作者：Simon Hade

每一个成功的游戏工作室都在不同程度的风险上下赌注。

新工作室的初始项目通常分为两种。一种是高度革命性、风险极大的项目，但一旦成功就有可能永远改变行业，并为工作室发展提供源源不断的资金；这就是创新。另一种是项目在已经拥有市场的项目上提出改进，风险较低，回本可能性大；这就是进化。

那么，你选择创新还是进化？在初始阶段，新工作室不可能两条路都走。制作错误的产品仍然比分心要好，所以你还是要诚实地告诉自己、雇员和投资商你的选择是什么，然后全力以赴。

Call It Football(from spaceapegames)

例如，我们的第一款游戏《Call It: Football》是一款即时预测运动游戏。我们认为是时候实现这个非常革命性的想法。但努力工作了四个月并投入大量资金后，我们放弃了。

相反地，我们的第二款游戏《Samurai Siege》走的是进化路线。这种即时战斗策略游戏已经被证明在Facebook和iOS上有庞大的市场。我们要做的就是在原类型的基础上引入一些新的玩法，使我们的游戏比市场上的竞争产品更优秀，提高它的生产价值并使它易于跨平台开发。

看一眼手机/平板游戏的收益排行榜，你会清楚地看到哪种类型的游戏在市场上最走俏。“创新”似乎仅限于改编已被实证的概念然后搬到新平台上（例如，把Facebook上的农场游戏移植到平板电脑上），或在既定的格式中添加新机制（例如，在探索游戏中加入新地图和社交机制）。

长期看来，优秀的游戏工作室应该把创新与进化相结合，形成一种可持续发展的开发模式。但对于新工作室的第一款游戏，你可以只选择其中一条路。

如果你选择的是“创新”，以下是几个建议：

1、筹集大量资金，越多越好。比在你证明你的革命性想法有潜力以前花光钱更糟的事就是，证明你的革命性想法有潜力后却没有钱继续实践它且筹资困难。

2、阅读Eric Reiss（游戏邦注：他是用户体验设计公司FatDUX集团的CEO，他在多所大学担任易用性和设计担任讲师和顾问，著有《易用为王:改进产品设计的10个策略》。）和Steve Blank（游戏邦注：他被《哈佛商业评论》誉为当代的“创新大师”，而《圣何塞水星报》则将他评为硅谷最有影响力的十大人物之一。他的《硅谷秘史》被公认是研究硅谷历史的最佳著作；《顿悟的四个步骤》也是创始人和VC的推荐丛书之一；他的最新著作是与Bob Dorf合著的《初创企业所有人手册》。）的书，并遵守他们的准则。把你的精力全部放在验证你的想法是否有市场上。认真看待消费者发现问题。确保公司所有员工处于相同的进度，且明确各个阶段的目标。

3、理解他人为何失败。也许有人已经尝试过你的想法，但失败了。是平台选错了？是执行不佳？是实践想法的时机未到？还是你重复了别人犯下的错误？我们对《Call It: Football》做的20个尝试都失败了。我们试玩过所有原型，不断地与开发成员们进行讨论。最终，我们决定放弃它，即使它看起来那么有潜力。

4、小心背后。如果它是个好想法，其他人可能也在开发它。在同一时间里，既要认真对待消费者发现，又要筹资、雇工和保密，是很困难的。保密协议只是一张没有价值的纸，所以你必须相信你的直觉。

5、迅速失败。当我们正在考虑第一款游戏的未来时，我们得到的最好的建议就是“没有人会为太早失败而后悔”。我希望我们早一个月就放弃那个项目，但当时我们实在太盲目了。我们没有全面地考察这款游戏。所以最终我们不得不放弃它。整个圣诞节我们都卖命地开发新项目，我们正在的扼杀这个项目吗？没有人罢工吗？辛苦开发了7个月后，我们的游戏一发布就冲入排行榜前20名。没有人会为太早失败而后悔！

或者，如果你走的是“进化”之路，那么请记住：

1、生产价值很重要。只因为这种类型的游戏的头号游戏发布时只显示了20%的特性并花了一年时间改进，并不意味着你也能以同样的方法侥幸成功。你的游戏必须出类拔萃。你的营销策略必须完美无缺。你的游戏必须让人觉得与众不同，必须有所改进，有所进化，不能让人觉得是山寨、克隆。

2、玩家发现仍然很重要。与玩家对话。找出他们对当前的游戏满意和不满意的地方。满足他们的需求。你可能会认为通过自己玩游戏和查看论坛反馈就能了解这种类型的游戏，但没有什么能替代观看别人到底怎么玩游戏。对于《Samurai Siege》，我们与各个平台上的几百名玩过这类游戏的玩家交谈过。我们每周观察玩家玩游戏两次，然后收集他们的反馈。当我们有了可玩的原型，我们就会看玩家怎么玩它。看别人玩游戏是很煎熬的过程，但每一次我们都能发现可以添加到下一个版本的东西。

（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）

Start-Up Special 2013: Innovation vs Evolution

By Simon Hade

Every successful games studio has a stable of bets with varying degrees of risk.

There’s the truly innovative, high risk projects that if they break out will change the industry forever and fund the company for years to come; the innovations. And then there’s the low risk bets that extend a concept for which there is a proven market and which stand a much better chance of paying the bills or funding the riskier bets; the evolutions.

But do you innovate or evolve? As a start-up you can’t do both out of the gate. Making the wrong product call is still better than splitting focus, so be honest with yourself, your employees and investors what type of opportunity you are going after, and go all in.

For example, our first game Call It: Football was a real-time predictive sports game. Our hypothesis was that this was an idea whose time had come, it was truly innovative. But we scrapped it in January after spending four months and a big chunk of our Series A money on it.

Conversely, our second game Samurai Siege is evolutionary. We took a real-time combat strategy genre that was well proven on both Facebook and iOS, introduced some new layers of gameplay, made it better than anything else in the market, upped the production values and built it in a way that was easy to take cross platform.

Glancing at the top grossing charts on mobile/tablet, it is clear what type of game the market rewards. “Innovation” appears to be limited to adapting a proven concept to a new platform (for exampe, bring farming games from Facebook to tablet), or by adding mechanics within an established format (e.g. add a map and social hooks to a switcher game).

The best game studios need a mix of both innovation and evolution to be sustainable in the long run but you can go either way for your first game.

If you go down the “innovation” route, here are some tips:

Raise lots of money, as much as you can afford to dilute. The only thing worse than running out of money before you have a chance to prove your awesome ground-breaking idea’s potential, is actually proving your awesome ground-breaking idea’s potential and then not having the money to follow through and raising in distress.

Do the Lean Start-up stuff. Read the book by Eric Reiss, and the work of Steve Blank. Actually read them and follow the formula. Focus 100 per cent of your energy on validating whether there is a market for your idea. Take customer discovery seriously. Make sure everyone in the company is on the same page and your milestones for each stage are clear.

Understand why others failed. People have probably tried your idea before. Was it the wrong platform? Poorly executed? Is this truly an idea whose time has come or are you destined to repeat the mistakes of others? For Call It, we found over 20 attempts at this genre that failed. We played all the ones we could, and spoke with employees past and present. Ultimately it was the pattern recognition from these conversations that helped us make the decision to kill it, even though it was showing promise.

Watch your back. If it is a good idea, others are probably working on it. It’s tough to take customer discovery seriously, raise money, recruit staff and maintain secrecy at the same time. NDA’s aren’t worth the paper they’re written on so you need to trust your gut.

Fail fast. The best advice we got when we were considering the future of our first game was “no-one ever regretted pivoting too soon”. In our case, I wish we did it a month earlier with hindsight, but at the time it seemed crazy. We hadn’t given the game a proper shot. We were writing it off. Quitting. We’d all just worked our asses off through Christmas, and we’re killing the project? Won’t everyone walk out? Fast forward seven months and we have a Top 20 game just one week after launch. No regrets about pivoting too soon!
Alternatively, if you go down the “Evolution” route, then remember:

Production values matter. Just because the No.1 game in the genre launched with 20 per cent of it’s current feature set and spent a year iterating and improvement doesn’t mean you can get away with that. Your game needs to shine. Your marketing execution needs to be flawless. It needs to feel different. It needs to be an improvement, an evolution, not a copy.

Customer Discovery is still important. Talk to customers. Find out what they like and dislike with existing games. Meet their needs. You might think you understand a genre from your own gameplay and reading forums but there is no substitute to watching people play. For Samurai Siege, we literally spoke with hundreds of players of the successful and unsuccessful games in the genre on every platform. Twice per week we’d watch people play games, and bounce ideas of them. When we had the most ghetto prototype we’d watch people struggle with it. It was a tough grind but every time we learnt something that made it into the next build.(source:develop-online)