作者：Charles Cox

如今我们已经在这个产业中摸爬滚打1年了。现在的我们拥有2款游戏，4个平台，3种盈利模式，超过6万名用户以及2500万多次游戏会话记录，我们很高兴仍然作为一个团队而共同努力着。不过说实话，在整个过程中我们也经历了许多艰难。为此我们将主要阐述两款游戏——让我们先从其中的一款游戏说起，它只面向iPhone这一平台。

介绍《四驱装甲赛车》

这是Elbert Perez最初面向Windows Phone所开发的一款游戏

后由Nick Gravelyn和Elbert Perez共同移植到iPhone上，并由4gency发行

基于应用内部购买模式，后又添加了应用内部广告机制

在2012年感恩节期间面向全世界的iPhone用户发行

Armored-Drive(from arcadesushi.com)

《四驱装甲赛车》是一款以间谍车为主题的无尽赛车游戏。玩家通过使用手机上的倾斜控制而左右移动汽车，并基于触屏控制去使用武器和工具而击倒其它汽车并获得奖励。拉开与其他玩家的距离以及战斗技巧都将带给玩家游戏内部货币奖励，而他们可以使用这些货币去购买更多弹药，工具或者其它汽车升级道具。因为Elbert Perez最初是使用免费广告模式而开发Windows Phone游戏，这便为4gency提供了进入iPhone游戏领域的机会—-即不仅让我们能够进入一个全新平台，同时也接触到了全新收益模式，如应用内部购买，从而帮助我们能够进一步从游戏中获利。

设计要素

我们认为《四驱装甲赛车》是IAP的典型代表。其无尽赛车主题与《火箭飞人》很相似，但是《四驱装甲赛车》通过升级了武器，道具和汽车外观而有效吸引了各种玩家的注意。排名系统和挑战有效吸引玩家再次回到游戏中，鼓励他们反复游戏并投入更多钱去购买弹药和道具。我们认为可以采取一种合理且不会让人厌烦的方式去执行IAP模式，即让玩家只能使用现金去换取游戏内部货币。在游戏过程中，玩家将因为杀死对手，拉开与对手的距离或提升排名获得货币奖励，而无需购买我们在现金市场中所提供的IAP货币包或持久的IAP“货币加倍器”。

游戏本身并没有终点–iOS排行榜是针对于每一回合的最快速度，所以优势不只是关于游戏时间，还取决于玩家每次使用工具和技巧的较能。我们也考虑到在游戏过程中提供额外的装置，以此延长每次游戏的行程，但最终却因为时间不足而将其搁置了。

定价要素

最初关于《四驱装甲赛车》的价格设定是基于免费模式，但是Monte Carlo关于只使用IAP和IAP与付费模式的结合模拟运行告诉我们，付费模式拥有较高的胜算。我使用了《How to Measure Anything》这本书中所描述的Hubbard Research模式。

预先付费意味着我们可以在之后使用免费推广去利用参照效应，并且多亏了Twitter bots，我们的游戏因为病毒式效应而吸引了超过1万5千名玩家。最终，事实也证明了Monte Carlo模拟运行的预测是对的，这将吸引更多玩家选择我们的游戏。

直到今天，基于0.99美元的付费版本所赚的的收益远远超过了IAP所赚取的收益。

我们该如何做

我们先通过在加拿大，俄罗斯以及中国等国家以免费发行模式去测试IAP，并明确用户的消费情况。通过测试我们发现虽然有400个人下载了游戏，但是我们最终却只获得1美元的收益。这一结果让人很沮丧。即不管我们获得了多少下载量，但是最终的用户转换率却低得可怜，甚至不能保证我们获得收益。所以我们才决定使用付费模式。不过这也是在看到Big Data分析了我们为何难以从游戏中盈利后才做出的决定。

最后我们可以看到，《四驱装甲赛车》共经历了四个版本，即在免费和付费模式间来回转变了4次，并获得了2万多名玩家。这完全是我们凭借自己的努力所创造出来的结果，我们并未拥有市场营销合作伙伴，完全是利用自己的媒体渠道而提高游戏的曝光率与用户粘性。

这2万多名玩家共为我们带来了560多美元的收益，也就是大约3美分的DARPU。

ArmoredDrive_PostMortem_OverallPerformance（from gamasutra）

什么可行，什么不可行

以下是《四驱装甲赛车》的相关参数，从中我们也明确了该采取何种方法而取得进一步发展：

较高的用户粘性——每次游戏时间为180秒，每个月平均玩2.8次游戏，高于动作类游戏的平均值

较糟糕的用户获取——低于10%的用户病毒式“吸引”，低于1%与4gency其它游戏的交叉推广

较糟糕的盈利——DARPU为0.03美元，IAP<游戏总收益（游戏邦注：包括广告和付费下载）的20%

以下图表列出了一些有关盈利和用户获取策略的相关数据。我们以红色字体标注了重要问题，即那些让我们感到惊讶的数字。

campaigns（from gamasutra）

我们从中了解到：

付费用户和免费用户是两种不同的生物：在2012年12月，虽然付费用户能为我们带来盈利，但是却几乎没有一名免费用户愿意在最初实行免费的那个周末购买任何IAP。在我们的DARPU，我们从免费用户和付费用户/广告那所获得的IAP收益是相同的，如此我们便需要获得70倍以上的收益，或者吸引70万名用户的注意。

很难找到鲸鱼用户：让我们继续基于上述内容，假设平均IAP花费是14美元，这便不足7个IAP买家（可能其中3名是“鲸鱼玩家”会投入10美元以上的钱）。这暗示着我们错过了拥有更多愿意花钱的用户的市场。因为IAP黑客，我们将参数瞄准较大消费者的行为受到了阻碍（这将在下文中提到）。

我们可能会自动获得免费用户：许多用户会自动被下调了价格的游戏所吸引，而Twitter bot也将发挥病毒式传播攻势去吸引更多用户的注意。

广告也很有效，但是必须具有针对性：1月份，我们使用了广告支持—–根据PlayHaven，具有针对性的广告所获得的收益是非针对性广告的13倍，并更接近于我们几个月内使用付费下载模式所获得的收益。

遭遇黑客：在游戏发行后24小时内，我们的参数便送回了一些有关付费道具“购买完成”的错误事件。在几个月内我们共收到5000多个有关这些事件的报告，但事实却是只成交了60笔购买交易。从中我们发现有50%的流量是来自中国，这里也聚集了我们50%的用户基础。

用户获取成本意味着不能获得盈利：我们研究了一些用户获取机制，如FreeAppADay，Flurry以及PlayHaven的用户获取机制，总的来看，手机游戏的用户获取大约在每个人2美元至2.5美元之间——除非你的DARPU能够高于这一数值，否则这便是不可能的事。而因为我们的DARPU仅为0.03美元，所以选择用户获取渠道无疑是白白浪费金钱。

所以出现了什么情况？

我们的大脑中充斥着一个最主要的问题：为什么盈利会如此低？尽管能够吸引许多玩家，但却很少人愿意为游戏花钱：

IAP（from gamasutra）

最终，因为一些问题的存在而阻止了《四驱装甲赛车》在iOS平台上获取成功，我们也从中吸取了一些经验教训希望能够用于下一款游戏中：

了解微观市场：当我们真正需要追逐的是“iOS动作街机游戏玩家”时，我们却只是在追逐着“iOS玩家”。要知道，比起综合市场，这个更加明确的市场中具有不同的消费限制，吸引和喜好，而我们必须直接瞄准目标市场。

尽早提高曝光率：我们不应该将预算浪费在用户获取渠道上。如果我们想要进一步深入付费市场，我们就需要想办法提高曝光率。我们需要尽早与媒体搞好关系，从而在游戏发行时才有人愿意为游戏做宣传。

相信市场测试：测试市场营销能够帮你发现IAP所具有的问题，并推动着你走向最后的发行。也许我们不能预测到所有行动街机游戏所具有的类型太过广泛的IAP问题，但是我们却牢记着相关数据并为游戏制定了B计划。

结论

我们很自豪能将《四驱装甲赛车》带向一个新平台以及新玩家群组。尽管这款游戏也遭遇了可发现性问题以及特定类型的盈利问题，但是我们却很高兴能看到玩家从中感受到巨大的游戏乐趣。

（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）

Armored Drive Post Mortem: The Hard Road of In-App Purchases

by Charles Cox

It’s been a heck of a first year in operation. With two games, four platforms, three monetization models, over 60,000 users and almost a quarter-million gaming sessions logged, we’re glad to still be in one piece. Seriously, it’s tough out there. We’ve got two games to talk about – let’s start with the second one first; with only one platform and form factor (iPhone), it’s a simpler study.

Buckle up, and we’ll dig into the whole story.

Introducing Armored Drive

Originally developed for Windows Phone by Elbert Perez, a developer with 2M+ game downloads on Windows Phone

Ported to iPhone by Nick Gravelyn and Elbert Perez, published by 4gency

Built with an in-app purchase (IAP) model, in-app advertising included later

Launched worldwide on iPhone around Thanksgiving 2012

Armored Drive is a spy-car themed endless racer. Players use tilt controls on their phone to move their car left and right on the road, and touch controls to deploy weapons and gadgets to knock out other cars and get rewards. Distance and combat prowess reward the player with coins, an in-game currency, used to purchase more ammunition, gadgets, car upgrades and more. Elbert Perez, who developed the original Windows Phone game using a free-with-ads model, gave 4gency the opportunity to take the game to iPhone, going to not only a new platform, but a new revenue model as we implemented in-app purchases (IAP) in hopes of more deeply monetizing the game.

Design Considerations

We felt Armored Drive was a good candidate for IAP. An endless racer with similar traits to Jetpack Joyride, Armored Drive had upgrades to weapons, gadgets, and car appearance that would attract a variety of players. A system of ranks and challenges brought players back in and encouraged repeat plays and investment in buying more ammo and upgrades. We felt that we could implement IAP in a reasonable, non-annoying way by using real currency only as a way to more quickly attain in-game currency. By playing the game, a player could get kills, distance, and rank up for good coin rewards without having to ever buy the consumable IAP coin packs or durable IAP “coin doubler” we offered in the real-money marketplace.

There was no “end” to the game, per se – iOS leaderboards were set up to sort on maximum distance in a single run, so an expression of superiority was not simply an aggregate number of times played, but rather how effectively a player could use their tools and skills in a single effort. Designs for “in-session” drops of additional gear were considered, as a way of extending run length per session, but had to be shelved for lack of time.

Pricing Considerations

Initial designs had Armored Drive being free from Day 1. However, a Monte Carlo-style simulation run between an IAP-only and a paid-with-IAP pricing model showed paid as the probabilistic winner in a higher percentage of scenarios. I used a modified Hubbard Research model, as described in the book “How to Measure Anything” and available in Excel form on the Hubbard Research site.

And – though we didn’t know it at the time – going paid first meant we could deploy a free promotion later to take advantage of the anchoring effect, an event that we later found drove over 15,000 users to our game virally, thanks to the network of twitterbots scouring the App Store. In the end, the prediction made by the Monte Carlo simulation turned out to be right, if overoptimistic about the number of users that would find and convert on our game.

To this day, the amount of money made on $0.99 paid copies of the game outweighs the amount of money made on IAP.

How We Did

We staged our release through a free, quiet pre-release period in Canada, Russia, and China to try out the IAP and determine depth of spend. In the test environment, we ended up with 400 downloads and $1 in revenue, so roughly one-quarter of a cent DARPU. It was discouraging at best. Regardless of how many downloads we got, the percentage of conversions was so low we’d be assured almost no return. It was at that point that we ratified going with the paid model. It wouldn’t be for several months until we saw the Big Data trend that showed us why we had very little chance of monetizing our game.

In the end, Armored Drive went through four versions, bounced between free and paid four times, and acquired about 20,000 total users. As this was a bootstrapped effort, we had no major marketing partners and worked through our own media channels to try to drive exposure and engagement in the game.

Total revenues equaled about $560 over 20,000 total users, or roughly three cents DARPU.

What Worked, What Didn’t

Armored Drive was heavily instrumented to send back metrics ; we got a good idea of how we were stacking up in a variety of ways:

Good engagement – 180 seconds per session, 2.8 sessions a month, above Action games average

Bad acquisition – less than 10% used viral “recruit” feature, less than 1% crossover with 4gency’s other game

Bad monetization – DARPU $0.03, IAP < 20% of all revenue earned on the game including ads and paid downloads

The following campaigns chart outlines how each move made to the monetization and acquisition strategy landed with our user base. Important questions are marked in red – these are the numbers that surprised or frightened us.

What we learned:

Paid and free users are different creatures: while many paid users monetized, almost no free users paid for any IAP in the initial free weekend in December 2012. At our DARPU, to even get the same amount of IAP revenue from free users that we got from paid/ads, we’d need to get 70x more, or close to 700,000 users.

Finding whales is hard: Tied to the item above, assuming average IAP spend is $14 as Flurry suggests, that’s less than 7 IAP buyers (and probably 3 of them are “whales” > $10 spend). This suggests we missed the deepest, most spend-eager market. Our ability to pivot our metrics on just the big spenders got hobbled by a wave of false events thanks to IAP hackers (see below).

Getting free users can happen almost automatically: users in the low-thousands will respond to a price-drop to free without any additional marketing – Twitter bots will pick up the change and drive traffic virally.

Ads can work well, but they need to be heavily targeted: in January, we went to ad support – targeted ads (via PlayHaven) drove 13x the revenue of non-targeted ads, and made close to the amount we made with paid downloads in just a few months.

You’ll get hacked: Just 24 hours after releasing, our metrics sent back hundreds of false “purchase completed” events for our most expensive items. 5,000 of these events were reported over several months, while only 60 legit purchases were ever made. About 50% of this traffic came from China, where 50% of our game’s total userbase was located.

Aquisition means nothing without monetization: we investigated several acquisition mechanisms, such as FreeAppADay and Flurry and PlayHaven acquisition departments – in general, user acquisition for mobile is between $2.00 and $2.50 per person – absolutely out of the question unless DARPU can rise above those levels. At our $0.03 DARPU this would be an almost suicidal waste of money.

So, What Happened?

Our minds were full with the most critical question: why was monetization so low? It was only a few months ago that a potential answer came up, from Apsalar: while games of the “Arcade” genre have high engagement (as we did), they have disastrously low monetization. Many will come, few will pay:

In the end, Armored Drive on iOS had a number of issues that kept it from overarching success, and stand as lessons we’ll use to better target and execute our next titles:

Understand the micro-market: we chased the “iOS gamer”, when we really needed to be chasing the “iOS action-arcade gamer”. This more specific market has different spending limits, hooks, and likes/dislikes from the aggregate market, and we should ensure we target it directly.

Be vocal, early: Acquisition was not something we paid for. If we wanted to get big and dig into the paying markets, we needed exposure, and that means being known. In the end, our groundswell contacts gave us very little – only two articles were ever published about Armored Drive. We needed to court media earlier, more aggressively, and with dedicated partners to help us.

Believe the test market: In the end, the test marketing effort found the problem with IAP, and we moved forward with the launch. We may not have been able to predict the genre-wide issue with IAP that all action-arcade titles had, but we might have taken the data to heart and constructed a Plan B for our game.

Conclusion

Over 125,000 sessions of Armored Drive have been played worldwide; roughly 6,000 hours of gameplay. We are proud to have brought the game onto a new platform, to a new group of players. While the game’s success suffered the familiar problems of discoverability and the less-known issue of genre-specific monetization, it is gratifying to know the game is out there for players to enjoy.(source:gamasutra)