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开发者称最成功的游戏可能最不挣钱

发布时间:2013-08-23 17:16:06 Tags:,,,,

作者:Yann Seznec

三周以前,我的小工作室Lucky Frame发布了《Gentlemen!》的iPad版和Android版。这是一款维多利亚风格双人格斗平板游戏,只能2人本地联网。

我们还刚刚发布Mac版和PC版,仍然是本地联网但允许2-4人同时游戏,且增加了新特征。

现在应该对本文的标题做出解释了。出售一款需要2人联网的平板独占游戏总是很困难的,但总是有一些出人意料的结果,我们不妨分析一下!

毫无疑问,《Gentlemen!》是我们有史以来评价最好的游戏之一。我们在Edge上得到让人垂涎三尺的8/10好评,Touch Arcade给我们打出不可思议的4.5星,PocketGamer给我们9/10的好评。这些结果让我们倍感自豪。为什么这款游戏能得到这么高的评价?这是值得思考的问题。它显然是一款让我们无比骄傲的游戏,我们觉得它好,但这还不足以保证外界对它高度评价。

在开发过程中,我们一度打算给游戏做一个单人模式。在还不确实这是不是一个好主意的情况下,我们就做出一些概念模型,甚至开始设计关卡。《Gentlemen!》是直接从第一版原型做成本地联网游戏的,在设计重力玩法和关卡布局时,我们只考虑二人玩家的情况。单人模式可能是多余的,并且也许并不好玩。

gama1(from gamasutra)

gama1(from gamasutra)

我认为得到积极的评价是个令人意外的结果。如果《Gentlemen!》中有半成品的单人模式,那么玩家可能会只玩单人模式,然后觉得它也没那么好玩了。相反地,当这款游戏没有单人模式时,玩家必须找人一起玩,一起玩上足够长的时间才能让他们给出这么高明的评价。与别人一起玩非常有趣,当你坐在一个开心地朝你扔鸽子的人面前一起玩这款游戏,我认为你很难对《Gentlemen!》提出什么消极评价。

当然二人模式的缺点在于,并非所玩家都能找到可以一起玩的人。测试游戏往往是一个孤单的活动,不止一个评论者表示确实想玩这款游戏,但找不到可以一起玩的人。我们很幸运,许多媒体对我们表示支持,有几家甚至为《Gentlemen!》做了额外评论——尽管我们的评论总数少于《Bad Hotel》和《Wave Trip》。

我们的二人设计导致的另一个有趣的结果是,有些玩家提议我们推出单人版本或多人联网。部分是我的过失,因为游戏介绍上说的是“需要2名玩家”,许多人不知道那句话的意思是“两名玩家要在同一个地方”。还有一件有趣的事是,许多评论者表示“是款好游戏,如果能在线多人玩或加入AI,就更好了”。这让我感到困惑,因为他们说它是款好游戏,又指出完全不同的改进方向。我的论据是,它是一款好游戏是因为你是跟朋友一起玩!

gama2(from gamasutra)

gama2(from gamasutra)

所以,评价很高,但如何转化为销售量?目前,iPad版的销售量是1114份,Android版的是144份。这是不是一个“好”成绩尚有争议。当然,每天发布的那么多游戏还卖不到这个数字呢。我们很清楚我们做了一款相当“极品”的游戏,因为它不仅只能在iPad和超过7英寸的平板上玩,而且只能两个玩家一起玩,所以其实我们没有抱很大期望。我们还把价格标得相当高——5美元,现在促销改成3美元了。

到现在,销量比我们期望的要低——我个人目标是卖出2000份,但能不能达到还要看运气。售出2000份,而且价格这么高,对于由一家3人小工作室做了5个月完成的游戏来说,很不现实。好吧,那是因为我们有幸得到Prototype基金和阿伯泰大学的大力支持。他们为那些真正想做好游戏的工室提供资金,且不提出商业要求。没有他们,我们当然做不出这款游戏,能在这样一个慷慨的社会生活和工作,我们真是荣幸。

我们在发布游戏时遇到一个问题,一个叫作“鸟叔”的搞笑艺人刚好发布了一首叫作《Gentleman》的歌。疯刺的是,我们当时还在为游戏的名称而烦恼,在很长一段时间里,我们给游戏暂定名为没什么吸引力的《Martin vs. Monty》。最后,我们决定使用“Gentleman!”这个名称(我们还想过其他名称,如“Scoundrels”、“East Stabwich”、“The Panic of 1857”、“Crumpet Clash”等),并且宣传材料上也相应地使用这个名称。当时我们并不知道这么一首流行歌曲的存在。你应该想不到一首流行歌能给一款应用造成什么麻烦吧,但我们很快就发现我们生活的是一个娱乐媒体大融合的时代。看到那么多游戏借用一个流行歌手的形象,真是让人郁闷。所以,很不幸,“发现”成了一个大问题。

gama3(from gamasutra)

gama3(from gamasutra)

我们的游戏没有得到苹果推荐,太惨了,但之后他们确实支持了我们原来发布的作品,所以我们也不抱怨了!

给游戏定价总是一个棘手的问题,当看到最初的5美元标价时,有些人就皱眉了。我们的想法是,双人游戏的价值比单人游戏的更高,因为它是可以与朋友共享的。且有时候,平板游戏的价格本来就可以定得更高,我想这是因为大屏幕吧。但最重要的是,我们认为《Gentleman!》带来的快乐超过5美元。我们看了人们玩游戏,他们的反馈是,与子女/伙伴/父母一起玩时,一次能玩一个小时或以上。这是有点老套的论据,但事实仍然是,这是相当大的娱乐价值。最后,在独立游戏领域,提价似乎是一个趋势,我们只是顺应潮流罢了。

游戏发布几天后,我们开始注意到Android版的数据相当奇怪。我们把分析包放进游戏,它可以告诉我们全世界有多少单独玩家在玩我们的游戏。两天后,我们在Google Play上只卖了8份,但玩家人数却增长得非常著。统计数字让我们大为吃惊,我们联系分析公司确认数据。之的我们在Lucky Frame的twitter上发布消息,让人们猜猜有多少人玩的是盗版的。没有人说出接近的答案:

好吧!我想可以公布答案了。《Gentlemen! 》官方Android版的销量是:3天售出8份。但盗版数量是2462。——Lucky Frame (@lucky_frame) July 19, 2013

三周后,数字变成官方销量是144份,盗版是50030份。可见盗版率一点也没有下降——甚至有走高的趋势!

无论如何,这个推特消息发起了一场火爆的社交媒体活动——基本上,后来的三天我都在回应别人的tweet和facebook消息(844个反推!)。这确实拉动了Android版的销量(第二天我们卖出25份——成功的营销!),且产生了一些有意义的讨论。这让我想到一些事……

人们对设备有偏见

这个经历非常类似于(但规模更大)《unVerse》被苹果拒绝的遭遇。虽然这个故事可能给讨厌苹果的人留下话柄,但把这件事说出来是证实苹果有偏见的好例子。人们经常说“这就是为什么你不应该开发Android游戏”,或更坦率的“这就是为什么Android很糟糕。”我觉得这种观点非常愚蠢。所有设备都只是计算机。有些有漂亮的UI,有些有优秀的产品设计,它们当然也都有缺陷。当人们把电子产品与生活方式选择联系起来,并以此评价别人时,我感到非常可悲。这些设备和公司背上道德和伦理困境的压力,几乎没什么人想到它们对于世界发展的贡献,和它们之间的差异根本是微不足道的。我们不应该说“产品X比产品Y好多了”或者“产品X的粉丝是傻瓜”,我们应该思考的是“如何以积极的方式使用这种技术?”或者从更技术性的角度说,“我们不应该发开Android产品”的想法是很可笑的。我们用Unity游戏引擎制作了《Gentlemen!》,使制作Android版本变得极基容易。大约只花了两三天就做出Android版了(整个开发周期是5个月),所以我们只卖出200份Android版仍然是与我们付出的努力相匹配的。

我们做了一款好游戏

许多人认为我们对这个数据感到心烦意乱。回忆过去,在Twitter谈论盗版率的事,也许暗示了我们不高兴,但事实上,盗版率只是向我们证实了,我们确实做了一款人们爱玩的好游戏!盗版游戏的人也玩得很多、玩得很开心——他们不是因为可以盗版于是就盗版的玩家。所以,这证明了我们的游戏设计确实扎实,我们做了一款超级好玩的游戏。老实说,我们感觉很好。这些盗版者是不可能购买我们的游戏的,所以我们只是为人们玩它而感觉良好。Android版是很容易盗版的,全世界玩盗版《Gentlemen!》的人比我们之前的游戏的所有玩家总数还多。

设备是复杂的

很多人抱怨市场上的Android手机和平板种类太杂,这对开发者来说是个大难题。我们对此非常谨慎,我们的措施是,只发布我们能够测试的设备的版本。我们不希望玩家购买了游戏,结果体验并不好。我们得到大量评论表示,他们的设备不能运行我们的游戏。我们仍然没有决定怎么处理这个问题,因为发布运行并不好的平板或手机版本是很可怕的事。我们认为只发布最流行的设备的版本就行了,但也许未必。另一方面,我认为这不是我们的游戏盗版率这么高的原因。我觉得,人们在Google Play上购买游戏,结果发现在他们自己的设备上运行得不好,于是就去盗版,这似乎不太可能。更可能的是,盗版游戏的人只有一种找到和安装应用的办法,那就是通过盗版网站。

可预测的位置

帮我得出那个结论的一个东西是,盗版的定位数据。在俄罗斯和中国(主要是中国),我们的这款游戏的盗版率高达95%。我们甚至没有把我们的应用商店翻译成俄语或中文,所以基本上可以肯定盗版者是在本地化盗版网站找到我们的游戏的。但另一方面,我很高兴我们的菜单设计非常直观,不会说英语的人能也玩游戏。

我们还有很多要学

这是我们的第一款Android游戏。我们本可以避免出现这么多盗版——或者更好地,把盗版玩家转化为付费玩家。我认为Android应用必然是会被盗版的,我很难想象,非常成功的付费应用的盗版率应该高到什么程度。然而,如果我们事行估计到这种情况,我们本可以在应用中加入一些IAP,或者一些需要解锁的关卡或模式。这样,那些确实喜欢游戏的盗版玩家至少有机会给我们一点儿回报——主要问题是,大部分这些盗版者存在于一个甚至连Google Play商店都没有的商业生态系统,他们不可能购买任何游戏。

用户评论

有一件小事让我们相当吃惊——Google Play用户更喜欢在应用商店里留评论……而且是非常积极的评论!近10%的人在Google Play上买这款游戏会留下评价,平均打分4.8星。在iTunes,这个比例仅为0.01%,而且我们的平均得分是3.3星。

我没有什么要总结的了。这是一段非常有趣的经历,我们当然受益匪浅。我们希望把这段经历分享出来也能启发其他人吧。(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

Gentlemen! Or, how our most successful game is also our least profitable.

by Yann Seznec

Three weeks ago my little studio, Lucky Frame, released Gentlemen! for iPad and Android. If you aren’t aware of it, it’s a 2-player head-to-head Victorian dueling game for tablets. Two players required, local multiplayer only.

We’ve also just released the desktop version for Mac and PC, which is still local multiplayer but is 2-4 players and has a bunch of new features.

Go buy it if you like, or there’s a free demo of the desktop version.

So this seems like a good time to talk about our tablet release, how it went and why. Selling a tablet-only game that requires two players was always going to be a challenge, but there were definitely some surprising outcomes and it’s always fun to try and analyze them. Let’s go!

Without a doubt, Gentlemen! was one of the best-reviewed projects we have ever produced. We received a coveted 8/10 on Edge, 4.5 stars on Touch Arcade, and a 9/10 Gold Award on PocketGamer. This was totally brilliant, and we are so proud. It’s interesting to think about why we got such great reviews. Obviously it’s a game that we’re super proud of, and we think it’s amazing, but that’s not always enough to secure great critical acclaim.

At one point, during the development process, we were planning to make a single player mode in the game. We got as far as mocking up some concepts and even designing a few challenge levels before deciding that it wasn’t a good idea. Gentlemen! was designed from the very first prototype to be a local multiplayer game – the gravity flipping, the level layout, it was all created with two players in mind. Any single player mode would have been superfluous and probably not very fun.

I think the positive reviews were an unanticipated outcome from this decision. If Gentlemen! had a half-baked single player mode, then reviewers would probably have only played that and not enjoyed it very much. Instead, the reviewers had to find someone to play with, and play a game together for enough time to make an educated assessment. As it turns out, playing games with other people is super fun, and I think it’s harder to be negative or cynical about a game when you’re sitting across from someone who is having a blast throwing pigeons at you.
The downside, of course, is that not all reviewers were able to find someone to play with. Reviewing games tends to be a fairly solitary activity, and more than one reviewer really wanted to test the game but was unable to find people to play with. We are lucky to have really great support from a number of different media outlets, and several of them made the extra effort to review Gentlemen! – though our overall number of reviews was far lower than Bad Hotel or Wave Trip.

Another interesting result of our multiplayer design was that we have gotten some user reviews, almost exclusively on iTunes, saying that we should make a single player version, or network multiplayer. Partially this is my fault, because the marketing copy said “Two Players Required!” and many people didn’t realize that meant “two players in the same place”. But there is also a funny logical thing going on, where many of the reviews say something like “Good game, could be so much better with online multiplayer or ai”. This is strange to me, because it admits that it is a good game, but then goes on to say that it should be different. My argument would be that the whole reason this is a good game is because you play it with a friend!

So! Great reviews? Check. How does this translate into sales? So far we have sold 1,114 copies on iPad, and 144 copies on Android. Whether this is a ‘good’ result is up for debate. Certainly, many many games are released every day that don’t sell anything close to these numbers. We knew very well that we were making a pretty esoteric game, in the sense that it is limited to iPads and tablets bigger than 7 inches and requires two players, so we didn’t exactly have high expectations. We also set the price relatively high – starting at $5, and currently on sale for $3.

So far the number of sales is a bit lower than we hoped – my personal target was to sell 2000 copies, but with a little luck we will get there! As a side note, amateur mathemagicians out there will realize that selling 2000 copies, even at our high price point, is not exactly good business for a 3-person studio working on a game for 5 months. Well, that’s because for this project we were really lucky to be supported by the Prototype Fund, a brilliant support grant run by the University of Abertay in Dundee. They give money to studios who want to make something great without the crushing weight of commercial expectations. We certainly couldn’t have made the game without them, and we are extremely privileged to live and work in a society where this exists.

One problem we definitely had was that just as we were releasing our game, a lovable little scamp named Psy happened to release a song named “Gentleman”. The deep irony of all of this was that we had a really hard time naming our game, and for the longest time it had the terribly uncatchy title of “Martin vs. Monty”. We finally settled on “Gentlemen!” (other ideas: ‘Scoundrels’, ‘East Stabwich’, ‘The Panic of 1857’, ‘Crumpet Clash’, etc) and sent out all of the promo material accordingly, blissfully unaware of this pop song. You wouldn’t think a pop song would cause problems for an app, but we quickly learned about the seedy world of games and apps piggybacking on other entertainment media. What a strange time we live in. Also, how depressing that people spend their time making Jetpack Joyride ripoffs using graphics referencing pop songs. So unfortunately, discovery was and remains a major problem.

We also didn’t really get any featuring from Apple for this release, which was too bad, but then they have really supported our previous releases so we can’t complain!

Anyway, pricing a game is always an interesting question, and there were a few eyebrows raised at our initial $5 price. Part of our thinking was that a two-player game has a higher value than a single player game, because it is being shared with friends. Tablet games can sometimes command a higher price as well, I suppose just because the bigger screen size conveys greater value. But most importantly we believe that Gentlemen! gives you way more than $5 worth of fun. We’ve watched people play game after game, and we get feedback from users who say they play with their child/partner/parent for an hour or more at a time. It’s a bit of a tired argument, but the fact remains that this is pretty great value entertainment. Finally, there’s a bit of a trend in the indie game world for raising prices on games, and we’re in favor of that and wanted to fit into the cool kids club.

A few days after release, we started noticing some pretty strange statistics on the Android version. At the last minute we had included an analytics package into the game that told us how many unique users there were playing around the world. After two days we had sold a total of 8 copies on Google Play, but we were getting significantly more players. The numbers surprised us so much that we actually contacted the analytics company to confirm that we were interpreting them correctly. Once we had done that I posted on the Lucky Frame twitter feed, asking people to guess how many pirated copies were being played. Nobody got anywhere near:

Ok! I think I’ll call time on this. Official Android sales numbers for Gentlemen! after three days: 8 copies sold. 2,462 copies pirated.

— Lucky Frame (@lucky_frame) July 19, 2013
If you’re interested, after three weeks those numbers are now 144 copies sold, 50,030 copies pirated. So, as you can tell the piracy rate has not really slowed down at all – if anything it has gotten even stronger!

Anyway, this tweet set off a firestorm of social media activity – basically, I spent the next three days responding to tweets and facebook messages (844 retweets!). It resulted in a definitely jump in Android sales (we sold about 25 the next day – woo marketing!) and generated some interesting discussion around the interwebs. This taught me several things…

People love hating on specific technology companies.

This experience was very similar (though much larger scale) to our whole experience with the unVerse rejection. Whilst that story provided fodder to Apple haters, releasing this data was a great example of confirmation bias. One narrative that kept appearing was “this is why you shouldn’t develop for Android”, or more bluntly “this is why Android sucks”. I find this attitude pretty silly. Let’s face it, all of these devices are just computers. Some of them have nice UI, some of them have nice product design, and they all certainly have downsides. It’s pretty sad when people associate electronics products with lifestyle choices, and judge others accordingly. These devices and companies are loaded with moral and ethical dilemmas, there is very little critical thought devoted to their place in the world, and the differences between them are negligible at best. Instead of saying “Product X is so much better than Product Y” or “Fans of Product X are blind/idiots/fanboys”, we should really be saying “How can we use this technology in a positive way?” On a more technical note, the idea that we “shouldn’t develop for Android” is kind of ridiculous. We made Gentlemen! in the Unity game engine, which makes building an Android version extremely easy. It probably took us an extra two or three days to make the android version (out of a 5 month develop cycle), so even if we only sell 200 copies total it’s still just about worth it.

We made an awesome game

Many people assumed that we were really upset about this statistic. In retrospect, talking about the piracy numbers on twitter probably implies that we were unhappy, but in reality the number of pirates just confirmed to us that we made a game that people love to play! The people who are pirating our game are also playing a surprising amount, with really great engagement – these are no casual pirates just downloading because they can. So this confirmed to us that our game design is solid, and that we’ve made a super fun game that people enjoy. To be honest, that is really great. It’s unlikely that any of these pirates would have bought the game anyway, so we’re just glad that people are playing. Android makes piracy very easy, and thanks to that Gentlemen! is being played by more people around the world than all of our previous games combined.

Devices are complicated

A lot of talk has been devoted to the insane amount of Android phones and tablets on the market, and how this poses a challenge to developers. We were very wary of this, and our strategy was to release only for devices that we were able to test on. This was a pretty limited number of mostly Google Nexus and Samsung devices. Our thinking was that we didn’t want anyone to buy the game and then have a negative experience with it. We got a fair amount of criticism for this, with people saying that the game wasn’t available for purchase on their specific device. We’re still undecided on how to approach this, because it is very scary to allow people to buy our game on a tablet or phone on which it won’t run well. We thought that releasing on the most popular devices would be fine, but it probably wasn’t. On the other hand, I don’t think that this was responsible for our piracy rate. It seems unlikely to me that people tried to buy it on Google Play, found it wouldn’t run on their device, and then tracked down a torrent instead. It’s far more likely that the people who pirated the game have only one method of finding and installing apps, and that is through pirate sites.

Predictable locations

One thing that helped me reach that conclusion was the location statistics for the pirated copies. About 95% of the pirated copies are being installed in Russia and China (and of those, mostly China). We didn’t even translate our Google Play store into Russian or Chinese, so it’s almost certain that the pirates just found our app on localized pirate sites. On the other hand, I’m glad our menu design is intuitive enough that you can play the game without speaking English!

We have a lot to learn

This was our first Android release. We probably could have done more to avoid the massive piracy of our game – or, even better, convert pirate users into paid users. I think that Android apps are definitely going to get pirated no matter what…I can only dimly imagine the level of piracy that a truly successful paid app has. However if we had anticipated this situation we probably would have included some sort of in app purchase, perhaps to unlock extra levels or game modes. At least then the pirates would have the opportunity to pay us a little something if they were enjoying it so much – the main problem is that most of these pirates probably exist in a commercial ecosystem where the Google Play store does not even exist, and it doesn’t occur to them to buy any games from there at all.

User reviews

One small thing that really surprised us – Google Play users are far more likely to leave reviews in the store…and very positive ones at that! Nearly 10% of the people who bought the game on Google Play have left reviews, averaging 4.8 stars. On iTunes, it’s more like 0.01%, and we’re only averaging 3.3 stars. Awww! So there you go.

I don’t have much of a conclusion here, I’m afraid. This has been a really interesting experience, and we’ve certainly learned a lot. I just thought it might be useful to get this all out in the open – let me know if you have any questions or comments!(source:gamasutra)


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