作者：Wojtek Kawczynski

如果你已经决定要制作iOS游戏，那么在你开始工作之前，你应当知道哪些内容呢？

我们在2011年发布了两款iOS游戏：《Garage Inc.》（1月份）和《KULA BLOX 》（9月份）。近期，我们花了大量时间思考这些经历，从中寻找可借鉴之处，这样下次就会做得更好。以下便是我们总结出的经验。

首先，你需要的是认知度，这包括人们对你游戏或对工作室的认知度。需要让人们知道你的存在，知道你游戏的存在，从而关注你游戏的存在情况。这似乎是理所应当的事情。然而，虽然许多人都知道这一点，但真正将其贯彻到游戏设计、盈利和营销决策中的人确很少。我将在以下几段内容中对此进行具体的解释。

让我们先从游戏设计开始。除非你是个知名开发者，或有大量可用在营销上的资金，或拥有可确保获得某种层次认识度的流行品牌，否则你最可能实现的是通过口舌宣传来让你的游戏变得流行。

考虑下，你自己的iOS设备上的多数游戏是怎么来的。如果你自己没有iOS设备，或许你需要再重新考虑下是否应该进驻这个市场。如果你和我们一样，那么多数购买决定是因为在好友的设备上试玩过游戏而做出的。好友会说：“我喜欢这款游戏，你试试看吧。”你说：“好的。”于是，尝试了这款游戏。经过一段时间后，或许是10秒、15秒或更长的时间，你决定购买游戏。

你的潜在用户也会有同样的做法。所以，这对设计提出的要求是：对于那些刚刚接触游戏的人，这些人可能未曾看过你的教程和屏幕截图也未曾阅读过你的营销材料，确保这些人能够在接触游戏的前10秒或15秒内喜欢上游戏。如果他们不喜欢，那么他们就不会购买你的游戏。你的销售量就会受到影响。

你要如何让游戏迅速俘获玩家呢？对于这个方面，我们也正处在探索中，所以这里无法提供通用的解决方案。当你在设计和测试游戏时，需要考虑到这个方面。

顺便说下，你要知道，即便是主流iOS站点上的积极评论也不会给你带来过多的认识度和下载量。尽管受苹果推荐在多数情况下比获得专业评论要更有价值，但也不能确保游戏获得成功。而且，你不应当将苹果推荐作为营销战略的最高目标。我们很幸运，两款游戏都受应用商店推荐为值得注意的新应用，但很可能你完全没有听说过它们。这并不是说你不该让游戏获得评论或不应努力让游戏获得iTunes App Store推荐，这是你应当争取的目标。我想说的是，实现这些目标对营销来说还远远不够。

假设你现在正在制作游戏，你已经将其设计成可以短时间内吸引用户。这确实是个良好的开始。那么，这样就足够了吗？当然不是。即便你确认自己已经实现上述目标，你也不应当止步于此。

你的下个步骤是，考虑尽可能多的认识提升服务和盈利服务，看看哪些服务适合你并能够对你的游戏起到帮助。在这里，我不对任何服务做推荐，我会客观地总结目前存在的服务和它们的运转方式。

免费游戏的盈利

目前有许多服务和方法，可以让你将应用设置为下载免费。如果你想要知道如何通过免费游戏获得盈利，我将在下文中对此进行解释。

最显而易见的方式是添加应用内置付费功能（游戏邦注：下文简称“IAP”）。虽然用户无需为应用本身付费，但你可以向他们出售升级和附加产品。

如果你不在游戏中设置IAP，那么免费提供游戏的优势便不那么明显。在这种情况下，设置应用免费的目标是构建认识度，这样当你开始为应用收费时才会有更多人购买你的游戏。那些免费下载游戏的人可能在与好友的交谈中提及你的游戏，这些人成为了游戏的传播者。当你再次开始向用户收费时，此前玩家间的口舌宣传便会带来额外的销售量。额外的销售数量取决于当游戏免费时下载游戏的人数以及他们向好友推荐的意愿度。在后者中，上述10到15秒的游戏玩法需求就有着举足轻重的作用。

提升认知度

heyzap(from intomobile.com)

Hey Zap：使用这个服务，你可以在不耗费大量资金的前提下让游戏获得很高的曝光度。它类似于Foursquare，只是你签到的是游戏而不是地点。关注你的人可以看到你正在玩哪个游戏。签到达到特定次数时，你就能获得一枚徽章。目前有个SDK，让你可以将Hey Zap按钮整合到游戏中，这样人们就可以在你的游戏中签到。Hey Zap的网站显示，目前该服务的用户签到总次数已超过1000万。

Game Center：苹果的游戏社交网络在iOS 5中有了显著的升级，增加了3个重要的功能：好友推荐、游戏推荐和从Game Center应用中购买游戏。在iOS 5发布前，Game Center的绝妙之处在于其排行榜和成就。但是，新的更新显著提升了好友所玩游戏的曝光度，相比以往来说成了更加强大的认知度构建服务。

OpenFeint：这项服务与苹果的Game Center相似，只是范围更大而已。OpenFeint存在的时间更长，但是该服务不支持iPad，只支持iPhone和iPod touch。它包含成就、排行榜和好友。它也有个iOS应用，称为《Game Channel》。该应用的主要功能是“每日推荐免费游戏”。

将OpenFeint整合到游戏中是免费的，你能够获得的好处同Game Center相似：你的好友可以在排行榜上看到你的分数以及你所获得的成就等。但是，与Game Center不同的是，OpenFeint允许你付费让用户看到你的游戏。“每日免费游戏”服务便由此产生。

通过支付费用（游戏邦注：可以是固定费用也可以是盈利抽成），你的游戏可以被推荐到OpenFeint旗下《Game Channel》的“每日免费游戏”上。由此带来的认知度可能会转变成销售量。如果你的游戏并非免费的，不要担心，你仍然可以开展“每日免费游戏”促销，只要你将游戏中的某些东西设置为免费即可，这样对你的新用户来说仍然是个不错的交易。

OpenFeint还有3种其他的服务。Fire Sale是个团购打折项目，OpenFeint玩家社区可投票表决他们希望看到打折的应用和打折比例。第2个是GameFeed，这是个相对较新的游戏内置社交行为新闻播报服务，你可能还未在游戏中见过。它就像证券报价机，在菜单屏幕底部滚动，向你展示好友正在玩的游戏和他们的表现。第3个是OFX，这是OpenFeint开设的应用商店，让你在无需向苹果提交二进制码的前提下修改你的游戏内置商店的产品售价。

Free App A Day：这是个类似于OpenFeint的“每日免费游戏”的服务，但是不含有社交网络功能。严格地说，它是个付费服务，有应用、网站和大量可以看到受推荐游戏的用户。

盈利

TapJoy兼具提升认知度和盈利性的特点。该公司的主要服务是Offerwall，这种方法让开发商可以付费让用户下载他们的游戏。玩家可以使用玩游戏所获得的虚拟货币来下载新游戏。新游戏开发商为此等下载买单，TapJoy将部分盈利分给下载来源游戏的开发商。2011年早期，苹果开始限制包含这种类型服务的应用。

TapJoy还有其他的服务，包括传统的游戏内置条幅广告、视频推广和全页面插播广告。它们的运作方式都很相似，你付费让自己的内容呈现在其他的游戏中（提升游戏认知度）或者当用户在你的游戏中点击广告或观看视频时你获得抽成（盈利）。从玩家的角度来看，他们与这些广告和视频互动也可以让他们获得一定的游戏奖励。

AdColony：这项服务用虚拟货币来奖励观看视频的玩家，类似于TapJoy中的视频推广。如果你在自己的游戏中展示视频，用户的完整观看能够为你带来一定收入。如果你希望自己的游戏视频被展示在其他游戏中，那么你就必须为用户的每次完整观看付费。

Flurry：尽管众人熟知的Flurry是家分析公司，但他们还拥有AppCircle，这是个针对iOS的交叉推广网络，使用他们的推荐引擎向玩家推荐游戏。类似于其他此类服务，你通过付费来让玩家在其他应用中看到你的游戏，你在自己的应用中展示其他开发商的游戏能够获得盈利。

Flurry还有个称为AppCircle Clips的新服务，也是向完整观看视频（游戏邦注：通常是游戏预告片）的用户支付虚拟货币。与上述情况相同，做广告的开发商付费，播放视频广告的开发商获得盈利。

Kiip：这是个新公司，目前只在美国市场运营。Kiip将现实世界奖励同获得成就联系起来。与其他服务不同的是，这项服务完全以盈利为目标。

以下是这项服务的运转方式：你在玩游戏时获得一项成就。所有人都会对获得成就感到欣喜，但现在你还能够收到1条消息，你从Kiip处获得奖励。奖励可能是1袋薯片、1杯打折饮料或1根口红。作为开发商，你只需要整合他们的SDK，剩下的都交由该公司来完成。当用户点击收集他们的奖励时，你就能够获得盈利。

但需要记住以下这几点：

你无需整合所有的服务，因为这对你来说等同于大量的工作，而且很可能会让你的玩家感到困惑。

当你发布新游戏时，努力取得强劲的开局，因为应用商店中的排名是维持销售量的最重要因素，营销持续时间过长会影响到效果。要尽快获得强劲势头，然后努力保持。

先提升认知度，然后再专注于盈利。你需要拥有足够数量的玩家，才能够通过他们来盈利。换句话说，如果你没有用户，那么所有的盈利方式都无法生效。

但要把握展开盈利行动的时机，要使用不同策略保持用户对游戏的兴趣。如果无法招徕或者留住玩家，你就没有办法实现盈利。

还有最后一个提醒：不要做无价值的游戏。应用商店中有许多优秀的游戏，无价值的游戏根本没有生存空间。

游戏邦注：本文发稿于2011年11月1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，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Game Design, Marketing, and Monetization on iOS

Wojtek Kawczynski

So you’ve decided to take the leap and make an iOS game. What should you know before you start? You’ve heard every opinion – how well you can expect to do, what the best strategy is, and who the right partners are. Everyone has their own methods, their own tricks and their own silver bullets. Finding the right approach for your game takes a lot of thought and a lot of research.

We released two iOS games in 2011: Garage Inc. (January) and KULA BLOX (September). Recently, we spent a good deal of time thinking about these experiences and we tried to figure out what we could learn from them so that we can do better the next time. Here’s what we came up with.

Above all, you need awareness, whether it is awareness of your game or just awareness of your studio. People need to know you exist, they need to know that your game exists, and they need to care that your game exists. This seems rather obvious when you state it outright. However while many people know this, very few manage to carry it through game design, monetization and marketing decisions. I’ll explain what I mean in the next few paragraphs.

Let’s start with game design. Unless you are a well known developer, or have a large pile of money that you can spend on marketing, or have a popular license that will guarantee some level of awareness, you’ll most likely be dependent on word-of-mouth for your game to become popular.

Think about what made you get most of the games that are on your personal iOS device. (If you do not personally have an iOS device, you might want to think again before getting into the market.) If you’re like us (and I speak for the studio here as we’re all in agreement) you make most of your purchase decisions based on a friend handing over their device with a game to try out. He or she says: “Hey I like this game – try it out.” You say: “OK” and you do. But for how long? Maybe 10 to 15 seconds or maybe a bit longer, but that’s about it.

THAT’S WHEN YOU MAKE UP YOUR MIND.

Your potential customers will do the same. So the design implication is this: make sure that a person who is brand new to your game, who hasn’t seen any of your clever tutorials, or watched your cutscene, or read your marketing materials, will really enjoy themselves in those first 10 to 15 seconds. If they don’t, then they won’t buy your game. Period. You will lose that sale.

How do you make a game that captures players that quickly? We’re trying to figure that out ourselves so I have no magical solution to offer here. It’s just something to seriously consider when you’re designing and focus testing your game.

As a side note, keep in mind that positive reviews – even on the main iOS sites – will not give you the kind of awareness (and therefore downloads) that you might expect. Even being featured by Apple, while many times more valuable and desirable than having professional reviews does not guarantee success. You also shouldn’t bank on being picked by Apple as a strategy. We were lucky enough to have both our games featured in the New and Noteworthy section of the app store and yet chances are good that you haven’t heard of either of our two titles. This is not to say that you shouldn’t get your game reviewed or that you shouldn’t try to get your game featured on the iTunes App Store – you absolutely should. What I am saying is that those things will not be enough.

So let’s say that you’re now making your game and that you’ve designed it to have that immediate appeal. Great. Is that it then? Well, no. You shouldn’t stop there even if you think you’ve nailed that. You can’t really be sure until the game ships.

Your next step is to consider as many awareness raising services and monetization services as possible to see what will make sense for your game and what you’re comfortable with. I won’t be making any recommendations here – I’ll just try to give you an objective summary of what’s out there and how they work.

Giving it Away

There are a number of services and approaches that involve making your app available as a free download. In case you’re wondering how giving your game away for free will make you money, let me digress for a bit to explain how this works.

The obvious way is to have in-app purchases (IAP). These allow you to sell upgrades and add-ons to users even if they do not pay for the app itself.

If you don’t have IAP (in app purchases) in your game then the advantages of offering your game for free are less obvious. The goal is to build awareness so that more people will buy your game when you start charging for it again. This model works by having the people who download your game for free talk/tweet/post/demo your game to their network of friends, effectively becoming evangelists working for you. The extra noise of having your game in their hands pays off when you start charging for your game again and you get a declining ‘tail’ of extra sales beyond what you had before the promotion. The amount of extra sales that you get will depend on how many people download your game when it’s free and how willing they are to recommend it (word-of-mouth). That’s where those first 10-15 seconds of gameplay need to be magical.

Raising awareness

Hey Zap: This is a service that allows you to get greater visibility of your game without costing you cold hard cash. It works like foursquare except that you check into games instead of places. People who follow you can see what you’re playing. Once you check-in enough times, you get a badge. There is an SDK which allows you to integrate a Hey Zap button into your game so that people can check-in from within your game. Hey Zap’s website shows that there have been over 10 million check-ins to date.

Game Center: Apple’s social network for games got a significant update in iOS 5 with three important additions: friend recommendations, game recommendations and the ability to buy games from within the Game Center app. Before iOS 5, Game Center was a good idea as it had leaderboards and achievements. However, the new updates significantly increase the visibility of games being played by your friends and as such is a much stronger service for building awareness than it was before.

OpenFeint: This is similar to Apple’s Game Center, only bigger. OpenFeint has been around longer, but it does not support the iPad – only iPhone and iPod touch. They have achievements, leaderboards, and friends. They also have an iOS app called Game Channel. The main feature of this app is their “Free Game of the Day”.

Integrating OpenFeint into your game is free and the benefits you get from doing so are similar to integrating Game Center: your friends can see you on leaderboards, you collect achievements which give you points, etc. However, unlike Game Center, OpenFeint allows you to pay to be seen. This is where the “Free Game of the Day” comes in.

For a price (either a minimum guarantee or revenue share) your game can be featured in OpenFeint’s Game Channel app as the “Free Game of the Day”. That gets you awareness which will hopefully translate into sales. If your game was not free to begin with, don’t fret – you can still do a “Free Game of the Day” promotion as long as you make something in-game free so that there is still a deal for your new customers.

OpenFeint has three other services that can help. Fire Sale is a crowd-sourced discount program where the OpenFeint community votes on which game they want to see discounted and by how much. The second is GameFeed, an in-game social activity news feed which is relatively new so you might have not seen it in-game yet. It’s like a stock ticker that scrolls at the bottom of your menu screens showing you what games your friends are playing and how they’re doing. The third is OFX which is an OpenFeint-hosted app store that allows you to make non-hard currency changes to your in-game store without the need to submit new binaries to Apple. It also saves your customers’ purchases (history and balance) on their servers.

Free App A Day: This is a service that is similar to OpenFeint’s Free Game of the Day but without the social network aspect. It’s strictly a paid service that has an app, a website and lots of users who can see games that are being featured.

Monetizing

TapJoy is a good segue from pure awareness-raising services to awareness + monetization services. TapJoy allows you to do both. The company’s main service is the Offerwall – a way for developers to pay for customers to download their game. Players get virtual currency in the game they are playing for downloading a new game. The developer of the new game pays real money for the download and TapJoy splits that revenue with the developer of the game from which the download originated. Apple started rejecting apps that contain these types of services earlier this year. However, I’ve heard that some apps that contain the Offerwall are being approved but the situation is far from being clear. Proceed at your own risk.

TapJoy has a few other services, including traditional in-game banner ads, video offers and full page interstitial ads. They all work in a similar way – you pay to have your content displayed in other games (awareness-raising) or you get paid when your customers click on an ad (or watch a video) in your game (monetization). From the player’s point of view, they get rewards from the game that hosts these various forms of advertising in return for interacting with the ads and videos.

AdColony: This service offers players virtual currency for watching videos, similar to the video offers in TapJoy. If you show videos in your game, you get paid for every completed view. If you want your trailer to be shown in other games, you pay for each completed view.

Flurry: While Flurry is mainly known as an analytics company they also have AppCircle, a cross-selling network for iOS which uses their recommendation engine to suggest games to players. As with other such services you pay if you want your game to be seen in other apps and you get paid if you show other developers’ games in your app.

Flurry also has a new service called AppCircle Clips, which again pays users virtual currency for a completed view of a video (typically a game trailer). And again, same situation as before – the developer doing the advertising pays and the developer hosting the video ad gets paid.

Kiip: This is a new company that for now operates only in the US (so your app has to be available in the US app store). Kiip ties real world rewards to getting achievements. Unlike the other services, this one is all about monetization.

Here’s how it works: you’re playing a game and you get an achievement. Great – who doesn’t like achievements? But now you also get a message that you just got a reward from Kiip. That reward could be anything like a bag of chips or a discount on a drink or a tube of lipstick. As the developer, you integrate their SDK and they take care of the rest. You get paid when your users click to collect their prize.

So there you go – a run-down of the major services out there and a brief description of each. Here are some things to keep in mind:

You probably don’t want to integrate all of them as it will be a lot of work for you and will likely be rather confusing for your players.

When you’re launching a new game, try to go out strong right off the bat as the most important thing for sustained sales is positioning in the app store so you don’t want to dilute your key marketing effort over too long a period of time. Gain momentum quickly and then try to keep it going.

Raise awareness first (start early) and then focus on monetization. You need to have players in order to monetize them. In other words, all of the monetization in the world does you no good if there’s nobody to monetize.

Unfortunately, you can’t wait too long to start monetization. Each of your players will only play your game for so long. Keeping those users interested involves a whole different set of strategies, around game design and content updates. Again, you cannot monetize players you do not have – regardless of whether they have not arrived yet, or if they have already left.

And a final thought in case it’s not obvious: don’t make crappy games. It doesn’t matter what you do, there are too many good games on the app store for a crappy game to stand a chance.

Good luck and please let me know in the comments if I got something wrong or if there are any other services that are significant in reach or new/innovative that I did not include. Thanks. (Source: Transgaming Studios)