当提到免费游戏时，很少有游戏能像《英雄联盟》那样成为典范。在编写我作为盈利设计顾问的实践故事时，总是会出现一些匿名网上评论者以《英雄联盟》和《军团要塞2》这两款游戏为例表示对我的厌恨。《英雄联盟》及其开发商Riot在任何我们可能想到的度量标准中都获取了巨大的成功：从每日用户粘性到员工的工作幸福指数，再到获取成功时的估值等等。

作为我正在编写的有关《英雄联盟》的文章的组成部分，我决定好好研究它的首次用户体验（ftue）。当致力于免费游戏时，ftue是开发者所专注的最重要的领域之一，但也是他们最容易忽视的一部分内容。

根据我的游戏开发经验，导致糟糕的ftue（不管是付费游戏还是免费游戏）的原因包括自然的元素以及一些不可避免因素。执行通常发生在开发即将结束之时，通常是在游戏将要发行之前。一般来说教程都会包含许多一次性用户代码或引导用户经历游戏的脚本内容。测试团队之外的游戏团队成员不可能反复访问ftue，或者如果他们这么做了，往往也是将其当成是固定模式而忽视掉。

在业务方面，免费游戏可以被当成是关于体积，转换率，优化的数字游戏。免费游戏也可以被当成开发者想要在一段较长时期内尽可能提供给玩家更多乐趣的一大目标。我认为这两种模式对于造就成功的免费游戏设计来说都非常重要。

从框架来看，如果你想要运行一个真正成功的业务，那么出色的ftue便非常重要。从数字角度来看，开发者能够为游戏做出的最有效的完善通常是出现在漏洞的顶部。优化ftue将影响最大规模的用户，并在游戏与特定用户留存基准发生交叉作用时影响着游戏盈利。在与开发者讨论了相关参数后，我会通过修正发展方向而引导对方着眼于ftue并想办法完善它，避免他只是为了之后的小部分游戏玩家而不断添加更多新功能。

从关系角度来看，ftue是开发者留给玩家的第一印象。就像在人类关系世界中，创造一个好的第一印象的效果无论怎么强调都不为过。免费模式的特点是拥有较低的市场准入标准。这便让玩家能够更轻松且零风险地安装开发者的游戏，并在与游戏进行最初5分钟的互动后为了其它游戏而抛弃这款游戏。丢失玩家是免费游戏运行中不可避免的一部分，但是创造良好的第一印象将能更有效地帮助开发者们留住玩家。

league of legends（from famousaspect）

让我们再回到《英雄联盟》。假设玩家在上网时看到了《英雄联盟》的广告。在经过数个月的思考，即想着“我是否真的该尝试这款游戏”，玩家最终点击了广告并被带到了leagueoflegends.com的注册页面。我们可以假设经过多年的游戏开发，该页面已经经过Riot市场营销团队的a/b测试，他们觉得已经能够突显其最棒的能力了。而注册只是漏斗的第一步。

接下来玩家必须下载并安装游戏。下载安装程序是第二步，运行游戏是第三步。我们可以假设一部分玩家下载了游戏但却从未运行它，对于开发者而言这种损失是不可避免的。他们可以在数天后向这些玩家发送电子邮件而做出挽回。

第四步便是玩游戏。而在这之前玩家必须下载并安装了游戏文件。为了简化这一过程，我们将转换到付费用户作为第五步，并忽视了首次玩游戏与购买之间的所有事件。

当我在昨晚安装《英雄联盟》并遭遇到这一安装程序时，我便开着它，然后去刷了几分钟的网页。之后我退出了Vita，并在确认还需要30分钟的下载时间后想说玩20分钟的《迈阿密热线》。再之后我又做了一些其它事，并最终走向床睡觉，早上起床后我关掉了安装程序便出门上班了。

这便解释了为什么一部分玩家在下载并安装了《英雄联盟》后却从未点击游戏按键。我关于检查这一漏斗的假设（游戏邦注：即他们在这一步骤中错失了新用户）是合理的。观看从未玩过《英雄联盟》（或多人竞技游戏）的玩家看着安装屏幕的眼神，我们可以发现他们并未真正投入情感于游戏中。与专门为新玩家定制的注册页面不同的是，这一页面上充满了各种让人困惑的信息，并且未提供给玩家足够的环境背景进行理解。《英雄联盟》留给玩家的第一印象便是“如果你不知道自己所面对的是什么，你便不属于这里。”

我不知道《英雄联盟》真正的指标是怎样的。为了明确优化漏斗上方的必要性，我将创造一些可信的指标进行思维实验。数值本身并不像这些信息来得有意义：作为免费游戏开发商，它是通过花钱去优化ftue。

为了进行思维实验，让我们想象《英雄联盟》为每次新注册支付了平均2.85美元的用户获取成本。怎么做才能面向新玩家提升用户获取活动的投资回报率？

new registration and paying player funnel（from famousaspect）

进一步假设：2%的新注册用户从未下载游戏，这些玩家中的5%从未运行安装程序。在那些运行了安装程序的玩家中，20%的人从未打开过游戏。最后，在那些打开了游戏的玩家中，有3.5%的玩家转换成付费玩家，并创造了产业中遥遥领先的125美元用户终身价值。

基于这些最初价值，Riot中的团队致力于完善安装程序，将打开游戏的玩家比例从20%降到16%（减少在第三步和第四步之间20%的玩家流失率）。付费用户获取活动对于安装10万个Summoner会有何影响？

campaign-performance（from-famousaspect）

如果所有的其它指标都保持不变，那么经过优化的漏斗将从10万个新Summoner中创造130个额外的付费玩家。活动收益将从4万1千美元提升到5万7千美元。活动投资回报率将从14.33%提升到超过20%（几乎提高了40%的效益）。1万6千美元的额外收益可能听起来没什么，但让我们假设这是基于1千万美元的用户获取预算而不是30万美元。对于漏斗最上方的单独优化将创造出超过50万美元的额外收益。

numbers（from famousaspect）

这是我为了审查而得出的一些数值，以防出错。茶青色单元格代表输入内容。

就像我所说的，这些数值都是假设的。只有Riot中的团队知道渠道长什么样，以及通过优化安装程序能够获得多少收益。只有Riot中的人员能够基于安装程序运行实验的潜在优势，并尝试着优化玩完游戏的新帐号数量。当完成了这些数值的估算时（让我们假设每年大约是50万美元），团队便能够判断分配人力去创造能够检测玩家是否首次登录游戏并提供给他们特定内容（如关于如何游戏的一系列视频，或教授玩家基本游戏互动的flash内容）的安装程序版本是否有意义—-这是基于提升留存指标的目的。

在此关于免费游戏最重要的一点是，开发者们必须尽可能给玩家留下最好的第一印象。只有通过检查首次用户体验的每一步表现，开发者才能确保是否与玩家奠定了一个成功且长期的关系基础。

（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）

League of Legends and the top of funnel imperative for F2P

When it comes to free-to-play, few games are held up as paragons of virtue as frequently as League of Legends. When writing about my practice as a monetziation design consultant, LoL and TF2 are the two games that come up whenever anonymous internet commenters let me know how much they hate me and all F2P games with these two exceptions. LoL, and by extension Riot, is a smash success on every conceivable metric: from daily user engagement to workplace happiness of employees to valuation at time of successful exit, Riot has crushed it.

As part of a forthcoming article I’m writing on LoL, I decided to take a good, hard look at its first time user experience (ftue). When working in F2P, the ftue is simultaneously one of the most important places for a developer to focus his effort and one of the most underserved parts of a game.

Based on my experience in game development, the forces that result in an underdeveloped ftue (in both paid and free games) are natural and somewhat inevitable. Implementation comes near the end of development, frequently during a crunch period in the lead up to launch. Tutorials generally involve a lot of one-time use code or script to guide the user throughout the game. Outside of the test team, game team members are unlikely to revisit the ftue regularly or if they do, overlook it as a series of rote steps instead of examining it with intention.

On the business side, F2P can be viewed as a numbers game that is about volume, conversion rates and optimization. F2P can also be viewed as a relationship where it is the developer’s goal to provide as much delight to the player over as long a time period as possible. I believe that both schemas are valid and necessary to successful F2P game design.

Viewed from both frames, having the best ftue possible is imperative to running a successful business. From a numbers perspective, many of the most effective improvements a developer can make to his game are at the top of the funnel. Optimizations to ftue will affect the largest pool of users and can have the largest effect on profitability until the game has crossed certain retention benchmarks. A frequent course correction I make after discussing metrics with a developer is to force him to look at and improve the ftue instead of making his live game more feature rich for a miniscule pool of late game users.

From a relationship perspective, the ftue is the developer’s first impression. Just like in the world of human relationships, the effects of making a positive first impression cannot be overstated. A hallmark of the F2P model is a low barrier to entry. This force which makes it easy and risk free for the player to install a developer’s game makes it just as easy for him to abandon the game for another within the first five minutes of interaction. Losing players is an inevitable part of F2P game operations, but making a strong, positive first impression goes a long way in helping a developer engage his players.

Which brings us back to League of Legends. Let us assume the player has been surfing the web when he see an advertisement for LoL. After months of thinking, “I really ought to give this game a try,” the player clicks the ad and is directed to signup.leagueoflegends.com. We can assume that over the years of LoL’s live development, this page has been a/b tested to death by the marketing team at Riot and they feel that they have optimized this flow to the best of their abilities. Sign up is step 1 of the funnel.

Next the player must download and install the game. Downloading the installer is step 2 and running it is step 3. We can assume that some percentage of players download but never run the installer, and that this loss is inevitable. Little can be done to improve this metric beyond sending the player an email after X days that he has registered his Summoner name and failed to sign into the game for the first time.

Step 4 is playing the game. In between, the player must use this launcher to download and install the game files. For the sake of simplification, we will end our funnel with conversion to paying user as step 5, ignoring all events between playing the game the first time and making a purchase.

Anecdotally, when I went to install LoL last night and was hit with this installer, I left it open and surfed the web for a few minutes. Then I pulled out my Vita and tried to beat the hospital level of Hotline Miami for at least 20 minutes before it was clear I still had at least 30 minutes of downloading remaining. I moved on to other activities, eventually went to bed, and in the morning closed the installer and went about my work.

It is reasonable to expect that some portion of players who download LoL and install it never actually hit the play button. My assumption based purely on examining this funnel is that the new user loss at this step is meaningful. Look at that launcher screen through the eyes of a player who has never played League of Legends (or any MOBA) and has zero emotional investment in the game. Unlike the signup page which is custom tailored for the new player, this screen is rife with confusing information he has little to no context to interpret beyond experience with other games. The first impression LoL makes in its relationship with the player is “if you don’t already know what you are looking at, you don’t belong here.”

I have no idea what LoL’s real metrics look like. To illustrate the imperative nature of optimizing the top of the funnel, I am going to make up a bunch of plausible metrics as a thought experiment. The numbers themselves are not meaningful as much as the message: as a F2P developer, it pays to optimize the ftue.

For the sake of the thought experiment, let us imagine that the LoL pays an average of $2.85 in user acquisition costs per new registration. What effect can improving the game launcher for first time players have on the ROI of a user acquisition campaign?

Further assumptions: 2% of new registrations never download the game and 5% of those players never run the launcher. Of the players who run the launcher, 20% never open the game for the first time. Finally, of those players who ever open the game, a healthy 3.5% convert to paying players with an industry leading $125 customer lifetime value.

Given these original values, a team within Riot works to improve the launcher, lowering the percentage of players who open the game from 20% to 16% (a 20% reduction in player loss between steps 3 and 4. What are the effects on a paid user acquisition campaign to install 100,000 Summoners?

If all other metrics hold constant, the optimized funnel will result in an additional 130 paying players from the 100,000 new Summoners. Campaign revenue will increase from ~$41k to ~$57k. The campaign’s return on investment will increase from 14.33% to just over 20% (a nearly 40% increase in effectiveness). $16k in additional revenue may not sound earth shattering, but now let us assume this played out on the scale of a $10 million user acquisition budget instead of about $300k. This single optimization at the top of the funnel would produce over $500k in additional revenue.

Here are my numbers for review in case I made any errors. Olive green cells are inputs.

As I said, these numbers are purely hypothetical. Only the team within Riot knows what the funnel really looks like and how much revenue could or could not be made by optimizing the launcher. Only someone within Riot could evaluate the potential upside of running experiments on the launcher to try and optimize the number of new accounts that end up playing the game. Once this figure was calculated (let us assume it is roughly $500k annually), the team could determine if it makes financial sense to allocate manpower to creating a version of the launcher that detects if this is your first ever log in and serves you specialized content – such as a series of videos on how to play, or interactive flash content that teaches you the basic interactions of the game – with the purpose of boosting retention metrics at the top of the funnel.

The larger point here is that on a F2P game, it is imperative that the developer make the best possible first impression with his player. Only by examining the performance of each step of the first time user experience can a developer make sure he is laying the groundwork for a successful, long term relationship with the player.(source：famousaspect）