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从独立章节游戏《狮子之歌》吸取的6大PR经验教训

发布时间:2016-11-28 14:21:54 Tags:,,,,

作者:Thomas Reisenegger

在ICO Partners我们为各种不同的游戏(从《神之浩劫》到《阿门罗》)提供PR服务,最近我们也开始致力于自己的第一款章节游戏:独立游戏《狮子之歌》。

为了庆祝游戏第二章节的发行,我们想要在此和你们分享我们在支持开发商Mipumi Games发行这款游戏的第一章节内容时所获取的PR经验教训。

The Lion’s Song(from steamcommunity)

The Lion’s Song(from steamcommunity)

1.在谈论单一章节前先声称整个“系列”

我们决定先以预告片先声称整个“系列”,描述游戏概念并测试每一个章节是必要的。在推广游戏,以及尝试着创造良好的第一印象所面临的挑战便是需要努力去寻找许多有效的谈话要点以及PR角度。

如果在首次公开时只专注于一个章节便会大大限制了我们能够触及的谈话要点的数量,并且导致我们不能将团队想要成功出售整个系列游戏的目标作为卖点。而对于其它章节的提前曝光也能进一步激励玩家去购买《Season Pass》。

只公开第一章节的缺点便在于你需要尽早明确所有细节并提交这些内容。此外,在早期阶段创造一个去呈现所有章节情节的预告片的确是大挑战,因为工作室在这时候可能只拥有第一章节的相关情节。所以为了做到这点Mipumi Gmes需要从零到有为之后的章节创造一些单独的内容,这当然也会对整个开发计划和时间安排产生影响。

而《狮子之歌》的揭示预告片便为我们带来了74篇网络文章,这远远多于有关第一章节发行的文章,并且我们还获得了像Killscreen,Pocketgamer,发过最大的游戏网站Jeuxvideo.com和主要德国游戏网站PCGames.de等知名网站的宣传。

2)如果你的第一章节是免费的你更需要仔细考虑自己的措辞

Mipumi Games决定免费发行第一章节的游戏《Silence》:他们认为这是在一开始将游戏曝光给更多玩家的一次机遇,他们也希望能够借此说服玩家去期待即将问世的新章节。

但是从PR的角度来看,我们担心免费呈现第一章节会导致媒体认为《狮子之歌》是一款面向粉丝的小型游戏,而这有可能导致他们拒绝去宣传这款游戏。毕竟这是来自较不知名的工作室的像素图像游戏,而我们的所有信息和推广资产也都在声称这一内容是免费的。

所以为了避免这种情况我们花了很多精力去思考传达免费章节的最佳措辞。就像不管何时当我们提到第一章节是免费时,我们便会马上提及整个《Season Pass》的售价为9.99英镑。如此人们便会清楚这是一款高品质游戏,与此同时我们也希望通过删除最初的准入门槛让玩家可以更多地进行尝试。

3)媒体似乎会专注于你的第一个章节内容

在ICO我们开发了一个名为Media Monitor的工具,它能追踪到许多网站并告诉我们游戏在这些媒体中的表现。对于《狮子之歌》,我们便利用了这一工具并获取了像《奇异人生》,《杀手》,《国王密使》或《无主之地传说》等章节游戏的数据希望看看它们的宣传是如何随着时间的发展发生改变。

当着眼于每个章节的宣传时我们清楚地发现第一章节总是更能吸引媒体的注意,而那之后的章节的媒体关注度便会随之减少。像《国王密使》,《我的世界剧情版》以及《无主之地传说》便是如此。

基于种种数据,我们会建议你将大多数PR努力和资源放在首次通告中,而不是将其留到之后的游戏宣传中。当然了,你也可以尝试着获取其它媒体关注,但是最初的章节却是帮助你的游戏获得关注的最简单方式,所以你最好好好去利用它。

4)尝试着去推动你的其它章节内容的全新价值

当我们着眼于发行日当天每个章节获得了多少宣传时,我们发现《奇异人生》便是一个非常有趣的案例。他们的第四章节明显破坏了之前提到的模式。结果呢,他们在宣传第四章节的同时还公开了销售100万份游戏的全新销售目标,这也是帮助不那么吸引人的章节获取更多注意力的有效方法。

我们也希望为即将问世的《狮子之歌》的其它章节找到有效的宣传方式。

5)Youtuber是章节游戏的好朋友

如果你看过有关《癌症似龙》的讨论,你便会发现开发者并不喜欢人们去传播他们的叙述游戏的攻略,因为他们认为这样会破坏游戏销量。而尽管《狮子之歌》也是一款叙述游戏,但是游戏的整体动态会随着章节的发展而发生改变。

所以尽管Youtuber可能会在某种程度上“破坏了”第一章节的内容,但是我们认为为即将问世的章节或整体的《Season Pass》提高曝光度并获取潜在访问者才是更大的利益。当然你不可能去阻止视频被发布,如此的话你为何不去尝试着鼓励并帮助那些对你的游戏感兴趣的Youtuber或streamer呢。

6)考虑不公开章节的发行日期

因为曾致力于许多更传统的发行周期,所以我们总是习惯在发行一款游戏前公开发行日期去了解玩家和媒体的态度,并让他们了解即将有一款游戏问世。但当着眼于其它章节游戏时我们发现情况却截然不同:即既有提前一周公开游戏发行日期(如《奇异人生)),也有在章节发行时才公开的情况,如大多数手机游戏。

通过媒体监测,我们并不能识别出最有效的模式,但是我们却能够学到一个有价值的经验教训:为较小的游戏公开发行日期通常会将媒体的影响力一分为二,并且有可能严重削弱媒体在发行日当天的影响力,而那天也是你希望大多数游戏玩家了解你的游戏的时刻。

不过对于像《奇异人生》等知名游戏来说,这种情况也就不那么重要了,因为大多数媒体和充满热情的玩家总是很清楚并且对全新章节的发行充满期待。

但是对于小型游戏来说,如果两次新闻的时间靠得太近情况也就不同了。就像《梦陨新章》(游戏邦注:虽然这是一个较大的项目但却未能达到《奇异人生》那般的媒体影响力)及其事先公开发行日期对于媒体宣传的影响。

而对于我们这款较小的章节游戏,将每个章节的新闻价值一分为二将会重创我们所拥有的媒体影响力,特别是在发行传统意义上表现不佳的章节时。这也是我们为什么会决定在章节一发行后我们只在全新章节发行时再公开它们的原因。

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

6 PR lessons learned from launching the episodic indie game The Lion’s Song

by Thomas Reisenegger

At ICO Partners we do PR for a wide range of games (from SMITE to Armello) and recently we started working on our first episodic game: The indie title The Lion’s Song.

To celebrate this week’s launch of Episode 2, we want to share some episodic-specific PR lessons we learned from supporting developer Mipumi Games in launching Episode 1 of the game.

1) Announce the whole “series” before talking about single episodes

We decided to announce the whole “series” first with a general trailer, describing the game concept and teasing what the individual episodes would entail. The challenge when promoting a game, and particularly when trying to make a strong first impression, is always to find as many strong talking points and PR angles as you can.

Focusing on just one episode for that first announcement would have severely limited the amount of talking points we had to work with, and wouldn’t have allowed us to sell the overarching vision for what the team are trying to achieve with the season as a whole. This additional outlook on the other episodes could also give further incentive for players to buy a Season Pass.

A downside of announcing the season first is that it means you need to nail down details and commit early. Additionally, having a trailer showing footage of all episodes at such an early stage proved to be a challenge because…well, the studio only had footage of Episode 1 at this point. To make this work Mipumi Games had to create individual sections for the later episodes from scratch just for the video, which of course could have a knock-on effect on the development plan and schedule.

Looking at the coverage breakdown though (graph above), we would highly recommend this approach for promoting smaller episodic games. For us having a general reveal trailer of The Lion’s Song resulted in 74 online articles and got even more articles than the launch of Episode 1, with announcement coverage from high profile sites such as Killscreen, Pocketgamer, France’s (and looking at Alexa also Europe’s) biggest gaming site Jeuxvideo.com and the major German gaming site PCGames.de.

2) Be careful with your wording if your first episode is free

Mipumi Games decided to launch Episode 1 – Silence for free: they saw this as an opportunity to expose the game to the largest number of players possible from the beginning, and that would hopefully convince players to stick around for the upcoming episodes.

From a PR point of view however, we were concerned that having a free first episode could result in media thinking The Lion’s Song was a small, almost fan made-like game, which could result in them deciding against covering it. After all, it’s a pixel art title from a relatively unknown studio, and all of our messages and promotional assets would say it’s free.

To avoid this from happening we put a lot of work into finding the best phrasing in the communication around the free episode correctly. Whenever we said Episode 1 is free for instance, we would immediately mention that the whole Season Pass costs €9,99. By doing this, we let people know that this is a premium quality game, but a game that we wanted to bring people into and try for themselves by removing that initial barrier to entry.

3) Press seems to focus and your first episode

At ICO, we have developed a tool we call the Media Monitor that basically tracks thousands of websites and shows us how individual games perform in the press (for more info on how it works look here). For The Lion’s Song, we took advantage of the tool and looked into data from other episodic games like Life is Strange, Hitman, King’s Quest or Tales from the Borderlands to see how their coverage evolved over time.

Looking at the coverage per episode it became clear episode 1 gets most media traction, whereas all episodes after that seem to drop in term of media coverage. You can see King’s Quest, Minecraft: Story Mode and Tales from the Borderlands as an example below.

Based on the data we would recommend to put most of your PR efforts and resources, especially for assets, into the initial announcement instead of saving your PR fireworks for later to build up hype. Of course it makes sense to try to keep pushing to gather press attention, but the first episode will be the easiest points of your campaign to get eyes on your game, so take advantage of this.

4) Try to boost the news value of your other episodes

Life is Strange proved to be an interesting case study in another regard: we looked at how much coverage each episode got when it’s launch day was announced. As you can see, episode 4 clearly breaks the pattern mentioned above. What happened? They announced a newsworthy sales milestone of 1 million copies sold at the same time as announcing episode 4 to boost their announcement – a clever way of helping the “weaker episodes” gather more traction.

That’s something we are looking into for the upcoming episodes of the Lion’s Song.

5) Youtubers are your friends, especially for episodic games

If you have followed the discussion around That, Dragon Cancer, the developers were not too happy about people streaming and putting together walkthroughs of their narrative game as they felt it hurt sales. Even though The Lion’s Song is a narrative game as well, the whole dynamic changes with episodic games, especially when episode 1 is free.

So while Youtubers might have “spoilered” Episode 1 for some players, we think the benefit of having more exposure and potentially hooking viewers on the upcoming episodes or the Season Pass seemed like a bigger positive for us. In the end, you can never really prevent videos from being released, so why not encourage and assist YouTubers/streamers who are interested in your game and have a direct line into the audience you are trying to reach

6. Consider not announcing the release date of your episodes

Working on many titles in a more traditional release cycle, we are used to announcing release dates before launching a game to get players and press in the right mindset, letting them know the game is coming soon and hopefully getting them excited. Looking at other episodic games, their tactics vary widely: From announcing the release date a week before (Life is Strange) to simply announcing the moment the episode becomes available, like most mobile games.

Going through our Media Monitor, we couldn’t make out a clear pattern that generally seems to work best, but we still learned a valuable lesson: a release date announcement for smaller games generally splits your media impact between two news beats (release date and launch shortly after) and can therefore drastically weaken your media impact on launch day – a moment where you usually want most players to hear about your game because they can get their hands on it straight away.

For high profile titles like Life is Strange (graph below) this might not matter too much, as media and a large, enthusiastic player base are generally aware of and excited for an episode’s upcoming launch anyway.

For a smaller game gaining traction for two news beats close to each other seems more difficult. As an example we looked at Dreamfall Chapters (which is a bigger project but didn’t reach the scale of The Life is Strange’s media impact) and their media coverage with announcing the release date beforehand.

For our smaller episodic game, splitting the news value per episode into two seemed like it would overall damage the media impact we can have, particularly for launching the traditionally weaker performing episodes. That’s why we decided that after Episode 1, we will only announce the Lion’s Song episodes once they are available to have the best chance of cutting through the media noise that day. (source:gamasutra

 


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