作者：Tom Cheshire

Jens Begemann每天早上的第一件工作便是核查数据。这位wooga创始人每天早上都会在iPhone上阅读一封凌晨4：04接收到的电子邮件。这是这家柏林公司新游戏《Magic Land》的数据图表，即关于过去24小时内活跃于游戏中的用户数；新注册用户数量；通过Facebook上的请求或好友链接而进入游戏的用户比例。Begemann可以通过“配置加载”而了解到有多少人进入了游戏的第二阶段；多少人完成了教程；玩家在哪个环节进展顺利等等信息。他将根据玩家的游戏行为将其分为新用户，一天留存用户以及每日活跃用户。

Wooga_Jens_Begemann(from gruenderszene.de)

从总体来看，Begemann将研究128个数据点。对于wooga的其它六款游戏他也是如此尽心。Begemann说道：“并不是每天所获得的数据都是相同的，就像周三的结果就比周四好。但是如果我还搞不懂这些报告，我便不可能创造出具有领先优势的产品。”说着他便放下了手机，带他2岁大的儿子去幼儿园了，然后便走路去wooga的办公室（游戏邦住：位于东柏林的普伦茨劳贝格）。

wooga算是一家新型的游戏开发商，重视参数大于创造性。它所遵循的核心原则是A/B测试或对比测试，即面向一些经过筛选的用户呈现新功能，并去评估他们的反应。如果用户喜欢这些功能，他们便会将其留下来。

而如果用户未做出反应，wooga便会尝试其它新功能，直到能够赢得用户的喜欢。wooga的每一款游戏都会保持每周的更新；最初发行只是他们开发过程中的某一阶段。Begemann说道：“在游戏发行后我们便开始受到各种参数的驱动了。在《Brain Buddies》（wooga的第一款游戏）发行的前两周，我们共做了4至5次的A/B测试。可以说几乎每天都会进行迭代。”

如此便会形成一个严谨的过程，对于开发者创造社交游戏并获得成功具有很大的影响作用。首席游戏设计师Stephanie Kaiser说道：“我们会对所有内容进行A/B测试，并想办法优化全部内容。”该公司的前任员工Thorbjörn Warin也说道：“对于产品开发部门来说做到这一点非常简单。他们拥有自己的关键业绩指标（KPI）以及相关参数。就像他们会说‘本周我们将专注于用户留存，所以我们将展开10个相关的活动去提高这一数值。’在《Monster World》前60秒中便有13至15个追踪点。当一个新用户开始玩游戏时，每隔3至4秒钟Stephanie和Jens便能够知道发生了什么。通常情况下他们都需要对内容做出相应完善，而这时候便会融入新的创造性。”wooga的用户不只会玩游戏，他们还帮助设计游戏。

经过证明这种基于参数进行完善的方法非常有成效。成立于2009年的wooga已经发展成为Facebook上第三大游戏开发商（在EA发布《模拟人生社交版》之前它还曾短暂位居第二位！）。wooga的游戏拥有来自231个国家共计3200万的月活跃用户；并且在这些玩家中有700万人每天都会玩wooga的游戏。大多数游戏每天都会吸引超过100万的用户——也只有Zynga和EA的游戏能够达到这一水平。去年wooga的用户数量增长了300%。

wooga是通过销售虚拟产品而盈利（而非通过广告）。根据Begemann的陈述以及公共信息，在扣除Facebook的30%抽成后该公司每年的收益大约在1290万–2000万欧元之间。去年该公司从Highland Partners（游戏邦注：来自美国的投资公司）募得了2400万美元（1480万英镑）的投资。那时候Balderton Capital的合伙人兼wooga的第一投资者Roberto Bonanzinga在谈及Begemann时说道：“他深为用户反馈所着迷。因为他们是基于测试和反馈信息每周推出游戏的一个新版内容。可以说wooga就是一个巨大的测试实验室。”

2008年，Begemann既没有公司也没有想法，并且他当时也还不清楚社交游戏到底是什么。但是他却早已认识到游戏工作室与其它网络服务并无两样，并且数据总是比艺术更为重要。

8月份的一个周四上午10点，wooga的办公室共聚集了35名员工。《Monster World》（游戏邦注：类似于《FarmVille》的一款Facebook游戏，但是却用野兽取代了人类）的新负责人Drussila Hollanda正在进行她的首次周会。她正在解释着游戏的最新更新：引进一个长期的风车功能，也就是游戏在Google+所呈现的那样，基于不同的加载屏幕和货币计划A/B测试，并计算上周的日活跃用户数量。基于每一款游戏wooga每周会召开6次例会。Begemann问到风车功能是针对于A/B测试用户所提供的功能还是面向所有玩家，Hollanda回答这是所有玩家都能够看到的新功能。虽然Begemann对此皱了下眉头，但是还是说：“我们同意也可以对此进行A/B测试检验。但是没关系，就这样设定吧。”

他的办工桌上写着一句话：“快速且大胆地发展。只添加能够提高DAU利益的功能。”他希望第二款游戏能够在两周之内问世。而刚好在一周前，他发行了《Magic Land》，并且吸引了80多万的用户。现在他可以骄傲地对世人宣告，他在两年前所创建的这家公司已经发展成市场中的巨头了。

Begemann是来自德国西部的一个小乡村Barkhausen。他的双亲都是农民，并都只接受了当地学校的教育。当Begemann十岁时，父母给他买了第一台电脑Apple II，也就是从那时起Begemann便开始进行编程。在完成柏林应用科技大学的商业课程后，他希望能够到初创公司谋职。2001年他加入了Jamba（在英国被称为Jamster）。Begemann说道：“该公司希望成为手机领域中的雅虎。但是他们却未能实现这一愿望。”Jamster出售的是付费SMS内容，铃声以及游戏，落得了通过广告和合同欺骗用户以及制造低劣内容的坏名声。

在2008年中旬，Begemann离开了这家公司，并决心变成一名企业家，但是这时候的他却还未明确前进方向。他参加了在旧金山举办的技术大会TechCrunch50，希望在此找到合适的发展方向。他说道：“游戏产业已经发展成为一个强大的细分产业。也许有10%的人口正在为这一产业贡献力量。而我的梦想便是创建一家面向所有人而创造游戏的公司。”现在的Facebook已经为我们提供了一个能够获得所有用户的完美平台了。

Begemann同样也见证了在Facebook上发行游戏改变了游戏的发行性质。开发者已经不再需要将游戏装在盒子中进行发行了，并且也不需要在发行前完成游戏的全部制作，他们甚至可以将实时用户反馈作为持续设计过程中的一大组成部分：每一款wooga游戏都将以“迷你游戏”形式问世，并在今后的每一周时间里进行更新。Begemann便是基于这一原理与他在美国所学习到的，即一些著名的网络公司所采取的对比测试而进行游戏开发。

1747年5月20日，HMS Salisbury的外科医生James Lind进行了世界上首次A/B测试。他选择了12名遭受坏血病折磨的海员并确保“这是我能够对付得了的病例”。Lind将他们两两分成六组，并在他们的日常饮食中注入不同的补充品。他描述道：“最显著的效果是来自于那些服用了橙色和柠檬色补充品的海员；这吃了这些补充品的海员在六天实验结束后都完全恢复了。”

实际上A/B测试算是一种设计实验，而最早进行这种实验的应该是伽利略。而到现在发生改变的只有规模：即我们已经可以同时面对上百万名用户进行测试。亚马逊（1995年）的创始人Jeff Bezos开创了在网络平台上进行对比测试的先驱，他于1997年在员工训练营中宣称：“我们将在亚马逊建立一种参数文化！”该公司的一名员工James Marcus在其撰写的著作《亚马逊》中说道：“来自焦点小组含糊的近似值将消失，来自市场营销部门的胡扯也将被世人所忽视。像亚马逊等公司将能够记录下每一个访客的行动以及他们最后点击的内容。”

会采取这种方法的公司往往都是一些零售公司或软件供应商。而Begemann则意识到A/B测试和可用性测试能够用于一些更具创造性的区域，并将其设定为wooga的一大特性。他说道：“一开始我们就将其整合进基础设施建设中。”Bonanzinga也表示这一点便是说服他再次转向wooga的主要原因，他表示：“当时我已经决定不再向任何社交游戏投资了。但是我却被他们的独特观点和方向所深深吸引了。”

结合游戏理念便是第一步骤—-wooga是在一些成功的游戏上吸取的经验。Begemann于2009年1月与联合创始人Philipp Moeser共同创建了wooga。他们的第一款游戏是《Brain Buddies》。“起初游戏的暂定名称是《Brain Sports》—-我们希望它能将任天堂DS上的成功延续到网络平台上。”在短短的12周内，也就是游戏正式发行前该公司共对《Brain Buddies》进行了12次用户测试。Begemann说道：“这很大程度地影响着游戏最后的发展。”游戏最终诞生于2009年7月，而对于该工作室来说真正的挑战才刚刚开始，即强化测试。这一测试的效果非常显著：在11月份前《Brain Buddies》便拥有了600万的日活跃用户。并且在当月，Balderton也宣称将向这家只有25名员工的公司投资500万英镑。

wooga_game(from wired.co.uk)

wooga一直都是以成功为目标——但是之后Facebook改变了游戏规则。以前，不管用户是否玩游戏都会接收到来自社交游戏的长篇广告内容。尽管这能够帮助游戏更好地进行营销，但也惹怒了不少玩家。而Facebook的改变适当地控制了这种病毒性。Begemann说道：“几乎所有公司都遭遇这种改变的重创。就像在1月份以前我们的月活跃用户便从600万跌至了300万。”开发者已经习惯于快速且具有病毒性的发行方式了，但是至此之后这种战术将不再管用。

对于Begemann来说，市场重组便是另一大威胁。2009年9月，其竞争对手Playdom获得来自迪士尼的2.6亿美元的资金。2个月后，也就是2009年11月，EA以3亿美元的高价收购了Playfish。“当我和联合创始人，以及一些实习生坐在办公室时，我们意识到了自己有多么渺小。我们意识到要想在这个市场上占有一席之地，我们就必须获得临界物质。这是我在2009年所作出的假设，即游戏间的交叉性将变得越来越重要（也就是wooga将引导现有游戏的玩家进入他们的新游戏）。我们可能需要一至两年的时间才能进入排行榜前五名的位置。我们改变了整体的游戏元素，即比起病毒性我们将更加重视用户粘性。”

wooga的下一款游戏是《Bubble Island》。这款游戏发行于2010年2月，并且一经发行便取得了巨大的成功；直到现在每天还有超过200万玩家在玩这款游戏。《Brain Buddies》和《Bubble Island》都属于由广告赞助的免费游戏。它们的目标都是创建用户基础。而之后游戏《Monster World》则拥有更大的野心。这是wooga第一款以出售虚拟商品赢利的游戏。这也是对于该公司整体业务模式的概念验证。

Begemann将游戏移交给他之前在Jamba的同事Kaiser（从未开发过游戏）。Kaiser是从Upjers所开发的网络浏览器游戏《Wurzelimperium》（看起来就像是一张Excel表格，而玩家将在此创建一座花园）身上汲取灵感。她将在保留游戏机制的前提下改变游戏的视角，让它呈现出3D游戏的效果。Kaiser的团队经历了标准化的开发过程，并基于纸上原型进行了可用性测试。但是当这款游戏正处于开发过程中时，其它农场游戏已经相继问世了，包括Zynga的《FarmVille》以及Playfish的《Country Story》。所以该团队不得不改变游戏方向，即“决定突出怪物主题”。

最终《Monster World》于2010年4月问世了。但是很快地这款游戏便停滞不前，即在8月份前它的日活跃用户只剩30万（游戏邦注：wooga将100万用户数作为游戏最低成功标准）。Kaiser说道：“游戏并未呈现出病毒式发展，可以说它根本就未取得成功。”其团队主要专注于三大元素：用户粘性，病毒性以及盈利，并最先着手于第一个元素。Kaiser一开始便明确了“用户漏斗”原理；她发现某一周共有38863位用户开始阅读游戏教程，所以她便决定观察他们是从哪个环节开始厌倦游戏。她说道：“我们并不能接受1.3%的用户流失，而我们也会有针对性地优化游戏。”当他们明确了用户流失后，Kaiser的团队便会想出两种解决方法，并使用A/B测试去验证哪一方法更有效，并将其贯穿于游戏的每个环节中。最终证明这一方法是有效的。在11月16日，《Monster World》的日活跃用户便达到了100万。Begemann说道：“我们发现即使在游戏发行后我们也仍可以改造游戏。即使我一直相信这一点，但这却是我们通过A/B测试所证实的，而这当然也属于一种创造性过程。对于大多数公司来说如果游戏发行四个月后还未取得成功，他们应该早就选择放弃了吧。”

在积累了如此强大的用户基础后，wooga便开始“转向盈利”。《Monster World》允许用户通过多种不同的方法花钱去定制自己的游戏。但是三分之二的wooga收益却不是来自于装饰品（可能只占总销售的2%），而是来自于能够帮助玩家加速的道具：如能够帮助玩家快速收获庄稼的魔杖（240个魔杖需要玩家支付480个Facebook credit，也就约等于76英镑），以及能够创造出其它有价值道具的“woogoo”。也许这听起来很古怪，但是Kaiser表示“必须根据参数决定要不要添加一种功能，它不能只是新鲜好看而已”。

据Begemann，只有不足5%的wooga用户愿意为游戏花钱——“几欧元或几美元，或者有时候也会出现2位数投入。”他们的目标是创造出深层次的用户粘性。Begemann说道：“这便是我们最大的盈利机制。”他们的主要收入来源便是那些愿意花6个月以上的时间去玩wooga游戏的玩家。

先着眼于用户粘性而非病毒性便是一种有效的方法。Begemann将wooga游戏的用户粘性与其它门户网站上的flash游戏进行比较。“那些开发者的目标便是尽快创造出更多游戏，然后允许玩家玩一个小时的游戏后便永远离开。而我则希望创造出容易上手但却难以精通的游戏，玩家需要投入数周乃至数月的时间才能真正掌握游戏。”

根据《旧金山周刊》上的一篇文章，Zynga首席执行官马克·平卡斯对他的员工们说道：“我并不想要创新。我们并不一定比竞争者聪明。所以我们能够做的便是复制他们的创意并努力追赶他们的成绩便可。”

游戏理念或机制很难专利化：就像在音乐或电影中，某些原理能够吸引用户的注意，所以它们便会被反复地使用。而随之肯定会出现某种程度的复制行为。Begemann问道：“纵观电子游戏产业的历史，我们可以从中找到多少不同的游戏类型？共出现了多少第一人称射击游戏？虽然我们总是会受到现有游戏理念的启发，但是我们也会努力创造出一些新内容。”

在过去30年时间里，电子游戏与艺术之间的差别已经逐渐模糊化了了。最近的一些游戏，如《生化奇兵》，《暴雨》以及《黑色洛城》便都呈现出了电影般的体验。而《FarmVille》或《Monster Land》却并非如此。

在社交领域，糟糕的游戏总是能够获得较高的利润。社交游戏开发者并不会尝试着去实现一个具有吸引力的理念：他们会先找到一个具有吸引力的市场，然后通过调整理念去适应这一市场。Menlo Ventures的总经理兼Social Gaming Network创始人Shervin Pishevar于2011年7月在GamesBeat大会上说道：“游戏领域已经从艺术家时代向数学家时代转变。我并不认为Zynga是一家游戏公司，它更像是一家极具商业才能的公司。”

《Exodus to the Virtual World》作者Edward Castronova说道：“像Zynga和wooga这类型公司根本就不在乎产品的结果。他们甚至从未事先规划自己到底在做些什么。因为他们唯一的目标便是创造一个环境让玩家投身其中，不断进行点击并花钱。”

传统硬核游戏玩家对此尤为不满。Begemann认为这并不具有可比性。“社交游戏拿掉了硬核游戏所具有的障碍，让玩家更容易进入游戏。而如果你是属于每周会抽出50个小时去玩游戏的玩家，你自然不会对这类型游戏感兴趣，就像我们的目标用户也不会喜欢硬核游戏。”Begemann也不认为各种参数能够帮助他们更有效地经营相关业务。“wooga所看重的是心灵与大脑的结合。对于我们来说创造性和逻辑分析同样重要。”

如今的社交游戏中出现了新规则。传统游戏可以被概括性地分为技能游戏和运气游戏。而《Monster World》和《FarmVille》则属于劳动游戏：玩家将在游戏中播种并种植庄稼。这种新规则能够有效地吸引一些新类型玩家的注意：wooga大多数用户都是40多岁的中年妇女，她们愿意每天反复登录游戏8次。Harvard Business School的副教授（致力于研究社交网络）Mikołaj Jan Piskorski说到：“拥有两个小孩和一份日常工作的妈妈白天总是辛勤地工作着，下班回到家还要照顾小孩。而当孩子们上床睡觉时，她便已经筋疲力竭了，希望能够放松自己或与好友聊天，不过时间往往都太晚了。而与好友一起游戏便是一种低成本且能够保持联系的好方法。”

游戏质量得到了完善。对于很多社交游戏玩家来说，《FarmVille》便是他们接触过的第一款电子游戏，但是现在这些玩家的衡量标准却变得更高了。wooga产品经理Wilhelm ?sterberg说道：“早前的Facebook用户总是能够忍受那些非常糟糕的游戏，只是因为他们之前未曾看到过这类游戏。但是现在这一平台已经日趋成熟了，即不再沉迷于混乱的病毒式发展，反而更强调游戏质量的重要性。”

制作出最优秀的游戏便是wooga能够争取到的市场机遇（因为它不具备EA和Zynga的大规模）。Piskorski说道：“我们很难在基于城镇理念的游戏上与Zynga一决高下。但是如果我们能够创造出一种全新且具有吸引力的游戏理念，我们便有可能再创Zynga的辉煌。”仅仅用了43天的时间《CityVille》便收获了1亿月活跃用户，但是在一个月后它也迅速丢失了400万的用户。除此之外，《FrontierVille》在2011年9月也仅在短短的1周时间内便失去了100万的用户，而与此同时，wooga游戏《Magic Land》却迅速吸引了60万用户，获得了300多万月活跃用户。

wooga准备在2012年的每个季度都向Facebook上发行一款新游戏；现在他们已经在紧锣密鼓地筹备着3款未公开名字的游戏。这一游戏组合赋予了wooga极其强大的临界物质，而这也是Begemann最想看到的。wooga新游戏的玩家中只有5%是由广告引进：剩下的95%都是通过现有玩家的介绍进入游戏。像Zynga那样（据Silicon Alley Insider数据显示，2009年Zynga在Facebook广告上投入了7200万美元）投入大量广告资金也就意味着他们只能获得较低的每用户平均收益——Zynga每个季度平均只能从每个用户身上获得1.6美元。在2011年第二个季度，Zynga的利润从1440万美元跌至140万美元——由于两款新游戏的高额开发和市场营销成本而下跌了90%。

diamond-dash(from insidemobileapps.com)

战火将蔓延至新的战场。wooga向iOS推出了《Diamond Dash》，并将自己的多款游戏移植到Google+，同时他们也在积极制作《Magic Land》的HTML 5版本（游戏邦注：但该公司最近已公开宣称HTML5技术尚不成熟，Wooga暂不会考虑这一战略）。除此之外他们还将目标转向了欧洲市场。Begemann说到：“对于我们来说欧洲市场比美国市场大得多。并且现在也有许多市场正在迅速发展着。如果我们开始执行本土化策略，我们便会积极测试提高用户粘性的最佳方法。”一开始，wooga便实施了内容本土化策略。现在它的游戏已经出现了7种不同语言版本，并且在不同区域也获得了各种成功（例如，wooga表示他们在法国市场的盈利性便是西班牙市场的4倍）。

Begemann希望能在012年中旬前将团队扩展到200名以上的成员。“我们最大的目标便是在2020年前发展成最棒的游戏公司之一。我知道这听起来可能有点疯狂，但是我们始终坚信这一可能性。这也意味着我们每年需要获得数十亿美元的收益。如果今后9年时间里我们仍然能够保持着过去两年的发展速度，这便是一个可达到的目标。”这算是一种冒险吗？wooga并不会凭空投下赌注：他们定会积极地进行各种测试。

在《Monster World》的讨论会后，为了解决Begemann的质疑，该团队开始对游戏中的风车功能进行A/B测试。一周后，Drussila Hollanda发来了一封电子邮件：“最初的A/B测试结果显示woogoo消费降低的可能性将达到75%，但这不会影响到游戏的DAU数值。这一功能仍将仅面向50%的玩家，因为我们将还深入探索并根据新测试结果进行调整。”

游戏邦注：原文发表于2012年1月5日，所涉事件及数据以当时为准。（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）

Test. Test. Test: How wooga turned the games business into a science

By Tom Cheshire

The first task for Jens Begemann each morning is to check the numbers. On his iPhone, the wooga founder reads an email sent at 4.04am. It shows charts for Magic Land, the Berlin-based company’s newest release: the number of users active in the last 24 hours; the number of new users and bookings; the proportion of unique users who came from Facebook requests or from links on friends’ feeds; how many batches of 15,000 Gold or 545 Diamonds, the game’s currency, were sold. Begemann can see how many made it to the second stage, “Configurations loaded”; how many completed the tutorial; and where those who didn’t dropped off. He checks the geography of players, broken down into new users, one-day retention and bookings per daily active user.

In total, Begemann studies 128 data points. He does the same for the six other games that wooga has released. “Some differences are obvious, like Wednesdays are better than Thursdays,” Begemann says. “But if I still can’t make sense of the reports, I forward the question to the respective product lead of the game.” Then he puts away his phone, takes his two-year-old son to kindergarten and walks to wooga’s Prenzlauer Berg offices in east Berlin.

Wooga is a new type of game developer, one that emphasises metrics over creativity. Its core discipline is A/B or split testing, in which new features are introduced to a selection of users, and their reactions measured. Features remain only if users engage with them. If they don’t respond, wooga tries new features until they do. Each wooga title is updated weekly; the initial release is just another stage in development. “After launch we become very metrics-driven,” says Begemann. “During the first two weeks of Brain Buddies [wooga's first game], we did four or five A/B tests. It was very fast — almost daily iterations.”

The result is a rigorous process that practically automates the creation of a social game, and maximises each title’s chance of success. “We A/B test everything, we optimise everything,” says Stephanie Kaiser, a lead game designer. “In the product department, it’s very simple,” says Thorbj?rn Warin, a former employee. “They have all of their KPIs [key performance indicators] and metrics. It’s really, ‘This week, we focus on nothing but retention, let’s identify ten activities that can increase that.’ In the first 60 seconds of Monster World, there are 13 to 15 tracking points. For a new user, when they start playing, every three or four seconds, Stephanie and Jens can see what is happening. Usually something has to be improved, and that’s when creativity comes in.” Wooga’s users don’t just play a game; they design it.

This paint-by-metrics approach has proved successful. Founded in 2009, wooga is now the third most popular games developer on Facebook (it was briefly number two, ahead of EA, before the launch of The Sims Social). Wooga games have 32 million active monthly users from 231 countries; seven million of these play a wooga game every day. The majority of its games have more than a million users who play daily; only Zynga and EA have managed the same feat. In the last year, the number of wooga users grew by 300 percent.

Wooga doesn’t make money from advertising, but by selling virtual goods. Using Begemann’s statements and public information, wired estimates annual revenue, after Facebook’s 30 percent, at between ￡12.9 million and ￡20 million. Last summer, the company raised $24 million (￡14.8m) from Highland Partners (who invested in Digg), taking its total backing to $32 million. At the time, Roberto Bonanzinga, a partner at Balderton Capital and one of wooga’s first investors, said of Begemann: “He’s obsessed by consumer feedback. These guys release a new version of each game every week, based on testing and feedback. It’s a huge testing lab.”

In 2008, Begemann didn’t have a company, or even an idea, nor did he know what a social game was. But he did know that a games studio should be no different from any other web service, and that data comes before art.

At 10am on a Tuesday morning in August, 35 people are gathered in the wooga offices. Drussila Hollanda, the new lead on Monster World, a Facebook game like FarmVille but with beasts instead of humans, is holding her first weekly meeting. She is explaining the game’s latest updates: the introduction of a long-worked-on windmill feature, how the game is faring on Google+, scheduled A/B tests of different loading screens and currencies, and the number of daily active users (DAU) over the week. Wooga holds six weekly meetings, one per game. Begemann asks if the windmill was A/B tested, or introduced wholesale. Hollanda replies that all users have the new feature. Begemann frowns: “We could also have A/B tested that. But OK. That’s fine.”

Behind his desk is a sign: “Be fast and be bold. Only do features that increase DAU monetisation.” He’s expecting his second child within a fortnight. A week earlier, he launched Magic Land, which already has about 800,000 users. Loud and large, he leans forward and explains how a company he founded two years ago is taking on giants.

Begemann grew up in Barkhausen, a tiny village in west Germany. His parents were farmers and also taught in the local school. When Begemann was ten, they gave him his first computer, an Apple II, and he began coding. After studying business at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, he wanted to join a startup. In 2001 he joined Jamba, known as Jamster in the UK.

“The vision was to be the Yahoo! for mobile,” says Begemann. “It didn’t work out.” Jamster sold premium-rate SMS content, ringtones and games. It earned a reputation for misleading customers with its ads and contracts, as well as for its low-rent content. “Remember the Crazy Frog?” he says. “I’m sorry for that. Very, very sorry.”

In mid-2008 he left the company, determined to be an entrepreneur, but unsure what sort. He travelled to TechCrunch50, a tech conference in San Francisco, in search of an idea and returned with a vision. “The games industry has become perfect at creating games for a niche,” he says. “Maybe ten percent of the population. My dream was creating a company that would specialise in games for the rest, for everybody.” And Facebook now offered the perfect platform for reaching everybody. Begemann also saw that distributing games through Facebook changed the nature of publishing. Games no longer needed boxes to ship. They didn’t even need to be finished before release, and in fact could incorporate live user feedback as part of a continuous design process: each wooga title is released as a “minimum game”, then updated every week. Begemann combined this insight with another he learned in the US: that some of the most successful web companies conduct split testing.

On May 20, 1747, James Lind, a surgeon on the HMS Salisbury, carried out one of the first recorded A/B tests. He chose 12 sailors suffering from scurvy and made sure “their cases were as similar as I could have them”. Lind divided them into six pairs and gave each different supplements to their usual diet. “The consequence,” he wrote, “was that the most sudden and visible good effects were perceived from the use of oranges and lemons; one of those who had taken them, being at the end of six days fit for duty.”

A/B tests are, in effect, designed experiments and they date back to Galileo. All that has changed is scale: they can be conducted on millions of users, in real time. Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon in 1995, pioneered split testing on the web, proclaiming at a staff boot camp in 1997: “At Amazon, we will have a culture of metrics!” James Marcus, then working at the company, later wrote a book, Amazonia, about his time there: “Gone were the fuzzy approximations of focus groups, the anecdotal fudging and smoke-blowing from the marketing department. A company like Amazon could (and did) record every move a visitor made, every last click and twitch of the mouse.”

The companies that took this approach tended to be retailers and software providers. Begemann realised that A/B and usability testing could be applied to more creative sectors too, and set out to make them part of wooga’s identity. “We built it into our infrastructure from day one,” he says. Bonanzinga says this is what convinced him to back wooga. “I had already decided I wasn’t going to do an investment in social gaming. But they had a very specific view of how they wanted to do it,” he says.

Coming up with the game ideas would be the easiest part — wooga studied successful games. Begemann incorporated wooga in January 2009 with cofounder Philipp Moeser. Their first game was Brain Buddies. “The working title was Brain Sports — we wanted to take this success from the Nintendo DS to the web.” In the 12 weeks before launch there were 12 user-test sessions for Brain Buddies. These “changed the game quite a bit”, says Begemann. In July 2009, the game went live — and the real work began: intensive testing. The effect was dramatic: by November, Brain Buddies had six million daily active users. The same month, Balderton announced it would invest €5 million in the 25-person company.

Wooga was set for success — but then Facebook changed the rules. Previously, users had been subjected to a tirade of notifications about social games, even if they themselves weren’t playing them. This annoyed many, but made it easy to market the games. Facebook’s changes curbed this virality. “Almost all companies suffered,” says Begemann. “Our numbers went from six million monthly active users to three million by January.” Developers had become used to fast, viral product launches: so far, Zynga has released 49 Facebook applications; EA has 45. These tactics wouldn’t work any longer.

Another threat to Begemann’s business was renewed consolidation in the market. In September 2009, Playdom, a rival firm, raised finance from Disney that valued it at $260 million. Two months later, in November 2009, EA bought Playfish for $300 million. “Sitting in this office, my cofounder and I, with a few interns — we realised how small we were. We realised that, in this market, you need critical mass. That was my hypothesis in 2009, that cross-linking in games [whereby players of one wooga title are pointed towards new releases] would become super important. We had maybe one or two years to get into the top five. We changed our whole approach to games, focusing on engagement instead of virality.”

Wooga’s next game was Bubble Island. Released in February 2010, it was an immediate success; more than two million people still play it every day. Brain Buddies and Bubble Island had both been free-to-play and were not supported by advertising. Their purpose was simply to build a user base. But the next title, Monster World, was more ambitious. It would be the first wooga title to charge cash for virtual goods. It would be proof of concept for the entire business.

Begemann turned over the game to Kaiser, a former colleague from Jamba, who had never developed a game before. Kaiser took her inspiration from Wurzelimperium, a web browser game developed by Upjers that looks like an Excel spreadsheet in which players cultivate a garden. She would change the perspective to make it look more 3D, but keep the mechanics. Kaiser’s team went through the now-standardised development process, performing usability tests even with paper prototypes. But while the game was in development, other farming games appeared: Zynga’s FarmVille and Playfish’s Country Story. The team changed direction and “decided to look into monsters”.

Monster World launched in April 2010. But it soon stalled, with only 300,000 daily active users by August (wooga considers one million users the minimum mark of success). “It was not growing virally and it was not a success at all,” says Kaiser. The team focused on three topics: engagement, virality and monetisation, and went to work on the first. Kaiser began with the “user funnel”; she studied 38,863 users who began the game tutorial one week, to see where they dropped off. “A 1.3 percent drop is unacceptable and the game is optimised accordingly,” she says. When such a loss was identified, Kaiser’s team would develop two solutions, put them both live as an A/B test, and find out which performed better. And so on across every part of the game. It worked. On November 16, Monster World reached a million daily active users. “What we learned was that you could really turn a game around post-launch,” says Begemann. “It had always been my belief, but that’s the first time we really proved it, by doing nothing else other than A/B testing, and of course being creative. Four months after launch, that’s when some companies would have given up.”

With this larger user base established, wooga “switched on the monetisation”. Monster World offers several ways for a user to pay to customise their game. But two-thirds of wooga’s revenues come not from these adornments, which account for around only two percent of total sales, but from the items that turbo-charge a player’s progress in the game: magic wands, which harvest crops instantly (240 wands cost 480 Facebook credits, worth roughly ￡76), and “woogoo”, which produces several other items of value. These may sound whimsical, but “a feature has to be driven by metrics, it can’t just be cool,” says Kaiser.

Begemann says that fewer than five percent of wooga’s users spend real money — “a few euros, a few dollars, sometimes in the double digits”. Its aim is to promote a deep engagement with the game. “It’s our biggest monetisation driver,” says Begemann. The revenue mainly comes from people who have been playing wooga’s games for maybe six months.

The emphasis on engagement ahead of virality is paying off. Begemann contrasts wooga’s deep approach with that of web portals offering flash games. “Their philosophy is creating lots of games, two a day, and then you play them for an hour and you’re done. I wanted to create games that are easy to get into but are so difficult to master that you spend weeks and months playing them.”

“I don’t fucking want innovation,” CEO Mark Pincus reportedly informed his staff at Zynga, according to an article in the San Francisco Weekly, in September 2010. “You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.”

It’s difficult to patent a game idea or mechanic: certain formulae appeal to users and so repeat themselves, as in music or films. Some degree of copying is to be expected. “If you look at the history of the computer games industry, how many distinctive genres have been invented?” Begemann asks. “How many first-person shooters have come out? Of course we’re inspired by existing ideas, but we always try to bring something new to it.”

Over the last 30 years, the distinction between video games and art has been eroding. Recent titles such as Bio-Shock, Heavy Rain and LA Noire aspire to a movie experience. The same could not be said of FarmVille or Monster Land. In the social era, bad games are making very good money. Developers of social games do not try to bring a compelling idea to life, then release it: they find a compelling market, then fit an idea to it. “We’ve moved in the gaming space from the age of artists to the age of mathematicians,” Shervin Pishevar, MD at Menlo Ventures and founder of the Social Gaming Network, told a panelat GamesBeat 2011 in July. “I don’t think Zynga is a gaming company, it’s a business-intelligence company.”

“Zynga and wooga and companies like that have no interest whatsoever in the outcome of the product,” says Edward Castronova, author of Exodus to the Virtual World. “They have no prior vision of what they’re making. All they want to do is provide an environment that people spend time in and click on and spend money on.”

Such criticism is especially vociferous from traditional hardcore gamers. Begemann says they’re not comparing like with like. “Social games are taking away [hardware] barriers and making everything accessible. Yes, if you’re a gamer playing 50 hours a week, some of the games will not resonate with you, just as how hardcore games do not resonate with our target group.” Nor does Begemann think the emphasis on metrics makes his company a business intelligence operation. “Wooga is heart plus brains. We have this creativeness and these analytics, and both are equally important.”

Social games come with new rules. Traditional titles can broadly be divided into games of skill and games of chance. Monster World and FarmVille are games of labour: plant a seed and you will eventually grow a plant. And this appeals to the new type of gamer: the average wooga user is a 40-year-old woman who logs in eight times each day. “The mum with two kids and a job, she works really hard all day, then comes back home and takes care of the kids,” says Miko?aj Jan Piskorski, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who studies social networks.

“When the kids go to sleep, she’s completely knackered and wants to relax or talk to her friends, but it’s too late to call. Playing the game with your friends is a low-cost way of keeping in touch.”

Quality is improving. For many social gamers, FarmVille was the first video game they had ever played, but they’re now more discerning. “Early on, [Facebook users] did put up with really bad games, because they hadn’t seen them before,” says Wilhelm ?sterberg, product manager at wooga. “That’s how the platform is now maturing — from viral chaos to promoting the best games.”

Making the best games represents a market opportunity for wooga, which lacks the scale of EA and Zynga. “If you’re trying to compete with Zynga on the city concept or ville concept, you’ll have a really hard time,” says Piskorski. “But if you’re developing a new way of engaging… I think it’s quite conceivable that you might be able to replicate a lot of the success of

Zynga.”CityVille reached 100 million monthly active users in only 43 days, but a month later it had lost four million. It’s still the most popular game on Facebook, but now has around 75 million users. FrontierVille, a newer Zynga title, lost a million users in a week in September 2011, while Magic Land added 600,000, to take it to three million monthly active users.

Wooga is preparing to release one game on Facebook per quarter in 2012; it currently has three as yet unnamed titles in production. This portfolio is giving wooga the critical mass that Begemann wants. Only five percent of users of wooga’s new games are acquired through advertising: the rest are introduced by existing players. Spending heavily on advertising, as Zynga does (Silicon Alley Insider reported that it spent $72 million on Facebook ads in 2009), means a lower average revenue per user; Zynga makes about $1.60 per unique user per quarter. In the second quarter of 2011, Zynga’s profits fell from $14.4 million to $1.4 million — a drop of 90 percent caused by development and marketing costs for two new titles.

The fight is moving to new battlegrounds. Wooga recently developed Diamond Dash for iOS, ported several of its games to Google+ and is building an HTML 5 version of Magic Land. It is also firmly targeting Europe. “In aggregate, Europe is bigger for us than the US — much bigger,” says Begemann. “And there are markets which are growing fast at the moment. We’re testing how much better engagement is if we localise.” From the beginning, wooga localised its content. Its games are now available in seven languages, with variable success in each region (for example, wooga says that France monetises four times better than Spain.)

Begemann aims to have grown his team to more than 200 employees by the middle of 2012. “Our big, big vision is to be one of the leading companies by 2020. We know that’s a little bit crazy, but we believe it’s possible. That would be billions of dollars per year. If we continue to grow over the next nine years like we have over the last two, then that’s a realistic goal.”

Speculative? Wooga doesn’t take punts: it tests everything.

By lunchtime after the Monster World meeting, the windmill feature is undergoing A/B testing, as per Begemann’s query. A week later, Drussila Hollanda sends an email: “The initial A/B test showed that there’s a 75 percent chance that woogoo consumption is lower and didn’t affect DAU. The feature will remain on for only 50 percent of the players as we’ll investigate it further and tweak it for a new test.”(source:wire.co.uk)