发完成度对传统主机游戏来说只能算完成“原型”,而特别之处就在于Facebook游戏直接将这个原型对最终用户发布。

开发商可通过多种方式获得有价值的信息,他们可能公开测试自己的产品,可能在发布首日就能获得收入,可能会保留自己的IP。或许最为重要的是,他们可以很快得知游戏创意是否能够产生吸引力,判断应该在哪个项目中投入更多的金钱和资源使其快速发展,抛弃那些用户不喜欢的内容转向新项目。

“快速失败,经常失败”是网络初创公司的常见想法,但对许多游戏开发商来说这还是个新概念。Facebook让这种想法变成现实,而且对那些试图脱离发行商的开发商来说,这第一步也极为关键性。

6、Facebook游戏可脱离Facebook

Facebook Connect是Facebook最有趣的发展产物。Connect允许开发商在Facebook核心站点之外使用Facebook账户和用户社交图谱。现在,许多博客允许用户使用Facebook Connect注册和发表评论,我觉得许多游戏也会逐渐开始让用户用Facebook功能登录。这种做法拓宽了整个市场。开发商可以不必再将产品制成Facebook应用,布局和设计也不会受到限制。开发商既能够以更灵活的技术开发独立站点游戏,也可以利用全球最大社交网络的病毒性效果。

游戏邦注:本文发稿于2009年10月15日,所涉时间、事件和数据均以此为准。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Face facts: Why Facebook games can’t be ignored

Nicholas Lovell

The most popular game in the world in September was not World of Warcraft. It wasn’t Guitar Hero 5 or a first person shooter. It was a game based on farming.

Farmville has seen a level of growth unprecedented for any game. It was launched by social games publisher Zynga on 19th June and within two months had over 33 million players. By the time you read this, it will probably have passed the 50 million user mark. Farmville has changed the perception of social games. It may also mark a fundamental shift in usage of Facebook, as the social network emerges as the gaming platform of the future. And most recently, both Zynga and its rival Playfish have been the source of serious acquisition speculation – with one report even pegging the latter as part of a big $250m acquisition by ‘traditional’ games publisher Electronic Arts.

There are six reasons why gaming on Facebook is such an increasingly vital part of the games sector:

FACEBOOK IS WHERE THE USERS ARE

An obvious reason for Farmville’s success is simply that Facebook has a lot of users. Over 300 million. Some reports put the figure at 330 million. Compare that with an installed base of 100 million Nintendo DS units or 25 million PlayStation 3s. Any game developer should be trying to put their content where the users are, and on that measure, Facebook is a winner.

But that’s not enough of an answer. There are at least 40 million iPhones and iPod touches out there, but for a game to reach a penetration rate equivalent to Farmville’s 10-15%, it would need to sell around 5 million units. We don’t see very many of them.

FACEBOOK GAMES ARE FREE

Of course, iPhone games cost money. (Except for the extremely popular Lite versions of many games). On Facebook, games are free. Free is very powerful price point for attracting new users. The Facebook gaming model is to allow users to experience your game for a long time without paying a penny. The key benefit of this is that it reduces the need to spend substantial amounts of marketing money to overcome the hurdle of getting users to shell out cash for your project.

Being free doesn’t necessarily mean that you will get users, though. There are plenty of great games on Facebook, and it can still be tough to stand out from the crowd. Zynga is one of the top ten advertisers on Facebook, and shelled out at least $2 million to seed the initial success of Farmville.

FACEBOOK GAMES ARE PROFITABLE

Free does not mean unprofitable. Facebook users have become accustomed to the freemium model, whereby they have the option of paying for virtual goods, which might give them special powers, accelerate the levelling-up process or allow them to express their identity. Numbers for Facebook games are hard to come by but across the web, many freemium games are generating ARPPU (average revenue per paying user) of around $20. Some users are spending hundreds of dollars a month.

The key advantage of microtransactions over subscriptions is that there is no upper cap to how much money a user can spend on your game. It is not a binary choice between £0 and, say, £4.99. It is a sliding scale between zero and a very large number indeed. Bigpoint, for example, have several users who spend over $1,000 each month on virtual items in their web-based games such as Dark Orbit. The downside is that the revenue is not as predictable as subscriptions, but if you are a good game designer, you should be able to make substantially more money from microtransactions than from traditional subs.

Companies like Playfish and Zynga are both profitable and have been almost since inception. Although both companies have raised substantial venture capital (Playfish: $21 million; Zynga: $39 million).

FACEBOOK GAMES ARE TRACKABLE

At the recent Games Gone Wild event in London, CEOs of social and casual games companies like Playfish, Jolt Online, Mind Candy, CyberSports and eRepublik were unanimous: the secret of success in this sector is metrics. Kristian Segerstrale of Playfish said that the toughest people to find right now were the analysts who could sort through the 300-400 million datapoints that his company generates every day to determine how to improve gameplay, stickiness and, crucially, conversion to making virtual goods purchases.

A Facebook game is endlessly tweaked. Developers try different colour buttons or slightly different text to see if it has an effect on conversion rates or ARPPU. When you have 50 million users, an increase of a fraction of one percent in conversion rates can have a very substantial impact on the bottom line.

FACEBOOK GAMES ARE PROTOTYPES

Facebook games are only 20% complete at launch. That’s not much more development than that required to get a traditional console game to a “vertical slice” prototype. Only the difference here is that the vertical slice is not put in front of a greenlight committee of suits and producers; it’s released to the end consumer immediately.

The developer gains in many ways: they get to test the product in the wild; they can generate revenue from day one; they keep their own IP. Perhaps most crucially, they can see very quickly whether their game idea has traction, in which case they should throw more money and resources at it as fast as possible, or whether it is, in fact, a rubbish idea that punters don’t like and should be trashed so that the developer can move onto a new project.

The idea of “fail fast, fail often” is common to web startups but a new concept for many developers. Facebook makes this possible and is a crucial first step for developers trying to move away from a dependence on publishers.

FACEBOOK GAMES LEAVE FACEBOOK

The most interesting development at Facebook is Facebook Connect. Connect allows developers to use Facebook credentials and a user’s social graph outside the core Facebook website. Many blogs now allow you to register and comment using Facebook Connect, and I think many games will start allowing users to login using Facebook credentials. This blows the market wide open. Instead of having to create a Facebook app, with all the limitations of layout and design that entails, developers can get the best of both worlds: a game on a separate website with more flexible technology combined with the viral effects of the largest social network in the world.

Combine with Facebook’s ongoing efforts to make a simple, trusted billing system and I think that Facebook has the potential to become the gaming “platform” of the future. (Source: Develop)


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