问题：免费增值游戏设计具有迭代性、响应性和敏捷性。它改变了编程的本质以及你们所需要的开发态度。那么你们在招聘游戏开发者时最看重哪些素质呢？

回答：

Will Lution（移动、社交及免费增值游戏顾问）

这一点不但对适用于产品，对服务、开发乃至你整个团队都很适用。你必须采用迭代和敏捷开发方法——瀑布式方法不管用。程序员、设计师、美术人员以及所有参与人员都要能够在开发过程中创造、检查和修改内容。

Bernard Chen（育碧用户体验总监）

转变为这种模式后，设计师所面临的挑战要大于程序员。任何软件项目的编程看起来都相差无几，而设计师这面的变化甚为巨大，他们必须学习如何创建在上线后仍可调整的机制。他们要通过多种分析查看游戏的状态，并分析服务器数据以调整游戏。

Hiring(from tweakyourbiz)

Ben Cousins（DeNA欧洲游戏工作室主管）

开放、好奇心，以及聪慧、无惧的品格。

我们很早涉猎这一新模式，即使你已经有了一些经验，你也仍会发现自己还有大量需要探索和学习的领域。

Scattered就是一个由经验丰富、希望提升技艺的F2P开发者，以及希望学习、尝试新事物的传统游戏开发元老组成的团队。

愤世嫉俗或目光狭碍的人是不会过得太舒坦的。

Andy Payne（Appynation首席执行官）

假设你已经掌握了作为游戏开发者所需的技能，在这个前提下我们要找的是心胸开阔、善于学习和“忘记”，能够合作与分享的人才。我们也希望与能够善待他人，喜欢微笑，积极融入大团队（而不是自己的小圈圈）这种成员共事。

Anthony Pecorella（Kongregate虚拟商品游戏制作人）

对一些开发者来说，从“传统”游戏开发（游戏邦注：包括演示版、零售发布，偶尔还有补丁内容）转向实时服务型、不断变化、免费增值模式这个领域当然很困难。我们已经多次看到这种情况，即出色的开发者采用了类似于零售领域的做法，制作了非常好玩的游戏，但却无法吸引用户或者创收。我认同Bernard所说的最大差别在于设计这种说法——熟悉敏捷开发的工程师和美术人员几乎都能够随时将自己掌握的技术运用于多种项目上。

虽然我们Kongregate一般不雇佣游戏开发者，但与他们结为发行合作关系时，我们也会参考招聘人才的标准来评估他们。除了一般要点（游戏邦注：例如，对本领域工作有卓越匠才能，富有激情，拥有良好的沟通技巧，是很受人欢迎的角色）之外，我们还希望与理解如何执行免费增值模式，对参数导向型（未必是参数驱动型）迭代和设计感兴趣的人合作。当我遇到深信设计必须凌驾于参数之上的人交谈时，我就清楚事情不妙了，我们将来与此人的交流必将出现障碍。

此外你还应选择理解并愿意接纳免费增值模式的开发者。通常情况下，开发者很难意识到首次用户体验究间有多重要，流量下滑有多迅速。此外，“付费取胜”的思维也常让一些设计师左右为难，导致他们无法在设计、维护和优化成功的盈利模式上施展手脚。没错，你也想让免费玩家获得公平，但当我同完全不乐意提供优势付费道具的设计师交谈时，我就知道其游戏几乎注定会失败。免费增值模式并不是剥削玩家，而是让玩家拥护并支持你的游戏，付费获得更出色的体验，但有些设计师就是不能接受这一点。

从我们的角度来看，我们要找的就是理解这是一项长期合作关系，愿意同游戏进行数年的长期合作，推动游戏发展，并扩大用户规模的开发者合作。总之，发行合作双方现在的关系并不像毕业后就一拍两散，而更像是一桩长久的婚姻。

Teut Weidemann（育碧在线专家）

因为工作类型各有不同，所以这个问题真的很难回答。由于免费增值模式对多数开发者来说仍然是新兴事物，你将在其中遇到什么“问题”也仍是未知数。

比如：我们制作了很成功，足以持续运营十年以上的在线游戏，但哪个程序员能够数十年如一日地为它编写代码？在这个行业中基本上没有人，因为多数人都已经习惯了解聘然后忘记之前的项目这种过程。这其中还包括多线程服务器方面的难题，它太难懂了，掌握这方面知识的程序员并不多。企业程序员比游戏程序员更善于处理这个问题。

设计师需要转变思想观念，这样会非常管用。

Martin Darby（Remode创始人）

用OOP方法论创造稳定软件，可让后者在特定区域扩展，免于因为大量漏洞而崩溃，这一点十分重要。这一领域的公司都很年轻，因此拥有丰富经验的技术总监/主管是不可替代的人才。信誉就是信誉，这正是许多主机领域的程序员所知晓的看家本领，而许多独立开发者却不具备的优势所在。

Ben Board（Boss Alien高级制作主管）

我最喜欢F2P开发的一点就在于，我们没有苛刻的“时间表”，我们有“发布时间”，这种心态很重要——你知道自己今天在做的东西，两周后就能跟玩家见面啦。

主机团队可能会有具备如下条件的人才，但比例并不高：

“我们重视拥有Unity技能的开发人员；了解服务器和数据库功能，能够承受持续高负荷的压力；能够让框架一直正常运行，知道核心玩法很简单，完成之后就不再胡乱折腾；清楚有许多任务并不那么有趣但却极有价值，例如用户获取策略、广告、参数、盈利机制等。”

我还同意以上一个观点：F2P应该要求玩家不时付费，要让掏钱的玩家也能像技能高超者一样获得进展。假如你心理上依旧无法接纳“付费获取”这一理念，那就不适合采用F2P模式。

Harry Holmwood（Marvelous AQL Europe首席执行官）

我们正在寻找拥有多学科知识（包括游戏设计、营销、销售、技术、美术和能够整合成一款现代F2P游戏的资料）的人才。虽然我们招聘的人才可能只是专注于其中的部分领域，但全面理解制作一款游戏所需内容也非常重要。鉴于较小的团队规模和服务型项目这一情况，我们认为聘请技能高超但极专注特定领域的人才，对我们来说不但是太奢侈了，而且也不符合我们的行事风格。总之，我们要找的是有才智、有好奇心和有创意的人才。

Eric Seufert（Grey Area营销主管）

当然，对F2P程序员来说理解并重视敏捷方法论这一点很重要，但我认为多数工程师现在或多或少都了解一些敏捷开发方法。我认为F2P领域的最大招聘瓶颈就在于，找到在数据导向型设计和营销环境中游刃有余的产品型雇员。几乎所有参与F2P产品设计的人多少都懂一些这方面的情况，以及测试->设计->衡量反馈循环，营销团队则需要精通定量方法，这样才能有效开展我们的用户营销活动。根据我的经验，真心很难找到拥有这些技能组合的人才，并且要传授这些知识也非常耗时间。

Andrew Smith（Spilt Milk Studios创始人）

我真想对那些声称“设计师应该做出改变(掌握新技能)，其他人没有问题”的人吐槽。

在这个数字发行、游戏即服务，以及组建了出色玩家社区的透明化开发过程的新世界中，团队中所有人无疑都应该100%了解快速迭代等概念的需求。

对小型团队来说更是如此，因为其中一个薄弱的环节可能就会摧毁整个项目，但认为程序员、美术人员和作曲人等非设计师成员就无需对此负责的说法，对我来说真是令人难以接受，即使是在大公司中也不例外。

当然，你也许可以只让你的设计师（或项目主管）了解免费增值/数字等概念，但一家“不让其他人插手这些事务”的公司是无法在这个行业中长存的。

Anthony Pecorella（Kongregate虚拟商品游戏制作人）

从我个人经验来看，比起团队中其他成员，我在与设计师打交道时更常出现矛盾，他们通常也是我最主要的直接联系人。我与工程师交流时则通常是因为我需要让他们修复或更改一些地方，也许我真的被他们惯坏了（他们太顺从了）。（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）

What do employers look for when recruiting game developers?

By Gamesbriefers

Free-to-play game design is iterative, responsive and agile. That changes the nature of the programming skills and attitudes that you need. What are the attributes that you look for in a game developer when recruiting?

Answers:Will Luton Games Consultant in mobile, social and free-to-playThis applies as much to products as to services and as much to developers as to all your team. You should be building iteratively and agilely – waterfall produces junk. Coders, designers, artists and everyone else involved should be able to create, review then amend throughout the process.

Bernard Chen User Experience Director at UbisoftThe challenge has been more on the designer side than on the engineering side.  Dev Ops will deploy frequently and regularly, but the engy side seems about the same as with any software project. The big changes are for the designers.  They/we need to learn to build mechanics that can be tuned while live. Lots of analytics to see the state of the game and server side data to make changes.

Ben Cousins Head of European Game Studios at DeNAOpen-ness and curiosity along with intelligence and fearlessness.

We are very early into this new model, and even in the rare circumstance that you have some experience, you will guaranteed still have an enormous amount to discover and learn.

Scattered is a blend of experienced F2P people looking to improve their chops, along with traditional games development veterans who want to learn, try something new and future-proof their careers.

Anyone with a hint of cynicism or closed-mindedness is not going to be comfortable.

Andy Payne CEO of AppynationProvided you know the skillset needed from a tech perspective we look for someone who is open minded, willing to learn and unlearn, able to collaborate and share. We also want people who are nice to others, can raise a smile and want to be part of a team, not their own team. ‘Seen it all and done it all before’ need not apply.

Anthony Pecorella Producer for virtual goods games at KongregateMoving from “traditional” game development (demos, retail launches, maybe occasional patches) to a live-serviced, constantly-changing, free-to-play model can definitely be difficult for some developers.  We’ve seen this a few times with great quality developers who approach free to play in a similar way to retail and create very fun games but ones that aren’t able to build audiences or revenue.  I agree with Bernard when he says the biggest difference is on design; engineers and artists who are used to agile programming should be able to apply those skills to a variety of projects somewhat agnostically.

While we’re generally not hiring game developers, at Kongregate we do evaluate them closely when getting into publishing relationships with them and look for similar qualities that would make a great hire.  Beyond the usual points (has strong aptitude in the field, is enthusiastic, communicates well, and is someone you would want to interact with daily), you want to work with someone who understands how to free to play works and who is interested in metrics-guided (not necessarily metrics-driven) iteration and design.  When I talk with someone who believes design trumps metrics entirely, that’s a red flag for difficult discussions in the long run.

You also need developers who understand and are willing to embrace the free-to-play model.  It is often difficult to wrap your head around just how crucial the first time user experience is and how transient traffic can be.  Then, feelings of “pay-to-win” can irk some designers to the point of making them incapable of designing, maintaining, and optimizing a successful monetization model.  Yes, you want some balance of fairness for free players, but I’ve talked with developers who are completely unwilling to offer any paid items that give an advantage, and that’s a nearly guaranteed sign of financial failure.  The free-to-play model is not about exploiting players, but it’s about allowing players who love and support your game to pay you for a better and more advanced experience, and some designers just can’t get on board with that.

And from our perspective, we look for developers who understand that this is a long term relationship, who are willing to continue to work with the game, potentially for years to come, to keep it growing and improving and to strengthen the audience.  Launch parties have a different flavor these days – they’re less like graduation and more like a wedding.

Teut Weidemann Online specialist at UbisoftThis question is hard to answer as it depends on job type. As the f2p model is young with most developers the “problems” you will face are yet unknown.

Example: we do online games which last 10+ years if they are successful. So which programmer is used to write code which is maintainable for 5-10 years? Hardly any in the industry as most are used to fire and forget approach. This also includes multithreading server side. Hard to understand, not very many programmers who mastered it. Enterprise programmers are more used to this than game programmers.

For designers there needs to be a brain reset, than it works pretty much.

Martin Darby Founder of RemodeOOP Methodologies for creating stable software that allow it to be expanded in certain areas without falling over under the weight of bugs.  This is very important.  This is where whilst companies in this space might be young, there is no substitute for having an experienced tech-director/lead.  Credit where credit is due, this is where a lot of coders who have worked in the console space know what they are doing and where a lot of indies don’t

Ben Board Senior Product Lead at Boss AlienMy favourite thing about F2P development is that we don’t have milestones, we have releases, and that mindset is crucial: what you work on today is in front of players in a couple of weeks.

Console teams have the following but as much smaller proportions of their team: we value people with Unity knowledge; people who understand servers and databases both in functionality and when operating under continuous heavy load; people who get that the build needs to work all the time; people who understand that the core gameplay is often quite simple, finished early and (once it’s proven) not monkeyed with, so you may never touch it; and that there are many tasks that are not sexy and scream ‘I’m making a game!!!’ but which are hugely valuable – user acquisition, ads, metrics, monetization mechanics.

I’d also echo this earlier point: F2P devs need to accept the need to ask players to pay for stuff from time to time.  Progress is going to be based on money as well as skill, and that’s OK.  If ‘pay to win’ makes you puke, F2P may not be for you.

Harry Holmwood CEO at Marvelous AQL EuropeIncreasingly, we’re looking for people who are multidisciplinary – game design, marketing, sales, technology, art and statistics are all merging into one to make a modern F2P game.  Although people we hire may focus mainly on one of these areas, a broader understanding of all the things that go together to make a game are essential.  With smaller team sizes and service-based projects, as a small team we think hiring extremely skilled but very specialised people is not just a luxury we can’t afford, but one we wouldn’t want to indulge in anyway.  Above all, we look for people who are intelligent, curious and creative.

Eric Seufert Head of Marketing and Acquisition at Grey AreaOf course it’s important in F2P for engineers to understand and appreciate agile methodologies, but I believe most engineers are at least familiar with agile / scrum development at this point. I think a bigger bottleneck for F2P recruiting is finding product-side employees who are qualified to operate in a data-driven design and marketing environment. Almost everyone involved with product design for a F2P title should have at least a basic understanding of statistics and the test -> design -> measure feedback loop, and the marketing group needs a fairly sophisticated grasp of quantitative methods in order to efficiently run user acquisition. Those skill combinations, in my experience, are hard to find and time consuming to teach.

Andrew Smith Founder of Spilt Milk StudiosI just want to have a tiny rant, aimed at anyone in this thread who claimed ‘really it’s the designers who need to change/have the new skills, everyone else is fine’ (or words to that effect – I’m sure I read a few)…

In this brave new world of digital delivery, games as a service and (particularly with independent studios) the kind of transparency in development that builds a great community – everyone on the team, without exception, must be 100% on board with the demands of fast iteration, mvp and all the rest of it.

This is doubly true in smaller teams where a single weak link can really cripple a project, but the idea that programmers, artists, musicians and the like can get away with maybe not really ‘getting’ the new wave is bonkers to me, even in larger setups.

Sure, you might be able to ‘get away’ with having just your designer (or project lead) buying into freemium/digital/mvp etc. – but a company built around ‘getting away’ with stuff is not going to last long at all in this wonderful industry of ours. We need to excel at all times.

Sorry if I’ve caused any offence, but it’s just barmy (and short sighted) to think otherwise.

Anthony Pecorella Producer for Virtual Goods Games at KongregateThat’s certainly a fair point.  From my experience I’ve clashed heads more often, and harder, with designers than other members of the team, but those are admittedly my primary contacts too.  The times when I talk with engineers they are generally ready to fix or change whatever is needed, but perhaps they spoiled me.（source：gamesbrief）