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田中良和谈GREE发展历程及日本手机社交游戏

发布时间:2012-07-28 14:14:05 Tags:,,

年过三十的田中良和(Yoshikazu Tanaka)凭借自己的努力,成为亚洲最年轻的亿万富翁,也是继Facebook创始人Mark Zuckerberg之后,世界第二年轻的自力更生型亿万富翁。把他与Facebook的创始人联系起来,不只是因为他穿着类似的服装:黑色的Crocs、白色的袜子、磨破的蓝色牛仔裤、白色的T恤和黑色的拉链卫衣,更因为他们都从社交网络领域发迹(田中良和的财富约43亿美元)。

田中良和(from news.chinaluxus.com)

田中良和(from news.chinaluxus.com)

但不要因为他的公司Gree就像Facebook,就认为其本人就纯粹是另一个Zuckerberg。田中坦言:“说实话,我不想被比作任何人,不过创造Facebook的人除外——他做得非常棒。”

田中于2004年创办的GREE是一家拥有1.9亿注册用户的网络公司。虽然这个数字只是Facebook注册用户的零头,但GREE毕竟是一家完全不同的公司——它的定位是蓬勃发展的手机市场和靠微交易盈利的免费游戏。GREE对日本的游戏业有多重要呢?去年东京游戏展,GREE占据整个场地的十分之一。但它面临着激烈的竞争,特别是运营手机游戏平台的网络公司DeNA。

尽管从根本上说,GREE是一家与Facebook不同类型的社交网络公司,但二者的成长背景是相似的。2003年,田中开始意识到美国社交网站Friendster的巨大潜力,认为日本也应该有一个类似的网站。那时,他供职于乐天公司(游戏邦注:Rakuten,日本电子商务巨头)。田中在大学时学习法律和经济学,做过各种工作,从图标设计到业务扩展,这一切都为他建立网络公司打了坚实的基础。为创办GREE,田中在业余时间还自学了编程。

“编程在结构方面是非常有趣的,特别是将操作系统TCIP组合在一起的方式。”田中的话将他隐藏在休闲外表之下的严谨个性展露出来了。尽管他谈吐儒雅,但难掩表面之下的严肃和刚毅。“当谈到年轻的公司时,人们往往认为它应该比较休闲。至于我们的商业风格,只要我们自己乐在其中,那就很好了。但为了成功,该做的事还是要做的。”尽管他以工作时间长闻名,田中强调时间未必带来成功:“并不是说你投入的时间越多,得到的成果就越好。”

田中首先把GREE打造成一家社交网络公司,但目睹了任天堂和PlayStation的成长壮大以后,他很快意识到游戏中的内容可以保留受众。“我从小就玩游戏;我一直在通过放大娱乐作用,寻找让人们进入手机社交网络的方法。这两方面都将我引向游戏行业。”童年经历启发他开发了GREE的第一款游戏,这是一款于2007年发行的钓鱼社交游戏《Tsuri-Sta》。

可以认为《Tsuri-Sta》是世界上第一款手机社交游戏。在这款游戏中,玩家收集工具、和朋友一起组织钓鱼团队、互相比赛。直到今天,这款游戏还在运营,几乎所有手机通过本地程序和浏览器都能玩。《Tsuri-Sta》证明了田中的卓识远见。“2005年,我们开始思考如何发展,我想开始制作产品应该是在这一年或下一年,总之提前了五年、十年吧。”他看到了当今的世界将由手机领航,于是将GREE打造成了手机社交网络公司。

但是,传统的日本游戏行业花了很长时间才跟上田中的步伐。“有许多公司还没转向开发社交游戏。”田中将Konami于2009年9月成功发行的大作《Dragon Collection》作为第一个例子。现在这款GREE头号第三方游戏的用户人数在4月份已达到600万。田中声称:“它的盈利性很惊人,这唤醒了所有其他主机游戏开发商。社交手机游戏就是未来,它证明了主机游戏开发商也可以在这方面取得成功。我们正在目睹从主机游戏向手机社交游戏的转变——仅一款游戏就能带来如此巨大的影响,这是值得骄傲的事。”

田中现在的目标是打入欧美市场,这是仍然缺少专用于手机的大型、统一社交网络的区域。Facebook的运营方向及其游戏业务仍然专注于桌面浏览器,而苹果Game Center锁定的是iOS。尽管还有OpenFeint这个专用于游戏的社交网络交叉平台,但它已经于去年4月被GREE以1亿400万美元并购。

现在,GREE的目标是劝服欧美开发商为GREE平台开发游戏。4月,GREE在美国的工作室发布了它的首款游戏《Zombie Jombie》,这是一款免费的iOS卡牌对战游戏,沿用了在日本极为流行的“Gacha”模式(游戏邦注:Gacha支持玩家支付真钱,随机获得游戏中的道具或装备,是一种具有赌博性质的游戏机。)。受自动贩卖机的启示,“gacha”让玩家为随机道具付费。《Zombie Jombie》在苹果App Store的评分目前是四颗星。田中指出:“我们发现这款游戏在北美市场接受度相当高,所以我认为,在日本制作的游戏也能被其他地区的用户所接受。”《Dragon Collection》也会成功吗?田中很自信:“是的,我认为会成功。”

因为Zynga的主宰地位和它显然取之不竭的资本,欧美的社交游戏市场已经不再是一片处女地,这不同于2007年的日本。但是,GREE对手机市场的专注会有所成效的。“许多公司说想制作游戏平台,Zynga是其中之一,但说得容易做得难。经过两年的努力,我们才在游戏平台方面获得成功。”

目前,GREE的成功因“gacha”而得到巩固。除了要考虑欧美受众对颇具日本风格的接受程度如何,GREE在国内也面临着不确定的未来。自从日本政府于五月初对“gacha”下达禁令,GREE及其竞争者的股票价格就直线下跌。随后,“Kompu”(完整版“gacha”)又被日本定为非法的机制,而欧美政府如何对待它尚未明确。尽管如此,但我们相信田中的专注及其背后的成功势头,定能使GREE成为日本游戏新浪潮的一支先锋力量。(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

Yoshikazu Tanaka on building Gree

By Edge Staff

Now in his mid-30s, Yoshikazu Tanaka is the youngest self-made billionaire in Asia, and the world’s second-youngest after Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, you can be forgiven for likening him with Facebook’s founder. Not just because he sports similar couture: black Crocs, white socks, ripped blue jeans, a white T-shirt and a black zip-up hoodie, but because they’ve also both made their fortunes (Tanaka’s worth an estimated $4.3 billion) founding social networks.

But don’t get too caught up in thinking that Tanaka’s company, Gree, is just like Facebook, and that he’s simply another Zuckerberg. “I’d rather not be compared to anyone to be honest,” Tanaka says. “But if I can be compared to the man who created Facebook – he’s done very well. He did a good job there.”

Gree, which Tanaka founded in 2004, is a network of 190 million registered users. It’s a fraction of Facebook’s 800 million, but it’s also a significantly different company, one built for the burgeoning mobile market and around free-to-play games supported by microtransactions. For an idea of how important Gree is to Japanese gaming, it took up a tenth of the entire floorspace of the Toyko Game Show last year, but faces strong competition, especially by DeNA, a web portal company that runs the Mobage mobile gaming platform.

Though Gree is a fundamentally different form of social network to Facebook, it grew out of similarly personal circumstances. In 2003, Tanaka became aware of Friendster, the American social network, and thought there should be a Japanese equivalent. At the time, he was working at Rakuten, Japan’s vast Internet services and e-commerce company, having studied law and economics at university. He’d worked in a variety of positions, from icon design to business development, which had given him a grounding in establishing an Internet company, and taught himself to program in order to build Gree in his spare time.

“The structural side [of programming] was extremely interesting, particularly the way it all fits together: the operating system, TCIP,” he says, revealing some of the formal rigour that lies beneath his casual appearance. Though softly spoken, he’s serious and an edge of steel lies beneath the surface. “I think when you talk about a young company, it tends to look more casual. In terms of our business style, if we’re having fun that’s great, but you must do what you need to in order to succeed.” But though he’s known for putting in long hours, he emphasises that time doesn’t necessarily translate to success: “It’s not the case that as long as you put in the effort then the time you spend ends up as a better product.”

Tanaka created Gree to be a social network first, but, having grown up with Nintendo and PlayStation, he soon saw in games the kind of content that could keep its audience engaged. “I played games as a child and was looking for a way to get people into mobile social networking by amplifying the entertainment aspect, and both lead me to games,” he says. His childhood experiences also gave him the vision for Gree’s first game, a social fishing game called Tsuri-Sta, which was launched in 2007.

Tsuri-Sta can be considered the world’s first mobile social game, with players collecting equipment, organising fishing parties with friends and competing with each other. It still runs today and, accessible on pretty much every data-enabled mobile device via its native app and browser versions, it’s testament to Tanaka’s foresight. “In 2005, we really started thinking of how to go forward and I thought that in terms of making products it shouldn’t be about this year or next year, it should be five, ten years ahead.” He saw today’s mobile-driven world (“Not everyone has a PC but pretty much everyone has a mobile phone”) and built Gree around it.

But it’s taken the traditional Japanese game industry a long time to follow Tanaka’s lead. “There are many that haven’t turned to create social games,” he says, pointing towards Konami’s breakout hit Dragon Collection, released in September 2010, as the first example. Now Gree’s number one thirdparty game, it reached six million users in April. “There was one quarter in which its profits did better than all their other software,” Tanaka claims. “That woke up all the other console software makers. Social mobile gaming was the future; it proved that console game makers could succeed in that environment. We are seeing a shift from console games to mobile social games – that single title has had such an impact. Something to be proud of.”

Tanaka’s aim now is to reach the western market, which still lacks a large and unified social network dedicated to mobile. Facebook’s business and its games remain focused on desktop browsers, while Apple’s Game Center is locked to iOS. There’s OpenFeint, though, a crossplatform social network built specifically for gaming, which GREE bought in April last year for $104 million, instantly gaining a foothold in the form of the 75 million users of the games that had supported it.

Now, though, the race is on to convince western developers to build their games for Gree’s platform. In April, Gree released its first game from its US studio, Zombie Jombie, a simple free-to-play iOS card battler that follows the ‘gacha’ collection format that’s found such success in Japan. Inspired by capsule vending machines, gacha has players paying for randomised items. Zombie Jombie is currently rated at over four stars on the App Store; “We’ve found that game has been quite well received by the American market so it’s my view that the games we make in Japan should be well received,” Tanaka says. Will Dragon Collection work, too? “Yes, I think it will.”

With social gaming currently dominated by Zynga and its apparently inexhaustible acquisition funds, the west today isn’t quite the virgin territory that Japan was in 2007 – but, again, Gree’s unwavering focus on mobile makes it distinct. “There are many companies that say they want to make game platforms, and Zynga is one of them, but it’s much harder to achieve than it is to talk about it. Over the course of two years, we’ve made a success of a game platform business.”

Currently, that success is underpinned comprehensively by gacha. Apart from how well western audiences will take to something so culturally Japanese, it faces an uncertain future at home. Following the threat in early May that the Japanese government may regulate extreme usage of gacha, Gree and its competitors found their stock prices plummeting – kompu, or complete, gacha was subsequently outlawed in Japan. What western governments make of it remains to be seen. Regardless, with Tanaka’s focus and the momentum of its success in the east behind it, Gree seems sure to become the vanguard of a new wave of Japanese gaming.(source:edge-online)


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