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

业内人士谈社交游戏发展历程及“成功秘诀”

发布时间:2012-09-12 09:54:31 Tags:,,,,

作者:Tracey Lien

一只毛茸茸的威尔士矮脚狗被主人用皮带牵着走在旧金山的 TownsendStreet上。小狗的脚不时发出沙沙声,就好似在拍打着地面一样;最后,它和身着牛仔裤与帽衫的主人拐进了标明了650号的建筑中。

一整天里共有2千多号人(大多数人都会携带着各种“东西”,像有些牵着威尔士矮脚狗,有些牵着混血狗,也有些带着帽子)会进入Townsend Street650号的大门中,可以说这栋庞大的四层楼办公室占据着Market Street以南的整个街区。

这栋用砖块砌成的建筑便是Zynga的总部,这家世界上最大的(面向Facebook平台)游戏开发公司。它的游戏拥有3亿多月活跃用户。它还宣称其玩家每秒钟会在游戏内部执行上百万次的活动,并且来自世界各地超过5千5百万的玩家每天至少会玩一款Zynga的游戏。它所拥有的市场资本远远超过了同一产业中的许多大型游戏发行商,甚至能够狠狠地击败那些拥有一定历史的传统发行商。

也就是这只威尔士矮脚狗的主人不仅在为上百万人创造游戏,同时他们也能够迅速获得数十亿美元的收益。不过却并不是只有他们能够做到这点。

游戏开发界的黑马

Zynga_exterior(from theverge)

Zynga_exterior(from theverge)

《MinoMonsters》(游戏邦注:社交游戏,玩家将在此创造一对可爱的怪物并与好友进行战斗)开发公司的联合创始人TJ Murphy已经在这个产业中打滚了多年。作为Zynga的产品经理,他曾经致力于《FarmVille》以及《CityVille》等炙手可热游戏的病毒性,社交性以及游戏设计元素的开发。Murphy还拥有其它开发者望尘莫及的一大成就(甚至是Zynga)——他创造并发行了Facebook上的第一款社交游戏。

他说道:“我发现各大论坛上的网页游戏都拥有各种游戏机制;这些游戏大多非常简单,就像‘按压网页论坛上的一个按钮便能够训练士兵’或‘按压网页论坛上的一个按钮便能够攻击某物’等。”

“我喜欢这些游戏的简单性;从中我意识到即使是在学校,孩子们也可以在计算器上玩游戏——因为他们未拥有电话。我便以其中一款游戏为灵感去创造游戏。当2007年Facebook平台最初问世时,我便选择将第一款应用推向这一平台。”

这款游戏名为《Warbook》。虽然那时候的游戏中还不存在我们现在所看到的社交游戏元素,但是当追溯到Facebook刚作为电子游戏平台问世以及《Warbook》初次亮相时,我们可以发现整个产业已经逐渐呈现出爆炸性发展了。

Murphy继续说道:“单从Zynga来,它拥有40多亿美元的市场资本,它每天能够吸引成百上千万的玩家,甚至Zynga现在的玩家数已经超过了5年前Facebook的总用户数。从整体来看,社交游戏取得了巨大的发展,《FarmVille》甚至变成了人们日常生活中的一部分。作为一种全新游戏类型它真的具有惊人的吸引力。”

在传统发行商纷纷消沉下去并不断削减成本的同时,并不是只有Zynga独枝一秀地发展着。离Zynga总部以北几英里外正是另一家社交游戏开发商Kixeye的新办公室(即位于旧金山市中心)。该工作室现在占有一栋能够俯视市中心的建筑的3个楼层。其耀眼的新办公室带有一间以星系为主题的休息室,即呈现出犹如在宇宙飞船中遨游太空的感受。因为即时策略社交游戏而备受瞩目,现在的Kixeye正以极快的速度扩展着,年初他们还在布里斯班成立了澳大利亚工作室,并且每个月都会雇佣超过20名的新成员。多么惊人的扩展速度啊!在我写这篇文章的时候我们更是能在整个旧金山捷运系统中的火车,公交以及各大站点上看到他们的招聘广告。该工作室计划在年底共吸纳300名员工。

KIXEYE_-_Main_Floor_Lobby(from theverge)

KIXEYE_-_Main_Floor_Lobby(from theverge)

在雷德伍德城,也就是从Kixeye驾车行驶半个多小时便能到达一家名为Storm8的工作室,其子公司正努力朝着社交游戏领域的顶尖开发者的目标而努力。与Kixeye一样,它的名字也不如Zynga那般显赫,但是这却丝毫不影响他们的快速发展。

Storm8(from theverge)

Storm8(from theverge)

该工作室现在共拥有120名员工,而他们也计划在年底将这个数值翻两番。他们的品牌下有33款游戏,并且他们的网络也拥有500多万的日活跃用户,在超过1亿多台设备中共获得3亿多次的安装量,并且在2011年末苹果的前100款年度最畅销游戏名单中便有10款游戏出自Storm8之手。该公司曾在2011年7月为旗下所有游戏举办了一次促销活动,并在一天时间里便赚取了100万美元的收益。

是谁在掏腰包?

这种成功并不只是发生在Zynga,Kixeye或Storm8身上。当传统发行商正在逐渐衰败(损失了数百万美元)的同时,世界各地未拥有多大名气的工作室也都以非常惊人的速度发展着,并吸引着数百万用户的注意。这些开发者正努力挖掘着传统游戏开发者所忽视的市场,并在此取得了巨大的成功。

投入了多年时间致力于为Facebook用户完善游戏的Murphy说道:“Zynga打败了许多肥皂剧,使得这些年长的女性用户成为社交游戏的主要用户,她们愿意投入大量的时间于Facebook上,因为Facebook扼杀了她们之前用于消遣的肥皂剧等工具。”

“Facebook游戏为各种不同类型的群体(有些甚至从未玩过游戏)打开了游戏市场,就像Wii那样。它们不仅将这些妈妈们带进了游戏,也将各种家庭带进了游戏,并将那些从未接触过游戏的用户带进了游戏。”

随着大量新玩家的涌入,并且这些玩家都拥有足够的金钱,所以社交游戏也迎来了新的赚钱机遇。

数字广告代理公司Rokkan的战略通信经理Melyssa Brown说道:“我曾经阅读过一篇关于Zynga扼杀了肥皂剧的报道。并因此促成这些喜欢观看肥皂剧的年长女性开始将更多时间投入在Facebook上,并成为了社交游戏的重要组成部份。”她的本行便是挖掘各种趋势走向,并且她也最清楚一家公司是何时开始获得优势。所以她认为,社交游戏的成功并非偶然。

她说道:“像Zynga和PopCap等社交游戏创造者都具有一种相同的态度和行为,即投入大量时间于游戏玩法中,并以此去吸引更多‘休闲’玩家的注意。

如果一款游戏足够简单有趣,并让玩家能够在此与好友通过竞争或合作而完成一个共同目标,我又有何理由不玩这款游戏呢?”

她表示外行们也都知道社交游戏。与传统游戏不同的是,社交游戏并不要求玩家必须拥有主机或高级的PC,并必须掌握一定级别的游戏知识,相反地,几乎家家户户都能够接触到像Facebook以及智能手机等社交游戏平台,从而他们都能够轻松地下载到游戏(并且大多数游戏都是免费的)。玩家无需访问Best Buy或GameStop,他们也不需要知道像Steam或GOG等服务或清楚显卡的性能等。准入门槛较低,对系统或装备并无特殊要求,并且玩家无需对此做出任何长期的承诺等便是社交游戏所追求的完美的生态系统。

Brown说道:“‘典型’的社交游戏玩家是那些拥有较高购买力的40多岁女性,所以微交易便成为了游戏创造者获得收益的主要来源。”

“便宜,简单和乐趣便是高利润的来源。”

鲸鱼玩家和违法行为

Zynga_SF_staff_in_atrium(from theverge)

Zynga_SF_staff_in_atrium(from theverge)

根据TJ Murphy,社交游戏开发者主要使用两种免费模式。第一种便是像Zynga等公司所使用的模式。如今Zynga每一季度都能吸引将近350万的付费玩家,并且这些付费玩家平均每个月会在虚拟产品中投入将近30美元。这与传统的PC游戏(如《英雄联盟》)区别并不大,即玩家是基于免费模式而游戏,但是有一部分玩家每个月却会投入20至30美元于微交易中购买各种道具(如色彩丰富的帽子等装饰品)。另一种模式便是Kixeye所使用的模式,即向玩家出售时间。在Kixeye的玩家vs玩家硬核游戏中,玩家可以通过花钱而加速游戏进程,从而让自己更快速地前进,并拥有对手所没有的优势。

Murphy说道:“许多游戏会煽动玩家投入数千美元于游戏中,这些玩家便是我们所说的鲸鱼玩家。所以开发者通常都会采取两种不同的策略:一种是鲸鱼策略,即在PvP硬核游戏中推动玩家为了获胜而投资数千美元的成本;另一种便是大众市场策略,即Zynga所使用的方法,吸引大多数玩家为游戏投资20至30美元。”

如果社交游戏推动着玩家通过微交易而进行无止尽的投资,我们又该如何阻止开发者利用玩家的这种胜负欲望所做出的推动消费行为呢?

Murphy说道:“很多人都将这种行为当成是不道德的行为。最近日本法律便将一种游戏功能视为非法手段——也许有许多人不能理解这种做法,认为这不过是游戏而已。但是因为日本社交游戏市场遭受到Complete Gacha赌博功能带来的各种负面影响,并且日本政府认为这种功能具有滥用性,所以才最终决定使用法律条款去约束它。”

基于Complete Gacha,玩家可以花钱去交换任何道具——就其本身而言这并不具有违法性。但是当玩家想方设法去收集一整套的道具并因此获得奖励时,这一功能便渐渐暴露出赌博性质。虽然这种方法能够激励玩家收集齐所有道具,但是因为有些道具较为稀少,并且玩家并不清楚自己投入了多少钱(直到最后才清楚),Complete Gacha总是鼓励玩家不顾一切地进行投资,但是有时候游戏却不能给予玩家等价的奖励。

西方社交游戏中也出现了类似的系统,但是它们却不是要求玩家使用现实中的金钱。即使是在赌博主题的游戏中,如《Zynga Poker》,玩家也不能够用真钱买卖游戏筹码,这就意味着玩家不会在游戏中无故遭遇金钱损失。

Murphy表示尽管还是有许多人对这类型的社交游戏表示反感,但是他也相信大多数开发者都不会去利用玩家,因为如果他们真这么做了,那么精明的玩家便会果断地选择离开游戏。

他说道:“很多人会认为游戏利用了这些鲸鱼玩家,但是当你深入研究时你会发现这些玩家并不是那种被骗光了钱的穷光蛋。他们反倒是拥有高净值的个人投资者。”

“最常见的一种误解是社交游戏开发者总是操纵着玩家为游戏花钱。很多人都认为Zynga肯定拥有许多心理学家在调整游戏机制,从而引诱玩家去做某事。我想说的是如果他们真的在使用这种策略,并且发挥了功效,我们便能够看到更多人为这些游戏掏腰包。但是事实上却不是如此。”

“只有5%至10%的Zynga用户会为游戏花钱,所以如果他们真的使用了一些特别手段去引诱玩家,我们现在看到的便不会只是这个数字。掏出信用卡与付钱间其实存在着一个高度摩擦的过程,这与人们平时花钱并不相同。玩家将带有目性的地说道‘我花钱是为了玩这款游戏。’”

Murphy还表示,很多人都错误地认为在免费游戏中花钱是不合理的做法。他认为所有关于游戏内部消费的消极反应都是不合理的。

他说道:“最后需要强调的是,玩家在免费游戏中的投入远远不及零售的盒装游戏。玩家可能会到Best Buy花60美元购买一款游戏,并在玩了2个小时候觉得游戏非常糟糕,这就等同于他损失了60美元。而在免费游戏中又有何不同呢?玩家可能会在一周时间里投入20个小时于免费社交游戏中,并在一个月的尝试后选择每周支出10美元继续玩游戏。我们可以很明显地看出哪种才是真正有价值的体验。”

Zynga的游戏

所以怎样才算更优秀的游戏体验?更确切的说是怎样的游戏体验才能吸引玩家愿意为提速而掏腰包?

Bill Jackson是Zynga Dallas的创意总监。在组建Bonfire Studios(游戏邦注:最后被Zynga所收购了)前他曾效力于Ensemble Studios并参与了《帝国时代》以及《光环战争》的创造。作为一名跨越了传统游戏开发并领导着团队创造了《CastleVille》这款出色游戏的开发者,他认为社交游戏吸引玩家的关键便在于以一种简单,容易理解的方式去呈现各种复杂的内容。

他说道:“就像《魔兽世界》与《无尽的任务》的比较。《无尽的任务》是一款相对复杂的游戏,它拥有难以琢磨的任务系统,并带给玩家一种更自由且更刺激的体验;而《魔兽世界》则相应地完善了这一点,即让游戏更容易控制并呈现出更容易理解的内容。”

关于这种完善的一种方法便是源于游戏购买与销售机制。在《魔兽世界》中,为了购买或销售道具玩家需要与商人进行交流并以此打开对方的口袋。玩家通过右击自己所拥有的道具而进行出售,并右击商人的道具将其买进。而在《无尽的任务》中,玩家如果要执行相同的任务便需要仔细阅读有关购买与销售的各种标签。

Jackson说道:“这两款游戏的游戏玩法非常相似;同样也具有一定的复杂性与深度,但是它们的控制却截然不同。也就意味着一款游戏比另外一款游戏更能吸引广大的用户群体。”

他表示尽管像《CastleVille》等游戏从表面看来非常简单,但是事实上玩家所面对的任务与传统游戏近乎相似。例如,在传统角色扮演游戏中玩家必须不断收集道具,制造各种对象并面向非玩家扮演角色(NPC)执行任务——同样的我们也能在社交游戏中看到这些任务,只是这时候任务是以不同角色和主题形式体现出来。

Jackson继续说道:“我发现‘角色的感受方式与要求我去做某事’是类似的;即我执行相关任务,而角色告诉我他们的感受,然后我们便能够携手继续前进。的确,在现在的社交领域中我们还未看到一款能够带给玩家即时快感的硬核射击游戏。但是我却敢保证在不久的将来我们肯定能够创造出这类型游戏,不过那时候我们将迎来一个全新的问题,即多少玩家能够真正并快速理解他们在游戏中所接触到的内容?其实我并不希望看到多少区别的存在。”

“我知道这么做肯定会引起传统游戏玩家的不满,但是我真的难以取舍,因为我同时接触了这两个不同的领域。”

Jackson表示,社交游戏开发者所面临的巨大挑战便是创造出具有深度的游戏, 无需复杂化游戏界面或提高准入门槛而能让玩家深深融入游戏中。他说道:“我常常以象棋为例。象棋是一种非常简单的游戏,玩家总是很容易理解每块棋子的作用,并因此顺利进行游戏。对于我来说象棋便是最佳范例,也是我们今后的游戏创造能够遵循的对象。”

这是一个缓慢的发展过程。游戏越复杂,我们便越难去定义简单的界面,这也是我们为何选择与用户一起完善游戏的主要原因,并且这么做也能够帮助用户更好地熟悉我们的每一款游戏。

Jackson表示他与Zynga的其他开发者正致力于培养一代新的玩家,并试图将他们带向之前从未接触过的全新世界。就像在《CastleVille》中,玩家便会发现自己必须掌握游戏中的锻造系统,并且特定角色能够以不同方式与游戏环境进行互动,甚至连建筑的不同装饰品也能够促成不同结果。而如果玩家更加深入游戏中,他们便能够掌握到更多游戏内容。当他们理解了游戏系统的作用时,他们便能够迈出下一步并尝试一些更复杂的内容。如果有一天当这些玩家做好尝试急动射击游戏的准备时,Zynga便会第一时间提供这种服务。

优秀的游戏设计

Storm8将其成功归因于他们所拥有的各种类别的优秀的游戏。只是创造出一款城市建造模拟游戏,面包店模拟游戏或泡泡射击游戏都不足以吸引玩家蜂拥而上,并投入无数资本于游戏中——玩家可不是你想象中的那么简单。

Storm8首席设计师Mitch Zamara表示,从前的开发者侥幸能够向那些并不是很了解游戏的玩家发行游戏,而现在的社交游戏开发者却不得不更加努力才能赚取游戏内部的交易收益。

在泡泡射击游戏中,开发者总是很容易去复制其它益智游戏。Zamara分析道:“当我们在制作一款游戏时,我们的目标便是创造出同类型游戏中最优秀的一款。新兴的泡泡射击游戏类型便是一个很好的例子。《Bubble Safari》(Zynga)和《Bubble Witch Saga》(King.com)在Facebook上一经推出便迅速吸引了大批用户的注意;几乎每个玩家都在玩泡泡游戏;甚至每隔一天就有开发者宣称自己的泡泡游戏的问世。不过在手机平台上这一类型的游戏却未能取得同样骄人的成绩。我们所推出的泡泡游戏是《Bubble Mania》,而它现在已经名列免费应用排行的前25名以及最畅销应用的前100名内。”

Zamara表示社交游戏开发者必须创造出能够激励玩家的游戏。就像在泡泡射击游戏中,开发者很容易去复制其它益智游戏并以此去吸引潜在玩家,但是最终起决定性作用的还是细节元素,并且细节也是突显Storm8游戏的重要内容。

在《Bubble Mania》中,玩家可以基于不同模式而游戏,并能够选择使用不同的泡泡枪——这是其它泡泡射击游戏所没有的内容。因为泡泡的特殊纹理设计将会创造出一种坚韧的摩擦,从而使得每次泡泡破裂时都会发出“pop”的声音,并且当两个泡泡撞击在一起时也将会表现出气球碰撞时的效果。带有美感,特性的游戏才能吸引特定类型玩家的注意。

Zamara说道:“我们每周都会更新游戏关卡,并时刻监视着游戏的发展从而即时调整游戏,以确保玩家能够感受到最适当且最公正的游戏体验。”

“从总体来看,这些游戏只能吸引那些希望在一天工作之余(一般是5至10分钟)玩游戏的玩家。也就是他们希望能够快速体验游戏乐趣。”

“类似的游戏如《FarmVille》或《FrontierVille》便为玩家提供了迷你的禅境花园体验。可以说这些游戏是帮助玩家逃离现实生活并在此掌控一切的圣地。”

Storm8的禅境花园便清晰地呈现在它的“故事”系列游戏中,即其附属工作室Team Lava所开发的游戏。玩家可以在《Bakery Story》中经营一家面包房,在《Dragon Story》中饲养龙,或者在《City Story Metro》中建造一座类似农场的城市。

Zamara说道:“着眼于市场整体并明确创造这类型游戏的机遇,我们便能够为玩家创造出真正的‘圣地’,让他们能在此尽情享受短暂的游戏乐趣。”

对于更倾向于硬核游戏领域的Kixeye来说,成功不只停留在即时策略游戏的设计上。

Kixeye市场营销部的高级副总裁Brandon Barber说道:“你能够轻易创造出一些相对肤浅的游戏内容,即让玩家只愿意玩一至两次,或者是十次;但是如果你想要创造出能够吸引玩家长达12个月,甚至是18个月的游戏,你就必须重视游戏深度和用户粘性。”

他说道:“你必须让玩家愿意玩你的游戏;并且你的游戏必须能够基于一个基本层面而激励玩家。不管是你在手机,Facebook,浏览器还是主机上玩游戏,这些游戏都具有一个共同点,即它们都具有优秀的游戏设计。如果任何一个平台上的一款游戏能够吸引你的注意力,那就证明它的游戏设计具有过人之处。”

“此时不管是Xbox 360还是手机平台都不重要。一款游戏存在的关键在于它是否能够让你感到满足,是否能让你在空闲时间娱乐并充实自己。这才是游戏真正应该把握的要点。”

误解

Tynon_Art(from theverge)

Tynon_Art(from theverge)

尽管社交游戏正飞速发展着,并且其销量也直逼传统发行商所拥有的成绩,但却并不是所有人都愿意将社交游戏当成“真正的游戏”看待。

Mitch Zamara说道:“我们仍处在发展初期,现在也还未出现哪一款社交或手机游戏能够与传统游戏真正相抗衡。”

“这是两种完全不同的类别。就像社交游戏和手机游戏其实与任天堂游戏的遭遇很相似。任天堂游戏也经常因为更倾向于休闲大众市场的主机游戏而遭到批评——即背离Xbox或PlayStation领域,所以社交游戏和手机游戏也只是待在属于自己的游戏类别中。”

传统游戏玩家所怀疑的并不只是承载着游戏的不同平台。Zamara也表示在早些时候,许多社交游戏开发者都将游戏业务当成是一种占据领地的活动;即每个人都在奋力拉拢更多用户以尽快创建属于自己的网络领地,但却因此而忽视了游戏设计,沉浸式和乐趣。

根据uCool(最近刚发行了社交角色扮演游戏《Tynon》)的业务拓展总监Benjamin Gifford(曾致力于早前的硬核社交策略游戏《Evony》)所说的,对于社交游戏来说,这种最初的领地占据活动弊大于利。Gifford指出,玩家之所以会怀疑今天的社交游戏是因为早前的许多社交游戏总是在滥用各种战术。

Gifford说道:“一朝被蛇咬,十年怕井绳。”

“玩家们都记得自己玩过一些不断被要求向好友发送垃圾邮件的社交游戏。而对他们来说这些游戏真的一点乐趣都没有。他们只需要在游戏中不断地点击动物便可,这哪算得上是一款游戏。”

“因为玩家曾经有过这种遭遇,所以当再次面对社交游戏时他们便会想起之前的经历,而不会愿意再经历同样的内容。”

盲目模仿和复制

每个产业都会犯错,而Gifford更是认为社交游戏是其中犯过最多错误的一个。最严重的错误便是许多游戏都将玩家当成垃圾邮件承载者去帮助他们在整个Facebook平台上做宣传,并不断向好友发送邀请信息。而较轻的错误则是开发者所创造出的肤浅的游戏体验。比起强调游戏的用户粘性和乐趣,开发者更加关心如何推动玩家向好友发送垃圾邮件并利用好友间的信任(游戏邦注:利用这种信任是指如果好友邀请你加入游戏中这便只是一种个人推荐)而获得更多用户。

第三种错误便是盲目模仿。

Gifford说道:“我认为模仿与复制具有差别。我认为模仿并不是一件坏事。

因为很多时候开发者将会看中之前一些著名的游戏,然后他们便会将自己的想法添加到游戏中,并引进全新的机制,更优秀的服务型软件以及更出色的用户服务等,所以尽管游戏体验有点相似,但是从整体上看来却是两款完全不同的游戏。”

“我不能忍受任何复制行为。因为对于我来说这便是在窃取其他开发者的辛苦工作。对于我来复制品几乎就是在窃取别人的内容,除了添加一些不同的精灵或图像,甚至有些游戏还保留了相同的图像,而这便是最大的问题。”

2009年当《Evony》发行后便出现了47款复制游戏,并且所有游戏都是基于免费模式以及带有类似机制的浏览器模式。他列举了EA的《Lords of Ultima》,这款复制游戏便只是调整了Ultima IP的皮肤。当然,也有些玩家想要体验Ultima世界,所以如果开发者能够更加努力地创新并不断完善游戏理念,那么这种复制行为便不一定是坏事。

在《Evony》发行的同一年,一位承包商直接复制了整款游戏,即盗取了游戏代码并使用新的精灵而发行游戏。复制游戏被重新冠以了《Caesary》,《Epic X》以及《Call of Roma》等名字。游戏界面完全相同,代码也几乎一致(甚至连错误的地方也照搬了),这些盲目的模仿者甚至复制了《Evony》在2009年的横幅广告(现在已经不再适用了),即关于一名衣着暴露的女人向玩家招手呼唤着“来玩吧,我的主人。”

Gifford表示从2009年起他们便不再使用这些广告了,但是因为各种复制者打着不同名号继续使用这些广告,从而让许多人误解《Evony》将以全新的外形并使用与3年前相同的策略再次问世。而这种误解非常不利于该品牌的发展,甚至会让玩家在玩其它开发团队所创造的复制游戏时还会误以为自己在玩《Evony》。

除此之外,盲目的模仿行为并不利于推动游戏产业的有序发展。这只能说是一种彻彻底底的偷窃。

Grifford及《Evony》团队将这些盲目的模仿者告上了法庭,他们投入了3年时间并花费了大量的金钱在打这场官司。虽然最终赢得了诉讼,但却发现模仿者是来自中国的公司,而美国法院的判定对于国外公司并不起作用。

盲目模仿与复制并不只是早期社交游戏开发中所存在的问题。最明显的目标之一要数Zynga的社交游戏了,并且随着该公司的日渐壮大,有关他们的复制行为的批评也日趋增多。

我们可以发现许多批评该公司游戏开发业务的报道。例如Zynga复制了其它开发者的作品,滥用游戏设计战术和玩家的信任,甚至还遭到其最大竞争对手EA的侵权指控,即关于Zynga的《The Ville》抄袭了EA的生活模拟游戏《模拟人生社交版》。

复制是游戏开发中的一种商业战术,并且比起其它产业,这里有更多人愿意去接受它。但是如果开发者像Zynga这样能够赚取比世界上最大的发行商还多的利益时,他们为何不考虑推出玩家从未接触过的新游戏?为什么一开始便选择走上复制游戏的道路?

Benjamin Gifford认为复制行为的始作俑者是开发者的业务策略——某些开发者认为自己的目标便是通过复制别人的游戏而打败同类型竞争者并赚的更多收益,而Mitch Zamara则认为不管是社交游戏开发还是传统游戏开发所给出的答案都是一样的。

Zamara说道:“我想不管是游戏开发者还是发行商选择避开大风险的原因都是相同的。”

“公司必须做出最明智的业务决策,同时他们还需要承担不可预知的风险,因为最终可能会因此遭遇损失而失去获得成功的机会。”

“我们很少会看到AAA级游戏开发者去尝试那些未经证明或未获得市场认可的内容,而社交和手机游戏开发者亦是如此。当然了,肯定也存在一些敢于尝试的人,但是市场上的巨头们却永远不属于这一行列。”

社交游戏的未来

社交游戏已经成为了我们生活中的一部分——不管我们喜不喜欢游戏,尽管现在这一产业中的最大开发商正遭遇诉讼案件的困扰,但是整个社交游戏产业却仍平稳地发展着:所有人都有自己需要完成的任务,他们正在用自己的双手缔造着社交游戏的未来。

Kixeye的Brandon Barber说道:“我们的目标是制作游戏,制作出真正有趣的游戏,并且我们也希望通过自己的努力而创造出一些真正有意义的内容。”他坚信不管出现怎样的竞争者,社交游戏都将迎来光明的发展前景。

他说道:“我们并不害怕实验,也不害怕测试结果,如果我们能够遵循最正确的发展方向,我们绝对能够走向更加有利的发展道路。”

“与之相比的是,在传统游戏产业中开发者会投入1千万美元并使用数百名成员去创造一张塑料磁盘(游戏),并将插入主机上播放,然后便集体去度假并期待着游戏的最终销售成果。他们将发行游戏并期待着能够遇到具有创造性见解的营销人才。但是在社交游戏领域却是完全相反的情况。”

Barber表示现在的社交游戏开发者能够更加灵活地回应玩家们了。他们不仅能够快速回复玩家反馈,同时也能够快速做出修改,而如果玩家希望看到完全不同的游戏内容或者想尝试急动射击游戏,他们也只需花几个月的时间便能够完成理念设想,原型创造以及最终发行过程。也就是现在的开发者不仅开发速度更快了,连学习速度也不甘落后。

Benjamin Gifford说道:“对于首个营销某样产品的人或市场营销领导者来说,做到不犯错真的非常困难。但是我们应该对犯错报以一定的期待,因为至少我们能够从中学到一些重要的内容。很多开发者便很好地利用了犯错的机会。他们通过尊重玩家并提供给他们有价值的内容而有效地执行着自己的业务。”

许多社交游戏开发者都认为这一行业确实犯了些错误,虽然许多错误具有不利的影响,如公然在玩家的Facebook推广墙上进行宣传,就像EA和Zynga所做的那样,但是他们同样也坚信:社交游戏将吸取更多经验和教训而更加平稳快速地发展着。

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

The secret sauce of social games

By Tracey Lien

A rotund corgi — well groomed, adequately fluffy, perfectly pudgy — gently tugs on its leash as its owner walks it down Townsend Street in San Francisco. The corgi’s feet make hacky-sack sounds as they flop against the ground; its owner, dressed in jeans and a hoodie, makes a turn into a building located at number 650.

Over the course of the day almost 2,000 individuals — mostly laid back 20-30 somethings, some with corgis, some with mixed-breed canines, and the odd person with a cat (who we shall not speak of) — will pass through the doors of 650 Townsend Street, an enormous four-story office that occupies an entire block in the district south of Market Street.

The brick building is home to Zynga, the world’s largest game developer on Facebook. Its games boast more than 300 million monthly active users. It claims its players are performing one million in-game activities every second, and more than 55 million people from all around the world play at least one of Zynga’s game every day. It has the market capital to rival some of the biggesvideo game publishers in the industry and flat out dwarf most traditional publishers that have been around for much longer.

Whether the corgis know it or not, their owners are making games that are played by millions and rake in billions. And they’re not alone.

The dark horses of game development

TJ Murphy, co-founder of the company behind MinoMonsters — a social game where players build a team of cherubic monsters and battle with their friends — has been in the industry for years. He was a product manager at Zynga where he was responsible for guiding the viral, social, and game design elements of FarmVille and CityVille, games that are now household names. Murphy also boasts an achievement that no other developer — not even Zynga — can put its paw on: he created and launched the first social game to ever be released on Facebook.

“I had seen a lot of these web-based games that were more or less forums with game mechanics around them; they were very simple and they were like ‘hit a button in a web forum to train troops’ and ‘hit a button in a web forum to attack someone else’,” he says.

“I like the simplicity of those games; they remind me of when I was in school, kids would play games on their calculators because they didn’t have phones. I used games like those as inspiration … This was in 2007 when they first opened the Facebook platform so it was one of the very first apps on the platform.”

That game was called Warbook. Social games as we now know them were non-existent at the time, but in the years that have passed since Facebook launched as a video game platform and Warbook made its debut, the industry has exploded.

“If we’re just looking at Zynga, it has a market capital of almost $4 billion. It has hundreds of millions of players every month, and Zynga has more players now than Facebook had users in total five years ago,” he says. “Social games in general have kind of blown up and become a phenomenon with FarmVille becoming part of the common vernacular. It’s really kind of caught on as a new way of gaming.”

It’s not just Zynga that’s ballooning at a time when traditional publishers are clamping down and cutting costs. A few miles north of Zynga’s Townsend Street headquarters, a social game developer called Kixeye has just moved into its new office in the heart of

Downtown San Francisco. The studio currently occupies three floors of a high-rise building overlooking the city center. It’s a shiny new office with an intergalactic-themed foyer that offers a superficial simulation of being on a spaceship. Best known for its real-time strategy social games, Kixeye is expanding rapidly, opening an Australian studio in Brisbane earlier this year and hiring more than 20 new employees every month. It’s expanding so aggressively that, at the time of writing, it has job recruitment ads plastered all over San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) trains, buses, and stations. The studio plans to have 300 employees by the end of the year.

Over in Redwood City, about a half-hour’s drive from Kixeye, a studio called Storm8 and its subsidiary studios are carving out a place for themselves as one of the top developers in social games. It, like Kixeye, may not be a household name, nor is it as well known as Zynga, but that doesn’t make its achievements any less impressive.

The studio currently has 120 employees, with this number expected to double by the year’s end. The studio has 33 live games across five brands. It has a combined network of five million daily active users, 300 million combined installs on over 100 million devices and, at the end of 2011 when Apple published its top 100 grossing games for the year, 10 of those games were by Storm8. When the company held a sale across all its games in July 2011, it made $1 million in a single day.

Who’s spending?

These stories of success aren’t unique to Zynga, Kixeye, or Storm8.

All around the world studios that few people have heard of are growing at an unprecedented rate and attracting millions of users at a time when traditional publishers are losing millions of dollars. These developers are tapping into a market that was previously neglected by traditional game developers, and it’s paying off.

“The majority of Facebook players are going to be your classic soccer mom,” says Murphy, who spent years perfecting games for a Facebook audience.

“I read somewhere that Zynga killed soap operas. There’s this group of older women that makes up the majority of social gaming who are spending more and more of their time on Facebook, and Facebook games in particular are killing things like soap operas that they typically used for entertainment before.

“Facebook gaming has kind of opened up the gaming market to different demographics that didn’t play games before, in same way that the Wii did. It’s bringing in all these moms into gaming; it’s bringing families into gaming; it’s bringing people that just weren’t into gaming before,” he says.

And with an influx of new players who have money to spend comes new opportunities to make money.

“I read somewhere that Zynga killed soap operas. There’s this group of older women that makes up the majority of social gaming who are spending more and more of their time on Facebook.”Melyssa Brown is the strategic communications manager at digital ad agency, Rokkan.

In her line of work she sees trends come and go and she knows when a company has caught onto something good. The success of social games, she says, is no accident.

“The creators of social games like Zynga and PopCap have tapped into several universally shared attitudes and behaviors that helped skyrocket the time spent in gameplay and the unprecedented number of ‘casual’ gamers,” she says. “If a game is easy, fun, and I can compete with my friends or band together with them toward a common goal, why wouldn’t I play?”

She says that the layman is also highly aware of social gaming. Unlike traditional games that require players to own consoles or advanced PCs and possess a certain level of knowledge about games, social game platforms like Facebook and smartphones exist in almost every household, they’re quick to download, and are often free-to-play. Players don’t need to visit Best Buy or GameStop. They don’t need to know about services like Steam or GOG, nor do they need to understand their graphics card’s capabilities. When the barrier of entry is low, there’s no special system or equipment requirement, and there’s no long-term commitment or difficulty, it creates the perfect ecosystem for social games to thrive.

“The ‘typical’ social gamer is a 40 year old female who has high buying power and a revenue stream game creators can tap into via in-game microtransactions,” Brown says.

“Cheap, easy, and simple fun is highly lucrative.”

Whales and outlaws

There are two dominant free-to-play models that social game developers use, according to TJ Murphy. The first is the model that companies like Zynga use. Zynga currently has approximately 3.5 million paying customers every quarter, and each of those users spends around $30 a month on virtual goods. This is not too dissimilar from more traditional PC games like League of Legends where players can play for free, but a percentage of users will spend $20-30 a month on microtransactions to buy items like colorful hats and other cosmetic goods. The second model is one that developers like Kixeye use where they sell the player time. In

Kixeye’s hardcore player versus player (PvP) games, players can spend money to speed up the game so that they can move more quickly, giving them an advantage over their opponent.

“A lot of these these games incite players to spend thousands of dollars, and those are the players we call whales,” Murphy says, with the idea of “whales” being the small group of devoted players who are willing to spend much more than the average player. “So there’s kind of two different strategies: there’s the whale strategy where you have a hardcore PvP game where players spend thousands of dollars and you have to pay to win; then there’s the mass market strategy that Zynga uses where a lot of people spend $20-30.”

So if social games allow players to spend a limitless amount of money through microtransactions, what’s to stop a developer from implementing measures that force a player to pay if they want any chance of winning?

“Well, there’s plenty of people who see this as unethical,” Murphy says. “Recently, Japan outlawed a game feature — and it sounds silly on the surface; why would you outlaw a game feature? It’s just a game! But the Japanese social gaming market is driven on gambling features and there’s one gambling feature called Complete Gacha that Japan thought was so abusive that they had to outlaw it.”

In Complete Gacha, players spend money in exchange for a random item — this on its own is completely legal. But things get murky and veer into gambling territory when players are rewarded when they manage to collect all the items in a set. This gives players the incentive to collect all the items, but with some items being rarer than others and players not knowing what they are paying money for until it is too late, Complete Gacha often encourages players to recklessly spend while the game dangles the possibility of a reward that might never come to fruition.

Similar systems exist in western social games, but none require the player to spend real-world money. Even in gambling-themed gamelike Zynga Poker, players are not able to trade in their chips for real-world money, which means players can’t unintentionally lose money in a game.

Murphy says that while there are still some ill feelings towards social games in this regard, he believes that most do not take advantage of their players, and if they try to, most players are savvy enough to turn their backs on the game.

“There’s definitely some feelings that these people spending thousands of dollars are being taken advantage of, but a lot of the time when you actually dig into it, people who are typically whales are not poor people being fleeced of all their money. They’re typically very high net worth individuals,” he says.

“I think there’s also a common misconception that social game developers are out there to manipulate people into spending money.

A lot of people think that companies like Zynga are filled with psychologists tuning the game mechanics to try to trick people into doing things, and I think if they had a strategy like that and it was working, you’d see a lot of people pay money for these games. But you don’t.

“Zynga only has five to ten percent of its users actually spending money, so if they had some trick that tricked people into spending money, you’d see that number be way higher. The friction of taking out your credit card and spending money is so high, it’s not like people are accidentally spending money. They’re very purposefully saying ‘I’m playing this game and I want to spend money on it.’”

Murphy says that a lot of people also have the misconception that if you’re spending money on a free-to-play game, then you’re doing it wrong. He believes the adverse reaction towards in-game spending is unwarranted and illogical.

“In the end, people spend much less money on free-to-play games than they’re spending on retail boxed games,” he says. “I could go out and buy a game for $60 from Best Buy, play it for two hours and feel like it’s shit, and I’ve just lost $60. How’s that different?

How’s that better than me spending 20 hours a week in a free-to-play social game and choosing to spend $10 a week over the course of a month on that? What’s the better experience?”

The Zynga game

So what is the better experience? More specifically, what is it about these experiences that are so compelling that people are whipping out their wallets at whiplash-inducing speeds?

Bill Jackson is the creative director of Zynga Dallas. He worked on games like Age of Empires and Halo Wars at Ensemble Studios before forming Bonfire Studios, which was later bought by Zynga. As a developer who has crossed from traditional game development to leading the team that made CastleVille, he believes that what draws people to social games is their ability to take something complex and present it in a simpler, easier to understand way.

“So an example would be World of Warcraft compared to EverQuest,” he says. “EverQuest is complex and the quest system is hard to understand and there’s so much freedom and it’s an amazing game experience, but World of Warcraft is a refinement of that. It’s much simpler to control and understand.”

An example of this refinement is in the game’s buying and selling mechanism. In World of Warcraft, to buy or sell an item a player talks to a merchant to open up their bag. They right click on their own items to sell them, and they right click on the merchant’s items to buy them. In EverQuest, to perform the same functions a player has to parse through different tabs for buying and selling.

“The gameplay underneath is very similar; there’s a lot of complexity and a lot of depth, but the way you control the two games is very different,” Jackson says, “which means one is going to appeal to a much broader audience than the other.”

He says that while games like CastleVille might look incredibly simple on the surface, the quests and tasks players have to accomplish are not too different from those in many traditional games. For example, players in traditional role-playing games are often required to collect items, craft objects, and perform tasks for non-playable characters (NPCs) — tasks that can be found in many social games, albeit wrapped in a different interface with different characters and themes.

“I see lots of similarities between ‘this character feels this way and is asking me to do these things; I do them and then they tell me how they feel about that and we progress through the story together,’” Jackson says. “Yes, I don’t see right now a hardcore twitch-based instant gratification shooter in the social space. I bet we could create one that could exist there, but the question is how much of the audience would understand all the things they really need to play that game and understand it quickly? I guess what I say is I don’t really see the difference.

“I know that there’s animosity there sometimes from traditional gamers, but I don’t have any and I come from both spaces.”

Jackson says that the challenge for social game developers is creating an in-depth game that can become complex as the player delves into it, without complicating the interface and raising the barrier of entry. “The example I always give is chess,” he says.

“Chess is a very simple game; it’s very easy to understand how all the pieces work and once you know you can play forever. That’s really to me the holy grail and it’s what you should be going after.

It’s a slow process to get there. The more complex the game is underneath, the harder it is to refine the interface to be very simple, and that’s why we take incremental improvements with our audience and bring them along so that they learn from each game.”

Jackson believes that he and other developers at Zynga are training a new generation of gamers and bringing that audience cautiously into a world that they may not have known before. In a game like CastleVille, players learn that there is a crafting system they can master and that certain characters interact with environments in different ways, and in a game like CityVille different decorations on buildings yield different results. There’s actually something that players can master if they delve a bit further into the game.

When they understand how these game systems work, they’re ready to take the next step and try something more complicated. Some day, if they’re ready for a twitch-based shooter, Zynga will be there.

Good game design.

Over at Storm8, the studio attributes much of its success to having the strongest game in every category it enters. It’s not enough to create a city building simulation or a bakery simulation or a bubble shooter and expect people to flock to the game and throw dollar bills at the developer — players are not that simple.

Mitch Zamara, a senior designer at Storm8, says that while once upon a time developers could get away with releasing shallow games to an audience that didn’t know better, social game developers now have to work a lot harder to earn those in-game transactions.

In a category like the bubble shooter where it is incredibly easy for developers to copy each other’s puzzles … Zamara says it all comes down to the details. “When we push a title out, our goal is to be the best in that category,” Zamara says. “I think a good example of that is the recent emerging category of the bubble shooter. It’s taken over Facebook with Bubble Safari (Zynga) and

Bubble Witch Saga (King.com); everyone has a bubble game; every developer is announcing their own bubble game every two days. But the category hasn’t really been super successful on mobile. We just put out a game called Bubble Mania and it’s already in the top 25 free apps and it is the top 100 grossing as well.”

Zamara says that social game developers have to create a game that is stimulating and exciting for the player. In a category like the bubble shooter where it is incredibly easy for developers to copy each other’s puzzles and flog them at potential players, Zamara says it all comes down to the details, and it’s the details that set Storm8 apart.

In Bubble Mania players can play in different modes and use different bubble guns that are not available in any other bubble shooter. The texture of the bubbles are given a rubbery friction so that every bubble fired makes a satisfying “pop” noise and, when two bubbles collide, they spring against each other in the way balloons might behave. The game comes packaged with an aesthetic, a personality, and appeals to a certain type of player.

“We’re updating new levels every week, constantly monitoring the progression and tuning of the games to make sure it’s not too punishing and overly unfair for our users,” Zamara says.

“I think as a whole these games just appeal to people that want a quick, 5-10 minute break away from whatever they’re doing during the day. They want a quick release.

“I’ve heard the analogy that games like FarmVille or FrontierVille are almost like a mini zen garden for people. It’s kind of their own little private sanctuary where they can be in control of everything.”

Storm8′s zen gardens are most clearly represented in its “Story” series of games, developed by subsidiary studio Team Lava. Players can choose to run a bakery in Bakery Story, raise dragons in Dragon Story, or build a buzzing ant farm-like city in City Story Metro.

The games are played in short bursts, and players are given the satisfaction of seeing fluffy muffins spring forth from an oven they switched on five minutes earlier in Bakery Story, or they can pause and appreciate the tiny cars and people strolling through a bustling city they’ve crafted from scratch in City Story Metro.

“I think by looking at the overall kind of market and seeing the opportunities for creating these kinds of games, we can really give people their own kind of sanctuary to enjoy and play on their own throughout the day when they have that five minutes to spare,” Zamara says.

Over in a slightly more hardcore territory, Kixeye believes that its success comes down to not compromising on the design of its real-time strategy games.

“You can create something that’s incredibly shallow that will get somebody to play it once or twice or maybe 10 times, but to create something that somebody comes back to over 12 months or 18 months, it has to have a certain amount of depth and engagement,” says Brandon Barber, senior vice president of marketing.

“They have to want to play it; it has to be exciting to them on a very fundamental level. Any game you play whether it’s on your cell phone or Facebook or in a browser or console, they all have something in common in that they have good game design. If a game that you’re playing on any one of those platforms draws you in and catches your interest, it has some level of game design that’s really working hard,” he says.

“It doesn’t really matter if it’s on an Xbox 360 or if it’s on a cell phone. It really comes down to whether or not that game is speaking to you in a way that is satisfying to you and scratches that itch you have to constructively fill up that time and compete and level up and best yourself. That’s what gaming is.”

Getting it wrong

Despite social gaming’s rapid growth and the impressive sales figures that put it in the same financial league as most traditional publishers, not everyone is ready to accept social games as “real games.”

“We’re still in a really infantile stage of development and right now you’ll never see a social or mobile game ever being compared side-by-side to a traditional game; it just doesn’t happen,” says Mitch Zamara.

“They’re seen as completely different categories. It’s like we’re the younger step-brother to the Wii. The Wii often gets criticized as being kind of a more casual mass market console that is not even in the same space as the Xbox or PlayStation, so social games and mobile games are in [their] own category even below that.”

It’s not just the platform that the games are played on that traditional gamers are skeptical about, either. Zamara says that in the early days, many social game developers approached the business as a land grab; everyone clamored to get as many users as possible to build their networks as fast as possible, often at the expense of game design, immersion, and enjoyment.

This initial land grab has done more harm than good for social games, according to Benjamin Gifford, business development director at uCool, which recently released the social RPG Tynon, and who worked on one of the earliest hardcore social strategy games, Evony. Gifford says that players have every right to be skeptical about today’s social games because of the abusive tactics employed by developers in many early social games.

“People get burned and they remember why they got burned,” Gifford says.

“Everybody remembers when they played a certain social game that just spammed all of their friends. It really started being abusive and it wasn’t interesting. All they did was click an animal and that was considered a game.

“I think people got burned and now when they talk about social games they remember that experience and they remember that they definitely don’t want to experience something like that again.”

Copycats and clones

Every industry makes mistakes, and the social games industry is one that Gifford believes has made a generous amount of them. At the top of the list is the way many games have used their players as spambots by publishing their in-game activities all over Facebook and spamming their friends with invitations. A bit further down the list is shallow experiences that developers have tried to pass for games. They’ve lacked the design games so sorely need to be engaging and interesting and instead relied on spamming players and abusing the trust that friends have with each other — the trust that if a friend invites you to a game it is a personal recommendation — to gain users.

The third mistake — and the one that really gets up Gifford’s grill — is copycats.

“I think there’s a difference between copying and cloning,” he says. “With cloning, I don’t think it’s necessarily a negative thing. The reason why is because most of the time a developer will see a previous game that’s quite popular and they put their own little spin on it and it might introduce new mechanics, better server software, better customer service, things like that, so even though the experience might be similar, it’s still different enough.

“I can’t stand people who copy, though. I think all that does is rob hard work from the developers. To me, copying is the exact replica, except maybe I put a different sprite on it, or different artwork, or even the same artwork, so that’s a big problem.”
Gifford is no stranger to both. After Evony was released in 2009, it inspired 47 clones, all of which adopted its free-to-play, browser-based model with similar mechanics. He cites EA’s Lords of Ultima as a clone of Evony tweaked with the skin of the Ultima IP.

Fair enough, he says — some people will want to play a game set in the Ultima universe, and as long as developers make the effort to innovate and improve on an idea, then the practice of cloning is not the worst thing that can happen in the industry.

But in the same year as the game’s release, Evony was outright copied by a contractor who swiped the game’s code and released it with new sprites. The game was copied under the names Caesary, Epic X, and Call of Roma. The interface was the same, the code was identical down to the typos, and the copycats went as far as to replicate Evony’s now infamous banner ads from 2009 that featured scantily clad women beckoning the player to “Come play, my Lord.”

Gifford says that Evony hasn’t run any of those ads since 2009, but because the copycat ads keep appearing under different names, many people assume that Evony is repackaging its product and pushing it out using the same strategies from three years ago. This, he says, is damaging for the brand and tricks players into thinking they’re playing an Evony game when they are in fact playing a copied game from a development team that doesn’t have a paper trail.

On top of that, copycats aren’t innovating or contributing to the progression of the games industry. They are outright stealing.

Gifford and the Evony team took the copycats to court, spent three years tied up in a legal battle that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even though they won, they’ve since found that their copycats are based in China where the U.S. court’s judgement cannot be enforced.

Copycats and clones aren’t just a problem from the early days of social game development, either. One of the most visible targets in social games is Zynga, and the criticism it faces with regards to copying and cloning has only gotten worse as the company has grown.

It’s hard to find anything written about the social game developer that doesn’t come with a barrage of snark about the company’s game development practices. The company has been accused of copying other’s work, of employing game design tactics that abuse the player’s trust, and at the time of writing Zynga is facing legal action from another industry heavyweight, Electronic Arts (EA), over claims that Zynga broke copyright infringement laws in its release of The Ville, a lifestyle simulation game that EA claims bears an uncanny resemblance to a game it released first, The Sims Social.

Cloning and copying are regarded as business tactics within game development, with one being more widely accepted than the other.

But if developers like Zynga are bringing in more revenue than some of the world’s biggest publishers, why don’t they blow their competition out of the water with brand new games that no one has seen before? Why copy or clone in the first place?

Benjamin Gifford attributes the prevalence of cloning to developers’ business strategies — some developers see their goal as making money by crushing their competition in the same category through cloning — while Mitch Zamara says that the answer lies in the similarities between social games and traditional game development.

“I think it’s for the same reason that you don’t see major game developers and publishers taking big risks either,” Zamara says.

“Companies have to make smart calculated business decisions and there’s often a bit of a fear in doing something that’s super high risk because it still costs money and it might not be successful.

“You don’t really often see AAA developers taking big leaps very often on something that’s not proven or hasn’t been validated in the market, and I think social and mobile developers kind of fall into the same category. There will always eventually be someone who’s willing to take a risk, but rarely will you see the biggest players in the market be the first to jump into it.”

A social future

To those watching at home, Zynga’s recent troubles seem to cast a dark cloud over social games, but to those playing at home, the only cloud they’re aware of is the puffy nimbus whisking them from one social game to another.

Social games have become a part of our lives, whether we love to play them or love to avoid them, and despite one of the industry’s biggest players facing a potential court case, the rest of the industry is unfazed: they have a job to do, a future to build.

“We’re here to make games. We’re here to make really fun games, and we want to work really hard to build something that’s meaningful,” says Brandon Barber from Kixeye, who believes that social games have a promising future, regardless of the competition gets up to.

“We’re unafraid to experiment. We’re unafraid to test what works, and if we follow what works we’ll be in a much stronger place than when we started,” he says.

“If you compare that to the traditional gaming industry, they spend $10 million with a hundred people to make a shiny plastic disc that goes into a console, and then they go on vacation and hope the game sells. They’ll ship a game and they pray that the creative insight that some genius had two years ago is relevant in the marketplace today. For us, it’s completely inverted.”

Barber says social game developers are in a position to be more agile and responsive to their players. They can respond to feedback quicker, they can patch quicker, and if their players want something different or decide they want a twitch-based shooter they can go from concept to prototype to release in a matter of months rather than years. Not only are they developing fast, they’re learning fast.

“It’s very hard to not make mistakes when you’re the first one to market or one of the market leaders,” says Benjamin Gifford. “You should expect to make mistakes, but at least learn from them. A lot of developers are doing it right. They’re doing business right by their customers by treating their customers with respect and putting value back to the player instead of abusing and milking the player for all they’re worth.”

Many social game developers will agree that the industry has made its fair share of mistakes, many of which have unfortunately played out publicly on their player’s Facebook walls and, in the case of EA and Zynga, in the media. But they can also agree on another thing: social games are here to learn, they’re here to grow, and they’re here to stay.(source:theverge)


上一篇:

下一篇: