作者：Robert Green

游戏评论通常都带有双重目的。一方面，它们带有与电影或音乐评论同样的功能—-这个产品是否出色？另一方面，因为从传统意义上来看，游戏比任何其它媒体都昂贵，玩家更看重的是“价值”（经常以游戏持续时间的形式呈现出来），所以评论总是致力于回答“这款游戏是否值得所需付出的时间？”

大多数情况下游戏评论都能发挥有效的作用。伴随着重玩性的高质量游戏能够获得较高的分数，而没有重玩价值的低质量游戏则会获得较低的分数，并不长的高质量游戏可能会得到“等到打折再买”的结论。

但是在2014年的手机领域中，大多数游戏都是免费游戏，免费游戏将所有的这一切都抛出了窗外。

当所有的内容给予玩家的消费情况发生改变时，我想知道评论者是如何说出“这是玩这款游戏所拥有的体验，这便是游戏所提供的价值。”也许在玩家花了一些钱后，一款本来无聊的游戏将变得有趣。或者也许一款游戏无需玩家花任何钱便已经很有趣了，而游戏中的应用内部购买都具有糟糕的价值。当我们谈到价值时，我们是否在谈论游戏的内部价值，或者应用内部购买？或者比起时间价值，现在的我们对于钱的价值越来越不感兴趣了？

问题1：玩这款游戏的体验是什么？

游戏评论总是会避开一些对于内部主观体验的权威看法。但尽管每个玩家的体验是不同的，至少两名玩家将会体验到同样的产品。即使是免费游戏也是不能保证的。让我们举个例子来说，在无尽奔跑游戏中购买了一个货币加倍装置的玩家并不能体验到与未购买该装置的玩家同样的产品，他们正在体验一款只花一半的时间便打开全新升级的游戏。假设这是某些由设计师亲自调整的内容，我便会主张这些玩家未能体验同样的游戏，他们只是在体验不同版本的游戏。

但是评论者该做什么呢？评论者不可能全部购买不同的IAP并各自写下他们的体验，这仅仅是因为不同结合的数量很快便会具有压倒性。

我读过的许多出版物都拥有这一难题的逻辑性解决方法—-我们可能不能评论所有可能的体验，但却能够评论平均玩家所拥有的体验。怎么做？因为免费游戏拥有大量的玩家，即大量不会花钱的玩家。因此如果你从“不想花钱买任何东西的用户”的角度评论免费游戏，你将可能覆盖至少90%的读者。这看似是一种合理的解决方法，但却引出了下一个问题。

问题2：最佳付费并不是付费。

公平地说，消费者更倾向于在任何时候都不用花钱是我们最终选择免费游戏世界的原因，这是资本主义坚实的原则。但我们同样也需要承认专业的游戏开发要求专业人员，这意味着人们需要领到工资。评论免费游戏（用户想要避免花钱）不可避免的结果便是，只有盈利很糟糕（或根本就未盈利）的免费游戏能够获得最佳评论，因此这使得它对产业基础充满敌意。那些关注手机领域一段时间的人将会记得2012年的《雷霆铁拳》，这款游戏获得了较高的评论，得到了大量的下载，但是收益却很少。如果“不需要花任何钱”的评论中能够塑造手机领域，这里将变成每一款游戏都在努力追求利润的地方，因为获得推荐的游戏也是那些人们觉得并不特别需要购买的游戏。幸运的是，许多智能手机用户并未阅读这些评论（或者iTunes/Google Play上的评论），但这并不是真正理想的状况—-最佳情况便是考虑批评的重要性。本文就不对这一点的原因进行详细说明了。

问题3：不存在盈利标准。

这里有一个有趣的情况—-关于去年《植物大战僵尸2》的三条不同的评论。根据第一条评论，它拥有“让人惊讶的非防御型免费模式”，而第二条评论则说，你被“要求去反复玩某些关卡直至你对它们感到厌烦，”同时，第三条评论建议你“不要玩《植物大战僵尸2》，因为它的存在主要是通过花言巧语去骗你钱。”尽管所有的这三条评论看似都传达了非付费玩家的立场，我们最终得出了关于同一款游戏的三条评论，并分别给出100%，70%和40%的平分，这主要是基于他们认为同一盈利模式的的攻击性的评判，或者他们围绕着该盈利模式所获得的体验。虽然这三位评论者玩的是同样的游戏，但是因为这些盈利模式都是新的，并且在不同游戏间也会不同，所以每个人对于“攻击性盈利”的理解也会不同，如此评论也将只能够提供一些有用的信息—-如果你们碰巧与评论者拥有同样的游戏品味和同样的盈利标准的话。

问题4：兴趣游戏。

就像我之前所提到的，游戏与游戏间的区别越来越大，即被设计用于消费以及作为不间断的兴趣的游戏。免费游戏更倾向于兴趣模式，显然徘徊于排行榜顶端的游戏都是那些能够长期说服玩家每天回到游戏中的游戏。如果这是人们所追求的，这便为评论者呈现了另一大挑战—-他们真正想要知道的并不是“这款游戏在发行时多有趣？”而是“这款游戏在每天体验时会多有趣？”

对于许多这类型游戏，比起立即发布评论，他们会分别写下第一天，第三天等等评论，并在第七天给予分数。不幸的是这仍然要取决于第一天的情况。

问题5.不断的更新循环。

即使上述问题得到了解决，还存在另外一个问题—-有些游戏仍会出现在公众的视线中好几个月，甚至好几年时间，并可能在这期间发生巨大的改变。在Google Play上的更新也可以以每日为单位，任何需要网络连接的游戏都可以在运行的时候改变某些内容。我们经常会阅读一条关于早前游戏的评论，但是在下载后却发现存在很大的区别，因此我们必须确保评论的与时俱进。除非评论者刚好是在一个A/B测试中，在这种情况下他们的体验可能不像其它他玩家在同一天所体验到的那样。乐观的看法将把评论当成一条极限，希望游戏不仅能够从那时起得到完善，同时我们还能坚持“付钱是糟糕的”理念，但可能事实并非如此，因为大多数开发者将随着时间的发展完善他们的盈利，这便是“尝试着说服人们花更多钱”的产业。

如今的每一周都会出现无数新游戏，大多数评论网站不得不精选那些他们想要优先评论的内容。回来并更新评论需要大量的人力资源—-这对于大多数游戏来说是难以实施的（除了那些最受欢迎的游戏）。

关于“价值”的旁白

我到目前所提到的大多数内容都包含了“游戏体验”的理念，即我所描述的作为游戏评论的“双重目的”的第一部分。而另外一部分便是价值，现在价值是一个奇怪的理念。我们习惯根据游戏在玩家开始前向他们索要50美元至60美元，去谈论价值，就像游戏比电影更贵是因为它持续的时间更长。我不敢保证这是否正确，但不管怎样这都可以作为定价的一个好理由。

只有现在，我们更常看到免费的无尽游戏，在这里你可以选择性地进行支付。这彻底颠倒了我们对于钱的价值的印象，即对于伴随着零售游戏长大的人来说这是很难理解的情况。但连同剩下的娱乐世界（视频，音频，印刷物）一起，现在的我们拥有了更多可消费的免费内容。所以现在我们需要承认的是，仅仅通过时间发展并始终提供给玩家某些目标的游戏是不足以获得推荐的。

这听起来可能再明显不过，但是在今天，如果没有人跳出来说他们未花任何钱便在某一款游戏中待了好几百个小时，我们便很难去批评任何免费游戏，这种逻辑就像是在说免费的肥皂剧是电视内容的高峰一样。

所有的这一切都是在婉转地传达一个道理，即有许多被游戏迷住并觉得需要每天回到游戏中的玩家并不能代表游戏质量，评论家需要不断地问自己他们回到游戏中的动机是什么，以及游戏是否真的值得玩家花费时间。

问题6：金钱的IAP价值。

对于大多数玩免费游戏的人们来说，谈论“金钱的价值”是毫无意义的，因为他们并不想在游戏中花任何钱。但这同样也是评论者所面临的挑战。因为专注于非付费玩家，大多数评论者会发现任何硬式收费墙都是消极的。对于非付费玩家来说，你在游戏中可以购买的任何内容都是能够通过游戏获得的，或者完全是没必要的。评论PC上排行前列的免费游戏（游戏邦注：如《DOTA2》和《Path of Exile》）经常会歌颂游戏中的购买是不必要的，你可以无需花一分钱而体验完整游戏的内容。

DOTA2(from replays)

但这意味着游戏是作为购买昂贵道具的玩家的奖励，从定义上看， 这是对于金钱的糟糕价值。同时，尝试着通过有价值的游戏内容盈利的游戏，就像早前的共享软件模式那样，得到了来自评论者较低的评分，因为其内容其实是有价值的，但却不受欢迎。在这里我可能犯了个错，但是我却未听说过应用商店中任何畅销的内容以及最畅销排行榜都暗示着消费品是有助于长期影响的唯一业务模式。

这是通过游戏奖励那些购买了并不值得购买的内容的玩家的一种奇怪系统。

该前往哪里？

我努力思考着该如何结束这一咆哮，因为这些问题都不是那么容易解决的，但如果不提供任何建议的话则是一种糟糕的做法。很明显的一点是标准的游戏评论模式更适合早前的消费娱乐模式。

以下是一些值得我们深思的内容：

尝试着识别游戏的目的是作为消费体验还是持续的兴趣，并以不同方式去对待它们。玩家当然会愿意这么做。

同样地，尝试着明确游戏是否鼓励你回到其中。如果存在一款硬核游戏和元游戏，哪一个才是主要的推动力量？几天后，硬核游戏是否仍然有趣，或者这只是元游戏中的进程发展？

在带有更多免费游戏的市场中，我最想节省的并不是钱，而是时间。同样的，精确的评分是不必要的，我只想知道“这些游戏是否值得我们去尝试。”Kotaku的yes/no/not-yet评论系统便是个很棒的例子。

如果一款游戏的价值是在你需要花钱的基础上呈现出来，它便没有任何价值，但这却不足以成为阻止你向别人介绍它的污点。

不要只是因为游戏中带有某些广告便批评游戏。如果你真的觉得广告妨碍了你的体验，那就没办法，但如果你只是抱怨免费游戏中带有广告，那请你好好想想，当你在看免费电视节目时也会遇到各种商业广告。

不想看到广告和不必要的IAP其实也是在用另一种方式表达“给我免费的游戏”。关于有“其他人”会资助开发并不是一个真正的借口。

要记得许多IAP的价格对于普通玩家来说是不可能合理的，因为商业模式并未要求普通玩家购买它们。赛车游戏中的高端超极赛车（就像它所基于的汽车原形那样），可能会基于0.01%人能够接受的标准进行定价。这并不意味着游戏便遭到了破坏，这也不意味着玩家就非常贪婪，这只能反应出商业本性。

最后两点看似矛盾，但事实却不是如此，非付费玩家可能能够弥补大部分玩家，但同时，他们却不能要求游戏是为他们量身打造的。

我们并不需要为兴趣游戏匆忙赶制评论。就像MMO一样，花时间去明确这是否是你值得坚持的内容更加重要。

如果一款游戏在最初评论后仍待在排行榜上6个月，你可能值得进行更新去覆盖那些已经改变的内容。当然了，不是那么受欢迎的游戏也能这么做，但这却是不实用的。

免费游戏市场并不像以前那样，即“大多数收益是来自发行当周”。同样地，游戏评论网站应该拥有“如果你在寻找一款游戏，这里便是我们认为你应该先尝试看看的游戏”列表。当大多数人在玩一年前发行的游戏时，你却完全专注于本周刚发行的游戏也很奇怪。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转功，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

How do you review a F2P game?

by Robert Green

Game reviews have typically served a dual-purpose. On the one hand, they perform the same function as a movie or music review – is this product any good?. On the other, because games have traditionally been more expensive than other media, gamers tend to place a much greater weight on ‘value’ (often expressed as the number of hours a game lasts, though I’ll come back to this), so reviews also seek to answer the question of “is this game worth the amount being asked?”.

For most of the time game reviews have been conducted, this worked pretty well. A high-quality game with good replayability gets a high score, while a lower-quality game with no replayability gets a lower score, and a high-quality game that isn’t very long might get a “rent this instead, or wait for a discount” verdict.

But in the mobile landscape of 2014, most games now are F2P, and F2P throws all of this out the window.

How, I wonder, is a reviewer supposed to say “here is what the experience of playing this game is like, and here is how much value it provides”, when those things change based on how much, if anything, the player spends? Perhaps a game that’s boring and irritating upon installing it actually becomes enjoyable after spending a couple of dollars. Or maybe a game is good fun without spending anything and the in-app-purchases are all poor value. When we talk about value, are we talking about an inherent value of the game, or the value of the in-app-purcashes? Or are we now less interested in value-for-money than we are in value-for-time?

Problem #1: What is the experience of playing this game?

Game reviews have always skirted a fine line of wanting to seem somewhat authoritative on something that’s inherently a subjective experience. But while the experience varied from player to player, at least the two players would be experiencing the same product. With F2P, even that isn’t guaranteed. To give a basic example, a player who buys a coin doubler in an endless runner isn’t experiencing the same product as someone who doesn’t, they’re experiencing a game where it only takes half as long to unlock new upgrades. Given that this is the sort of thing that would usually be hand-tuned by a designer, I’d contend that these players aren’t experiencing the same game differently, they’re essentially experiencing a different version of the game.

But what is a reviewer to do? They can’t possibly have a bunch of reviewers all buy different IAP’s, and different amounts of IAP’s, and have each write up their experience, if only because the number of different combinations would quickly become overwhelming.

Many of the publications I’ve read have taken a fairly logical approach to this conundrum – it may not be feasible to review every possible experience, but it is possible to review the experience that the average player will have. How? Because F2P relies on having a huge number of players, the large majority of whom will never spend any money. Hence if you review a F2P game from the perspective of “the user who doesn’t want to pay anything”, then you’ll probably cover at least 90% of your readers. It seems like a fairly reasonable solution, but it leads to the next problem.

Problem #2: The best payment is no payment.

To be fair, the fact that consumers prefer not to pay whenever possible is how we ended up in this F2P world to begin with, and it’s a pretty solid principle of capitalism in general. But we also have to acknowledge that professional game development requires professionals, which means that people need to get paid. The inevitable consequence of reviewing F2P games as if the user wants to avoid ever spending money, is that only F2P games that monetise very poorly (or not at all) can get the best reviews, thus making it a system that is quite hostile to the very industry it’s based around. Those paying attention to the mobile scene for a while now will remember the case of Punch Quest in 2012, which gained some very high reviews, a lot of downloads, and very limited revenue. If the “paying anything is undesirable” reviewers were actually able to shape the mobile landscape, it would likely turn into a place where every game similarly struggles turn a profit, because the only recommended games would be those where purchases always feel completely unnecessary. As luck would have it, most of the hundreds of millions of smartphone users are not reading these reviews (or the reviews on iTunes/Google Play it would seem), but that’s not really ideal either – the best situation would be one where the voice of the critic matters. This article is already a bit long without explaining why, but I may dive further into this in a later post.

Problem #3: No standards for monetisation.

Here’s an interesting case – 3 different reviews of last year’s Plants vs Zombies 2 (1, 2, 3). According to the first one, it has an “amazingly non-offensive freemium model”, while the second says that you’re “asked to cough up or play levels over and over until you’re fed up with them”, while the third suggests that you “don’t play Plants vs Zombies 2, because it exists primarily to wheedle you for money”. Even though all three reviewers seem to have adopted the position of the non-payer, we’ve ended up with three reviews of the same game, scoring it 100%, 70% and 40%, based largely on how offensive they found the same monetisation model, or more to the point, their experience getting around the monetisation model. All three of them thus played the game similarly, but because these monetisation models are so new and vary so much from game to game, everyone has a different understanding of what it means to be ‘offensively monetised’, so a review may only be providing useful information if you happen to have the same taste in games and the same standards of monetisation as the reviewer.

Problem #4: The hobby game.

As I’ve covered before, there’s an increasing distinction in gaming between games that are designed to be consumed and games that are designed to be an ongoing hobby. F2P heavily favours the hobby model, and it’s evident that the games sticking around at the top of the charts are the ones that convince players to keep coming back every day for as long as possible. If this is what people are looking for, this presents another challenge for reviewers – What they really want to know isn’t “how much fun is this game at launch?”, it’s “how much fun will this game be to play every day?”

Kudos here to PocketGamer, who have at least tried to formalise some kind of process here. For many games of this nature, instead of publishing their review immediately, they write up impressions on day 1, day 3 and then give a score on day 7. Which unfortunately still depends on when day 1 is…

Problem #5: The constant update cycle.

Even if the above problems were solved, there’s yet another problem – some of these games stay in the public eye for months, even years, and can change drastically during that time. Updates on Google Play can even be done on a daily basis, and any game with an online requirement can even be changing aspects on the fly. It’s not uncommon to read a review of an older game and download it to find a number of key differences, hence making the review only accurate at the time it was written. Unless the reviewer happened to be in an A/B-Test, in which case their experience may not even be what all other players on the same day experienced. An optimistic view would be to see the review as a baseline, in the hopes that the game has only improved since then, but if we’re sticking with our mantra of “paying money is bad”, then this might not be the case, because most developers will be looking to improve their monetisation over time, which is industry slang for “trying to convince people to spend more money”.

With hundreds of new games being released every week, most review sites already have to hand-pick which ones they’re even going to review in the first place. The ability to come back and update those reviews down the line would require an enormous increase in manpower – it’s largely unfeasible for all but the most popular games.

An aside on ‘value’.

Most of what I’ve mentioned so far covers the idea of the ‘game experience’, the first part of what I introduced as the ‘dual-purpose’ of game reviews. The other part is value, and value is a strange concept now. We used to talk about value in terms of the $50-60 being asked from the gamer before they could play it, and often references were made to game length, as if the reason that games were several times the price of a movie is that the experience lasted several times longer. I’m not sure that was ever true, but it might have been seen as a good justification for the price regardless.

Only now, it’s more common to see free, endless games, where you can optionally pay to play less. This has so completely upended our impression of value for money that it can be hard for anyone who grew up with retail games to properly comprehend it. But along with the rest of the entertainment world (video, audio, print), we’re now in the position of actually having more free content to consume than we could ever make time for. So what we need, going forward, is an acknowledgement that merely passing time and always giving the player something else to aim for is not enough to recommend a game.

This might sound obvious, yet it’s difficult to criticise any F2P game these days without someone jumping in to say that they spent hundreds of hours in it without paying a cent, the kind of logic that would suggest that free-to-air soap operas were the pinnacle of TV content.

All of which is a fairly roundabout way of saying that the number of people who will get hooked on a game and feel a need to keep coming back every day isn’t necessarily an indicator of quality, and critics should regularly ask themselves what is motivating them to come back, and whether or not a game is really valuing the players time.

Problem #6 – IAP value for money.

It’s largely pointless to talk about ‘value for money’ for the majority of people playing F2P games, because they have no intention of spending any money in them. But for those that do, it also presents a challenge for reviewers. Because of the focus on non-payers, most reviewers see any kind of hard paywall as inherently negative. For the non-paying players (the large majority), everything you can buy in a game should either have a way to earn it through playing, and/or be completely unessential. Reviews of the top F2P games on PC (games like DOTA2 and Path of Exile) often praise the fact that the purchases are not in any way required, and you can have a complete and fun experience without spending a cent.

But this means that games are rewarded for making purchases luxury or vanity items, which are, by definition, poor value for money. Meanwhile a game that attempted to monetise valuable gameplay content, like in the old shareware model, is scored negatively by reviewers (and the non-paying players for that matter) precisely because the content is actually valuable, and undesirable to be missing out on. I might be mistaken here, but I don’t know of any huge successes selling content on the app store, and the top grossing charts suggest that consumables are the only business model that makes for a long-term impact.

It’s a strange system that rewards a game for only having purchases that generally aren’t worth buying, but here we are.

Where to from here?

I’ve been struggling to figure out how to end this extended rant, because these problems are not easily solved, but it would be rude of me not to at least try some suggestions. One thing that’s clear is that the standard game review model is much better suited to the old consumable entertainment model that it sprang from.

Here’s a few things that might be worth thinking about:

Try to identify whether or not games are designed to be consumed experiences or ongoing hobbies, and feel free to treat them differently if so. The players certainly will.

Similarly, try to identify what about the game is motivating you to come back to it. If there is a core game and a metagame, which is the main driver? After a few days, is the core gameplay still fun, or is it just the means to progress in the metagame?

In a market with more free games than I can play, what I’m looking to save first and foremost isn’t money, it’s time. As such, a precise review score isn’t necessary, I only really need to know “these games are definitely worth trying, these ones less so, these ones don’t bother”. Kotaku’s yes/no/not-yet review system is a good example.

If a game turns out to only be worth playing if you’re going to spend money, that’s worth noting (maybe in bold text), but it shouldn’t be a black mark that causes you to avoid recommending the game to anyone.

Don’t criticise a game just for having some advertising in it. If you really feel like it’s hindering your experience, then fine, but complaining about just having some ads in a free game is like watching free TV and complaining every time a commercial comes on.

Recognise that wanting no ads and completely unessential IAP’s is basically just another way of saying “give me your game for free”. The idea that some nebulous ‘other people’ will fund the development isn’t really an excuse. It’s eerily similar to the game pirates who say that the developers shouldn’t mind because they recommend the pirated games to other people.

Remember that the price of many IAP’s is unlikely to seem reasonable to an average player, which is fine because the business model doesn’t require that the average player buy them. A high-end supercar in a racing game, much like the car it’s based on, may be priced at a point that only 0.01% of people are willing to pay. This doesn’t mean the game is broken, and it doesn’t mean the developers are excessively greedy, it just reflects the nature of the business.

The last two points can seem contradictory, but they aren’t – the non-payers may make up the large majority of players, but at the same time, they can’t ask that the game be perfectly designed for them, as that may result in no payers at all.

There’s no need to rush out reviews on hobby games. Like MMO’s, it’s better to take the time to really determine if this is something that’s worth sticking with.

If a game is still on the charts 6 months after its initial review, it might be worth doing an update to cover what’s changed since then. Ideally less popular games would get this too, but that’s just not practical.

The F2P market doesn’t resemble the old school of “most revenue comes in launch week”, in a number of different ways. As such, a game review site should have an easily accessible list of “if you’re looking for a new game, here are the games we think you should try first”. It would be strange to focus entirely on what’s new this week when most people are playing games that are a year old.(source:gamasutra)