游戏邦在:
杂志专栏:
gamerboom.com订阅到鲜果订阅到抓虾google reader订阅到有道订阅到QQ邮箱订阅到帮看

DeNA中国高管谈本土网络环境和用户获取挑战

发布时间:2012-06-28 10:07:07 Tags:,,,

作者:Brandon Sheffield

DeNA中国的Mobage平台在该地区取得突出成绩,同时也令第三方开发者在此获得丰厚回报。DeNA中国的平台项目经理Kang Sun在台北GDC大会上提到,在2011年第4季度,第三方游戏收益超过公司平台总营收的50%,且始终维持这一水平。

但发展至今并非一帆风顺。首先,中国的网络环境非常复杂。Sun表示,即便持有智能手机,多数用户依然采用2.5G技术。“在中国,我们有9.4亿的手机用户,其中有约4.31亿用户连网”,但只有1.47亿用户采用3G技术。

他表示,“在中国,很多用户都通过GPRS连网。上网速度非常缓慢。相比日本或韩国,我们的下载速度是每秒几十千字节至每秒200千字节。”

复杂网络环境带来低数据传输率和昂贵网络流量费问题,这将玩家拒之门外。“如果用户下载内容需要等2分钟,他们多半会选择其他内容。只要进行体验,他们就愿意付费。”

公司还遭遇用户因下载速度慢而给游戏1颗星评级。所以他们需要修复的两大问题是下载速度和注册&安装次数。在手机社交游戏的初期阶段,下载-体验的整个过程如下:游戏下载 > 安装 > 启动 > 注册 > 登录 > 体验。

首先要做的就是将游戏包最小化。他表示,“如果这是款大型游戏,我们希望将其拆分成初始包和下载包,”(游戏邦注:主要借鉴2000年初期的浏览器游戏策略)。Android分化问题将此问题进一步复杂化,所以他们有时需要基于特定手机准备具体资产。如果他们分解包裹,这将能够帮助他们配合这些独特的设备环境。

Ninja Royale from gamasutra.com

Ninja Royale from gamasutra.com

例如,在DeNA的《忍者无极》中,首个下载内容是22.5MB。第二个空间是7 MB,第三个是10MB,特殊事件数据约是4MB。公司预期这些下载内容将间隔1-2周左右,减轻终端用户的痛苦。

下个问题是用户账户。在公司的首次安装中,许多用户并没有完成注册过程,虽然他们尝试将用户手机号码变成登陆账户,以简化操作过程。之所以出现问题部分是因为用户需要使用手机浏览器,这需占用3-4分钟时间。

2011年7月,他们就此进行优化。他表示,“我们将门户网站转变成本土页面,当玩家进入游戏时,页面就会嵌入应用中。”用户输入手机号码、邮件地址和密码,进而完成注册过程。他表示,“相比过去,用户条目明显少很多,”将下载-注册成功率提高10%以上。但这依然不够。

2011年11月,他们再次进行优化。用户只需输入昵称和性别即可。注册时间降至30秒。2012年1月,机制进一步得到完善,玩家只需选择性别。如今Weak Account System系统会随机分给你一个傻气的昵称,让你自动登录—–注册工作都由Mobage完成。现在当你体验Mobage游戏时,游戏会自动将你载入同个设备的其他游戏中。这样下载-体验的转换率就得到100%提高。这同时也降低用户获取成本(游戏邦注:由于引入这一机制,成本降低50%)。

另一问题是远程通知,通过提醒通知这能够有效提高用户留存率。通知信息主要针对Android和iOS平台——这对苹果来说完全没问题。但对于Android,问题要复杂得多。Sun表示,“若你想要通知用户,他们就需要有谷歌账户。中国的挑战之处在于,很多Android手机都没有这一功能。而且很多用户都不会经常登录他们的谷歌账户,他们通过其他东西取代谷歌账户。”

为完成这项工作,公司首先通过Mobage服务器过滤所有通知信息——终端用户的通知会通过Mobage平台,然后得到苹果的批准,发送至iOS设备。这带来的额外优点是,他们能够跨平台使用相同推送通知。虽然中国的准入门槛很高,但其中回报非常丰厚。(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

How DeNA overcame network and user acquisition challenges in China

by Brandon Sheffield

DeNA China has had good success with the company’s Mobage platform in the region, and boasts big success for third parties as well. Kang Sun, project manager of open platform for DeNA China, mentioned at GDC Taipei that revenue for third-party games has exceeded 50 percent of the company’s total platform revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, and has remained that high.

But getting to this point was not without its issues. To start with, there’s a very complex network environment in China. If they have a smartphone at all, “Most users still use 2.5G,” Sun noted. “In China we have 940 million mobile phone users, and about 431 million use the internet,” he said, but 3G adoption is only 147 million.

“In China many people have an iPhone using GPRS to get onto the internet,” he says, “And the speed of the network is very slow. Compared with Japan or Korea, our downloading speed is several 10s of kilobytes to 1 or 200k/second.”

This complicated network environment leads to low data transfer rates, and expensive network traffic fees, which turns players off. “It they have to wait for 2 minutes to download something, they’ll just try something else,” says Sun. “Once they play, they’re willing to pay.”

The company also had the problem of users giving games 1 star because of slow downloads. So the two major things they had to fix were the download speed, and the registration and install times. In the earlier days of mobile social games, the journey from download to play looked like this: game download > install > launch > register > login > play.

The first thing to do was to minimize the game package. “If it’s a big game, we want to split it up into an initial package, then later packages for downloading,” he said, calling to mind browser game tactics of the early 2000s. Android fragmentation further complicates the issue, so they have to prepare specific assets for specific phones on occasion. If they break up the packages, that helps serve these unique device environments.

In DeNA’s Ninja Royale for example, the first download is 22.5MB. World two is 7 MB, world three 10MB, and special event data is around 4MB. The company expects around 1-2 weeks between these downloads, easing the pain on the end user.

The next problem was the player account. In the company’s first implementation, lots of people didn’t complete the registration process, even though they tried to streamline it by making the user’s phone number their login. The trouble came in part because users had to use the mobile browser, which could take up to 3-4 minutes.

In July 2011 they optimized. “We changed our portal to a native page, and as they get into the game, it’s embedded in the app,” he said. Users enter a phone number, a mail address, and a password, which they use to complete registration. “Comparing to the past, there’s less user entry,” he said, improving download to registration success by more than 10%. But it still wasn’t enough.

In November 2011 they optimized again. You only entered a nickname, a gender, and that’s all. Registration time went down to 30 seconds. In January 2012, the system was improved further, to where players chose a gender, and that’s all. Now, with a system called Weak Account System, the system just randomly assigns you a silly nickname, and logs you in automatically — the registration is all done on the Mobage side. Now if you play one Mobage game, it will log you in automatically for any other game on the same device. With this, the conversion rate from download to play improved by 100 percent. This also reduced the cost of player acquisition — it fell 50 percent since the introduction of the system.

Another problem is remote notification, which is useful for player retention through reminder notices. Notifications are specific to Android and iOS — and this is no problem on the Apple side. But for Android, it gets more complicated. “If you’d like to notify a user, they need a Google account,” Sun noted. “The challenge in China is that many Android mobile phones don’t have this function. Also, many users don’t log into their Google accounts that often, and they have other things to replace their Google account.”

In order to make this work, the company filters all notifications through Mobage servers first – the end user’s notifications go through the Mobage platform, which then can push through apple to iOS devices, and through the mobage notification system for Android devices. This has the added benefit of allowing them to use the same push notification cross-platform. Though the barriers for entry to China are strong, the payoff is huge.(Source:gamasutra


上一篇:

下一篇: