作者：Leigh Alexander

游戏行业最近几年的发行合作方式完全颠倒了，有些大型公司明显落后了。发行游戏现在面临的新挑战远超以往，每个向游戏市场推出内容的人都应该确保自己做好了面对这些新挑战的准备。

风险资本家Mith Lasky（Benchmark Partners）引用Jonathan Knee在2011年《大西洋月刊》发表的文章《为何内容不为王》一文指出，媒体行业的肮脏秘密就在于内容整合者而非内容制作者，以压倒性的优势主导着行业的经济价值。

Benchmark Partners是一家向电子游戏以及一些通用技术领域投资的风投机构，Mitch Lasky认为行业的某些领域可以从过去数年发行模式的转变汲取大量经验和教训。

旧模式：规模为主

在20世纪的发行模式，由专家审查的理念令那些被认定可行的IP进入了制作环节，而制作过程则面临一个发行商掌握了利用企业规模，通过分销和营销，瞄准合适消费者这一优势的瓶颈。

Video-Game-Publishing(from pc.mmgn.com)

Lasky解释道，“当时的主要价值在于规模，你要努力通过工业流程创造规模经济，你得将制作者的IP引入这一过程，最后他们只分得了与这个过程相关的一点点收益，但至少他们得以接触到了这个庞大的市场。”

作家们曾经依赖这个庞大的工业链条以便将自己的作品呈现在读者面前。而100多人的游戏团队甚至需要聚合资本才能够开始自己的创作，在取得收益之前开发团队需要大量资金。电视的崛起也因为频道的稀缺性而面临与零售行业货架空间类似的问题——“因此，你得拥有围绕通过这些网络制作和发布IP的庞大规模效益。”

在分销环节，筛选、包装和发布领域规模庞大。在电影行业中，面向3500至4000电影院的35毫米胶片成本为700至800万美元，而且并非任何能够进入电影院的人都可以标榜为“零售商”。你得能够利用稀缺资源（放映时间）为人们提供便利，从获赢得回报。在过去的时代，人们还没有接触观众的直接渠道，所以进入大众市场的资本和规模成了必需品。

新模式：整合者和管理者是赢家

Lasky解释道，较少的把关控制为创作者创造了不同的融资选择，“你可以依靠更小的团队将内容推向市场，这些团队所需的资金更少——King的《Candy Crush Saga》制作成本可能就数千美元左右，现在收益却超过了10亿美元，并且虏获了世界成百上千万的用户。”

而由于其他融资选项的出现，制作环节也呈现了大众化的特点，例如保持较小的团队规模，使用众筹平台或以小型公司的身份筹集资金。而在分销和营销方面，向亚马逊或App Store等平台发布内容也相当容易了，允许开发者直接与用户打交道。

由于社区营销和广告网络、YouTube等渠道的兴起，营销活动也比以往更有效了。所有的这些都让行业环境更加通俗性，同时也更具挑战性，最终呈现与旧式的发行模式截然不同的面貌。

Lasky指出，“由于21世纪新发行方案的崛起，目前市场上有4种新瓶颈，”这些障碍分别是检索、用户获取，粘性和盈利性。许多人认为留存率也是其中之一，但Lasky认为这是一个“伪命题”。

“如果你的游戏极具粘性……那就能够有效推进游戏的留存率。我认为我们过度沉迷于留存率这一观念是错误的。如果你可以围绕IP创造真正热情的粘性，那么它就具有超越留存率的价值。”

新零售货架现在被包装成了应用商店，每个月都有成千上万款新游戏在iOS平台露面。相比之下，旧主机领域则平静得多——各大公司掐准时机争先发布游戏以确保自己地位的时代已经远去了。

“每安装成本”用户计算法的问题

请求App Store推荐的方法很可行，虽然它并非长久的解决方案。游戏领域的欺骗性元素可能就在于“用户获取”，但获得新用户却是值得争取的。专注于CPI（每安装成本）会让行业形成对游戏有害的观念。Lasky认为试图评估获得用户的短期成本是否能够与自己在项目中投入的时间和资金对称，这是一种令人烦恼耐而无效的观念。

candy-crush-saga(from yiyuanerci.com)

他称“像Supercell、King等许多公司都采用了数据分析方法，他们有理由进行这种投入，《Candy Crush Saga》并非病毒传播现象。他们为推广这款游戏投入了4亿美元的营销资金。从营销角度来看，这可能是10部电影的发行预算了。”

“我认为这对我们行业来说非常有害，但它却完美解释了这种现象发生的原因。”

这意味着你无法围绕一个飞轮创造可持续的粘性。你是在与YouTube、Snapchat和其他令人分心的娱乐工具争夺“时间份额”。“现在我们可选择的微消费性信息远超以往。有1.5万人在观看 《英雄联盟》的最终结局，这就是一个富有粘性社区的定义。”

出售虚拟商品的F2P（免费模式）现在盈利性比相应的付费游戏高4倍，“现在已经无法回头了，F2P吸引用户的原因很多，很显然它是一个营销策略。它并不完全是个商业模式，它是个营销手段：你告诉人们‘免费试试吧，你会喜欢的。’”

Lasky认为“F2P的另一个优势在于它具有弹性的价格曲线。”极为投入游戏的玩家可能会投入上千美元，而不甚投入的玩家可能投入较少。

Lasky称世界上最大的电子游戏公司并非索尼，任天堂等传统行业巨头，而是腾讯这家掌握了Riot、Epic股份的公司。

“奇怪的是，在西方却没有人注意到这一点。极少数电子游戏高管能够正视这一情况，但这正是我们行业最有趣也是最可怕的现象之一，我认为这却为未来的发行之路指明了方向。”（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）

Four publishing challenges the game industry isn’t ready for Exclusive

By Leigh Alexander

The game industry’s approach to publishing has been completely upended in recent years, and some of the big players have lagged behind. Publishing games now has an entirely new set of challenges than it once did, and everyone bringing content to market in the games business needs to make sure they’re ready to face the new choke points in the process.

Venture capitalist Mitch Lasky of Benchmark Partners cites Jonathan Knee’s 2011 Atlantic article “Why Content is not King” to note that the media industry’s dirty secret is that content aggregators, not content creators, overwhelmingly drive financial value in business.

Mitch Lasky’s Benchmark Partners is a venture capital firm that invests in the video games space as well as some general tech, and he says some sectors of the industry have a lot to learn from the way publishing models changed over the last decade and a half.

The Old Way: Scale rules

In the 20th century publishing model, ideas vetted by experts led to a pool of presumed-viable IP that entered production; the manufacturing process that followed was something of a choke point where advantage was given to publishers that could leverage industrial scale and, through distribution and marketing, target the right buyers.

“The principal value was scale,” Lasky explains. “You were trying to create economies of scale through industrial processes, and you had creators who, by putting their IP into this mix, would come out the other end with very little of the money associated with that process, but at least they got access to this enormous mass scale.”

Authors once relied on enormous industrial chains to bring their work to their readers. By contrast, a 100-person game team needs aggregated capital to even begin to do their work; significant capital is required before revenue even becomes a possibility. The rise of television also faced problems with scarcity around channels in a similar way to shelf space in retail business — “as a result, you had huge economies of scale created around the production and distribution of IP through these networks,” Lasky says.

On the distribution side, pick, pack and ship businesses are enormous in scale. In the movie business, 35mm prints for 3500 to 4000 theater openings costs seven or eight million dollars, and not just anyone could access the theater itself as “retailer”. You had to be able to convince people you would make use of a scarce resource — screen time — to earn enough return. In the old days there was no way to directly access audience, so the capital and scale to mass-market were also necessary.

The New Way: Aggregators and curators win

Less gatekeeping creates different funding options for creators, he explains. “You can get content to market with smaller teams, those teams require far less capital — King’s Candy Crush probably cost only a couple thousand dollars to make, and now has billions in revenue and reaches hundreds of millions of people around the world.”

The production end is democratized by other funding choices like keeping teams smaller, using crowdfunding or getting investment as a small company. And as for distribution and marketing, publishing on places like Amazon or the App Store is comparatively simple, and allows creators to access consumers directly.

Marketing is more efficient as well, thanks to marketing through community and the micro-targeting that’s possible thanks to ad networks and channels like YouTube. All of this makes the environment more accessible, but also more challenging, and ultimately enormously different from the old publishing model.

“There’s four new choke points in the current market that have arisen as a result of this migration to the 21st century publishing scheme,” Lasky says. Now, the obstacles are discovery, customer acquisition, engagement and monetization. Many people think retention is one, but that’s sort of a “false god,” Lasky suggests.

“If your game is engaging… that is effectively what enables you to retain. I think the idea we should be obsessing over retention percentages is absurd,” he says. “If you can create really passionate engagement around an IP, it has value way beyond its retention significance.”

The new retail shelf is a packed app store, with thousands of new games published every month on iOS every month, “an appalling amount of noise in our business.” The old console business feels pastoral by comparison — the days when companies could time their releases to make sure very little like them would be available are long gone.

The problem with those ‘cost per install’ user calculations

Begging to get featured on the App Store works, although it’s not a sustainable solution. The scammy elements of the games business may center on “customer acquisition”, but gaining new users is desirable. Focusing on CPI — cost per install — has led to a poisonous way of thinking about games. Trying to evaluate whether the short term cost of acquiring a user is going to be worth the time and money they spend with the project is troubling and ineffective, Lasky suggests.

“There are companies out there, like Supercell, like King, who have that math going, and they can justify that kind of spending,” he says. “Candy Crush Saga is not a viral phenomenon. They spent $400 million in marketing to get that game going. That’s probably ten feature film launch budgets, from a marketng perspective,” he says.

“I think this is a poisonous aspect of our business, but it’s perfectly understandable why that’s happening.”

And that means you can’t create sustainable engagement around a flywheel. You’re competing for “share of day” with YouTube, Snapchat and other distration tools. “There’s probably more micro-consumable information available to us than there has ever been. There is engagement, and ther’s 15,000 people watched the League of Legends final in person,” he says. “This is the definition of an engaged community.”

Free to play games selling virtual items now monetize at four times the rate of equivalent paid games, he says. “There’s just no going back at this point: F2P is so interesting for a number of reasons, obviously because it’s essentially a marketing strategy more than anything else. It’s not really a business model, it’s a marketing strategy: You’re telling people ‘try it, you’ll like it.’”

“The other great benefit is it has an elastic pricing curve,” he says. Someone who is so into something that they’d spend a thousand dollars on it can be monetized to that extent, and people who are only slightly engaged can spend only a small amount. “It’s hard to argue with the likes of a game like Candy Crush, that’s going to do a billion-five in revenue by creating more complicated puzzles and frustrating you and making you pay to get past them.”

The world’s largest video game company isn’t Sony, Nintendo, or anything like that: It’s Tencent, Lasky says, the umbrella under which companies like Riot, Epic, and many others now lie.

“Oddly, in the West, no one’s paying attention to this. Very few video game executives would be able to unpack what’s going on with it, but this is the most interesting thing that’s happening in our business, and also the scariest,” Lasky says. “And I think that this points the way to the future of publishing.” （source：gamasutra）