作者：Brendan Sinclair

在Kabam面向西方国家发行手机格斗游戏《漫威英雄格斗赛》的同时，该公司也决定将这款游戏带向中国。根据Newzoo的报告，中国甚至已经超过美国成为了世界上最大的游戏市场。在计划进军中国市场时Kabam所采取的行动和大多数西方游戏创造者一样：他们找到了一家当地的房型是去处理各种复杂的问题，即他们选择了龙图游戏展开合作。

但是在这一过程中，中国市场却发生了改变。Kabam的首席运营官Kent Wakeford解释道，苹果和iOS开始在中国创造更大的影响力，来自“高端”手机游戏开发商表示，他们有将近一半的收益是来自App Store。

Wakeford说道：“这与12个月前的情况具有非常显著的区别，那时候我们听到的情况还是80%至90%的收益是来自Android应用商店。”

Kabam要想在中国独立发行Android游戏还不大行，反而将游戏带到App Store上更有可能，他们需要为此投入更多精力，而这也是帮助他们找到在中国独立发行游戏的一种方法。Kabam在北京组建了一支拥有35名成员的团队，并且他们还有许多需要跨越的旷日持久的障碍。

他们需要遵守来自不同机构的不同要求。他们需要与中国合作者，即中国亚马逊，重新创造基础设施。而单单这项工作就需要投入6个月的时间，Wakeford表示这远远比他们想象的更加复杂。游戏需要针对那些拥有与西方玩家完全不同行为模式的全新玩家进行本土化。

Wakeford说道：“我们期待着《漫威英雄格斗赛》中的某些角色，特别是那些与在中国具有知名度的电影相关的角色能够大受欢迎，如钢铁侠或蜘蛛侠。但我们却发现中国玩家特别喜欢那些带有特殊能力的角色（即从游戏功能的角度来看）。所以他们往往不会对他们所知道的最佳IP或最佳角色感兴趣，反而会被那些真正有趣且具有与众不同的能力的角色所吸引。就像黑寡妇便因为拥有与美国队长或钢铁侠不同的技能而大受欢迎。”

这将帮助他们明确未来的角色设计，Kabam的本土化也将对现有的游戏做出一些较大的改变。Wakeford表示该公司想要添加一些全新功能到游戏中，因为中国玩家已经非常熟悉一些其它免费游戏了，所以他们便添加了一个全新的齿轮系统让玩家能够定制自己的角色属性，还添加了一个新选择让玩家能够略过一些真正的打斗内容。

Wakeford解释道：“中国玩家希望更快速地前进。他们会非常努力地游戏以获得前进。所以我们创造了一种快速打斗系统让玩家能够自动战斗，这一功能在西方市场中是最受欢迎的内容之一，玩家可以通过自动战斗更快速地刷任务并获得所有战利品，从而更快速地在游戏中前进。比起某些游戏玩法，这更加侧重于元游戏的循环。”

“比起西方消费者，中国消费者对免费游戏系统更有经验。他们对于付费获胜机制的接受度更高，特别是游戏中的VIP对此拥有更高的期待值，所以游戏对待VIP的方式也会比较特别。不管是他们在游戏中能够获得什么还是游戏提供的消费者服务，我们都需要确保VIP在游戏中拥有特殊待遇。”

漫威格斗（fromgamesindustry）

5月5日，Kabam在App Store上发行了中国版的《漫威英雄格斗赛》，名为《漫威格斗：冠军之争》。一经发行它便快速登上iPhone和iPad下载排行榜顶端，如今已经获得了将近200万的安装量。对于这款游戏早期的成功一部分原因是游戏的本土化，还有一部分原因则是其市场营销的本土化。

“在广告生态系统方面，中国市场真的非常特别，但我们还是以同样的方式去面对它。我们在中国组建了一支团队。我们与中国20家最大的广告网络公司和不同的服务供应商维持了良好的关系，我们希望能够采取与在西方市场相同的方式去理解这里的效果营销，即假设你投入1美元，你便可以着眼于每安装成本是多少，这些用户的终身价值，并估算你的投资回报率。而当我们真正走到市场中时，我们却不知道自己是否该如此计算，不知道我们是否该采取与在西方市场相同的市场营销方式。这时候我们真正能做的便是努力去破解中国的效果营销代码。“

这个市场中存在的一个特殊区别便是拥有一款超级受欢迎的文本服务应用—-微信，Wakeford认为它“极其强大”。

Wakeford说道：“我们发现在中国排名推送非常流行。并且它可以以不同形式呈现出来，其中一种方式便是微信中的市场营销，即强大的一日推送能够有效影响着你的游戏在排行榜上的位置。可见微信或任何与微信相关的内容的市场营销方式真的非常强大。而这也是你在西方市场上所看不到的。”

让人惊讶的是，Kabam进入中国市场并未得到中国最大的网络巨头阿里巴巴多少帮助。2014年，阿里巴巴投资了Kabam1.2亿美元作为一种“战略合作”方式去帮助Kabam在中国发行游戏。

Wakeford说道：“当他们做出投资时他们拥有自己对游戏策略的看法，而现在这种策略发生了改变。所以从根本上看来他们不再参与我们的行动。而话虽这么说，他们还是非常支持我们进入中国市场所付出的努力。”

现在Kabam的任务便是维持《漫威格斗：冠军之争》的发展，吸引更多玩家并调整盈利方式。而不管从现在起它的表现如何，这款游戏已经在某种程度上获得了成功。

Wakeford继续说道：“对于我们来说整体的理念便是创造能够将所有未来产品带到市场上的基础设施，并通过市场营销方式去支持它们的发展，并且我们所需要的所有技术都必须是基于产业最佳的标准。中国是世界上最大的手机游戏市场，甚至超越了美国市场。所以对于作为手机游戏公司的我们来说，拥有一个能让我们真正走向全球市场的基础设施非常重要。而进入中国市场便是其中非常重要的一步。”

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

How an American company topped China’s mobile charts

By Brendan Sinclair

Right around the time Kabam was launching its Marvel Contest of Champions mobile fighting game in the West, the company decided to bring it to China as well. After all, it is the single largest market for games in the world, having recently surpassed the United States according to Newzoo. At first Kabam did what most Western game makers do when looking to crack the Chinese market: it found a local publisher to handle the heavy lifting, announcing a partnership with Longtu Game.

But somewhere along the way, the plan–and the Chinese market itself–shifted. As Kabam COO Kent Wakeford explained, Apple and iOS started to gain traction in the country, and the company was hearing from developers of “higher end” mobile games that nearly half of their revenues were coming from the App Store.

“That was a very dramatic shift from 12 months prior, where we heard that 80-90 percent of revenue was coming from Android stores,” Wakeford said.

While a Kabam-published Android launch of the game in China remained out of reach, getting it on the App Store seemed comparatively doable, and the extra work that went into it would be an investment, a pipeline for future Kabam games to find their way into China through self-publishing. Kabam put together a team of 35 people working on the project out of Beijing, with a number of time-consuming hurdles to clear.

There were the regulatory requirements with licenses from two different ministries to line up. They needed to recreate their hosting infrastructure with a Chinese partner, in this case Amazon China. That alone took six months, and Wakeford said proved to be more complicated than initially expected. The game had to be translated and localized for a new audience that had some significantly different behavior patterns from their Western counterparts.

“We had anticipated that some of the characters in the Marvel Universe, especially those associated with some of the big films in China, would be the most popular, whether it’s Iron Man or Spider-Man,” Wakeford said. “But what we found is that gamers in China are really interested in characters that have super special powers [from a gameplay functionality perspective]. So not necessarily gravitating toward the best IP or the best characters they know, but toward characters that have really interesting and differentiated powers. So characters like Black Widow become super popular because she has a different type of skill set than Captain America or Iron Man.”

While that will help shape how new characters in the game are designed in the future, Kabam’s localization involved some significant alterations to the existing game as well. Wakeford said that the company wanted to add additional features to the game that Chinese players have become accustomed to from other free-to-play games, so they added a new gear system that lets players tailor their characters’ stats, and a new option that lets players skip the fighting game’s actual fights.

“Players in China like to progress a lot faster,” Wakeford explained. “They play, they play hard, they want to progress. So we created a quickfight system where you can autoplay the fighting, which in Western markets is one of the funnest aspects of the game, but you can autofight to grind through it a lot faster and get all the loot drops and get to the progression a lot faster. It’s a lot more focus on the metagame loops than some of the gameplay.

“It’s really understanding the Chinese consumer, understanding that they are in many ways more sophisticated when it comes to free-to-play game systems than Western consumers. There’s a much deeper acceptance of the concept of pay-to-win, and that there is an expectation, especially by VIPs in the game, that VIPs are treated in a very special way. And that’s in everything from what they get in the game to the customer service, and really making sure there’s a special ‘white glove’ treatment for the VIPs in the game.”

Kabam published Marvel Contest of Champions in China on the App Store under the name Man Wei Ge Dou: Guan Jun Zhi Zheng on May 5. It quickly topped the most downloaded charts on iPhone and iPad, and is nearing 2 million installs. Part of that early success is due to the localization of the game, but part is also due to the localization of the marketing.

“China’s a really different market when it comes to the ad ecosystem, but we really treat it the same way,” Wakeford said. “We put a team on the ground in China. We developed relationships with 20 of the largest ad networks and different [service providers] in China, and we really looked at understanding performance marketing in a way similar to Western markets, where you deploy a dollar and you can look at what the cost per install is, what the lifetime value of those users is, and you can calculate your return on investment… Going into the market, we didn’t really have a good sense of if we could scale this, if we could spend marketing the same way we do in more Western markets. And what we were able to do through a lot of hard work by our marketing team was really kind of crack the code on performance marketing in China.”

One specific difference in the market is the prevalence of texting service WeChat, which Wakeford described as “incredibly powerful.”

“What we learned is the idea of rank pushes is something prevalent within China,” Wakeford said. “And it can happen many different ways, but one of the ways we found is marketing on WeChat with a strong, one-day push can drive your download rankings on the charts with very dramatic shifts. So the power of a marketing program on WeChat or any kind of tie to WeChat can push people to the top of the rankings… You don’t have something similar like that in the Western markets.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Kabam is making its push into China without much hands-on assistance from the country’s web giant Alibaba. In 2014, Alibaba invested $120 million in the company as part of a “strategic collaboration” to publish Kabam titles across China.

“When they made the investment, they had a vision for their gaming strategy, and that strategy has shifted,” Wakeford said. “So they are not as involved with us on a day-to-day basis. That being said, they are fully supportive of our efforts to go into China.”

Now the task for Kabam is to keep Man Wei Ge Dou: Guan Jun Zhi Zheng rolling, to grow the audience and fine-tune the monetization. But regardless of how it performs from here on out, the game is already a success on one level.

“The whole idea for us was to be able to create the infrastructure to be able to bring all of our future products into the market and be able to support them with marketing, hosting, and all the technology we need to run them at best-in-class standards,” Wakeford said, adding, “China is the largest mobile gaming market in the world, surpassing the US. For us, we are a mobile company and it’s important for us to have an infrastructure that allows us to be truly global. Being in China is a critical element of that strategy.”（source：gamesindustry）