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关于免费游戏的一场争论

发布时间:2014-10-23 15:40:34 Tags:,,,,

作者:Gamesbrief

Nicholas Lovell

游戏并不是鞋子。但关于这一主题,它又与鞋子一样。

thomas-geiregger(from gamesbrief)

thomas-geiregger(from gamesbrief)

我认为如果预期的价格跌至0,我们便很难维持高端价位。有些人更想要高端价位,这是合理的。因为这样人们所期待的便是价格下跌,而不是价格上升。

这将加深竞争的难度。

Chris Bateman

我当然同意鞋子不是鞋子。实际上我曾在自己的文章中列举了耐克进行讨论。

我认为这里存在的最大未知便是在面对来自免费游戏的竞争压力时,有多少高价政策继续受到欢迎,在这一领域我们找不到任何先例能够作为预测标准。我想我们并不会期待着价格的提升—-在零售游戏中并没有多少提升价格的传统。我不认为在高档商品领域存在足够的信息能够预测价格的下降。AAA级产品(就像名牌鞋)是依赖于较高的开发预算和市场营销开支而发展,源自“较低端”的竞争不足以对此产生影响。但是在其它市场中情况却不一定如此。

这将会是非常有趣的几年。

Nicholas Lovell

你不认为音乐开始走下划线吗?我对电视和书籍也报以同样的担忧。

Chris Bateman

音乐和AAA级游戏之间的区别在于前者会因为一些未花费任何开发成本的材料而收取一定费用!我可以说电子书并未对现实书籍的销售造成不利影响—-实际上,自从我的书籍的电子书版本发行以来,我的现实书籍版税反而增加了一倍多,尽管书籍的实体零售受到了影响。因为我对电视市场还不了解,所以我不能对此作出更多评价。

我认为如果你想谈论的是游戏“平均价格”,我便同意向下趋势,因为在底层将出现越来越多较小规模的产品。但是对于高价游戏来说,最大的挑战并不是源自免费游戏的直接竞争,而是失去实体零售以及市场营销和推广等优势的危险。

Nicholas Lovell

我想我已经捕捉了你的一个逻辑谬误:你的第一个句子暗示产品的价格是基于制作成本。伯川德竞争却主张这是不相关的。更明显的是,我们已经掌握了许多证据能够证实“但这花费我们更多制作成本”是不相关的理念,特别是当你的竞争者已经明确在遇到某些更便宜或者免费但却具有同样质量的产品时该选择放弃。

所以你现在所讨论的是“因为AAA级游戏是昂贵的,所以他们将保持高价。”而我所讨论的则是“因为我们正在训练消费者去期待免费和各种类型的定价,这边是AAA级游戏需要适应的情况。”只有少数玩家会坚持高价且一次性香妃的AAA级游戏体验,但我深信在这些玩家中很少有人能够待在当前的发行生态系统中,可能也不是主机生态系统。

我的推论是:你是从主体的角度在分析情况,而我则是从局外人的角度进行分析。当然了,我们可能都带有自己的偏见。但我认为我的观点比你的来的正确。

Chris Bateman

不,这并不是因为我认为价格是基于制作成本,这是与电影,汽车一样的高端娱乐产品,在AAA游戏的运作领域中,市场营销的开支是主要元素。AAA级游戏的开发成本决定了其市场营销成本的规模—-就像一部电影的制作成本决定了其它大片的节奏。伯川德竞争并不能应用于市场营销作为主要成本的领域中。

也许我们之间的主要区别在于你想要将所有商业游戏组成一个单一的市场,然而我最近开始怀疑这一简化的正确性了。关于“市场”的整体概念假设了竞争的平等性—-例如棉球的存在并不是为了与刀片相抗衡。但是游戏市场已经不再是一个单一的市场—-它是一个能够满足许多不同玩家需求的复杂领域。你可以将其塑造成一个单一市场,但基于这点所作出的假设是无效的。

我将玩家研究作为我的主要研究形式之一—-最近我发现在沉迷于游戏的玩家中,免费游戏并未彻底挤掉AAA级游戏,它们之间的关系与电影和电视间的关系更加相近。能在电视上免费观看电影并未阻止人们前往电影院看电影—-所以即使拥有免费游戏也未能阻止玩家(游戏邦注:那些想要获得AAA级游戏体验的玩家)去购买AAA级游戏。此外,对于许多沉迷于游戏的玩家来说(特别是那些更喜欢独立游戏的玩家),免费游戏模式甚至不值得一提,因为他们觉得这类型游戏影响了游戏体验。对于这类型玩家来说这就像棉球与刀片之间的关系。但是他们也仍会购买AAA级游戏和独立游戏。

我们的分歧点实际上是关于主机:你认为(就像我不久前所想的那样)免费游戏业务模式将打破主机市场的开放性,因为这一领域的利润空间已经不够了(就像索尼和微软从整体上看都在赔钱,但是任天堂却仍能凭借且掌上游戏机获取利益)。我同意如果免费游戏除掉了主机,你便赢了。但其实控制器是主机价值定位最重要的元素之一(“界面就是游戏”),所以一般设备并不会消除专用主机的商业可行性,它们只会提供到达更广泛用户(“休闲用户”/大众市场)的渠道。现在后者通过免费游戏获得了主要的游戏体验,尽管他们通过这么做创造了一些客观的收益,并且只是因为大众市场的人数远超过沉迷游戏的玩家。

如果你宣称免费游戏将忽视沉迷游戏的玩家市场,那么从投资角度来看这种情况已经发生了。但是主机领域的收益仍然很重要,现在我怀疑这一领域很快就会领先,一部分是因为AAA级游戏的宣传效果,还有一部分是因为专用控制器的重要性。所以如果你说“被围困,有可能沦陷”,我会说“即使被围困,但仍会坚持下去。”

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

Shoes are not shoes: a debate about free-to-play

By Gamesbrief

Nicholas Lovell

Games are not shoes. But nor, for that matter, are shoes.

My point is that if the price that is expected falls to zero, it will be hard to maintain premium price points. Some people will prefer to have premium price points, and that’s fine. By the expectation is of falling prices, not rising prices.

And that makes it difficult to compete.

Chris Bateman

I of course agree that shoes are not shoes… I kind of snuck this point into my post, actually, by referring to Nike. :)

I think the big unknown here is how much premium pricing continues to hold onto its popularity in the face of competition from free-to-play, and in this space we don’t actually have as much of a precedent as we would need to make a firm prediction. I agree that we should have no expectation of rising prices – but there hasn’t been much of a tradition of rising prices in retail games. I don’t think there’s enough information to predict falling prices in the premium product space either. AAA’s thrive on high development budget, high marketing spend – like premium shoes – and competition ‘from below’ is not guaranteed to affect this. On the basis of other markets, it probably won’t.

It’s going to be an interesting few years, that’s for sure!

Nicholas Lovell

You don’t think that music hasn’t trended downwards yet? I am nervous about both television and books too.

Chris Bateman

Ha – the difference between music and AAA games is that the former was charging a fortune for material that did not cost a fortune to develop! :) Records were always a boondoggle and now they’ve been forced to confront that. Ebooks have not hurt book sales as far as I can tell – in fact, my book royalties have more than doubled since ebook versions of the print books appeared, although bricks and mortar retail of books has been hurt of course. Less certain about television shows as I’ve studied this market a lot less.

I suppose if you want to talk about ‘mean price’ of games, I would agree to a downward trend because more and more smaller scale products are going to be coming in at the bottom. But for premium priced games, the biggest challenge isn’t direct competition from free-to-play but the danger of losing bricks-and-mortar retailers and all the advantages that gives in terms of marketing and promotion.

Nicholas Lovell

I think I have caught you in a logical fallacy: your first sentence suggests that the price of a product is based on how much it costs to make. Bertrand competition argues that is irrelevant. More broadly, we have seen plenty of evidence that a plaintive “but it costs us lots to make” is irrelevant when your competitors figure out how to give away something of approaching similar quality for much cheaper, or for free.

So you are arguing that “because AAA games are expensive, they will remain premium priced”. I am arguing “because we are training consumers to expect free+variable pricing, that is what AAA will need to adapt to. There will be some substantial minority of gamers who hold out for premium, AAA pay-once experiences, but I am convinced that there are not enough of them to maintain the current publishing ecosystem, and probably not the console ecosystem either.

My (slightly ad hominem) take: you are analysing the situation from a incumbent perspective, while I am analysing it from the outsider’s. Of course, we might both suffer from our biases. But I think mine is more right than yours :)

Chris Bateman

No, it’s not that I think price is based on cost to make, it’s that premium entertainment products such as films, cars, and AAA games operate in a space where marketing spend is the prime factor. The cost of development for a AAA game sets the scale for its marketing spend – just as the cost of production for a tent-pole movie sets a pace that other blockbuster movies must match. Bertrand competition (at least as much as I understand this term – not an economist!) just doesn’t apply in spaces where marketing is the primary cost. Just ask Nike! :)

Perhaps the primary difference between us is that you seem to be taking all commercial games as constituting one single market, whereas I have recently begun to doubt the validity of this simplification. The whole concept of a ‘market’ presumes equality of competition – such that, for instance, tampons are not presumed to compete with razor blades. But the games market just isn’t a single market any more – it’s actually an extremely complex space where many different player needs are being met. You can still model it as a single market – but predictions made on this basis have limited validity.

I work on player studies as one of my primary forms of research – what I’ve been discovering recently is that free-to-play isn’t edging out AAA significantly among the gamer hobbyists… the relationship is closer to the one between movies and television. Having free movies to watch on television does not stop people going to the movies – having free games does not stop players (who want the AAA experience) buying AAA games. Additionally, for many gamer hobbyists (especially those who favour indie games), the free-to-play model – because it affects the play experience of the game – isn’t even on the table. It’s tampons to razor blades for such players. But – crucially – they still buy AAA as well as indie titles…

The crux of our disagreement is actually over consoles: you believe (as I did not very long ago) that the free-to-play business model is going to break the console market wide open, since the margins in this space were already incredibly tight (looks like Sony and Microsoft are both losing money overall, although Nintendo is still profitable on the back of its handhelds). I do agree that if free-to-play took out the consoles, your scenario would win out. But it turns out that controllers are one of the most important aspects of a console’s value proposition (‘the interface is the game’), and so general purpose devices do not eliminate the commercial viability of dedicated consoles, they just provide a channel for reaching the wider (“casual”/mass market) audience. It is solely this latter audience that now get the majority of their play experience via free-to-play – although they certainly generate some impressive revenues by doing so, simply because the mass market outnumbers the hobbyists by an order of magnitude!

If your claim is that free-to-play is going to marginalize the gamer hobbyist markets, well, from an investment perspective this has already happened. But the revenues (if not the profit margins) in the console space are still significant and I now doubt this space is going away any time soon, partly because of the effectiveness of the AAA hype machine, and partly because of the importance of the dedicated controller. So you say ‘besieged, will fall’, I say ‘enclave, will persist.’(source:gamesbrief)

 


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