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为什么游戏市场营销生态系统正在不断瓦解?

发布时间:2016-09-08 11:12:13 Tags:,,,,

作者:JEFFRY VAN EDE

对于许多开发者来说,传统的在线推广产品的方法已经过时了。

mobile-game(from venturebeat)

mobile-game(from venturebeat)

因为不能直接接触潜在消费者,他们只能依赖于广告交换平台,媒体购买平台,数据聚合器,代理以及经销商等方式。但是可想而知这些方法的弊端便是:价格不公平,质量不高,用户流失率飚升。

这种让人不安的情况导致许多游戏开发者不得不将关注点从消费者获取转向用户留存,即希望能够推动市场营销策略的成本效益。

Kabam的首席执行官Kevin Chou在上个月Venturebeat有关用户留存参数的特约专栏中写道:“现在我们是以年为单位进行考虑,而不再是以天,周或月。”

但是这也仍不能处理数字广告经常瞄准错误的人这一基本问题。如果玩家并未真正对你的游戏感兴趣,那么花钱去吸引他们的注意也就没什么意义。

推动广告技术的投资同样也不能解决问题。实际上,发展技术对于发行商来说是好事,但是从购买者的角度来看这只会让事情变得更复杂而不能真正改变结果。

其中有一部分问题是关于内部利益冲突,即关于购买者(游戏开发者)和销售者(发行商,代理和网站)间的关系。广告代理和网站总是想让购买者尽可能花更多钱在广告上而不管广告效能,发行商则希望确保用户是模糊的,即未拥有明确定义。但现在许多开发者已经不能接受这样的条件了。

开发商MZ的首席执行官说道:“我们很快便能知道该如何评定你的用户。这并不只是关于你拥有多少用户。没人会因为你拥有用户便给你钱。我们只是想知道他们是否是真实的用户。毕竟现在也有很多虚假用户。我想知道如果我们在此投入了钱是否真的有效。”

所以答案是什么?

当提到效果营销时,网页巨头谷歌和Facebook继续凭借其大量的用户数据而拥有不可取代的优势。但游戏开发者却因为只有少量分销渠道而不得不面对昂贵且高风险的广告购买。一些全新推广程序广告技术虽然能够提供一些优化和完善的ROI,但却仍然需要依赖于广告网络。这也将导致游戏创造者与终端用户间存在一个不必要的界限。

我们总部位于柏林的初创企业便尝试着通过面向游戏开发者的对等营销平台去改变这种情况。即虽然在3月份才刚刚成立,Simplaex已经将许多游戏产业巨头变成自己的客户了。

我们知道并非所有游戏开发者都会对现在的这种情况感到厌烦。但事实上人们都在期待着改变,因为如今的技术变得更加复杂成本也不断提高,但人们所看到的结果却并未发生改变。

而我们的全新平台让开发者既可以避开传统游戏生态系统也可以有效面向玩家进行销售。使用第一方数据及其实时报价,即这将变成执行玩家获取与用于留存的市场。

如果能够实时利用玩家在游戏中的互动,开发者便可以去瞄准明确的用户并更准确定制市场营销活动。Simplaex同时也提供了定制化选择让玩家可以通过游戏生命周期去反复吸引用户的注意。除此之外该平台还创造了全新的收益流,如从那些不再积极玩游戏的玩家身上获取盈利。

带着在今年的第三季度末直接访问超过1亿名玩家的目标,我们在上个月底于科隆举办的gamescom展会上向开发者展示了平台的demo。

而这是否意味着缺少透明度,隐藏成本和中间商便不能为数字游戏市场营销创造任何价值的时代将结束?这个我并不能确定,但有一点值得肯定的是:现在的游戏市场营销生态系统正在逐渐瓦解着。

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

Why the game marketing ecosystem is ripe for disruption

JEFFRY VAN EDE

For many game developers, the traditional way of promoting their products online is broken beyond repair.

With no direct digital access to potential customers, they depend on an ungainly mix of ad exchanges, media buying platforms, data aggregators, agencies, and resellers. The results of such a tangled web are predictable: Unfair prices, low-quality leads and surging churn rates.

This unsatisfying situation has led many game developers to shift their focus from customer acquisition to retention in the hope of boosting the cost-effectiveness of their marketing strategies.

“We now think exclusively in terms of years – not days, weeks, or months,” wrote Kevin Chou, CEO of Kabam, in a VentureBeat guest column on retention metrics last month.

Still, this doesn’t address the fundamental problem that digital advertising often targets the wrong people. And if players aren’t really interested in your kind of game, there’s not much point in spending money to try and keep them around.

A push to invest in ad tech also hasn’t solved the problem. In fact, extending the technology stack has served publishers quite well, but from a buyer perspective it has only resulted in more complexity and no discernible improvement in results.

Part of the issue is an inherent conflict of interest, with ad buyers (game developers) on one side and ad sellers (publishers, agencies and networks) on the other. Whereas ad agencies and networks have an incentive to try to get buyers to spend as much on ads as possible regardless of their effectiveness, publishers have an incentive to keep their audience as vague and undefined as possible. But many developers are no longer content to accept such conditions.

“We’re very quickly getting to a point where we can value your eyeballs. We’re not just gonna talk about how many you have anymore. No one is going to give you money because you have eyeballs,” said Gabe Leydon, CEO of developer MZ, in a now famous interview venting the frustrations of the industry. “We want to know if they’re real. There’s a lot of fake eyeballs. There’s a lot of fraud. We want to know if it performs when we buy it.”

So what’s the answer?

With their troves of user data, web behemoths Google and Facebook continue to have a sizable advantage when it comes to performance marketing. But game developers stand to make their ad buying more expensive — and risky — relying on just a few major distribution channels. And upstart firms promoting programmatic ad technology, though offering greater optimization and an improved ROI, still depend on ad networks. This keeps an unnecessary layer between game makers and their end users.

Our Berlin-based start-up is trying to change the equation with the first peer-to-peer marketing platform for game developers. Launched only in March, Simplaex already counts many of the game industry’s biggest companies as its clients.

We never expected that nearly every game developer we talked to would be so annoyed by the current situation. But people really want an alternative, because the technology stack is getting more complex and their costs are increasing, but their results hardly change.

Our new platform enables developers to buy, engage, and sell to players while bypassing the traditional gaming ecosystem for digital marketing. Using solely first-party data and its own real-time bidder, it essentially functions as a marketplace for player acquisition and retention.

Capturing in-game events of players in real-time, developers can use it to target identifiable users and tailor marketing campaigns on a granular level. Simplaex also offers personalization options to engage and reengage users throughout the lifecycle of a game. Plus, the platform creates new revenue streams, such as monetizing players that are no longer actively playing a game.

Aiming to have direct access to over 100 million players by the end of the third quarter, we are offering developers a live demo of the platform at the gamescom trade show in Cologne, Germany later this month.

Will it mean an end to the lack of transparency, hidden costs, and middlemen failing to add any value in digital game marketing? Only one thing is certain: The current gaming ecosystem is ripe for disruption.(source:venturebeat

 


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