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关于免费游戏的一些问题与解答

发布时间:2013-07-09 15:37:54 Tags:,,,,

作者:Paul Johnson

问题:对于消费者来说“免费”是否是件坏事?

答案:并非如此。

几乎所有消费者都接受了这一模式,只是大多数人都保持沉默而已。关于证据,你只需要着眼于最畅销排行榜单或最高下载排行榜单便可。至少在手机领域中,大多数游戏都是基于免费模式,付费游戏只占少数。

问题:如今越来越多手机游戏都将使用免费模式。这难道不是一种贪婪的表现?

答案:可能是也可能不是。但大多数情况下并不是。

发行商(游戏邦注:包括大型发行商与独立开发商)主要分成两个阵营。一个阵营只是单纯地开发游戏并因此赚钱。他们是因为在游戏玩法中投入了许多努力而备受瞩目。

我并不想要详细描写这类型阵营,因为我还想要专注于其它信息。但是我必须强调一件事,即如果你认为一家公司滥用免费模式,请你直接致电他们提出这一抱怨。不要就此责怪这一销售模式—-是公司在运行该模式而不是模式自己。

另外一个阵营,也是包含我们以及其它独立开发商的阵营便是坚持“游戏第一,盈利第二”的理念。我们活着就是为了开发游戏,并且我们只需要足够的钱去完成这些目标。

你将从许多年轻人身上听到这样的说法,但是对于我们这一年龄层的人,这需要一些警告。我仍然先重视游戏后重视利益,但是如果我不能通过创造自己的游戏挣得足够养活自己的钱,我便需要另外去找份能够糊口的工作。我也拥有一个家庭且需要还贷款,所以“游戏优先”理念并不包含“让老婆睡大街”的情况。所以你认为我会如何处理“游戏优先”。

free(from videogamer.com)

free(from videogamer.com)

问题:如果不是贪婪,为什么你不直接销售一款1美元的游戏?

答案:因为它的价值不只1美元。

这便是最根本的原因。当然了,它们的价值必须超过0.99美元。我是这么觉得的,但是客观来说,你必须着眼于市场的力量—-产品必须值得消费者掏钱购买。

让我们着眼于这些起作用的市场力量。几年前,少数开发商们从早前的App Store中赚取了巨大的利益。这便导致了许多人开始往这一平台投钱,不知不觉便出现大量游戏涌向该平台。随后便爆发了价格战,0.99美元成为了最普遍的定价。如果iTunes拥有一个10美分的价格段,那么游戏就需要面向大众投入10美分去吸引他们的注意。

大多数消费者(也有可能是全部)都知道,如果他们停下游戏并进行思考的话便会知道这是一种荒谬的交易,但是他们却并未这么做,因为没有必要。只有当我们着眼于差异性时,定价才会变成一种元素。我敢打赌,大多数用户在看到2.99美元的游戏时都会说“不可能,这一价格是普通定价的3倍,但是它的质量却不一定是其它游戏的3倍高”,但是他们却忘记了即使是3倍定价也比一杯大咖啡便宜。这只是我们的脑子运行方式,没有人可以为此责怪别人。

而现在的问题则是关于,数值将不再增加。

在早前的淘金热时期,开发者可以以较短的开发时间(游戏邦注:如创造出较低的游戏质量)去补偿较低的价格标签,从而导致用户对产品的咆哮。

而今天,淘金热已经结束。我们所面对的现状是太多人转向了其中一个阵营。根据148App的“App Store Metrics”页面,如今每天只会出现100款新应用。让我们好好想想。可以说质量门槛一直在提高—-如今许多游戏已经可以与早前PlayStation 3和Xbox 360游戏的图像相较量了。虽然它们还是比不上更糟的主机时代的游戏。显然,游戏玩法也应该匹配这种高质量。

简单来说,这样大规模的消费者已不复存在了,如今的消费者面对的是更多可消费的内容,而开发者的开发时间也随之增加着。这对于我们这些小型开发商来说真是祸不单行。

让我们着眼于当前的数值。根据TechCrunch上的一篇文章,如今,平均每款应用的收益为1万9560美元,并仍在下降着。着眼于我们当前的收益并将其与历史上的排行情况相比较,说实话,我应该想着会看到更低的数值,但是不管怎样我仍会坚定地伴随着它。(我们所赚得的利益多于这一平均值,但是我们也仍有一些游戏在最初发行后便掉落到排行榜的最低点。但是大多数开发商却没有这样幸运,要知道,每天可是有1000款应用出现在消费者面前。)

减去给苹果的30%分红,以及所需支付的税收,你还剩下1万美元吗?基于这些收益的业务能否继续发展?要记住,这是一款应用的终身价值,并不是每月收入。就拿我们来说,我们需要支付5个人的工资,还需要承担租赁费,设备费,商业利率,保险等等。

所以开发者需要着眼于其它事物。许多开发者会在不得已的时候选择放弃。也有些人能从前100位排行榜中赚取巨大利益,但总共也只有100款游戏能够做到这点—-新游戏发行能够吸引后最有价值的时间只有短短几个小时。那剩下的时间呢?

这里有一点需要注意的,如果人们喜欢1美元的游戏,他们便会喜欢上免费游戏!这便可以直接略过差异性问题,因为不存在比之更便宜的游戏了。如果没有最初的“在尝试前购买”的模式,你从理论上便可以再次吸引这种大规模消费者的注意,至少让他们愿意看看游戏。

问题:我不关心你的问题,你不能期待着我去保持你们公司的运行!

答案:当然,我们没有权利这么做!

但是我们却有权进行尝试,成功的一种有效方式便是从我们的工作中获得一个合理的报酬。所以我们便免费将游戏呈现在消费者面前,希望能够吸引他们进入游戏,在此长期逗留并为某些内容消费。我们也希望报酬超过1美元的价值。现在我们总是很难找到具有差异性的内容,我们希望能从提供给消费者的几个小时的乐趣中获得回报(如果你不喜欢游戏内容,你就可以不用付钱并离开)。

问题:但这便是所谓的心理诈骗技巧。

答案:有时候是这样的,但是我们需要对此做出判断。

我们一直尝试着去销售各种东西,并且不想假装我们没在这么做,对于预付机制也是如此。在我们的游戏中,我们通过销售补充包而提供给玩家更多选择。你可以长时间免费玩我们的游戏,但是我们却不想要欺骗大家,并假装自己是在做慈善。当你真正深入游戏中时,我们便会希望你能够通过消费而支持我们的努力。

的确有一些较为积极的公司会使用真正的心理学技巧去增加收益;市面上也有许多有关这方面内容的书籍。但再一次地我想劝你根据个体公司做出判断,而不是对于销售模式。我们所创造的是自己认为符合道德标准的免费游戏,即主要的“诈骗技巧”是创造一些让玩家愿意花钱购买的内容。

顺便一提的是,销售技巧并不局限于免费游戏中。你是否好奇为什么许多产品的定价尾数都是99美分?这便是一种心理技巧,即让玩家相信它比1美元更加便宜。如此说来,iTunes上的每一款应用都在对你使用心理诈骗技巧了。

这里有另外一个经常会被忽视的点。关于预付游戏,玩家不得不先花钱并期待着购买的内容是自己所喜欢的。但是通常情况下却不是如此。而对于免费游戏,玩家可以在消费前先看到完整的游戏以及他们想要购买的内容。

问题:所以这完全是关于“鲸鱼”玩家以及通过小孩去挤榨家长的钱?

答案:当然不是。

哪里都会出现鲸鱼玩家。如果你是一个千万富翁,那么对于你来说在游戏中投入1千美元就等于我们投入1美元一样。撇开这个不说,我们并不是在寻找千万富翁玩家,你也不需要在我们游戏中投入1千美元,这完全是两回事。

首先,并没有多少手机游戏千万富翁玩家会注意到我们的游戏并喜欢它。这并不是可行的追求目标,如果我们这么做就会导致游戏错失了那些真正的玩家。

我们所追求的应该是从玩家身上获取10至20美元。我们需要再次撇开差异性并只是考虑真正想要赚取多少钱。想要创造好几个小时的娱乐体验?对于一款花了10个人好几年时间而开发出来的游戏?我认为这都是需要回答的合理问题。

但是如果你不认为这是合理的,我们拥有一些较低的定价选择能够用于扩展游戏。或者如果你真的决定不为游戏花任何钱,你便可以完全免费地长时间玩游戏,所以游戏中并不具有付费获胜机制。这都是你的选择。这种选择非常棒,不是吗?

而关于小孩的那个问题,我只能说这是个老生常谈的问题。没有人想要故意这么做,即便是贪婪的阵营。我理解苹果和谷歌为阻止这种情况而采取的种种行动,我也希望他们能够为了所有人的利益取得成功。(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

Ranting about Free to Play (it’s not what you think)

by Paul Johnson

Here’s an odd situation. I was just telling someone why Combat Monsters (Rubicon’s next game) will soon make a dent on the App Store, and he wasn’t sold on a particular new feature. I was about to type “Trust me, it’s free to play so why not just give it a go and see” and… I caught myself.

I had not mentioned it was an F2P game, and letting the cat out of the bag might have started another ranting session that I didn’t want to get sidetracked with.

But how on Earth did we get into a situation where “free” is seen as a bad thing for the consumer?

Free to play seems to be a very controversial topic right now and I’m girding my loins as I type this out, but I’m determined to get my own point of view down on record, so here goes. First off, let’s answer that question and then I’ll present a few more, with my answers, based on the various things I’ve seen raised on forums again and again.

Q. How on Earth did we get into a situation where “free” is seen as a bad thing for the consumer?

A. We didn’t.

Almost ALL consumers are fine with it, they’re just a lot quieter about it. For evidence you only need to look at the top-grossing charts or the top downloads charts. On mobile at least, both are full of F2P games with paid for games being in a minority. I won’t post a chart here as it will be out of date by tomorrow, but you can click this for a current list: http://www.razorianfly.com/charts/grossing/

Q. Ever more mobile games are going F2P these days. That’s just greed isn’t it?

A. Yes and no. Mostly no.

Publishers (meaning the big ones as well as indie developers) fall into two camps. One camp develops games purely and only to make money. They are notable because they seem to make far too much of it for the gameplay they provide, and I’m sure you can all think of an example of this right now.

I don’t want to dwell on this camp for long though, because there’s another message I want to concentrate on. However I will urge one thing. If you think a company is behaving appallingly and abusing the free to play model, then please by all means call them on it. But don’t blame the sales model – it’s the company that’s doing it.

The other camp, the one that we and probably most other indies fall into, is that of “games first, money second”. We live to develop games and we need only enough money to get by.

You’ll hear that a lot from younger guys, but at my age it needs a bit of a caveat. I still live to develop games and money is second, but if I can’t earn a living wage by making my own games, I’ll have to go get a job working on someone else’s who will pay me better. I have a family and a mortgage to worry about and “games first” seriously does not include “putting my wife out on the street.”  So how about I go with “games mostly first.”

Q. So if not greed, why don’t you just sell me the game for a buck?

A. Because it’s worth more than a buck.

That really should be the end of this one, shouldn’t it? Surely they have to be worth more than $0.99? I certainly feel so, but to be objective about it you have to look at market forces – things are worth what people will pay for them. Period.

Let’s look at these market forces in action. Several years ago, a few developers were making eye-watering sums of money from the early App Store. This led a lot of people to start up and cash in, and before we knew it, there were tons of games coming out. An inevitable price war then broke out and $0.99 became the only number in town. If iTunes had a price tier of 10 cents, then games would now have to cost 10 cents for the masses to even consider buying them.

Most customers, probably all, know that this is a ridiculous bargain if they stop and think about it, but they don’t – there’s no need to. The only time pricing becomes a factor is when looking at differentials. I’ll bet most people have looked at a $2.99 game at some point, and said to themselves “no way, that’s triple the normal price but it won’t be triple as good” – totally forgetting that triple the price is still less than a large coffee. And nobody can blame them for that; it’s just how our minds work.

The problem now though is that the numbers just don’t add up anymore.

In those early gold rush years, a developer could make up for a ridiculously low price tag with short (i.e. poor game quality) development times and the sheer mass of available customers crying out for product. Any product!

Nowadays though, that gold rush is long over. And we all know what mining towns look like shortly after the gold runs out. What happened is that simply too many people turned up to the party. According to 148App’s “App Store Metrics” page, there are just shy of a thousand apps a day being released now. Just stop and think about that, one thousand a day. And the quality bar is rising all the time – a lot of games now match the graphics of early PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 games. Those that don’t tend to match the console generation beforehand. And obviously the gameplay should be there to match the spectacle.

Put simply, those massive customer numbers are not there anymore as consumers have far more variety to spend on, and the development times have also ballooned. That’s a double whammy for us small developers.

Let us look at the numbers as they stand now. According to an article on TechCrunch, the average app income is now $19,560 and falling. Given our own earnings and matching that to our chart history, I was expecting a lower figure if I’m being frank, but I’ll go with it on faith. (We do earn more than this, but we have a couple of games still at the bottom end of the charts after great initial showings. However, almost all developers are not that fortunate – a thousand apps per day, remember.)

Anyway, remove Apple’s 30 per cent from that figure and pay the tax and you’re left with about $10,000? How is any business meant to exist on that? This is an app’s lifetime earnings don’t forget, not a monthly income. In our case we’d need to pay five guys out of that, plus rent, equipment costs, business rates, insurance, etc.

So developers need to look to something else. Many will quit while they can, others will quit when they’re made to. Some will prosper as there’s still big money to be made from the top 100 chart, but only 100 of them at most – that’s several hours’ worth of new releases. What of the rest of the year?

Enter F2P. Here’s a thing, if people like one dollar games, they’re going to love no dollar games! That slips us nicely past that artificial differential problem as there’s no game cheaper than that. And with no initial “buy before you try” blocker, you can in theory get those massive customer numbers back again, at least for just a look see.

Q. I don’t care about your problems; you can’t expect me to keep your company running!

A. Absolutely, we have no automatic right to exist.

But we do have the right to try to, and a good way to succeed is to get paid a reasonable sum for our work. So we show it to you for free, hoping to hook you into the game so you might stick around and pay for something. We’re hoping that payment will be more than a dollars’ worth too. Now that the differentials thing is out of the way, we would like to get a sane amount for the many hours of enjoyment we bring you (if you’re not enjoying it, pay nothing and move on – another win for the consumer).

Q. But that’s when the psychological con tricks start.

A. Sometimes, but judge the book.

We are trying to sell you stuff and we’re not trying to pretend we won’t, but that’s the same with prepaid. In our game, we sell booster packs to give you more choices. You can play our game for free for a long time, but we’re not trying to be dishonest and pretend we’re a charity. If you get so far into it, yes we hope you will support us with a purchase.

It is true that more aggressive companies use genuine psychology and stuff to maximize their earnings; there are even books on how to do it. But again I urge you to judge the individual company on that, not the sales model. We’re making what we consider a perfectly ethical F2P game where the main “trick” is to make something you’ll want to buy!

By the way, sales tricks are not limited to F2P either. Have you ever wondered why everything is priced at something ninety nine? It’s a psychological trick to get you to think something is a dollar cheaper than it is. So there you go, every app on iTunes is using tricks on you!

And here’s another oft-missed point. With a prepaid game, you have to pay upfront and hope that what you’re buying is what you actually wanted and expected. And often it’s not, we’ve all been there. But with an F2P game, you see the whole game AND the things we want you to pay for, right there in situ before paying a dime. If I tried really hard, I could probably make a case that prepaid games are abusive and F2P is the real deal.

Q. So it’s all about the ‘whales’ and milking kids with their parents’ iTunes login?

A. No.

Whales happen everywhere. If you’re a multi-millionaire, dropping a grand on a game is about as serious as we think dropping a few bucks is. Get over this one, we’re not chasing millionaires and you won’t ever spend a grand on our game, so that’s both boxes crossed out.

For starters, there’s nowhere near enough mobile phone game playing multi-millionaires who might notice our game and like it enough. It’s simply not a viable thing to chase and trying to do so would put the game beyond us mere mortals who are the real audience.

No, what we’re after is to get 10-20 bucks out of you. Put away those differentials again and just consider how much money that actually is. For hopefully many, many hours of entertainment? For a game that took ten man years to develop? I think that’s a perfectly reasonable ask, and you might too the next time you book theatre tickets.

But if you don’t feel that’s reasonable, we have some lower priced options to extend the game some. Or if you’re really determined to not pay us anything, you can play a long way into our game for totally free, including unlimited multiplayer with matchmaking, so it’s not even pay to win. It’s your choice. Choices are good, right?

Regarding the kids thing, I’ve seen this mentioned a few times and find it abhorrent. NOBODY is trying to do this deliberately, not even that greedy camp. I understand that Apple and Google are working to stop this and I hope they succeed for everyone’s benefit.

Q. Why is this post so long?

A. Guess I got carried away a bit.

I’m truly impressed you made it to the end, and I really hope that this has done a small amount to bring balance to the Force.(source:gamasutra)


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