作者：Mitchell Smallman

这是我的自白书。我从事社交游戏设计……我是少数职业生涯的第一份工作就社交游戏设计师的人之一。当我所欣赏的设计师表示担忧社交游戏正在危害整个游戏行业，这有时候会让我感到自己的工作很卑鄙。多亏了设计过几款能赚钱的游戏，有时候让我觉得自己是社交游戏领域的权威，是知道如何让小游戏工作室活得体面的专家。无论是上述哪个时候，我都觉得我似乎找到吸引游戏消费者的良方妙招，找到了人类灵魂的那个神秘且危险的“花钱”按钮。我必须忏悔……我一直利用这个原理，即使我知道没有所谓的“花钱”按钮存在。你不可能追踪然后调整某些指标就让玩家乖乖地在你的游戏中花钱，因为根本不存在这样的指标。然而，为了赚大钱，你必须同时把你的受众当作消费者和玩家。为此，我通常会考虑我所谓的“价值点”。

value(from techvalidate.com)

价值点是指当玩家将金钱价值赋给你的游戏的时刻。你的美术和UI设计是价值点。当人们面对一款游戏时，会看它的外观、细节和风格在多大程度上吸引自己，然后做出自己的价值判断。一款美术糟糕但系统高明的游戏，仍然可能错过关键的价值点。内容设计是另一个价值点。除了拼写错误，角色一致性和叙述进程与玩家游戏节奏的匹配性等也很容易错失价值点。比如，当玩家沉浸于故事且努力地解决难题以进展到下一个部分，却因为设计师不重视故事且希望玩家也如此，导致游戏的叙述品质低下，玩家会感到非常失望。当你总是把你的玩家当作会决策的人类、不断地分析你的游戏而不只是指标，你就会发现价值点了。

尽管社交游戏通常以迭代设计方式设计，这种方式非常非常重视数据，但价值点是通常难以按活动划分的游戏的组成部分。数字无法告诉你为什么你错失了让玩家支持你的游戏而不是别人的游戏的东西。当你的游戏与竞争对手的具有相似的主题和机制时，如何让玩家觉得你的游戏比别人的更值得玩？如何突出你的游戏的优势同时隐藏它的劣势？如何吸引可能喜欢你的游戏而不是别的游戏的玩家？要解答这些问题，光看你现有的玩家数据几乎没有帮助，市场调研的作用也就那么多。最终，无论是新特征还是新类型，游戏总是能够通过提供新玩意增加它的价值，但这总是有风险的。为了让游戏赢利，设计师必须理解玩家（无论他们是老玩家还是新玩家）把价值放在哪里。

但我们谈的仍然是社交游戏，所以当你开始研究你的玩家想要什么时，指标仍然是你的好朋友。简单粗暴的答案是，设计新特征然后做A/B测试，详尽地理解各个修改的数值，直到你对目标玩家类型像对自己的习惯一样了解。然而，这种方法费时又冒险，失败率也大，涉及一些难以向风投、发行商或管理层证实可行的东西。

对于起点，我最喜欢的指示是EFPA（游戏邦注：其他设计师对此可能有不同的术语），即“Engagement at First Purchase Average”（首次消费平均值），它的意思就是，玩家通常玩你的游戏多久后会说“这款游戏值得我花钱”？在这里，你可以开始分析游戏最满足玩家需求的东西是什么然后在此创造价值。EFPA反映价值点，你只需要发现它是什么。它可能是想赶进度的玩家遇到重大障碍的时候。它可能是当你开始提供非常适合你的玩家基础的收费内容的时候。也许你的EFPA非常长，玩家要玩上数周或数月而不是数天才开始付费，那时你必须承认你的游戏可能没有太多价值点。或者也许你的EFPA非常快，你的游戏有一些能吸引玩家马上购买的有趣玩意。如你所见，发现你的EFPA不能立即给你答案，但给你提出了许多有助于发现游戏的价值点的好问题。

价值点就像子弹，但只是普通的子弹，不是银子弹，瞄准需要时间，有时候会打不中，单靠这些子弹有时候还不管用。但如果你有足够多的子弹，且你打得够快，那就没有什么能阻碍你的了。除了指标，还有许多东西能让你感觉到价值点的存在。你的玩家论坛和社区，虽然它们不可能总是解答关于商业利益的问题，但可以告诉你玩家重视什么。观察类似的游戏，想想为什么它能成功，也许可以帮助你发现新特征而不是大量抄袭。随时发现新东西。你并不打算靠故事吸引玩家，但让玩家愿意花钱的恰恰是你的故事！不要在方向上太固执，也许玩家重视的东西正是你不在意的。归根到底，你要理解你的玩你的游戏的玩家……这是从来没有被贯彻落实的任务。（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）

Value Points: The (Almost) Invisible Metric That Runs Your Game

by Mitchell Smallman

This is my confession. I started out working in social games…I’m one of those few people who has only ever worked as a designer in the social games field. Sometimes it makes me a pariah, with designers I admire voicing concern over the damage that social games are doing to the industry as a whole. Thanks to a few successfully monetized games, sometimes I am seen as an authority, someone who has figured out how to bring the little game studio some decent cash. Both times, I’m treated as if I have found some sort of silver bullet to the heart of the game consumer; that I have found a mystical and perhaps unhealthy “release money” button in the human soul. I must confess… I have taken work on this principle even though I know that no such silver bullet exists. There is no metric you can track and tweak that makes people pay money for your game. There is however, a great deal of money to be made by understanding your audience as a consumer and a game player at the same time. To do this, I usually ask developers to consider what I call “value points.”

A value point is the moment a player assigns monetary value to your game. Your initial art and UI design is a value point. People look at a game, and see how much work, polish and appeal to their sense of style has gone into the game, and they place a value on it. A game with “programmer art”, while having a well-designed system, will still be missing a key value point. Content design is another value point. Not just things like spelling errors, but character consistency, and narrative progress matching player effort are other examples of value that can be easily lost. There’s nothing more frustrating for a player to be engaged in a narrative and work hard at an obstacle to get the next piece, only to have the quality of the reveal be lackluster because the designer places no value on the narrative and expected the player to do the same. Value points are discovered my constantly thinking of your player as a human being making a decision and analyzing your game as opposed to just a metric.

Although social games are often designed with an iterative design style that is very ,very heavy on data, value points are the portions of the game that are often difficult to nail down in terms of action. The numbers will not tell you why your game is missing that thing that makes people decide to support your game instead of others. How do make your game, which may have similar theme and mechanics to others, LOOK like it is worth investing in it instead of a competitor? How do we make it demonstrate its advantages and hide its disadvantages? How do we attract the type of player that will enjoy our game more than other games? These are things looking at the data of your existing players will help only a little, and market research only goes so far. Eventually, whether it is a new feature or a new genre of game altogether, a game can always increase its value by offering something new, but it is always a risk. In order to chart such a release successfully, the designer needs to understand what the players, be they players they already have (retention) or players they want (acquisition) place value on if they want the game to monetize.

But we’re still talking about social games, so metrics are still going to be your best friend in STARTING to figure out what your players want. The simple, blood-sweat-and-tears answer is design new features and A/B test the hell out of them, knowing the numbers of each change in detail, until you know the type of player you attract as a second nature. However, this method takes a great deal of time and risk and often involves not a few failures, things that are difficult to justify with a venture capitalist,publisher or management breathing down your neck.

My favorite metric for a starting point, and other designers may have other terms for it, is the EFPA, the Engagement at First Purchase Average. How long have your players been playing before they finally say “you know, this game is worth some of my hard earned money?” From here, you can start analyzing where you can best meet the needs of your players and create value for them. The EFPA represents a value point, you just need to discover what it is. Perhaps players interested in progress reach a significant hurdle there and are paying to bypass it quickly. Perhaps that is when you start offering premium content that suits your player base very well. Perhaps your EFPA is very long, and they pay after weeks or months of play instead of days, and you then have to accept that your game may not have many value points at all. Or perhaps your EFPA is very quick, and there may be some interesting thing that players are buying right away. As you can see, discovering your EFPA doesn’t give you an immediate answer, but provides lots of interesting questions to help you discover the value points of your game.

Value points are regular bullets, not silver ones. They take time to aim, sometimes miss and don’t always get the job done by themselves. But if you have enough of them, and you unleash them fast enough, nothing will stand in your way. You can get a sense of them through many avenues aside from metrics. Your community forums and groups, while they may not always ask for things that are in your business interest, will tell you very vocally what they value. Observations in similar games may help you discover your next feature or release based on an understanding of why it is successful, rather than copying wholesale. Be prepared to discover new things. Maybe you didn’t design your game to hook players on the story, but maybe that’s what your players are showing you they are willing to pay for! Don’t be stubborn in your direction if it turns out players value something you didn’t intend. In the end, it comes down to understanding the players that enjoy the game you have created… and that is part of the job that is never truly complete.(source:gamedesignaspect)