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探讨F2P社交游戏中付费模式的滥用现象

发布时间:2012-11-10 12:23:28 Tags:,,,,

作者:Richard Vaught

最近在工作之余,我会登陆Facebook与一些老朋友叙旧,并浏览新游戏广告。我突然在其中看到了一些全新元素,点击进入游戏进程,启动模式。它具备流畅的画面、奇特有趣的玩法、一系列相当平衡的游戏机制;我希望“赞”它一下,而这时我却看到了价格标签。

我不是小气鬼,我也清楚制作一款游戏需要投入巨大的开发成本,但是当我看到这些价格时,我的血压立马上升,我觉得有必要向市场营销者讲明情况(游戏邦注:图文无关联)。

fishville-fanta-sea-items(from friskymongoose.com)

fishville-fanta-sea-items(from friskymongoose.com)

你可能疑惑怎么会产生这种反应?以下我将呈现它们的价格分类。

虚拟货币    现金       比例     每个单位价格

2100        200美元    10.5:1      0.105

1000        100美元    10.0:1      0.100

475          50美元     9.5:1      0.095

182          20美元     9.1:1      0.091

90           10美元     9.0:1      0.090

40            5美元     8.0:1      0.080

在我们具体阐明为何这是一种滥用付费手段之前,我们先谈下游戏市场外的营销战略,比如DIFT技术,它是指先向消费者提出一个较大的诉求,一旦遭到拒绝,转向较小的诉求,以期达到消费者依从的一种策略。因此,即使我们拒绝前两个价格,它仍留有4个选项,其范围从AAA游戏一样价格到麦当劳玩具组合定价不等。

虽然,单从价格角度上看,它并非一种滥用现象。毕竟,价格可以衡量产品价值。一般而言,针对高价值物品设定昂贵价格并非滥用定价现象,同样,冠以低价值物品低廉价格也是如此。造成滥用定价现象可定义为赋予低价值物品高昂的价格,即以。为了解发行商运用这种行为的方式,我们必须更加深入地研究游戏。

弊端

为获取真正价值,我们必须调查游戏的基本机制,这样我们才能进行有价值的对比。为此,我区分了NAPT(被动游戏时间)与APT(主动游戏时间)两者。NAPT是指玩家在游戏未需要时出现在进程中的那段时间,但游戏内部事物仍会继续发展。比如社交游戏中的房屋建构、农作物生长、物品研发,或者其它定时机制,即玩家的存在并非为了主动完成任务。APT的定义则刚好相反;即玩家必须主动坐在电脑前,登陆,为引发某些事而点击按钮。

大部分社交游戏均采用这两种时间方式的结合,比如《FarmVile》中的种植与收获属于APT,植物的生长周期属于NAPT。同时,它们也包含减缓APT的能量表。随着时间的推移,表中会填满能量,但游戏中的每次行动都会相应地消耗一定能量值。我认为本文涉及的游戏也遵循这种运作方式。基于APT模式的部分游戏设置了能量消耗标准。但相比其它游戏,这种消耗标准不会依靠自己补充能量,相反,它会通过基于NAPT机制的游戏资源生产的道具进行补充。这些资源会以稳定速度再生,直到达到某个上限之后,玩家可以在利用它们之前将它们收集起来。玩家还可以根据自己的级别利用道具‘补充’APT标准范围,因此随着玩家级别的上升,道具资源与生产资源成本也会相应提升。最终会达到一个稳定水平。为保证公式的合理化,我将以粗略体验一周的休闲玩家所获得的统计数据作为研究基础。

游戏资源一般分为两类,A和B,而每种资源的获取速率存在些许差异,而且它们都是游戏内置购买的必要元素。

为了保护游戏版权,我将用字母代表游戏资源。

一个2级A设施每2小时可以生产300个资源A,或是150个/每小时。这等于每24秒产生1个资源A。

一个2级B设施每2小时可以生产120个资源B,或是60个/每小时,等同于每分钟产生1个资源B。

生产3个APT再生道具(以字母C代表),需要140个A、40个B、外加15秒的时间。也就是说,生产3个C道具共需耗时(24*140)+(40*60)+15=5775秒,或者是每个C道具需耗时1925秒。

其价格大约与道具(D)等价,约需要6个‘货币’。我们已在上面提到,游戏内置货币价格大概是0.09-0.12美元/每个货币,因此一个D道具约需花费0.60美元。

1925秒 ~= 0.60美元,也就是每32秒大约需要注入0.01美元。

这是NAPT时间方面的价值,即32秒左右需要0.01美元。

那么ATP的情况又会如何?APT标准会随着玩家级别的上升而升高,但在级别2时,每个角色大概拥有48点生命值,玩家最多只能拥有6个角色,其中3个为主动角色。由于每次行动需消耗1点生命值,每个回合持续4秒。

因此:

你拥有48点*4秒=192秒(APT从满值到O)。

1个D道具=0.60美元左右=192秒的APT时间

192/60=每秒APT为0.032美元。

由于每次通常只能拥有3个主动角色,也就是说,它们的每秒行动需耗费0.096美元,或者,当你主动参加战斗时,你需要为APT支付的费用低于每秒1美分。

现在,你并不能够通过虚拟货币购买所有食物。基于上述公式,以2级A设施为例,假设你有6个A设施(最大值),那么你每2小时能收获1200个A资源。假如我们还拥有6个B设施,每个B设施每2小时生产120个资源,那么你在每2小时内共能收获720个资源,或者每小时你会分别获得600/360个A、B资源。

如果基于上述数据生产APT再生道具(C),现在你需要924个道具C。如果通过3种渠道获得,那么你拥有3个主动角色,每个角色需生产308个道具C。也就是说每个角色需在主动战斗中投入192秒,那么你总共需耗时:

(((308*192)/60)/60) = 16.42(每个月为免费APT耗费16.42小时)

记住,如果你什么也不做,比如不建造房子、不升级、不制作道具、不购买治疗药水或者其它事情。除此以外,你所做的任何事都会减少APT。同样地,假如玩家为了‘收集’资源会固定每2小时进入游戏进程。任何超过连续2小时的被动游戏时间也会减少APT。由于玩家一个月共有720个小时,他们的免费APT时间只有16.42小时。

如果你想以0.096美元/每秒的成本购买该月的剩余游戏时间,那你大约需要支付4147.20美元。当然,不会有人在游戏中投入所有时间,但如果他们没有固定2小时登陆游戏,APT会缩短。如果他们构造事物,APT也会缩短少。如果他们升级角色,APT就会缩短。

对比

平均每个社交休闲玩家每周会在自己的游戏中投入85分钟,他们平均每个人需支付60美元。但这无法反映玩家的实际消费水平,因为90%的游戏收益来自那些每月为游戏支付100美元的玩家。通过计算可知,每个玩家每秒大约需支付0.015美元,每分钟支付0.85美元,每小时支付5.10美元。

我们将此与其它类型的游戏进行对比。AAA主机游戏一般包含20-80小时的游戏时长,其首次发行价格一般为60美元。这表示,玩家需为每小时的游戏进程支付3.33美元-1.33美元,这里并不考虑游戏的重玩现象,或者玩家在通关后可以兜售游戏,或者在二手商店进行交易,回收成本。

在含有订阅模式的MMO游戏中,可能你每个月支付15美元便能享受所有进程。为确保休闲游戏市场的公平交易,我认为有必要预先支付游戏60美元,尽管事实上,现在许多游戏可以提供有限的F2P选项。而支付60美元可以享受30天的付费订阅模式。由此可知,玩家需为每小时的进程支付0.12美元,而接下来的几个月内的成本会持续保持在0.048美元/每小时。考虑到许多MMO游戏已提供无需玩家预先购买核心游戏的F2P模式,它们的总体成本会大幅下降。

总结

本文并非讨论游戏应该收取用户多少费用,也不是追究每小时游戏进程的价格。本文主要讨论游戏开发商应为用户提供的游戏价值,以及这种价值对我们行业的意义。

对于我们这些十分熟悉游戏行业,而且又是雅达利主机时代的老客户的人来说,我们可能会想起游戏行业的惨败时期。虽然那时涉及不少问题,但其主要原因是市场上充斥着大量打着高品质、高价旗号的垃圾游戏。这些游戏的制作成本十分廉价,而且其中并未包含大量游戏资源,但游戏却被印上高价。

我们再次看到这种现象。除了平台与营销策略的不同,其欺诈手段并未发生本质改变,最终,如83年那样,用户将十分明智地停止支付行为。他们表示,那些不能从历史中吸取经验教训的人只会重蹈覆辙,显然,发行商还未从过去经验中吸取教训。

随着失业率的逐渐增加,全球经济的不稳定发展,人们已经开始勒紧裤腰带,合理利用每笔资金。而人们最先节省开发的领域通常是娱乐内容,然而,鉴于市场上存在大量可用的娱乐资源,人们可以选择更多的削减对象,首当其冲的当数属于最低价值的游戏。

如果游戏发行商/开发商不想成为用户削减开支的对象,他们应停止滥用价格手段与营销策略,为玩家提供具有真正价值的游戏。以较低价格吸引玩家付费体验游戏是滥用收费手段的极端表现,游戏开发商最终只会自食恶果。(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

Abusive Pricing Practices in F2P Social Games

by Richard Vaught

Setting The Stage

Recently during some down time at work, I hopped on Facebook to catch up with some old friends and saw an advertisement for a new game (I am not going to name the game or company here, as I think that would be rather unethical). Immediately my eyes lit up with excitement at seeing something new, so I clicked my way in and started playing. Smooth graphics, quirky fun gameplay, a set of fairly well balanced mechanics; I was itching to show my support. That is, I was right up until I looked at the price tag.

Now, I am not cheap, nor am I unaware of the significant development costs of a creating a game, but when I saw these prices my blood pressure went up and I felt the need to reach out and slap a marketing person somewhere.

What would raise that kind of reaction, you might ask? Well, here was their price break down.

Currency- Cost   -    Ratio    -   Price per Unit

2100       $200           10.5:1        0.105
1000       $100           10.0:1        0.100
475       $50            9.5:1        0.095
182       $20            9.1:1        0.091
90       $10            9.0:1        0.090
40       $5            8.0:1        0.080

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of why this is abusive, let’s start by saying that there are certain marketing strategies out there, such as “Door-In-The-Face” technique, where you make a large offer, knowing that it will be refused in order to secure acceptance of a smaller offer. So, even if we assume that the top two are designed to be refused, that still leaves 4 options ranging from the price of a AAA title to the price of a McDonalds Combo(not super-sized… that’s extra :P ).

The price alone, though, is not what makes these abusive. After all, price is just a measure of value. A high price for a high value is not abusive, nor is a low price for a low value. What makes these abusive is that it is a high price for a low value, couched with psychological prompts that are designed nickle and dime the consumers. To see how that is being applied though, we have to dig a bit deeper into the game.

The Con

In order to get to the value, we need to look at the underlying mechanics of the game itself, so that we can find a value on which we can make a comparison. For this to make sense, I am differentiating between NAPT(Non-Active Play Time) and APT(Active Play Time). NAPT is time when the player’s presence is not required within the game, but things keep happening regardless. In social games, these are things like build times, crop growth times, research times, or any other timer mechanic where the players presence is not actively needed in order for a task to get accomplished. Active play time is just the opposite; time where the player must actively be sitting at the computer, logged in, and clicking buttons in order for something to happen.

Most social games use a combination of these two, such as Farmville’s planting and harvesting (APT) and their growth cycles (NAPT). Most social games also have some form of energy meter that acts as a bandwidth throttle for APT. Over time, the meter fills up, but every action in the game drains it. The game I am considering for this article is no different. The segment of the game that is APT based has a guage that drains over time. However, in contrast to other games, this guage does not refill on its own, but is instead recharged through in game items which are in turn produced by in game resources that are based on the NAPT mechanic. These resources regenerate at a fixed rate up to the cap of the building and then must be ‘gathered’ by the player before they are usable. The items needed to ‘recharge’ your APT guage scale with your level, so as your level increases, so does the cost of the item in terms of resources as well as your resource production. In the end, it stays fairly static. To keep the math reasonable, I am going to be basing the numbers off stats a player should have after roughly one week of casual play.

The in game resources come in two flavors, A & B, each of which are acquired at slightly different rates, and both of which are required for any in game purchases.

Again, to protect the identity of the game I will be using letter designations for the resources. I am not here to bad mouth any one company.

A level 2 A-Facility  produces 300 of resource A every 2 hrs, or, 150/hr. That equates to  1 A every 24 seconds.

A level 2 B-Facility produces 120 of resource B every 2 hours, or 60/hr, which equates to 1 B every 60 seconds.

To Produce 3 APT regen items (C) costs 140 A,  40 B, & 15 seconds time.  That equates to (24*140)+(40*60)+15= 5775 seconds per stack, or 1925 seconds per C.

The roughly equivalent item (D) available with the premium currency costs 6 ‘coins’ . We already established above that the in game currency equates to between $.09 – $.12/coin, so D is  ~$.60

1925 seconds ~= $.60 or ~32sec = $.01

This is the value they are placing on NAPT time, $.01 = ~32 seconds.

But what about active play time? Their APT guage grows with the player level, but at this level, they are roughly 48 points per character in the game, with a maximum of 6 characters, only 3 of which can be active at any given time. Each in game action requires 1 point, and each round lasts 4 seconds. So:

You have 48 Points*4seconds = 192 seconds of APT from full to 0.

1 D = ~$.60 = 192 seconds APT
192/60=$.032/second of APT.

Since you normally will have 3 characters active at a time, that translates in to $.096/second, or just under a dime for every second that you are actively engaged in combat is you were paying for your APT with premium currency.

Now, not all of your food is purchased through Premium currency. Using the calculations above, with level 2 A-Facilities, and assuming that you have 6 built(the maximum), you are producing 1200 A every 2 hours. If we also assume 6 B-Facilities at 120/2 hrs you are producing 720 every 2/hrs, or 600/360 per hr. (43200/month & 259200/month respectively).

If you put every single bit of that into APT regen items (C), you are looking at 924 C. Split that three ways in a party and you have 308 per character in a 3 character party. At 192 seconds of active combat per character per C, you are able to play:

(((308*192)/60)/60) = 16.42

hours a month for free APT.  Again, remember that is if you don’t do ANYTHING else, no more buildings, upgrades, crafting, purchasing heal potions or anything else. Anything you do beyond that reduces your active play time. That is also assuming that the player logs in every 2 hours like clock work in order to ‘gather’ the resources. Any inactive time over 2 consecutive hours reduces their APT. Out of 720 hours in a month, you get 16.42 for free(Active Playtime).

If you wanted to purchase the play time for the remainder of the month, at $.096/second, it would cost you roughly $4147.20. Of course, no one is claiming that anyone is going to play 24/7, but then again, if they don’t log in every two hours, their APT diminishes. If they build anything, their APT diminishes. If they upgrade their character, their APT diminishes.

The Comparison

The average social casual gamer spends about 85 minutes a week on their game of choice, with and average per user cost of $60. Granted, this does not reflect the actual spending habits because 90% of the revenue comes from players spending over $100/month on a game. This works out to a rough cost of about $.015/second for the average player, $.85/min, or $5.10/hour.

Let’s contrast that with other forms of Game media entertainment. The AAA console title is going to have somewhere between 20-80 hours of gameplay, for a fairly static price of about $60 at first release. That works out to roughly between $3.33 – $1.33 per hour of gameplay, not counting any replay value the games might have nor the fact that once you have beaten the game, you can sell it or trade it in at a second hand store to recoup some of that expenditure.

For a MMO with subscription plan, you might pay $15/month for unlimited play with all the bells and whistles. For the sake of giving the casual game market a fair shake, I will even assume that you had to pay the $60 upfront for the game, despite the fact that many are now offering limited F2P options. In their case, you pay $60 for the game which usually comes with 30 days premium subscription included. This works out to about $.12/hr of gameplay, with a continuing cost of $.048/hr of game play on following months. Considering that many MMO’s are now offering a F2P without an initial purchase of the core game, their total cost drops tremendously.

What does it all mean? And what the hell is all of this about Atari?

This article is not about how much we charge customers, though. It is not even about price per hour of game play. It is about the VALUE that we give our customers, and what that value means to us as an industry.

For those of us old enough to have been either in the industry or a consumer at the time of the Atari console generation, you probably can recall when the bubble burst on the game industry. While there were several issue involved when that crash, one of the major causes was that there was a glut of garbage on the market selling at the same price point as the higher quality games. Games were being produced cheaply and with minimal resources and then being sold at premium prices.

This is a situation we are seeing again. There is no essential difference beyond the platform and marketing strategy, and eventually, just like they did in ’83, consumers will get wise and stop paying abusive prices for low value games. They say that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it is quite apparent that publishers have not learned their history yet.

As unemployment continues unabated and economic uncertainty continues around the globe, people are going to be on a crusade to tighten their belts and make every penny in their pocket stretch even further. The first thing that gets cut when belts tighten a notch is often the entertainment budget. However, given the glut of entertainment resources available, people have a much wider choice of which entertainment options to cut. The first ones out the door will be those with the lowest perceived value.

If game publishers/developers do not want to be in the part of the budget that gets cut then they need to stop the abusive pricing packages and abusive marketing schemes and start offering their players real value when they ask for their hard earned money. Charging someone just under minimum wage to play your game is abusive in the extreme, and it will come back to bite you. (source:gamasutra)


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