作者：Robert Boyd

行业中长存的一个认知误区就是，如果你的独立游戏能够进入Steam平台，那就你是成功的，并且能够赢得大量收益。但请不要误解我的意思——一般来说，独立游戏在Steam平台的销量确实超过其他平台，但位于Steam平台却并非成功的保障。由于Valve已经降低Steam平台的准入门槛，独立游戏将愈加难以在该平台获得曝光度和商业成功。因此，我认为有必要讨论开发者可用于提高曝光度的不同策略（这正是推出成功商业游戏的必要之举——很少人会购买自己从未听说过的游戏）。

讽刺策略——克隆一款热门游戏，披上该游戏的外衣，但是要使用巧妙的控制的心理迫使人们对你的游戏投入更多关注，但我并不是很赞同这一策略，所以还是看看其他的方法。

定价策略——让游戏售价低于竞争对手的游戏，吸引用户购买较低价的游戏。这在几年前是非常管用的方法，但现在市场上充斥大量廉价和免费游戏，所以低价已经没有什么新鲜了。但如果以短期促销的形式推出降价活动，却仍然十分有效。

质量策略——制作一款比竞争对手的某一方面或多个方面更强的游戏。我想这正是许多独立开发者栽跟头的地方。仅仅制作出一款对“独立开发者来说算不错”的游戏是不够的。制作出一款优秀的游戏也还是不够的。如果你想用质量来赢得关注，你的游戏必须要很出色才行。

细分策略——找到一个他人尚未发掘的细分市场。这里要注意，仅仅找到一个不甚流行的题材对你并没有好处——有些题材不受欢迎是有原因的。关键是找到那些似乎被遗忘但却拥有一定用户基础的游戏题材或子题材。简而言之，就是找到那些供不应求的题材。冲锋枪们来说，找到回合制RPG题材就是个合适的选择——因为大型公司一般关注的是动作/RPG和RPG混合游戏，也没有太多独立开发者制作高质量的RPG，所以这个领域的竞争不大。这种方法也适用于平台（游戏邦注：这正是向新系统发布游戏效果更好的原因）。

创意策略——制作一款并不完全符合当前游戏题材趋势的游戏，这样你实际上就没有什么竞争对手（除非出现了克隆游戏）。这是一种赌博，因为创意游戏一开始通常会遭遇失败，但如果你的游戏抓住了大众的想象力，那么就可以获得极大回报。《Minecraft》是这种策略的绝佳典型。最近的例子则是《Papers》——它是一款压抑、基于故事的官僚主义模拟游戏，虽然听起来并不像是能够畅销游戏，但却能够引发大众议论，并最终获得理想的销量。你也可以在游戏中植入一些独特的手法来实现创意策略。

当然，你甚至还可以将上述策略结合起来用。以Telltale为例，该公司通过结合细分策略（拥有微解谜元素的视觉小说）以及其他作品的IP（例如《行尸走肉》这种热门IP）元素而在近年大获成功。当然还有其他更高质量的视觉小说/解谜游戏（例如《Ghost Trick》、《Ace Attorney》、《999/VLR》），但由于使用著名IP，Telltale收获了比其他策略更大的成功。事实上，他们可能还借此培养了这类游戏的用户群体。

Cthulhu saves the World(from store.steampowered)

如果你看看多数成功的游戏——例如《Cthulhu Saves the World》，你就可以发现它几乎以不同程度使用了上述所有策略：

借鉴引用——以Cthulhu之名使用热门IP

定价策略——3美元（这是在免费模式盛行之前的2010-2011年期间，它在主机和PC平台的售价）

细分策略——回合制主机RPG

创意策略——惊悚闹剧

质量策略——我认为它真是一款很棒的游戏

独立游戏领域的竞争性将随着时间发展而不断增强。仅仅制作一款好游戏是不够的，如果你不想让自己的游戏被竞争对手淹没，就一定要采取相关措施。（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）

Strategies for having a commercially successful game

by Robert Boyd

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.

The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

There has long been a myth that if you were able to get your indie title on Steam, you’d be successful and make a lot of money. Now, don’t get me wrong – indie titles do traditionally sell better on Steam than they do elsewhere (although better than next to nothing may still be next to nothing) but being on Steam is no guarantee of success. As Valve lowers their barrier to entry, it’s going to become more and more difficult for individual games to get noticed and find financial success. Therefore, I thought it would be useful to discuss some of the various strategies developers can take to improve their chances of being noticed (which is essential to having a commercially successful game – no one’s buying games they’ve never heard of).

The Cynical Strategy – Clone a popular game and try to ride its coattails. Alternatively, use manipulative psychology to coerce people into paying more for your game than they originally intended. I disapprove of this strategy so let’s move on.

The Price Strategy – Price your game lower than the competition and attract buyers looking for a bargain. This was a very useful strategy a few years ago but now there’s a glut of cheap & free games on the market so a low price is no longer much of a talking price. However, this strategy is still very useful when used in the form of publicized short-term sales.

The Brute Force Strategy – Spend tons of money on marketing so that people can’t help but hear about your game. Alternatively, have or gain the rights to a super popular IP.

The Quality Strategy – Make a game that’s better than the competition in one or more ways. Here’s where I think a lot of indie developers stumble. It’s not enough to make a game that’s “good for an indie.” It’s not even enough to make a game that’s just plain good. If you’re trying to use quality to gain attention, your game needs to be AMAZING.

The Niche Strategy – Find a niche that is underserved and serve it. The important thing here is that just finding an unpopular genre isn’t going to do you any good – some genres are unpopular for a reason. The key is finding a genre or subgenre that has a fanbase that feels neglected. In short, find a genre where demand exceeds supply. For us, we’ve found the turn-based RPG genre to be a good fit – big companies are all focused on Action/RPGs and RPG hybrids these days, and there aren’t many indie devs making high quality RPGs so there’s not much competition. Alternatively, this approach can be taken to platforms as well (which is why launch titles on new systems often do better than they would have otherwise).

The Creative Strategy – Make a game that doesn’t really fit into existing genres so that you essentially have no competition (until clones arise). This is a gamble as wildly creative games often fail to take off, but it can pay off greatly if your game catches the public’s imagination. Minecraft is a great example of this strategy. More recently, Papers, Please managed to pull this off – a depressing, story-focused bureaucracy simulator hardly sounds like a bestseller, but it got people talking and ended up selling really well. Alternatively, you can use the creative strategy to a lesser extent by having a unique gimmick in your game.

Of course, you get even better chances of success when you combine strategies. Take Telltale for example. They’ve found great success in recent years by combining the niche strategy (visual novels with light puzzle solving) with the brute force strategy (popular IPs like The Walking Dead). There are higher quality visual novel/puzzle games out there (Ghost Trick, Ace Attorney, 999/VLR), but through the use of high profile IPs, Telltale has managed to find much more success than other strategies to the genre. In fact, they have probably even managed to increase the audience for these kinds of games.

If you look at our most successful game – Cthulhu Saves the World – you can see that it uses almost all of these strategies to various degrees:

Brute Force – Popular IP in the form of Cthulhu (which happens to be public domain so we could use it)

Price – $3 (back in 2010-2011 on home consoles & PC before the freemium wave had really reached its peak)

Niche – Turn-based console-style RPG

Creative – Eldritchian horror as farce

Quality – Well, I happen to think it’s a really good game.

The indie game field is just going to get more and more competitive as time goes on. It’s not enough to just make a good game; you need to have a strategy if you don’t want to get lost in the crowd.（source：gamasutra）