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

分享以较低营销成本实现游戏盈利的经验

发布时间:2012-10-19 17:27:48 Tags:,,,,

作者:Mike Thompson

尽管我们从未投入上百万元于市场营销中,我们的游戏也只是曾短暂停留于最高排行榜单上,但是不得不承认的是YesGnome仍然是一家能赚钱的公司。

我们最初的一款游戏《童话城市》虽然只是短暂地停留于最高排行榜单上,并且也未受到广泛的欢迎,但是我们却始终认为这是一款成功的游戏,原因很简单:按照月份来算,它所获得的收益已经远远超过我们所投资的成本。

但这却不意味着它拥有极高的终身价值(LTV)。通常情况下,我们的iOS游戏平均每90天可以赚取1美元的每用户平均收益。尽管这一数值远不及顶级的中核游戏开发者所获得的成绩,但是仔细估算,你将会发现这一数值也能让我们大获其利。所以我将通过本篇文章阐述,即使从每个日活跃用户身上只能赚取0.06至0.08美元,社交游戏开发者也能够从中赚取大量收益并获得巨大的成功。

用户留存和替代盈利方法

关于用户留存的一个较合适的基准便是,第一天为40%,第七天为20%而第30天为10%。良好的用户留存是推动应用稳步发展的关键因素,因为忠实的长期用户更有可能向其他玩家推广你的游戏。就拿我们自己来说吧,我们的大多数自然用户都是来自于口口相传模式或基本的社交整合活动。

良好的用户留存同样也能够帮助你提高广告收益——特别是能够让你从非付费玩家身上赚取利益。对于小型开发者而言这是一种重要的替代收益来源,占据他们总游戏收益的40%至45%。

警示:广告盈利不应该与应用内部购买收益出现重叠,所以你需要确保当用户进行应用内部购买时,他们便不会接触到广告交易。事实上,你需要确保你的用户知道这种广告禁用方法,因为这能够帮助你更好地提高用户转化率(游戏邦注:从免费用户到付费用户间的转化)。

Fairy Tale(from insidesocialgames)

Fairy Tale(from insidesocialgames)

用户获取

如今,免费游戏的用户获取成本大约是1.5美元,有时候甚至会高达3美元(每用户)。但是这却不意味着游戏只要能够赚取2美元以上的LTV便算是有利可图的。开发者必须仔细评估游戏的潜在收益,并确保每用户获取成本总是低于游戏的LTV——如果必要的话最好能够低于1美元。

以下是一些能够降低成本的方法:

利用一些规模较小且有限的活动:通过在每款游戏的每次下载时支出0.5美元至0.6美元的成本而获取少量的用户。也许你会觉得这种支出低得夸张,但是根据我们自己的经验,只要你每天瞄准少量用户,那么即使是较低的支出也能够帮助你获取更大的收益。

使用多种资源:关键在于从不浪费任何资源并且从不尝试那些超越自己能力范围的内容。我们发现将最高竞标价格设定在0.6美元便非常合适——尽管你可能希望一开始能够保持较低的价格,并基于你所获得的结果去设定限度。为了有效地使用资源,我们还需要妥善地面对其他开发者(交叉推广平台Chartboost便是一种有效的工具),并利用广告网络以及其它代理(就像我们便使用了W3i,同时我们也发现Fiksu是个不错的平台),但同时你还需要确保能够清楚地告诉他们你的预算限制。

足够灵活:从某种程度上看来这就像是在预定航班时选择“日期灵活”去寻找最低价格一样。确保数量,时间以及预算的灵活能够帮助你获得稳定,少量且廉价的新用户。

依赖于自然用户:良好的用户留存能够帮助你争取较高的自然用户比例,而最终帮助你降低50%以上的用户获取成本。当然了,当人们谈及花费1.5美元于用户获取时,他们并不是指自然用户。如果你能够确保每个付费用户能够为你带来两个以上的自然用户,你便能够减少三分之一的用户获取成本,并最终显著地提高你的利润率。

定期检查你的资源:将你的用户获取资源罗列成一张大列表,并根据它们能够支撑的不同数量,你需要花多长时间去激活它们,它们需要花费多少成本,它们适用于什么类型的游戏等等元素进行划分。当你利用某一特殊资源而获取一定的用户后,你需要继续追踪他们的相关参数,并基于这些用户的用户留存以及LTV等数值给予这一资源相应的质量评分。这并不是一份固定的列表,所以你最好能够定期进行查阅,并适时添加新资源。

避免爆炸性活动:如果你想使用一种具有爆炸性威力的活动而将你的游戏推向App Store的前10名排行榜单,那么1.5美元的成本(或高于每用户获取成本)便能够发挥功效。这应该算是最诱人的策略,但同样的它也需要付出较高的代价并且具有较高的失败比例(如特定的资源不能发挥功效或者在最后几分钟时不能达到预期效果)。

Fairy Tale(from insidesocialgames)

Fairy Tale(from insidesocialgames)

这里所强调的理念是,你必须抵挡住能够帮助你挤进最高排行榜单的爆炸性活动的诱惑(除非你自信地认为你的游戏可以支撑得住如此高额的市场营销费用或排名),并依赖于真实数据的引导。你要清楚你们并不是一家大公司,所以你只要安分地每天利用每种资源(大约利用20种不同的资源去获取40至60名用户便可。努力推动自然用户数量的增长,如此你每个月所获得的新用户便有可能增至10万人。这是一个值得你努力追求的目标:如果你的游戏能够维持1美元的LTV,你便有可能在花费2万美元的用户获取成本后而获得8万至10万美元的每月收益。

游戏组合

我们总是很难去解释清楚拥游戏组合的重要性,特别是当我们的脑子里已经根植了一种传统思想(如果你的市场营销资金有限,你就需要倾其所有去推广1或2款游戏)时。然而,拥有更广泛的游戏组合能够帮助你在降低用户获取成本的前提下吸纳稳定数量的新用户。以下我将大致阐述游戏组合的作用:

如果一家发行商拥有1万名用户,而你在一天时间内将游戏广告呈献给所有的用户,你便有可能从中获得10名新用户。对于发行商来说,这便意味着他们能够获得6美元左右的收益。而如果这家发行商将相同的广告再次呈献给这些用户,那么这次他们所获得的下载量将低于第一次活动所取得的成绩,因为你已经吸收了大部分愿意接受游戏的用户了,并在第一次活动中实现了最轻松的转化。所以再一次面向相同的用户进行游戏推广只会耗费你更多成本并且只能获得较糟糕的结果。发行商将会建议你投入更多成本并更加努力地去提高转化率——对于他们来说,如今每次广告活动的基本成本为6美元,但是这却是难以达到的目标,因为所有用户都已经看过这一广告了。而如果你拥有游戏组合,你便可以有效地利用每一种资源。你可以面向不同游戏设置全新的广告,并以较低的成本获得10名新用户。

游戏组合还能够帮助你将某一款游戏的忠实用户引向另一款游戏,从而有效地降低整体的用户获取成本。跨平台广告以及电子邮件支持等渠道能够帮你实现不同游戏间的玩家转化。Facebook的状态信息以及当前游戏中的奖励机制也是很不错的方法。

Fairy Tale(from insidesocialgames)

Fairy Tale(from insidesocialgames)

基于上述模式,我们便只花费了7千至1万美元不到的成本而为《童话城市》吸收了更多新用户,并让我们在短短90天时间里从这些用户身上赚取了2万5千美元至3万美元的收益。最后我想说的是,与其它游戏开发商一样我们也始终积极地创造着我们所信赖的游戏,并享受于这种创造过程。对于每一次游戏的发行,我们的目标都不是将其推上最高排行榜单,而是努力确保每一款游戏都能在潜在收益范围内持续盈利。

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

Guest Post: How to be profitable with less than $20,000 in marketing per game

By Mike Thompson

Even though we haven’t spent millions in marketing and our games haven’t hit the top charts more than briefly, YesGnome is still a profitable company.

One of our first games, FairyTale City, has hit the top charts only briefly, and has not been wildly popular, but we consider it a success for a simple reason: on a month to month basis, it makes significantly more money than we spend on it.

This does not mean that we are seeing dramatically high Lifetime value (LTV). In general, our games on iOS make around $1 on a 90-day average revenue per user. True, this is not even close to what some of the top mid-core developers are seeing, but when you do the math, these numbers still make us very profitable. This article is an attempt to demonstrate how to be a successful and profitable social games developer even with average revenue per daily active user in the range of $0.06 to $0.08.

Retention and alternative monetization

For retention, a good benchmark to shoot for would be 40 percent on day one, 20 percent on day seven and ten percent on day 30. Good retention is an important factor in organic growth since loyal, long term users are more likely to promote your game to others. For us, nearly all our organic users come from word-of-mouth or basic social integration.

Good retention also helps in maximizing ad revenue–especially since it lets you monetize non-paying users. This is an important alternative revenue source for small developers, and can account for as much as 40 to 45 percent of the total game revenue.

A word of caution though: Ad integration should not cannibalize your in-app purchase revenue, so set up your games in such a way that when a user makes an in-app purchase transaction, ads are disabled for that particular user. In fact, consider actively ensuring your users are aware of this method of disabling ads; this will noticeably improve your free to paying user conversion rate.

User acquisition

These days, the cost of user acquisition on free games tends to average about $1.50, often going as high as $3 per user. But this does not necessarily mean that a game can be profitable only if it can make $2 LTV or more. The trick is to assess your game’s revenue potential, and ensure that the cost of acquisition per user is always below the LTV of the game–well below $1, if necessary.

Here are a few ways we’ve been able to keep our costs low:

?Use small, limited campaigns: Acquire a small number of users per game per month by spending as little as $0.50 to $0.60 per download. This may seem extremely low, but our experience shows such low rates are still possible as long as you aim to acquire only a small number of users per day.

?Use multiple sources: The trick is to never exhaust a source and never bid above your limit. We have noticed that setting the maximum bid price at $0.60 works well, though you may want to start even lower, and set your limit based on the results you get. To use your sources effectively, make deals with other developers (Chartboost is an effective tool), and use ad networks as well as other agencies (We use W3i  and have heard good things about Fiksu too) as necessary, but always make sure you communicate your budget constraints to them clearly.

?Be flexible: In a way, this is a little like using the ‘my dates are flexible’ option to look for the lowest rates available when booking flights. Be flexible about volume as well as timing, always stick to the budget, and you will get a steady, small, and inexpensive stream of new users.

?Bank on organic: Good retention earns you a higher percentage of organic users, which would bring your effective user acquisition cost down by 50 percent or even more. To be sure, when people talk of spending $1.5 on user acquisition, they are also not accounting for organic users. When you ensure that each paid user brings in two more, you are reducing the effective user acquisition cost by one third, which would make a significant difference to your margins.

?Review your sources regularly: Make an extensive list of your user acquisition sources, and categorize them based on the volume they can sustain, how quickly you can activate them, what they would cost, what types of games they are most suited for, and so on. Once you have acquired users from a particular source, track key metrics for them carefully, and assign a quality score to this source based on the retention as well as the LTV of these users. This is not meant to be a fixed list, so be sure to review it regularly, and add new sources as they come up.

?Avoid burst campaigns: If you are looking for high volume burst campaigns to break into top 10 charts of the App Store, costs of $1.5 or above per user come into play. This may be the most glamorous strategy, but it is also the most expensive and prone to high-cost failure if certain sources do not kick off or at the last minute fail to deliver the volume expected.

The general idea here is to resist the temptation of chart-topping focused burst campaigns (unless you are extremely confident that your game can sustain such marketing or ranking), and rely on the actual numbers to guide you. Instead of running big campaigns, only try to acquire 40-60 users per day per source, and use around 20 different sources. This rate can get you up to 30,000 new users a month. Add in the organic user growth, and the total number of new users for the month could go up to 100,000. These are good numbers to aim for: if your game sustains an LTV of $1, you are potentially looking at a revenue of $80,000 to $100,000 per month for a $20,000 spend on user acquisition.

Portfolio

It’s a little tricky to explain the importance of having a portfolio of games, especially since traditional thinking would be that if you only have limited marketing funds, you should go all out to promote one or two games. Nevertheless, having a wider portfolio of titles allows you to keep user acquisition costs low, while maintaining a steady stream of new users. Here is how this (roughly) works:

If a publisher has 10,000 users, and you show your game ad to all of them in the course of a day, you would maybe get 10 new users from this little campaign. For the publisher, this would mean a revenue of about $6. Now if this publisher shows the same ad to this same user base again, the number of downloads you get this time would be a lot lower, since you have captured all the early adopters, and made the easiest conversions in the first campaign itself. So the second time you promote your game to the same user base, it’s costing you more and getting poorer results. These are poorer results for the publisher too, who would then typically advise you to increase your bids and try harder for conversion–for them, the benchmark is now $6 per campaign–unsustainable, since all the users have seen this ad already. But if you have a portfolio of games, you can utilize each source fully. You can place a new ad for a different game, and again get 10 new users at a low cost.

Having multiple games also allows you to transition your most loyal users to your other games, which in turn reduces overall user acquisition costs. To transition your users from one game to another, consider using cross-promotion ads, channels such as  support emails, Facebook page posts and also reward mechanisms in the form of incentives in the current game.

Using the above model, we have been able to spend $7,000 to $10,000 a month on acquiring new users for Fairy Tale City, which consistently makes us around $25,000 to $30,000 from those users over a 90-day period. At the end of the day, like anyone else, we build games that we believe in, and enjoy playing as well as creating. But our approach is not to try to break charts with every single release, but to ensure that each game we release is consistently profitable within the revenue potential it offers.(source:insidesocialgames)


上一篇:

下一篇: