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移植版手机游戏究竟该如何定价?

发布时间:2014-01-21 15:54:57 Tags:,,,,

作者:Rohan Harris

去年,我和兄弟共同发行了我们的第一款游戏《TownCraft》。这是面向iPad的一款非常复杂的城市建造/管理游戏。这也是一款付费游戏——没有微交易或任何应用内部购买机制,在决定基于这种模式后我们花了很多时间在纠结价格的设定。

iPad游戏在价格上具有很大的差异,但最终我们决定基于5美元的价格出售(也就是5.49澳元)。我们认为这样的设定是公平的,并且不会让玩家在下手前 做过多思考。当然了,我们本来可以设更高的价格,如7.5美元,但后来我们发现,也就是在观察了所遇到的每一款iPad游戏后,这一价格似乎有点偏高了——它超过了可能引起冲动购买的门槛,使得一些原本“听起来不错”的内容将变成玩家深思熟虑的结果,而这将导致你丢失许多玩家。

TownCraft(from towncraftgame)

TownCraft(from towncraftgame)

在我们的情况中这点尤为重要,即不存在免费版本也没有方法能够从忠实玩家身上捞到更多钱——一旦他们拥有了游戏,一切便成定局。

虽然很难做出评判,但我们认为自己的价格选择是合理的。我们并未收到任何有关该价格的抱怨(甚至在许多评论中获得了赞扬),并且我们也拥有相对稳定的销售流。

然而现在,也就是几个月过后,我们付出了巨大的努力并即将发行这款游戏的iPhone版本。进行这样的移植花费了我们不短的时间。并不是因为技术的原因,而是源于界面。我们的游戏较为复杂,并且考虑在不牺牲易用性的前提下将一款策略/惯例游戏带到较小的屏幕上并不是件容易的事。

这让我们必须面对一个问题:我们需要设定怎样的价格?

如果我们只是面向iPhone发行游戏的另外一个版本,我们便可以采取与iPad版本一样的做法——即设定对于该平台来说不管是内容数量还是质量都足够公平的价格。

然而,我们并不认为那些购买了我们游戏iPad版本的玩家会再次为自己的iPhone购买这款游戏。就拿我自己来说吧,如果我必须在同样的商店中再次购买之前买过的游戏,我便会非常郁闷。所以我们决定让它们趋于通用。也就是玩家一旦购买了这款游戏,便可以同时在iPad和iPhone平台上玩它。

这意味着:或者我们更新游戏使其成为一款通用应用,同时获得iPhone和iPad的支持,或者降低应用的价格。

一方面,降低价格是有意义的。有些人在看到自己iPhone上的游戏后不会知道或在意它也能够用于iPad上,并且在iPad上的价格是5美元而不是iPhone上更亲民的3美元。他们只会认为它“太昂贵了”,而如果他们基于更低的价格购买了游戏,我们获得的收益可能就不如所付出的成本。

另一方面,如果我们突然以一款带有花费了2年时间创造出来的几个小时游戏玩法的iPad游戏而告终会有点太疯狂,甚至设定了比6个月前还低的价格!特别是当你认为我们在这六个月时间一直在努力完善游戏并创造新内容。

实际上,如果我们降低了价格,玩家将支付更少的钱给多出120%内容的关卡以及多出25%内容的方法,资源和普通内容。再加上这还是一款带有更多测试,更棒的UI设计以及更出色的图像设计的更可靠的游戏。

并不是说我为此感到痛苦——如果我不想这么做的话我便不会花费6个月的时间去创造新内容并继续致力于游戏中,但有时候看到人们只是期待着游戏价格能够随着时间的发展而下降时,还是会有点抓狂。

更低的价格等于更少的价值?

在游戏发行后我们不时会进行促销—-在一些特定事件后暂时降低游戏价格。

在Black Friday促销时,我们决定将价格降至99美分,并让游戏出现在许多“Black Friday iOS Sales”列表中。

结果是?我们比往常多获得了几百的销量。当然我们每份销量所挣取的利益也相对减少了。

在圣诞假期中我们也采取了同样的方法,将游戏价格降到3美元。这一次并未出现许多集中的”特价区“列表,而销量的增长是出现在圣诞之后,但是涨幅并不大。实际上,在仔细分析了数值并与其它开发者所提供的数值相比较时,我们发现自己的销量增长可能只是人们在圣诞节获得了iTunes的礼物卡和iPad,并因此下定决定购买自己想要的游戏。

而当我们降低价格时还存在另一种影响,虽然我们对其感到怀疑,但在证实它时却仍感到有点沮丧。

当我们最初讨论价格点时,我希望设置更高的价格而我的兄弟想要设置更低的价格。他的论点非常有逻辑——如果我们卖的更便宜就能够卖掉更多份(并有可能赚到更多钱)。

然而我所考虑的是:

我希望人们能够玩游戏。真正地玩游戏。我还注意到自己的一些行为并没有多不寻常。

情况是:如果我为游戏花110美元,我便会非常认真地享受游戏。这便意味着我将花许多时间于游戏中,并明确自己是否喜欢它。

相反地,如果是在促销的时候购买了99美分的一款游戏,我甚至有可能只是将其搁置在一旁。也许我只会花几分钟时间去体验它。如果游戏未能立马吸引我的注意力,我可能就会直接放弃。

当我与别人说到这点时,似乎他们也有相同的看法。

进入我们的游戏需要花些时间——如果你不了解游戏的话,教程本身就需要10分钟了。所以如果我们将其定价99美分,人们可能不会对其投以足够的注意力。

总之这一理论就是:你的游戏的价值感知不只能够定义其在销售之前的感知价值,同时还能够明确之后人们会在它身上投入多少时间和能量。

我们很难去证实这一理论的对错,但我们发现当与其它参数进行比较时,销量呈现出了一些优势。

首先是分析。我们并未进行过多测量,但我们的确做了足够的测量去了解玩家留存以及每周的独特玩家数量。

其次是电子邮件。我们总是频繁收到人们有关问题,评论,赞许,批评和漏斗报告的电子邮件。如果我们在一周内卖出100份游戏,那么我们可能会收到1至2封电子邮件。

在出现大型促销高峰期间,分析内容清楚地说明了我们只有1/3至一半的销量转变成真正的新玩家;我们所收到的支持电子邮件也证实了这点。

的确,我们在促销期间卖掉了更多游戏,但在这些游戏中有很多是玩家不会认真去玩游戏的——或者至少不足以让人们产生可靠的意见并传达给我们。

更多游戏等于更多钱?

正是因为这一问题推动着我写下这篇文章。

随着时间的发展,《我的世界》逐渐避免向用户收取更多利益,并证明这是有意义的。与我们的游戏一样,比起最初基于20美元和10美元的测试和alpha阶段,如今基于40美元的《我的世界》变得更大型,更稳定且带有更多功能。

这是有意义的。

当我与其他开发者聊得更多时,我便更加认为富有争议的“在游戏完成前购买游戏”的说法带有一些优势。

也许我仍然觉得在游戏真正可行前将其出售有点不公平。但是对于《我的世界》,即当它出于alpha阶段和测试阶段(并不符合传统的alpha和测试阶段的定义),它在几乎每一方面看来便是一款稳定且完整的游戏,虽然还缺少足够的功能与优化。

在我们努力解决“我们是否该在iPhone版本发行前降低《TownCraft》的价格?”这一问题的同时,我们同样也发现自己陷入了另外一个问题中:“我们是否该在发行iPhone版本前提高《TownCraft》的价格?”

我们当然可以通过促销而卖掉更多份游戏,但是我们想要的并不只是销量——我们要的是玩家。我们想要确保玩家能够推动着我们游戏的发展,同时我们也能够对于游戏开发时所付出的时间而获得合理的补偿。

我并不确定这是否是个好的想法,但当我们与独立开发者进行更多交流并阅读更多像Jason Rohrer的文章时,我们便更加觉得应该认真地思考这些问题。

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

The Value of a 99c Player

by Rohan Harris

Last year, my brother and I released our first game, TownCraft. It’s a fairly complex city-builder / management game designed for iPad. It is also a premium title – with no micro-transactions or in-app purchases of any kind – and after deciding on this model we then spent quite a while deliberating over a price for our game.

iPad games vary quite a bit in price, but in the end we decided on the $5 price bracket ($5.49 in our native Australian dollars). We felt it was both fair, and not going to cause too much pause before people bought it. Sure, we could have gone with the slightly higher $7.50 price point, but we found, after much reading and grilling almost every iPad gamer we met, that it seemed to be just a little bit too high – it crossed that magical threshold where an impulse purchase because something ‘sounds cool’ becomes a careful deliberation… which often means you lose the sale.

This is particularly important in our case, as there’s no free version and no way to get more money out of dedicated players – once they have the game, they have the game.

It’s hard to tell, of course, but we feel that our price selection was a good one. We saw and received no complaints about the price (and indeed were praised for the value it represented in many reviews) and have had a relatively steady stream of sales.

However, it is now some months later, and after much work, we are closing in on time to release our iPhone version. It’s taken quite a while to do this port. Not for technical reasons, but for interface ones. Our game is complex, and condensing the UI for a strategy/management game to a screen a fraction the size without sacrificing usability is no easy feat.

This brings us to a problem: how much do we charge?

If we were simply releasing another edition of the game for iPhone, we would just do what we did with the iPad version – price it at what we think is fair for both the quantity & quality of content, and for the platform.

However, we don’t think people who’ve bought our game for iPad should have to buy it again for iPhone. It’d annoy me if I had to buy the game a second time when it’s all through the same store… why should I inflict that upon anyone else? So we’re going universal. One purchase and you own the game on both platforms.

Which means this: either we update our game to be a Universal App with iPhone support as well as iPad and leave the price as is… or we reduce it.

On the one hand, reducing makes sense. Someone seeing the game on their iPhone won’t know or care that it’s for iPad as well, and probably worth the (not unreasonable) $5 instead of the more iPhone-friendly $3 price-point. They’ll simply see it as “too expensive” and it might cost us the buck and a bit we’d otherwise have made if they’d bought it at the cheaper price.

On the other hand, it seems mildly insane that we suddenly end up with an iPad title with hours of gameplay that took two years to make… and we’re charging even less for it than six months before! Especially when you consider that those six months were spent improving the game and producing new content for it.

In fact, if we do reduce the price, the buyer will be paying less for a game which has about 120% more content in terms of levels and about 25% more content in terms of recipes, resources and general content. Plus it’s a more solid game with more testing, better UI design and even far superior art in many places.

It’s not that I feel bitter about this – we wouldn’t have spent six months building this new content and continuing to work on the game if we didn’t like doing it – but it does sometimes feel like a bit of a head-scratcher that the climate for video games is such that people just expect prices to drop over time.

LESS MONEY? LESS VALUE.

Something else which has happened since our game was released is that we’ve occasionally had sales – temporarily reducing the cost of our game down for af few select events.

During the Black Friday sales, we decided to join in and drop our price to a mere 99c, and got ourselves listed on numerous “Black Friday iOS Sales” lists.

The result? Sales. Not huge amounts, but we still got a good few hundred more sales than we’d have gotten otherwise. Sure, we earned less per sale, but we still “moved units” (an odd term given the “units” are things we didn’t actually have to pay for in any meaningful sense).

We did a similar thing over Christmas, reducing our price to a slightly less insane $3. This time, there weren’t so many centralised “what’s on sale” lists for us to appear on, and the sales figures spiked after Christmas… but not much. In fact, after careful analysis of the numbers and comparison with numbers other developers had released or hinted it… it seemed that our sales bump was probably just the result of people getting iTunes gift cards and iPads for Christmas and buying titles they’d pretty much already decided to spend money on anyway.

However, there was another effect when we reduced our prices, and it’s one we’d suspected might be the case, but still found a bit dispiriting to be proven right over.

When we first debated price points, I wanted more, and my brother wanted less. His argument was logical – we’d sell more units (and probably make more money) if we made it a bit cheaper.

However, my concern was this:

I wanted people to play the game. Really play the game – give it a good go… and I had noticed something in my own behaviour which I felt was probably not out of the ordinary.

It was this: if I paid $110 for a game, I was desperate to enjoy it (otherwise, I’d return it if I was able). That meant I would really spend a lot of time to get into the game and find out if I was able to enjoy it or not.

By contrast, buying a 99c game on special… sometimes I wouldn’t even play it. At least, not until a long time later, and even then I might only give it a few moments. Doesn’t hook me straight away? I’d give it up.

When I spoke to other people about this, it seemed to not just be me.

And our game takes quite a bit to get into – the tutorial alone takes a good ten minutes if you don’t know what you’re doing. So if we priced it at 99c, people might not give it the attention it needed to have spent on it in order to actually get into the game.

The theory, in summary: the *perception* of the value of your game defines not only its perceived value before a sale, but how much time and energy people will grant it afterwards.

It’s hard to prove this theory right or wrong, but we did find that our sales went a ways to showing that there’s some merit to it when contrasted with other metrics

Firstly, there’s analytics. We don’t measure much, but we do measure enough to get an idea of player retention and the number of unique players per week.

Secondly… there’s emails. We get emails quite frequently from people with questions, comments, praise, criticisms and bug reports – at a fairly consistent rate, too. If we sell 100 copies in a week, we can probably expect 1-2 emails, in our experience.

During predictably large sales spikes, analytics clearly showed that only about a third to a half of the number of sales we made were translating into actual new players; the number of support emails we got also supported this.

Yes, we sold more copies by a bit during the sale, but we also sold more copies that didn’t actually get played – or at least, not enough for people to form solid opinions and want to tell us about them.

MORE GAME? MORE MONEY.

Which brings me to this interesting article.

Minecraft got away with charging more over time… and it makes sense. Much like our game, Minecraft is bigger, more solid, has more features and more to do now at its full $40 price point than it did at the beta and alpha stages, when it sold for $20 and $10 respectively.

And this makes sense.

The more I talk to other developers and take note, the more I think there’s some merit to the controversial “buying a game before it’s done” thing.

Well, sort of. I still feel that selling a game before it’s playable is a bit unfair. Even Minecraft, when it was sold while still in ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ probably didn’t fit the traditional definitions of ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ – it was a solid, completed game at almost every point, albeit a less polished one with less features.

So while we grapple with the question of “Do we reduce the price of TownCraft now before our iPhone release?” we also find ourselves grappling with a different question: “Do we increase the price of TownCraft before our iPhone release?”

We could sell more units by going on sale all the time and just generally selling cheap, but we don’t just want units sold – we want *players*. We want to ensure that people give our game a fair go, and also that we get compensated reasonably for the time we spent developing the game.

A good idea, or not? We’re not sure, but the more we talk to other indie developers and read articles like the one by Jason Rohrer linked above… the more we think it’s worth giving it some very serious consideration.(source:gamasutra)


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