作者：Tadhg Kelly

Zynga、ngmoco、Playfish、Wooga以及其他一系列社交游戏发行商究竟为这个游戏行业带来了什么影响？

这无关发行渠道。尽管许多社交游戏公司很擅长找到用户，但这一领域总因创新性vs新鲜感的问题而处于半红不火的状态。今天有许多社交游戏公司基本上是靠广告驱动业务发展，虽然仍在使用社交渠道但却鲜能获得回报。

这并不是游戏设计。社交游戏有许多与时间延迟、门槛有关的机制，但多数游戏日复一日的玩法却基本上来源于《龙与地下城》、《动物之森》、《牧场物语》、《模拟人生》及博彩游戏。

它并不具有美感。PC独立游戏常在主题及基调上进行创新尝试，而社交游戏通常只是在外观上改头换面而已。只有一小部分能够超越这个标准（例如《Dragonvale》），但这一领域除了可爱、友好及大众化的产品，甚少出现恐怖游戏、真正古怪的游戏，打破常规的奇幻游戏。它们缺乏属于自己的文化。

这类游戏所带来的真正变化就是，证明了亚洲游戏盈利模式（游戏邦注：虚拟商品及其他免费增值模式）在西方同样可行。社交游戏将付费玩游戏，付费获优势，付费跳过障碍引进这个市场，掀起了免费游戏玩法的爆炸性发展。但问题在于所谓的大众游戏行业究竟能否以此长存。

freemium(from blog.homegain.com)

即将降临的暴风雨

在1997年之前，市场基本上只有两种出售游戏玩法的模式。一个是售票制，另一个是“季票制”。售票制出现于街机领域，玩家投入一枚硬币可以玩上几分钟游戏，游戏以此挑战玩家的肢体技能。而“季票制”则主要用于主机及PC游戏，你买了游戏设备，获得了游戏，那么你想玩多久都成。

在91年代末游戏经济开始扩展。《Ultima Online》大型多人游戏问世并引进了订阅付费的概念。尽管此前在线游戏已经存在了数年之外，但这些大型游戏生命力却更为长久，并主要侧重于角色扮演游戏等类型。它们开始逐渐蚕食了传统PC、主机游戏的市场。

起初它采用的是严格的订阅模式，但随着时间的发展（大约从2003年开始），有人开始探讨微交易模式理念。当时这种围绕销售游戏关卡的概念在西方几乎无人重视。但数字道具及升级内容在亚洲市场疯狂销售的消息却不绝于耳。对西方市场来说，这种模式听起来很荒唐，后来Nexon的《跑跑卡丁车》问世并宣布年收益达到2.5亿美元时，仍有许多人认为这肯定是子虚乌有的传闻。

当然，这并非虚言，并且还只揭露了这个现象的冰山一角。越来越多大型多人游戏开始试行免费增值模式，《Puzzle Pirtes》等休闲游戏也开始迎头赶上，Zynga也接踵而至。甚至出现了许多专门讨论虚拟商品、免费模式可行性等话题的行业会议。将玩家归为“鲸鱼”和“小鱼”的行业术语也开始逐渐盛行，一时间大众游戏领域中的许多公司似乎陷入了一阵迷茫之中。

他们不明白这一点：免费增值游戏在客观上是个糟糕的理念。它们一般都很简化而并不高级，具有明显操纵意图但并不重视争取玩家的信任。它们缺乏一种真正健康的游戏动态。但还是有许多玩家涌向这些游戏，投资者也不例外。免费增值模式在行业引发许多争议，而为免费增值游戏效力则似乎是一种有失体面的事情，好比是在电视台工作的人总会自觉低于电影同行一等。

这个模式也并不具有广泛可行性。如果你是针对Xbox 360、PS 3或Wii平台开发游戏，那就根本无法采用免费增值模式。这些平台都不支持这种盈利模式，即使有涉及微交易模式，也通常只是出售付费游戏中的额外内容。因为这些销售规模很小（只有少部分例外情况），以至整个免费增值模式在这一领域看似风靡一时的现象。这个市场的“体面”发行商坚信自己的内容才有付费价值，因此并不把Zynga等公司太当一回事。他们认为这阵暴风雨总会过去的。

艰难时期

而如果你有幸为一些高端工作室效力（游戏邦注：例如暴雪、Bethesda、Valve等），可能就不会觉得情况有多严重，但对于这个行业其他多数公司而言，AAA游戏领域已经进入一个惨淡经营的时期。大预算游戏销售额在过去一年下滑了23%，有些月份的情况确实是惨不忍睹。

有些人将此归咎于行业的周期规律，并将矛头指向Xbox和PS3过时的硬件设备，生命周期相对较短的Wii，以及Kinect战略的失败。他们称玩家可能在等待下一代硬件的问世，因此2013年将是市场反弹的年月。但我并不是很认同这个看法。

首先，掌机游戏领域（包括任天堂3DS、Playstation Vita）最近都已经极大更新了硬件设备，但市场反应却很平淡。任天堂不得不大幅削价出售3DS，而索尼Vita基本上毫无生命力可言。看起来玩家似乎并不想花高价购买掌机游戏，他们仅需花十分之一的钱就能买到iPod Touch的游戏。虽然Wii U看起来确实很棒，在许多硬核群体中也大获支持。但还是有不少用户抱怨其300美元售价过于昂贵。

其次，我并不认为硬件升级就真能解决问题。PC游戏玩家仍会坚守阵地，去Steam平台玩游戏，并自认为已经拥有最佳游戏设备。实际上，他们多数使用的只是中低端的硬件而已。PC销量已经开始停滞不前，但要知道游戏玩家曾是PC设备发展的主要推动力。但现在这种情况已经一去不返了，掌机用户应该也会对PS4做出同样漠不关心的反应（“我并不觉得这些硬件有什么进步之处”）。

如果说技术问题不再是一个竞争力，那么售价就是主要影响因素。这对免费供应游戏的数字平台来说尤其如此。这意味着家长更愿意为孩子购买iPad，让他们在iPad上玩游戏应用，而不是去购买掌机和电视，并让家庭电视都被孩子占用玩游戏。这意味着免费就是用户对游戏的期望，这样玩家才好决定是否该购买游戏。这意味着游戏开发成本必须下降。

这很可能永久性地改变游戏行业的动态，暴风雨不会结束。

“免费硬核”用户

发行商进入市场时总需要长尾收益来避免孤注一掷产生的不良后果。动视很早以前就意识到了这一点，并与Vivendi合并业务以便顺利通过《魔兽世界》创收。EA也看出了这一点，并迅速收购了Playfish，迪士尼也不例外，并将Playdom收入囊中。但许多中间阶层的发行商却无动于衷。

clash-of-clans(from finalcheckpoint.com)

在移动及平板电脑市场，许多游戏以0.99至4.99美元发售，但后来就消失在榜单中。能够长踞热销榜单前列的通常是免费游戏，例如《Clash of Clans》、《Dragonvale》和《CSR Racing》。这其中有许多游戏并非杰出产品，但它们却可通过免费模式来弥补其中不足，并寄希望于20个玩家中或许就有一人会在其中消费。

结果就是这个市场出现许多还过得去的游戏，它们都在寻找愿意在游戏中买些东西的少数玩家。这种机制引起了不少大型游戏公司的注意，他们也希望能够从中分得一杯羹。他们想找到不排斥免费增值模式的硬核玩家。而为了运营，他们也不得不这么做。

但真的存在这种免费硬核群体吗？

“核心”或“硬核”是用来形容对游戏价值有自己一套判断标准的铁杆粉丝，这一定义自《毁灭战士》问世以来就鲜有变化。硬核玩家非常重要，他们通常是Kickstarter平台游戏融资项目的支持者，以及《Minecraft》、Steam等独立游戏大获成功的主要动力。他们对游戏充满激情，并且重视游戏的创新性。他们也很看重的游戏公平性。比起花钱获得特殊宝剑，或者荣誉勋章，硬核玩家通常更愿意通过自己的努力而实现这些成就。他们会认为花钱取胜的方法简直有辱自己的身份和地位。

硬核群体的人均游戏消费量很可观，并且极具影响力。这一群体也通常会发挥“布道”功能（游戏邦注：即向他人宣传游戏）。有许多“菜鸟”玩家就是通过这一群体而获得相关游戏资讯或攻略，这也正是促进《使命召唤》或《Borderlands 2》等游戏获得成功的一个原因。但我粗略估计，这一群体在全球范围的玩家不超过2000万-2500万，而菜鸟主机游戏玩家规模却至少达到1.5亿。

免费增值模式并非硬核游戏（除了大型多人游戏）的威胁。Mojang software（《Minecraft》开发商）或TellTale Games（《The Walking Dead》开发商）所收获的用户已足够其维持多年的运营。这对Steam来说是个好消息，对任天堂等平台持有者来说也不算什么坏事。零售游戏仍有一定的市场空间，至少对第一方游戏（例如平台持有者发行的游戏）来说是如此。

但免费增值是菜鸟游戏市场的一大威胁。它很可能瓦解这一市场的游戏定价模式，而对经常借硬核群体获得菜鸟玩家的中层发行商来说，这可是一个大问题。他们通常不知如何同菜鸟玩家打交道，而如果硬核玩家对他们的免费增值模式并不感兴趣，那么他们就无从向这一群体推销游戏。

只要还能玩《火炬之光2》等游戏，硬核玩家可能还是很乐见游戏行业出现的一些变化，他们愿意花钱体验这些游戏。他们对免费增值模式并不感兴趣，而这种情况似乎仍将长时间持续下去。他们当中许多人更希望游戏行业变小一点，不要再向好莱坞看齐，最好恢复其原本面貌。他们希望看到PAX出现的新游戏，而不是E3大会展出的内容。

所以那些试图将硬核群体作为获取其他用户的跳板，并寄希望于他们成为免费硬核用户的AAA游戏发行商也犯了这个错误。硬核群体对此并不感兴趣，这些发行商可以推出极出色的图像和音效等元素，但这一群体并不会买帐。

有些人认为Kabam和Kixeye等公司才是未来趋势，他们将找到或者培养出新的硬核用户。我认为硬核玩家只会成为一个亚文化族群，并促使许多小型开发商反思其价值。我认为免费增值模式仍将日渐盛行，被许多新开发商和发行商所采用；下一代掌机将汇集来自第一方的大预算游戏，以及推行免费增值模式的游戏。

那么当前的中层发行商该怎么办？那些无法屈尊制作免费增值游戏，但又无法掌握自身命运的公司又将如何？这些公司将被这场暴风雨所吞噬。（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 Free-To-Play Storm and the Freecore Gamer

Tadhg Kelly

Editor’s Note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of the leading game design blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. You can follow him on Twitter here.

“All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear — I fear greatly — the storm will not pass” — Winston Churchill

What’s the biggest change that Zynga, ngmoco, Playfish, Wooga and a brace of other social game publishers have managed to effect in the games industry?

It’s not distribution. While many social game publishers have proved expert at finding players, social always had a half-life based on novelty versus irritation. Many social game publishers are ordinary advertising-driven operations today, still using social but seeing low rates of return.

It’s not game design. True, there are a couple of mechanics to do with time-delays and gating which have spread around social games like memes (formally, game designers call them “ludemes”). Yet the ordinary day-to-day gameplay of most big social games is pulled straight from Dungeons and Dragons, Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, The Sims and casinos.

It’s not aesthetic. Where indie PC games are wildly experimental in theme and tone, social games are usually interchangeable in look and style. A few manage to raise above that (for example: Dragonvale), but few in social are making a horror game, a genuinely quirky game, an unconventional fantasy or anything that isn’t cute, friendly and mainstream. They tend to lack a real culture of their own.

Ain’t none of the above genius. The really big change was proving that the Asian model of monetising games through virtual goods and other free-to-play business models worked just as well in the West. Social games brought pay-as-you-go, pay-to-cheat and pay-to-skip to games, and the consequent explosion in free play has fundamentally changed what many players expect. The question is whether the so-called mainstream games industry can really survive it.

The Oncoming Storm

Prior to 1997 there were essentially two models for selling gameplay. One was to sell tickets and the other was to sell season passes. The ticket model happened in arcades, where a coin got you a couple of minutes’ play (maybe more if you were really good) and the game tested your physical skills. The season pass model was the console and PC game. You bought the machine, bought the game and it was yours to play with for as long as you liked.

In the late 90s the economics of games started to expand. Massive multiplayer games like Ultima Online emerged and introduced the idea that you could subscribe. While online play had existed for a few years prior, these massive games were more persistent, and so naturally focused on roleplaying games and the like. They slowly started to eat into what was considered the traditional PC market, and then console.

At first it was strictly subscriptions, but around the edges (circa 2003 and forward) some people started to talk about micro-transactions. The initial idea of this revolved around selling game levels (going back to the arcades), and in the West was mostly ignored. However word kept coming from the East of games that sold frivolous digital items and upgrades. To Western ears they sounded ridiculous, but then games like Nexon’s Kart Rider popped up and announced numbers like $250 million a year in revenue. Many of us assumed this must have been a typo.

But of course it wasn’t. It was the tip of the iceberg. Massive multiplayer games increasingly experimented with free to play, then casual games like Puzzle Pirates and then Zynga. Whole conferences were formed just to talk about virtual goods, how they worked, what sold best or worst. The language of classifying players as “whales” or “minnows” emerged, and all the while many in the mainstream games industry looked on in bafflement.

You see, they couldn’t understand this: free to play games were (and mostly still are) objectively pretty bad. They tended to be simplistic rather than elegant, blatantly manipulative rather than earning player loyalty. They lacked a really robust game dynamic. And yet players flocked to them, and so did investment money. Free to play called into question many foundational assumptions about the industry, while working on free to play games became a little bit like the perceived loss of status that movie people used to feel about working in television.

The model was also unavailable. If you worked in Xbox 360, PS3 or Wii there simply was no path to free to play. None of the platforms supported it as standard, and the odd toe-dip into micro-transactions was usually only the sale of extra content in purchased games. Since those sales were often small (with one or two exceptions), it seemed as though this whole free-to-play thing was either a fad or low-rent. Believing that its content was of premium value, the “proper” games industry largely left Zynga and a few others alone. They thought the storm would pass.

Tough Times

If you are lucky enough to work at one of five or so premium studios (Blizzard, Bethesda, Valve, etc.) then you probably don’t see it, but for most of the rest of the industry these are miserable times to be in AAA games. Big-budget game sales are down at least 23 percent on the previous year, and some months have been truly miserable.

Some peg this on the cyclical nature of the industry and point to the aging Xbox and PS3 hardware, the relatively short lifespan of the Wii and the overall damp squib that was Kinect. They say that gamers are probably waiting for the next round of hardware to be announced, and so 2013 will be a bumper year. I’m not so sure.

For one thing, the handheld industry (Nintendo 3DS, Playstation Vita) has recently had a fairly significant hardware refresh, but reactions were apathetic. Nintendo had to drop the price of the 3DS massively, and Sony’s Vita is essentially dead. It seems that players don’t want to pay premium prices for handheld games in a world where the iPod Touch sells games for 10 percent of the price. Meanwhile the Wii U certainly looks amazing and has many among the hardcore stoked. Yet there’s much rumbling over the price of the unit ($300).

Secondly, I’m not sure the specs argument really works. PC gamers still cling to their rigs, to Steam and to perceiving themselves as having the best machines. Yet they are mostly doing so with mid- or low-range hardware. PC sales have stalled where traditionally it used to be gamers who pushed the PC forward. Not any more it seems. If it transpires that the would-be console purchaser has the same reaction to the PS4 (“I can’t really see the difference”) then that means something.

If technological power is no longer a competitive vector, then price is the primary one. That plays into digital platforms’ hands, especially digital platforms that give their gameplay away. It means that parents are more likely to buy their kids iPads and have them play apps rather than shell out for consoles and TVs (and have the family TV taken over by video gaming). It means that the expectation becomes that the game is free so that the player can know what she’s buying before she buys it. It means that the price of game development itself has to drop.

And that changes the dynamic of the games industry, probably permanently. The storm will not pass.

The “Freecore”

Publishers need long-tail revenues to avoid betting the farm every time they go to market. Activision figured this out a long while ago in merging with Vivendi so that they could get access to that World of Warcraft money. Electronic Arts also saw the light and jumped in feet first by acquiring Playfish. So, too, did Disney with Playdom. Many mid-tier publishers have not.

In mobile and tablet, lots of games are released into the app landscape for prices ranging from $0.99 to $4.99 but then disappear. The ones that remain on top of the Top Grossing charts are usually free to play, like Clash of Clans, Dragonvale and CSR Racing. Many of these are not great games, but what they lack in smarts they make up in offering themselves for free on the understanding that maybe 1 in 20 players will ever get around to paying anything.

The upshot is that you get a lot of okay games trawling users and finding the few who like the experience enough to buy something. That mechanism is one that an increasing number of big game makers are looking at, and wondering if they can be a part of it. They want to find the hardcore gamers who will not be put off by free to play. They have to. Their livelihoods are at stake.

But does that freecore really exist?

“Core” or “Hardcore” describe a type of gamer that has not significantly changed since Doom, who has a fixed set of values about what games are. Core gamers are very vital, often the kind of people who power Kickstarter games and indie successes like Minecraft and Steam. They are passionate and believe in gameplay innovation as a key value. They also believe in the idea of objective fairness. A core gamer prefers to have ground through a game to get the special sword as a badge of honour than to buy it. He considers buying his way through shameful in terms of cultural status and legitimacy.

That core market (which is an umbrella term for a much more complicated landscape) buys a lot of games per capita and is very influential. It serves the function of the evangelist. Many in what I call the muggle market take their cues from whatever the core is excited by, which helps propel a Call of Duty or a Borderlands 2 to success. However the core by itself probably (by my own rough estimate) comprises no more than 20-25 million players worldwide. Whereas the muggle console market is easily 150 million or more.

Free to play is no threat to the core (outside of massive multiplayer games), or for the game developers who focus on it. Mojang software (of Minecraft fame) or TellTale Games (of the Walking Dead) can rely on the audience to stay where it is and keep buying games on PC for many years to come. This is great news for Steam, and it’s not too bad for platform holders like Nintendo either. There’s enough room in that end of the market still for retailing to work, at least for first-party (i.e. published by the platform holder) games.

However free to play is a big threat to large parts of the muggle market. It is much more likely to fragment for reasons of price and so to be attracted to free to play games. And for the mid-level publishers who are used to using the core as a springboard into the muggle market, that represents a massive problem. They often have no idea how to talk to muggles, so if the core gamer is not interested in their free to play proposition then they have no way to really market them.

Core gamers seem perfectly happy to watch the rest of the industry burn as long as they get their FTL, Torchlight 2 and so on. Those are the games they want at the price they want to pay, with the culture that they want to see reflected in their games. Free to play is of zero interest to them, and that situation is likely to remain in the long term. In a sense, many of them would prefer if the games industry got smaller, stopped trying to pretend to be Hollywood and got back to its roots. They want to see what’s happening at PAX, not E3.

So AAA publishers who have used the hardcore as a springboard want them to become a freecore that fills the same role. But the hardcore is not interested. Those publishers can try as much as they like to make big splashes in the market with graphics and sounds and all the rest of it, but there’s nobody really there to take that message in.

This leads some to say that companies like Kabam and Kixeye are the future, that they will either find the new hardcore or create it. Maybe. I think core gamers will simply become the sub-culture that they want to be and promote many smaller developers that reflect its values. I think free to play will continue to go from strength to strength, anointing many new developers and publishers and it does so. I think the next generation of consoles will prosper with a combination of first-party big-budget games and also working with those new free-to-play publishers.

But the current mid-level publishers? The ones who can’t sink low enough to make free to play games and can’t control their own destinies? Those companies will be devoured by the storm.（source:techcrunch）