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《Hard Lines》开发者谈转变不良公关形势的经历

发布时间:2011-07-09 16:05:34 Tags:,,

作者:Nicholas Lovell

正当我觉得事情可能会简单、清晰或容易理解之时,过去两周发生的事情让我大感困惑。

Hard Lines(from bit-tech.net)

Hard Lines(from bit-tech.net)

《Hard Lines》发布于6月9日。首周的表现很不稳定,直到苹果在“最新且值得注意应用”版块中推荐这款游戏。毫无疑问,销售量突飞猛进!这种感觉棒极了,从以下图表中就可以看到销售量大幅上升,从每天约100次增加至600次左右的下载量。

sales_since_launch(from gamebrief)

sales_since_launch(from gamebrief)

在游戏从“最新且值得注意应用”版块首页滑落到第2页之前那周末顺理成章的有所增长,但接下来那周便又开始滑落。我不知道第3周会出现何种情况,但第2周的销售量平均在650份左右。

iOS游戏网站评论

我们应该先说些有趣的事情,周二和周三在Eurogamer、Slide to Play和Touch Arcade(游戏邦注:这家网站并未给出游戏评分)获得高评价时的销售量是0。这真是令人难以置信,3家大型游戏评论网站的肯定,居然也换不来一份销量!这确实非常奇怪,难道人们都把购买时间留到周末?

游戏漏洞的危险性

问题就出在周四上。我们过快地发布了一个更新版本,没有认真检查,所有下载或更新游戏的用户会在看到公司logo之后跳转回到主界面。这个漏洞产生毁灭性的伤害,销售量迅速下滑。幸运的是,我们赶在周五结束之前修正漏洞并发布更新版本。然而,这种错误的行为毕竟还是影响到了销售量。

周四晚上,我们迎来了新一轮评论高潮和推荐,包括AppSpy(5/5)、Edge(8/10)和FHM.com(8/10),而且Kotaku(游戏邦注:访问用户8000左右)将游戏推荐为“每日游戏应用”。因而,我们看到销售量在当天上升得很快,达到835份。第二天,就掉落到350份左右,接下来的周末就处在这个范围内。

sales_last_week-copy(from gamesbrief)

sales_last_week-copy(from gamesbrief)

我不确定影响因素到底是那些漏洞还是因为游戏滑落到“最新且值得注意应用”版块第2页,影响游戏销售量的潜在因素很多。

客观地说,在游戏被推荐后的第2周应该会维持当前的销售量(游戏邦注:即每天160份左右),但我时常在想能否让游戏进驻前20名榜单,从而让此销售量能够维持更长时间。我们发布下个更新或下款游戏时会更注意这一点。

游戏的长期销售趋势

那么,我们下一步的期望是什么呢?如果游戏跌出“最新且值得注意应用”版块,我肯定周销售量会下滑至每天100份左右,然后每周末照常有所增加。我们给游戏设定的价格是1.79英镑,计划每周末或每次发布更新时开展打折活动。用能想到的任何方法来提高销售量。关键在于如何设定打折的价格。我们会尝试找出最好的战略计划,但目前我们拟定的打折价格在1.19英镑至1.79英镑之间。很显然在英国,定价高于0.99英镑对销售量的影响已经较小,但1.99英镑这个价格还是会产生影响。美国的情况与英国不同,如果我们将价格定在2.99美元,销售量可能会比0.99美元和1.99美元要低得多。总之,时间会证明我们的决策是否是正确。

那么,我们现在要如何应对可能跌出“最新且值得注意应用”版块的风险呢?当然要改变这种糟糕的情形。尽管我们在发布更新时修正了游戏记录上的漏洞、与粉丝商谈并用大量言语来提升玩家的兴趣度,我觉得我们还是失去了一个很好的机会。

使糟糕的公关转危为机

幸运的是,我已经制订了公司网站的开发计划,部分内容便是加深品牌与玩家的联系。我认为,实现这个目标的方法之一便是通过纸模。公司的logo已经非常有趣并与游戏有一定关联(游戏邦注:logo中包含游戏角色),因而假设人们愿意以某种方式与这个角色互动并不过分。纸模是几乎所有人都可以参与其中的东西,你所需要的只是一台打印机、剪刀和胶水即可。

对于因带有漏洞的更新版本给玩家带来的不便,我从中看到的机遇是给他们提供免费的礼品,而且任何想要的人都可以获得。我曾经收到过一位老奶奶的邮件,她表示自己的孙子确实很想玩《Hard Lines》,但他们最终下载到的却是带有漏洞的版本,不能玩这款游戏。我想向玩家提供纸模logo的想法便由此产生。

这是个改善公共关系的绝佳机会。我们开始在网站以及Twitter和Facebook上开展竞赛活动,只要你打印出游戏中的角色并将其制作出来,把完成纸模的照片发送给我们便有机会赢取《Hard Lines》免费促销码。比赛信息的访问量很高,而且也显示出我们正用免费的礼物来为之前的漏洞做出补偿的诚意。有家媒体认为这很有报道价值,因而迅速编写文稿发表相关报道。在还未向所有玩家发送邮件解释漏洞错误前,公司的名声甚为关键,你应该优先考虑这一点。

如果这个计划成功,我们所采取的行为能够得到主流游戏或科技站点的报道,那我会先买瓶啤酒庆祝一下。时间会证明一切的!

保持与公关媒体的联系

我们希望能够增加《Hard Lines》的曝光度,比赛活动是措施之一,但还有大量网站未曾对游戏评分,因而我们需要在游戏内容更新时向这些网站发送邮件申请报道该游戏。上周我们得到了Indiegames.com的推荐,Paranerds & Appsmile也对游戏发表评论,下周预定接受148Apps播客的采访。加上游戏发布前期得到许多国家媒体(游戏邦注:《Daily Record》的网站和游戏评论提及这款游戏,《The Observer》7月3日也对该游戏发表评论)的关注,很显然我们在公共关系方面并未止步不前。游戏运营需要长期坚持,稍歇片刻就有可能影响到销售量。

游戏前两周的表现确实非常有意思。就个人而言,漏洞确实让我蒙羞,也使我对销售量的展望有所动摇。现在这个错误行为对我们在榜单上排名提升的影响还不甚明了,但我们只能从中吸取教训,努力将其转变为机会并继续前进。现在,在平台上发布游戏并不是结束,而是个真正的开始,你应该尽量将游戏售出并让游戏为你的顾客提供大量的乐趣。现在,我就是利用《Hard Lines》每天得来的收入来做这件事情。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

SPILT MILK DIARY 8: HOW TO TURN AN IOS PR DISASTER INTO AN OPPORTUNITY

Nicholas Lovell

Just when I thought things would be simple, clear, or easy to understand, the last two weeks come along and completely dumbfound me.

Hard Lines came out on the 9th June. That first week was a rollercoaster, ending in Apple featuring us in the New & Noteworthy section. That’s right. SALES BOOST! It was great, and you can see by looking at the nice chart I’ve provided that sales jumped quite a bit. We’re talking a leap from ~100 per day to ~600 per day! Not half bad.

Of course that increased for the weekend, and then settled back down for the week after, before we moved off the front ‘page’ of the New & Noteworthy, and settled onto the second page. I’ve no idea if there’s a third week to look forward to on the list, but that second week on sale (the first in New & Noteworthy) we were selling ~650 per day. Until of course ‘The Thursday’.

iOS reviews. Do they matter?

But before then, we should cover something interesting – getting reviews on Eurogamer (8/10), Slide to Play (4/4) and Touch Arcade (they don’t do scores) on the Tuesday and Wednesday saw zero spike in sales. Zero, from 3 of the bigger games sites around – and all of them very positive! Interesting… but maybe people save up their purchasing decisions for the weekends?

The dangers of a badly bugged iPhone game

So, that Thursday. Derived from Thor’s Day, the God of Thunder – and thunder was what struck. We released a build too fast, not properly checking it, and anyone who downloaded or updated the game were simply faced with my company logo and then a crash straight to their home screen. Devastated it had slipped through, we swiftly updated and were fortunate enough to get the fix through and released before the end of Friday. Still… what damage had been incurred?

Thursday night saw us riding high on another series of high-profile reviews and features from AppSpy (5/5), Edge (8/10), FHM.com (8/10) and being featured as the ‘Gaming App of the Day’ for Kotaku (which got nearly 8,000 views). So we saw a nice jump in sales that day, to ~835. The next day we’d dropped like a stone to ~350, and that’s where we stayed for the weekend.

I can’t be sure what longer term effect the week of good reviews would’ve had because of the crash bug, and also because of dropping that same day to the second page of New & Noteworthy. There are simply too many large events that potentially have an effect on sales to properly gauge the damage the crash did, or how positive reviews from those big sites affect sales (if at all).

It’s probably fairly safe to say that we’d still be at the current sales level (~160 per day) on the second week of being featured anyway, but there is a part of me that will always wonder if the spike would’ve seen us rise into the top 20 and therefore get sustained a touch longer. Without a doubt that weekend should have been a high sales weekend, because we saw a spike to our best day of sales yet on the Thursday evening (~830 compared to the previous Sunday’s ~730). Ah well, we’ll be a lot more careful in the next update and for my next game.

What’s the long-term trend for Hard Lines sales

So what are we expecting next? If we drop off from New & Noteworthy then I’m pretty sure we’ll settle into a weekly groove of ~100 downloads a day, with boosts at the weekend as per usual. We’ve set a price of £1.79 for the weekdays, and then plan to do discounts every weekend, or every time we do an update. Any excuse for a sale (and a press release), really. The key for the weekly price-point is to balance ‘lost’ sales from a higher price-point with the money being made back by that self-same price. We’ll see after things settle what the best tactic is, but for now we’re of the opinion that there’s not much of a dip in sales between £1.19 and £1.79, so the higher price point makes more money for us. In the UK obviously the £0.99 mental barrier is broken, but not the £1.99 barrier. In the USA it’s different, as we’re sat at $2.99… potentially seeing a drop off compared to $0.99 as well as $1.99, if we follow the same logic. Again, time will tell if this is the right move for us.

So what are we up to now we’re potentially faced with losing our choice spot on New & Noteworthy? Turning a bad situation into something positive, of course! When we updated Hard Lines with the crash – even though we turned around a fix in record time and talked a lot with our fans to make the impact less of an inconvenience, not to mention adding 100 extra quips to spice up the game, and full Retina support too – I felt like we were missing an opportunity.

Turning a PR disaster into an opportunity

Luckily I’d been developing plans for the future of my company website, part of which was getting people more involved with my brand. One way to do this, I thought, was through papercraft. My company logo is already quite fun and relatable (being a character in and of itself) so it wasn’t a big jump to assume people would like to interact with him (or her) in some way. Papercraft is something almost anyone can get involved with; all you need is a printer, scissors and some glue so it made sense to plan for a time when I could offer this through my website.

The opportunity as I saw it was to make up for inconvenience we caused with the buggy update by sending out a free gift, and making it available to anyone who wanted it. For example, one email that really got to me was from a grandmother telling of how her grandson had really been looking forward to playing Hard Lines, and then when they’d finally downloaded it the crash meant they couldn’t play! So the unveiling of the papercraft logo was brought forward.

Then it hit me. This was the perfect opportunity to get some PR. From a failure, no less! So we’ve started a competition on the website and via Twitter and Facebook – if you print out the bad boy, make him, and then send us a picture of it in a funny, clever or cool image or location you’ll be in with a chance of winning a free code for Hard Lines. The competition, combined with the amazing high profile reviews – and remembering we’re also apologising for a bug with a free gift – felt like being newsworthy, so a press release was hastily written and sent out. But not before I had sent emails to all the people who’d been in touch regarding the crash bug in the first place – reputation is everything, and you’ve got to have your priorities straight.

Suffice to say that if this works and we get any coverage from the main gaming/tech websites, I’ll be the first to buy me a beer. Check back next time to find out!

Keeping up the PR pressure

So we’re hoping to keep the Hard Lines coverage incoming – the competition is one facet, but there’s a ton of websites that still haven’t posted reviews of Hard Lines, and plenty more to send press releases to when we do our inevitable-and-amazing content updates for the game. In the last week we’ve been featured on Indiegames.com, reviewed by Paranerds & Appsmile, and even recorded an interview for the 148Apps podcast for next week. Add to that the beginnings of some coverage in the national press (Daily Record’s website and games review, as well as an expected review in the The Observer on Sunday, out on the 3rd July) and it’s clear we’re not resting our laurels. This business is all about the long term and if you stop for a minute you’ll sink.

The past fortnight has been an interesting one to say the least. On a very personal note I was crushed (and humiliated) by the crash and it really did affect my outlook on the sales dip that we experienced on the weekend quite significantly. That said time and distance have made me realise we can’t tell (and never will be able to) quite what effect it had on our chances of rising up the charts, but as I keep saying regardless of what’s happened in the past we can only learn, try to turn it into an advantage, and move forwards. Releasing a game on almost any platform these days should be the beginning, not the end, of your efforts to get it selling and provide your customers with a ton of fun. Suffice to say that right now I’d be able to keep doing this based solely on the day’s income from Hard Lines. (Source: Games Brief)


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