作者：Daniel Cook

游戏开发的不稳定性根深蒂固。技术，市场，利润率和团队经常在变。这几个要素中的任何一者都可能摧毁一个之前运营良好的公司。个人游戏开发者可能因此而面临失业，一点不确定性就可能危及我们的人际关系和长期的幸福生活。

为了糊口谋生，你只好让自己的梦想继续沉睡数年，甚至数十年。

那么如何打造一个安乐窝？也就是建立一个在做游戏的同时，至少不会让你心爱的团队或银行帐户常被掏空的所在。本文列入了一些在当前市场创造出高质量游戏的开发者成功背后所需的数据。在此我不会提供解决方案，但你可以从中找到一些有用的概念。

举例

也有一些极为成功的案例。如果你靠制作游戏在税后赚了1000万至3000万美元，很可能就会为此大受鼓舞并将自己的余生投入游戏开发中。你可能没有足够的资金养活更大的团队，但如果预算合理，你至少可以承当自己一生的开销。要知道你的游戏制作团队每增加一人，你一生的游戏制作预算就要增加1000万美元（你可能不愿意将自己的钱投入其中，但这并不在我们的讨论范围之内）。

最小的可持续性

什么是边界案例？想象一架滑翔机正缓慢下坠，但还是保持了向上的势头以免机身崩溃的样子。

以下是经营者在这个追求轰动效应的传媒行业中长期生存下来的一些关键理念：

1.对成功的定义：成功率，成功规模，可变性

2.增加成功机率的策略：制定预算，制作原型，业余爱好，收益流

1.对成功的定义

成功率

在90年代，Sierra曾提出每四款游戏中就有一者能够获得成功，并且足以填补其他未产生利润的失败之作所产生的缺口。而Epic前总裁Mike Capps最近则声称他认为一款游戏的成功机率不会超过10%。如果你制作了10款游戏，最多只能寄希望于其中一者获得成功。

这里所指的成功率仅仅是取得某一经济层面上的成功的游戏vs你发布的所有游戏数量之间的比例。它永远不可能达到100%，其比例可能介于1%至25%之间。

随着时间发展，这种成功率还会一直下降。现代游戏市场几乎看不到25%的成功率。因为当代市场的开发工具更平价，分销平台也更开放，今天的游戏产品供应远比过去更丰富。玩家数量虽然也大幅增长，但增速却远远不如数量激增的开发者。在一批质量相当游戏当中，只有一小撮能够实现盈利。

我经常会从资深开发者的角度去思考游戏的成功率。这些数据来自那些已经使用了多种技巧来降低风险的专业开发者，他们制作游戏续作，并且能够利用现成的客户关系，向粉丝团出售续作。

在此，我并不是说成功完全取决于运气。我只是想承认这样一个事实，即使你采取了自己力所能及一切行动，这个市场上仍然存在你无从直接控制的巨大风险。

你对每款游戏都要做好小概率成功机会的心理准备。这并不是在散布消极心理，总有些智者能够在这个充满不确定性的系统中实现盈利。

成功的规模

多大的成就才能算得上成功？人们对成功的定义多种多样。我们在本文中不妨将能够保持收支平衡不至于破产视为初级水平的成功。至少这意味着你能够为失败买单。

首先要意识到并非所有具有盈利性的游戏都能够创造长期性的成功。

如果你制作了10款手机(或PC)游戏并盈利10万美元。

*惨败：有3款游戏收入153.02美元。它们并没有获得应用商店推荐，并最终陷入沉寂。这是很常见的现象，只是人们一般都讳谈自己的失败。

*中度失败：4款游戏收入5万美元！

*收支平衡：2款游戏收支平衡。人人都在讨论这两款游戏，好像它们就算是一种成功了。

*成功：仅有一款游戏收入100万美元。它的收入必须比其成本多10倍才能够填补你的整体开发成本。

如果那款具有盈利性的游戏收入60万美元呢？它的收益就是成本的6倍！你就能够拿额外的50万美元再制作5款游戏。尽管收获了一个成功的果实，你仍然是在走向破产的漫漫长路上。因为这5款游戏获得成功的机率只有40%，长期来看，你最终会落得囊中空空或负债累累的下场。

我经常听到媒体或独立开发者吹嘘某个团队取得收支平衡或者在某个项目上实现双倍盈利。我很乐见他们取得了再度投身这一市场进行奋战的资格，但也总能看到他们的一两款游戏资金耗尽时就退出市场或陷入绝望的结局。

将收支平衡的项目视为一种经济上的成功，对于其他开发者来说是一种有害的行为。收支平衡并没有什么意义。你仍然只是在艰难求生，因为你一无所得，所以仍然需要精打细算。

多变性

即使是那些收益比一般项目成本高10倍的工作室也难免走下坡路。

抛一枚硬币20次试试。总有一半时间会抛到正面。但你并不知道何时抛到正面，何时抛到背面。你有可能连续10次抛到正面，而如果你只想抛到背面，就会有很大的麻烦。

随机系统具有内在的多变性，游戏开发也不例外。世界上最棒的团队有可能连续10次获得成功，你的项目有可能以失败为主调，也有可能是成功唱主角。但你的成功程度不但要能够为一般的失败机率买单，还要能够承担起运气最糟糕时期的下场。

你的缓冲期越大，你所遭遇的霉运可能就越长久。你在计算成功机率时至少要考虑到一些可预期的失败概率。这并非完美的策略，但至少可以让你有足够的心理准备应对霉运。

我对成功项目的定义

我们在Spry Fox过去5年中积累了以下数据：

*有31个项目制作成原型。

*20个更小的原型并没有成功。有些历时数月，有些数天就阵亡了。

*11个项目实现发布。

*4个项目并没盈利（属于惨败和中度失败）。

*4个项目收支平衡。

*3个项目取得成功。

对我们来说，成功意味着一个已发布的项目要取得比其制作成本多5至10倍的收益。这样才足够补偿所有原型制作、失败项目等相关费用。

我发现在我们的项目原型中，每10个原型中大概只有1个最终能够成功。我认为我们制作的失败原型可能远远超过实际上看到的情况。在已发布的项目中，我们的成功概率接近于1：3。

这种结果已经高于预期了。但我还是很担心随之而来的霉运。我们现在很可能只是处于成功为主调的情况，我们实际上的成功机率也许低于当前这小部份样本所显示的情况。

但最重要的是，我们了解了这些数据。它们有助于我们判断该在一个项目上投入多少，我们应该保留多少资源。

2.提高成功率的策略

行业中已经有大量应对游戏开发多变性的技巧。我在下文中提到的是一些并不能从根本上改变运气的策略，但它们有助于你增加成功率，这是一个截然不同的概念。

持续运营的基本预算

开发者在制作游戏上投入过多资金是一种极常见的情况。为此你至少要提出以下问题：

*目标收益：你想赚多少？

*成功率：你赚到这笔钱的机率？

你的预算大概就是目标收益*成功率。所以，如果你实现50万美元收益的概率是10%，你就要在每个项目上投入5万美元。也就是1名全职资深开发者连续工作5个月，每个月需为其支付1万美元。或者针对类似职位，连续投入10个月，每月支付5000美元。

这些数据看起来也许触目惊心。这意味着大量独立开发者会因为财政困难而生活拮据，并且只能看运气而非依靠理性的财政战略来运营项目。

制作低成本的原型

注意我所分享的成功率数据已经相当接近于Mike Capps所称的10%。但是，我们所发布的游戏成功率却更高（30%以上）。原因就在于我们在早期用了低成本管道制作低成本原型来验证游戏玩法。

这些原型成本远低于发布的游戏。这30个原型中有些项目原型只用了一名程序员数天的时间。尽早排除糟糕的游戏理念，我们才能在具有更高成功率的游戏上投入足够的资金。

在多个平台发布游戏

你每回在新平台发布游戏时，都要再次寄希望于好运降临。《Triple Town》在eInk Kindle平台上原来只是一款收支平衡的游戏，但在Android和iOS平台上却获得了真正的成功。如果我们首次发布就停止了脚布，我可能就会认为《Triple Town》是一款没有取得收益的失败游戏。

利用能够快速而低成本地转向新平台的设计及技术，可以降低你的移植成本并减少你保持运营所需的成功规模。

将开发游戏视为业余爱好

持续开发更令人棘手的一面就在于，我们在此过程中必须养家糊口。如果你不需要仅仅依靠制作游戏就能够支付这些成本，是不是更好一些呢？

可以参考以下路径：

*外包：你可以为承接他人的项目来赚钱，并将这部分所得用于周期性的全职开发工具。这里所涉及的成本具有双重性，你的开发工作会更缓慢，并且从长期来看你的平均所得也会更少。

*晚上兼职：你有一份从事其他事项的全职工作，只是利用晚上和周末时间来制作游戏。这里的成本也是开发工作会更为缓慢。但因为你每周工作时间超过了40小时，这样制作出来的游戏也很难保证质量。你还要因为牺牲闲暇时间来制作游戏而丧失机会成本。

*依靠配偶或家人的支持：你家里的其他成员赚钱多，这样你就有空全身心投入制作游戏。此时开发者所面临的成本就很小，你所面临的损失就是家庭收入的下降。如果你们能够承担这种情况，那就再好不过了。

我们不打算对此进行赘述，但的确有大量成功的“专业”艺术家是靠他人支付的费用获得成功。他们并非深度理解持续发展这一概念的成功企业家，而不差钱的全职“业余爱好者”。他们有大把闲暇时间，并且可以全身心投入游戏开发。

但大部份人很难承认这一事实。他们对此保持缄默的情形误导了其他资金匮乏的艺术家盲目追求不切实际的梦想。如果你也是一名受人资助的开发者，不妨光明正大地说出来。也好为独立开发者的集资方式正名。

长期收益流

付费游戏一般都有针对发布和特别销售的棘手收益流。财政不稳定性深深扎根于其商业模式中。

以下是增加稳定性的最普遍方法。

*授权：长期游戏授权的销售额来自推广续作或重制游戏。这是保守的大公司的常用策略，但也适用于类似Spiderweb Software这种小型公司。

*持续更新：不断更新游戏并为其造势。对多数游戏来说，项目发布一两年后销量都会下滑。易消费型游戏通常不会是长盛不衰的企业资产。

*免费模式：令游戏成为一种服务并以此创造收益流。这要求你了解免费运营模式的方法。对于独立开发者来说这是一种不常见但却极有价值的技巧。

只要你公司的资金消耗费并没有失控（超出收益流），你就可能持续创收。

这些收益流是我们公司的目标，我们致力于创建能够通过铁杆玩家社区产生稳定收益的长期游戏。这并非易事，但至少我们是有意识地针对这一目标创造游戏。

总结

我们的经验就是你只能控制自己交好运的机率。要知道已发布的大量游戏中，只有一部分可能获得成功。并且你要根据自己能够承担的制作成本来制定预算。孤注一掷是一种错误的想法，有时候可能获得回报，有时候可能竹篮打水一场空。

要认识到一直在付费游戏市场角逐并非明智之举。一般情况下你会在5至10款游戏上栽跟头，只有一款游戏会成功。

也许长期的解决方案就是将游戏视为一项服务来运营。尽量创造可以产生可靠资金流的产品。这可能需要一定程度的商业思维。你要制作一部可以持续使用的财政机器而非转瞬即逝的艺术品。（本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao）

Minimum Sustainable Success

by Daniel Cook

Let’s dream for a moment about sustainable game development.

Game development is inherently unstable. Technology, markets, profit margins and teams shift regularly. Any of these can quickly destroy a previously comfortable business. Individual game developers end up dealing with unexpected layoffs, last minute moves across the country (or across the world) and a level of uncertainty can damage our relationships and long term happiness.

In order to simply make ends meet, you end up compromising your dreams, for years. Or decades. Game development exemplifies Schumpeter’s creative destruction on an accelerated scale with intensely personal consequences.

So what is required to build an oasis? A place where, at minimum, one might make games at least without having your beloved team or your bank account regularly exploded. This essay covers some of numbers behind reaching success as a developer of premium games in the current market. I don’t offer solutions, but you may find some of the concepts useful.

The uninteresting case

There are obvious examples of extreme success. If you happen to make a game that personally earns you 10 to 30 million USD after taxes, you can likely devote the rest of your life to game development. You may not have enough to fund larger teams, but given reasonable budgeting, you’ve at least covered your expenses until death. For every additional teammate you need to make games, add another 10 million to your lifetime game making budget. (You may not want to actually spend your own money, but that’s a different discussion)

For those of you who find your gilded selves in that particular pickle, well done. None of the rest of this essay is meaningful to you.

Minimum Sustainability

What are the borderline cases? Imagine a glider that slowly drifts downwards, but manage to catch just enough of an updraft to never quite crash.

The following are some ideas pertinent to surviving long term in a hit driven media industry.

Defining success: Success rates, Size of success, Variability

Tactics for surviving the odds: Budgeting, Prototyping, Hobbies, Revenue streams

1. Defining success

Success rates

In the 90s, Sierra expected 1 out of 4 games to be a success and pay for the other products that failed to turn a profit. Recently, Mike Capps, the previous president of Epic, claimed that he couldn’t promise more than a 10% chance a game would be a success. If you made 10 games, on average, you’d expect only 1 would be considered a success.

Success rate is simply the ratio of ratio games that hit some threshold of financial success vs the total you’ve released. It is never 100% and can range from 1 to 25% based on the particular market you are in.

Over time success has been dropping. 25% is almost never seen in modern game markets. Tools are cheaper, distribution platforms are more open and there’s simply a much larger supply of games today than there have been in the past. The number of game players has increased as well, but far slower than the vast increase in developers. Given a set of equally competent games, only a fraction will become profitable.

I typically think of success rates in the context of experienced developers. These are numbers coming from professional developers that are already using every trick in the book to mitigate risks. They are making sequels, they are leveraging existing relationships, they are selling to their fan bases.

When I talk about probabilities in game development, I’m by no means saying that success is all due to luck. Instead, it is merely acknowledging that even when you do everything you possibly can there are still huge risk factors that are out of your direct control.

You might as well plan for only a small chance of success with an individual game. This isn’t being negative. Smart people make good money off probabilistic systems every day.

Size of success

How big of a success is actually a success? There are many definitions of success out there. For the purposes of this essay, let’s consider making enough money to not go bankrupt the first tier of success. At the very least that means paying for your failures.

The first thing to realize is that not all profitable games provide long term success.

If you make 10 mobile (or PC) games for $100,000 a pop.

Brutal failures: 3 make a total of $153.02. They didn’t get featured by the app stores and were lost in the sea of obscurity. Pretty common, though people tend to be shy about discussing their failures.

Moderate failures: 4 make $50,000!

Break Even: 2 games break even. Everyone talks about them as if they were a success.

Success: Only a single game earns $1 million. It needs to earn 10X its cost to cover your million dollars in total dev costs.

What happens if that profitable game make $600,000? It earned 6X its costs! You made a profit of $500,000, enough to make 5 more games. However, you are still on the long road to bankruptcy, despite an apparent success. There’s only a roughly 40% chance those 5 swings at bat will result in a success. Long term, you’ll find yourself out of money or in debt.

I regularly hear press or indies trumpeting that a team broke even or doubled their money on a project and I cringe. I’m happy that they got a scratch off ticket to play again. But these are the same developers that are quitting the industry or sunk into despair when a game or two later they’ve run out of money.

It is a disservice to other developer to claim that a breakeven project is a financial success. Break even means almost nothing. You are still on the knife’s edge of baseline survival and should operate financially exactly as if you had achieved nothing.

Variance

Even studios that have successes that are 10X their average project cost still end up going under.

Flip a coin 20 times. On every 1 out of 2 times should be heads. But you don’t get a pattern of alternating heads and tails. You get streaks. You may see 10 heads in a row. This is within the bounds of chance. However, if you really needed tails to come up, you are in a lot of trouble.

Random systems have natural variability and game development does as well. The best team in the world can strike out 10 times in a row. It is just as likely for your failures to be front loaded as it is for your success. So not only do you need your success to pay for the average rate of failure. You need it to pay for the worst possible luck.

The more buffer you have, the longer bad luck streaks you can survive. At the very least, add a few expected failures into your success rate calculation. It isn’t a perfect tactic, but it helps you deal with bad luck in addition to mere average luck.

What I personally consider a successful project

At Spry Fox, in the past 5 years we’ve accumulated the following numbers:

31 projects started as prototypes.

20 smaller prototypes that also didn’t pan out. Some took months, others took days.

11 released projects

4 that didn’t make money (both brutal and moderate failures).

4 break even projects

3 outright successes.

For us a success means a released project makes back 5 to 10X its production cost. That is what pays for all the prototyping, failed projects and general poor dice rolls.

I was surprised to note that of our prototypes, roughly 1 in 10 end up being a successful project. I assumed we had a lot more horrible prototypes than apparently we do. For released projects, we are closer to 1 in 3 being successful.

That’s better than expected. But it does make me mildly worried that a bad luck streak is on the way. It would be completely fair to suggest that our successes were front loaded and our actual success rate is lower than the current small sample indicates.

However, the most important aspect of these numbers is that we are aware of them. They limit how much we can spend on a project and how much we could keep in reserve.

2. Tactics for surviving the odds

There are a vast number of techniques that help deal with the variability in game development. The following, however, are ones that don’t fundamentally alter the odds. They help you survive the odds, which is a very different goal.

Basic Budgeting for Sustainability

It is very common to spend too much money making your game. At minimum ask the following questions:

Target Revenue: How much do you expect to make?

Success Rate: What is chance of making that much money?

Your budget is likely Target Revenue * Success Rate. So if there’s a 10% chance of reaching $500,000, you should spend $50,000 on each project. That’s 1 full-time experienced developer for 5 months assume pay of $10,000 a month. Or if you underpay yourself relative to what you might make at comparable jobs and spend 10 months at $5,000 a month.

These numbers should look scary. They suggest that the vast majority of indie developers are ripe for financial ruin and are operating primarily on hope instead of any rational financial strategy. I think that’s accurate.

Low cost prototypes

Notice that the numbers I shared for concept success rate are quite similar to Mike Capp’s 10%. However, our released games have a much higher success rate (30+%). The reason for this is that we prove out the gameplay early using a low cost pipeline of low cost prototypes.

These prototypes cost dramatically less than a released game. Some of those 30 prototypes only took a couple days with a single programmer. By disproving bad ideas early, we put real money into games that have a much higher chance of success.

Releasing on multiple platforms

Each time you release a game on a new platform, you get to roll the dice all over again. And you do it a much lower development cost. Triple Town was only a break even game on the eInk Kindle. It was a true success on Android and iOS. If we had stopped after the first release, I would have considered Triple Town a financial failure.

Using designs and technology that quickly and cheaply transfer to new platforms reduces your porting costs and decreases the size of success you need to remain in business.

Operating as a hobby

One of the trickier aspects of sustainable development is the need to pay for food and housing. What if you can pay for those costs through some other means than games making money?

Some typical paths.

Contracting: You can save up money working for someone else and then spend that money on a period of full-time development. The cost here is two fold. Development goes more slowly and long term you average wage is lower.

Working at night: You work a full time job doing something else and then spend evenings and weekends making your game. The cost here is that work goes much slower. It is also not likely to be your best work since it is difficult to maintain quality while working more than 40 hours a week. You also bear the opportunity cost of sacrificing your leisure time to making games.

Supportive spouse or family: Someone else in your family makes enough money that you have the leisure to work on games full time. The costs to the artist are generally low. The dominant one is a reduction in household family income. A great situation if you can manage it.

We don’t talk about it much, but a large number of successful ‘professional’ artists are in a relationship with someone else that pays their way. They aren’t successful entrepreneurs with a deep understanding of sustainability. Instead they are full-time hobbyists in a fortunate financial situation. They accumulate excess leisure time and spend it on game development.

This sort of blessing is very difficult to admit. But embarrassed silence dupes less fortunate artists into pursuing an unrealistic fantasy of how to thrive. If you are a kept developer and are living off someone else’s money, talk about it. Indie finances could use a little sunlight.

Longer term revenue streams

Premium games tend to have spiky revenue streams focused around launches and special sales. Financial instability is built into the business model.

Here are the most common ways of adding a dash of stability.

Franchise: A long term game franchise where sales come from promoting sequels or remakes. This tactic is regularly practiced by conservative large companies, but also works for smaller operations like Spiderweb Software.

Eternal updating: Continually update a game and making some noise about it. Toss in some sales. For most titles, this tends to drop off after a year or three. A consumable game tends to not be an evergreen business asset.

Freemium: Make a game service and build a stream of revenue. This requires that you know how to run a freemium business. It is an uncommon skill set for an indie, but quite valuable.

These give you a base layer of predictable revenue. As long as your burn rate as a company doesn’t go wildly over your income stream, you can keep making games.

These revenue streams have been our goal as a company. We are looking to build long term games that produce a steady stream of revenue from a community of dedicated players. This isn’t an easy target to hit, but at least we are building games with that conscious aim in mind.

Conclusion

The big lesson is that your exposure to luck is something you can manage. Think about releasing a portfolio of games, only some of which will be a success. And you should budget in such a manner that you can afford to make that portfolio. Blowing your existing capital on a single title is almost always a dumb idea. Sometimes it pays off. Most of the time, it doesn’t.

However, it is also worth realizing that playing the premium market straight on is, by many measures, a sucker’s game. The standard bet is to lose money on 5 to 10 games and have one success that lets you do it all over again. For most companies, the house always wins in the long run.

Perhaps the longer term solution is to run your games as a service. Try to create a product that produces reliable cash flows. This likely require a certain level of business thinking. You are making a financial machine that lasts instead of a Hail Mary piece of art that vanishes.（source：gamasutra）