作者：Dave Jones

距离《Brickbat》首次在Windows Phone Marketplace问世已经3个多月了（游戏邦注：《Brickbat》是作者个人独立工作室Jeffalisk所开发的第一款游戏）。在这整个过程中我真心体验到了各种合理与不合理之处，并将在此与其他开发者分享我的相关经验。

合理之处

学到很多

最终，你会发现你真的从自己的第一个项目中受益匪浅（特别当你白手起家开发第一款游戏时）。也许对于开发一款仿制Breakout（打砖块题材）的手机游戏来说，九个月有点过长了；但是你要知道在这整个过程中我从头学习了C#和XNA以及游戏设计和编程的基本原理。尽管这么做不一定能够让你的游戏脱颖而出——但对我个人来说，我的主要目标只是期盼着创造并发布自己的游戏，而其它任何成绩只是我所获得的额外奖励。

任何人在获得回报之前总是需要有所付出的！

Brickbat(from gamasutra)

平台的选择

也许有很多人会说这一点应该被归为“不合理之处”，的确，尽管《Brickbat》的下载量不尽人意（我将在后面的内容详细阐述），但是我仍然认为对于那些与我一样白手起家创造手机游戏的开发者来说，Windows Phone是最佳平台选择。

相比之下，App Store已经充斥着各种优秀的游戏，要想让你的新游戏从中吸引玩家吸球绝非易事；另外我对Objective-C也没有什么好感。而尽管Android系统非常普及，但是如果需要编写一款同时适用于各种软件和硬件型号的游戏，我真会彻底抓狂。

而对于Windows Phone，我真的是孤注一掷了，因为这个新平台仅处于初级阶段。不过因为我也才刚刚起步，那些让众多已成气候开发商头疼的问题对我并没有多大影响。我认为微软的免费开发工具非常有效，并且由于拥有严格控制的硬件标准，其设备兼容性也并非什么大问题。

尽管这是一种冒险，但是对于现在的我来说确实是最佳选择；并且如果需要的话我也可以在之后转移到不同平台上去。

不合理之处

遭遇大量同类游戏

当《Brickbat》还处于开发阶段时，WP7市场中只有5款Breakout类型的游戏，并且大多数游戏都不够完善。但是当《Brickbat》正式发布时，该市场上已经涌现出众多同类型游戏了，甚至还包括备受瞩目的Xbox Live游戏《IonBall EX》。似乎所有开发者都希望通过复制此类游戏来试水WP7市场。

更糟糕的，我甚至不知道最初向Marketplace提交应用时，我们的游戏搜索关键字中既不包括“Breakout”也没有“Arkanoid”，反而被广泛定义为“动作+冒险”类游戏，这就导致我们的游戏一经发布便快速被首页显示的游戏所淹没，甚至连针对于该类游戏进行搜索的玩家都难以找到它。我在1.1版本中改善了这些问题，它对下载量直接产生了影响。

之所以遭到市场的排挤除了因为耗费了较长的开发时间，还有就是我一开始便选择了一个乏味的开发项目。尽管WP7拥有大量忠实的Breakout游戏粉丝，但是当《Brickbat》出现时，这些玩家早已经开始对这类型游戏感到厌倦，但是我却未在一开始时就预见这一情况。

经验教训：今后的Jeffalisk应该尝试更多原创作品。

转移目标

对于第一款游戏设计项目来说这种转别是不可避免的，但是《Brickbat》的理念却随着开发进展发生了非常显著的变化。在我充满高度设计热情时，我是想将Breakout作为一种隐喻的心理治疗法而强调游戏的故事驱动元素，让玩家能够通过打碎“心理障碍”而缓解压力。不过我最终还是决定回到直白的街机游戏中。但是回想起来之前投入于创造所谓的故事型游戏的努力完全白费了，还不如直接用于优化并创造出更加完善的游戏。

低估开发时间

这也是新手们常常会面临的一大问题，就像我甚至在一开始便为自己设下3个月内完成开发任务的目标。现在看来那时候还真是异想天开。更糟的是我两次提前宣称了发行日期。对于那些独立游戏开发者，特别是还有日常工作的人来说，我更是需要强调：任何工作都会花费比你预期更长的时间！也就是当我们觉得自己已经完成任务时，其实还需要将完成点适当往后推迟。就像《Brickbat》两次的失败认证便是因为存在过多漏洞，并且每一次微软认证过程都需要花费大约1周的工作时间。不过我的意思并不是说每个独立开发项目都必须在“完成游戏”时才明确发行日期，只是我希望开发者能够确保自己所设定的目标不会扼杀自己的积极性。所以我不会再重蹈《Brickbat》的覆辙。

假期发布

由于我之前提到的因素，我最终选择了在一个错误的时间发行了这款游戏，即在圣诞节和新年期间。相信我，这对于发布应用来说真的是最糟糕的时间。因为没有人想要在这个时间段购买手机应用，那时候大多数人都不用上班，不用上学，并且可以自由地玩“正统的游戏”。即使是那些想要购买应用的玩家也不一定会上网或登录社交网站，所以他们并不会看到你的推广内容。如果他们这么做了，并且购买了你的应用，他们也不会看到其他人在谈论你的游戏。更糟糕的是，你所发送的任何新闻稿也会遭到忽视，因为那时候大多数游戏平台面处于停工期（如苹果的App Store）。而我就是因为太没有耐心了，希望自己在花了9个月时间所开发的游戏能够尽早上线，从而才导致如此惨淡的结局。如果我有足够的后见之明，我便会意识到这一点并推迟到1月份才发布游戏。

没有推出试用模式

这是任何首次开发游戏的开发者也常遇到的问题。其他WP7开发者曾经在Twitter上警告我说很多玩家甚至不愿意下载没有试用版本的游戏，但是那时候的我却仍然一意孤行，从而导致游戏未能在玩家心中留下深刻的印象——尽管这款游戏的价格已经是Marketplace的最低点（79便士），但是第一周的全球销量甚至惨淡到不足14份。

意识到这一问题，我便在1.1更新版本中添加了试用模式，并有效地提升了游戏的下载量——当我们的试用模式上线时，我看到了游戏的付费下载从原来的平面走势迅速开始往上抬升了。下次如果我还在WP7上发行付费游戏，我一定在一开始就设置好试用模式。所以希望其他面向WP7平台的独立游戏开发者也能够吸取这种教训。

低调的营销方式

老实说，我真心希望能够好好宣传我的游戏，但是因为我之前提到的发布时间问题，也导致游戏的宣传成了泡影。市场营销包括在YouTube上发布预告片，在游戏网站上发布新闻稿，或者利用Twitter帐号进行宣传等。但是因为不存在绝对有效的营销策略，需要你根据自己未来的游戏类型进行选择。游戏，特别是那种表现平平的产品，不可能在没有市场营销的情况下自我提升销量。

不甚乐观的销售数据

幸运的是，我并不是想通过卖游戏而谋生，我并不期待能够从游戏身上赚取一分钱。让我们先看看我迄今为止所收集到的一些数据：

出现在Marketplace的天数：99天

总下载量：929次

付费版本下载量：50次

平均每天下载量：9.38次

平均每天销量：0.5份

转化率：5.38%

以下是相关图表：

sale figure(from gamasutra)

第一次峰值出现于1.1版本更新时，即试用模式上线时。但是对于第二次峰值我却不明缘由。因为据我所知这一款应用并未真正凸显于Marketplace，也没有得到多少积极的评论，所以我真的不知道为何会出现这些峰值。

除了峰值，游戏销售（以及下载量）大部分时间都趋于平缓发展。考虑到微软要从中抽成，也就是我只能从50个销量中赚的35美元的收益。并且我只有达到200美元的最低门槛才能弥补之前的支出，也就是在真正盈利并且直到下载量枯竭之前我必须尽可能卖出比现在多5倍的应用。

其实，很多问题都是我自己的无能所致。这是一款在错误的时间发布的错误游戏，发行不当甚至连推销也不甚理想。并且看到这一系列惨淡的数据我不禁怀疑WP7付费应用是否也存在这种广泛问题。

WP7 Marketplace的游戏其实与Xbox 360的可下载游戏存在相同的两级分化特点。在Marketplace中的Xbox Live品牌游戏总是备受瞩目，并且各种案例也表明玩家很少关注Xbox Live游戏之外的产品，这就意味着与iOS或Android相比，那些自主发行游戏的开发者要更费力地争夺更小的市场份额。

据我了解，Elbert Perez是一个以开发WP游戏谋生的独立游戏开发者，他放弃了早前的付费应用，并在自己的网站occasionalgamer.com提供了大量相关数据以支持自己发行免费游戏的理念，以及告诉人们应用内部广告是从WP7平台上获得盈利的唯一手段。热门文字游戏《Wordament》也遵循了广告赞助模式。

虽然我仍然不愿意放弃付费模式，我真心希望我所阐述的内容能够对那些想要进入这个市场的开发者有所帮助。（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）

Don’t Give Up the Day Job: An indie Windows Phone 7 post mortem

by Dave Jones

It’s now more than 3 months since Brickbat, the first game from my one-man indie studio Jeffalisk, debuted on the Windows Phone Marketplace. Here I take an unflinching look at the few things that went right, the many things that went wrong and share my download figures for fellow devs to mull over.

What went right

Learned a lot

At the end of the day, this is all you’re really looking for from a first project, especially when you’re coming to game development from scratch as I was. Nine months in development might seem a bit over the top for a mobile phone Breakout clone, but included in that time was learning C# and XNA from scratch and a crash course in the fundamentals of game design and programming. The end result was never likely to be anything to set the world alight – my main aim all along was just to see a project through to release, and anything else would be a bonus.

Hey, you’ve got to pay your dues before you pay the rent.

Choice of platform

Now, there will be people – many people – who think this needs to go under “What went wrong” along with, well, virtually everything else. But I still think, despite Brickbat’s poor download figures which we’ll get to later, that Windows Phone was the best choice for someone starting out in mobile games at the time I did.

The App Store is saturated with so many polished titles already that trying to get a new game noticed is real needle-in-a-haystack stuff, plus I’ve never heard a good word said about Objective-C. Android is everywhere but the writing a game to perform well on all the various software and hardware combinations out there was a headache I really didn’t need.

With Windows Phone, I took a gamble to get in, at an early stage, on a new platform that’s just getting started. Many of the disadvantages for established devs didn’t apply to me because I was just starting out. Microsoft’s free dev tools are great to work with, and with tightly controlled hardware standards compatibility isn’t really an issue.

It is a gamble, granted, but for now I still feel this was the right choice and I can always switch platforms later on if needed.

What went wrong

Attack of the Clones

When Brickbat started development, there were perhaps five Breakout games on the WP7 marketplace, and most of them were pretty rudimentary. By the time Brickbat was released, that number was well into the dozens – notably including a high-profile Xbox Live title (IonBall EX). It seems every dev and his dog chose a Breakout clone to test the water with.

Worse, I’d been coy about the game’s influences in the original marketplace submission – neither “Breakout” nor “Arkanoid” were included as search keywords, and it was submitted in the hugely overcrowded catch-all “action + adventure” category, with the result that it was quickly buried off the front page and couldn’t even be found by people specifically looking for that kind of game. Both these points were rectified for version 1.1, and had an immediate impact on downloads.

Being crowded out of the market was partly down to a long development time, but mostly down to a poor, uninspired choice of project to start with. Even the most ardent WP7-owning Breakout fan would have been getting sick of them by the time Brickbat came out, and this is something that should have been foreseen before the project ever got off the ground.

Lesson learned, though: future Jeffalisk games will bring something original to the table, or they won’t get made.

Shifting scope

Perhaps inevitably for a first game design project, the scope of Brickbat shifted dramatically as development went on. At the height of my design mania, it was going to be a story-driven game using Breakout as a metaphor for psychotherapy, with the player breaking down “mental blocks” to help various patients. Eventually it was scoped back to a reasonably bare bones arcade game. But the amount of wasted effort that went into the wilder flights of fancy was ridiculous and could have been put to much better use adding polish to the more manageable game that we ended up with.

Underestimated development time

Another classic beginner’s mistake, I started out with an unrealistic aim of completing development in 3 months. Looking back, this was never going to happen. The problem was compounded by announcing tentative release dates, twice. This is something that I can’t stress enough for anyone starting out in indie dev, especially if you’ve also got a day job: everything is going to take much longer than you expect it to! And just when we thought we were done, we hit more delays – Brickbat failed certification twice because of bugs, and each time through the MS cert process took roughly 1 working week to complete. I’m not saying every indie project’s release date should necessarily be “when it’s finished”, but setting targets you can’t keep kills motivation. I won’t be doing it again.

Holiday launch

Through a combination of the factors I’ve already gone into, Brickbat ended up launching at the worst possible time imaginable – between Christmas and New Year. Take it from me, fellow indies, this is a terrible time to release an app. Nobody wants to buy a mobile app at that time of year, because they’re all off work, off school and have access to “proper” games. Even those who do want to buy an app are much less likely to be spending time online or on social networks so they aren’t going to see your marketing. And even if they somehow do, and end up buying your app, they’re not going to be seeing anyone to spread the word. Worse, any press release you send out will be roundly ignored because the games sites aren’t working either. But I was impatient. I’d just spent 9 months working on this thing, so it was going to be released as soon as humanly possible. The temptation was overwhelming. But in hindsight, this was a massive mistake and I should have waited until January for a more coherent launch.

Launched without a trial mode

Another huge mistake, and another one that first-time devs fall into all the time. Other WP7 devs warned me on Twitter that lots of people won’t download without a trial, but I still went ahead and launched without one. The results were underwhelming – first week sales totalled a less-than-inspiring 14 copies worldwide, at the Marketplace’s lowest available price point of 79p (99￠).

Realising my mistake, a version 1.1 update – which included a trial mode – was rushed out , and the impact on downloads was dramatic – I saw a big spike when the trial went live, and paid downloads started ticking upward again after having flatlined. Next time I launch a paid-for game on WP7, the trial will be in there from day zero. For the love of god, WP7 indies, learn from my mistake here. (There is, of course, the wider question of whether paid-for games are viable on WP7 at all, which I’ll get to later.)

Low-key marketing effort

I’ll be honest here, I had lots of good intentions about getting word out there but – mainly because of the timing issues mentioned above – they all fell by the wayside. The launch marketing consisted of a launch trailer on YouTube, a press release that got featured on one site, and continual plugs through our Twitter account. But there wasn’t much real strategy and this will need looking at for future projects. Games, particularly generic ones, won’t just sell themselves.

Don’t get too excited: Sales figures

Fortunately for me, I don’t need to earn a living through selling my games. I say fortunately because it honestly doesn’t look like I’ll see a cent from this game on its own. Let’s take a look at my figures to date:

Days on marketplace: 99

Total downloads: 929

Of which paid downloads: 50

Avg downloads per day: 9.38

Avg sales per day: 0.5

Conversion rate: 5.38%

Here’s the graph:

The first huge spike is the 1.1 patch – which introduced trial versions – going live. The second, slightly higher spike? I’ll be honest, I have no idea why that happened. (If any fellow devs have experienced similar, I’d love to hear about it in the comments). As far as I can tell the app’s never been featured on the Marketplace, or reviewed anywhere, so I am genuinely at a loss as to where all those hits came from.

With the exception of those spikes, sales – and downloads – have been very flat. Taking into account Microsoft’s cut of the sale price, those 50 sales have earned me about $35. There’s a $200 minimum threshold to hit before I see a payout, so I’d need to sell about 5 times as many copies again before getting paid, and downloads have pretty much dried up. I’m not ordering the swimming pool just yet, put it that way.

Now, a lot of this is down to my own ineptitude. There were many mistakes made with this release. It was the wrong game, at the wrong time, launched badly and not promoted properly. But those are still some pretty wretched figures, and I wonder if they indicate a wider problem with paid apps on the WP7 market.

It seems to me that the WP7 marketplace, when it comes to games, is becoming a two-tier market that shares much in common with that for downloadable titles on Xbox 360. Xbox Live branded titles enjoy prominence in the storefront and anecdotal evidence suggests many gamers never look beyond the Xbox Live section of the Marketplace, leaving self-published games to fight it out for a smaller slice of what’s already a very small pie when compared to iOS or Android.

Elbert Perez, to my knowledge more or less the only one-man-band dev to make a living out of developing for Windows Phone, gave up on paid-for apps early on in his career, and has provided plenty of figures over on his site occasionalgamer.com to back his theory that releasing games for free and supporting them with the revenue from in-app ads is the only way to earn reasonable money on WP7. The hit word game Wordament also follows the ad-supported model.

I’m reluctant to go down that road, and probably won’t give up on paid-for just yet, but hopefully by releasing my figures I can at least provide some food for thought for anyone thinking of entering what’s still an unproven marketplace.(source:GAMASUTRA)