本文原作者：Brandan Sinclair 译者ciel chen

如果游戏开发者身上有哪个特点让你想远离他们，那就是他们那满腔的激情。他们那种对于做游戏的激情、推动传媒业的激情、以及对争执“video game”到底是一个还是两个单词的激情。（是两个。）但是直到最近一次和Bekah以及Adam Saltsman在上个月游戏开发大会的交流中我终于有了改观，我从没想过我会从一个游戏开发者那里听到他们会对资金损耗也有“激情”。

这个话题是由《Night in the Woods》引起的，Finji是这对夫妇在三年前创建的，这款游戏是这两口子挑出来作为Finji发行标签的第一个游戏项目。《Night in the Woods》是由三人组成的Infinite Fall团队制作的，于2月份在Steam&PlayStation 4平台上发行。游戏发行后好评如潮，但是财政收入表现才是他们关注的点，据Adam说尽管当时的销量真是以“几乎可怕的”数字符合了他们的期望值，然而制作团队仍觉得跟他们的预期值相差甚远。虽说Infinite Fall的成员Alec Holowka在发行独立游戏方面有很丰富的经验（荣获IGF奖项的《安吉拉之歌》的制作人之一），但动画师Scott Benson和作家Bethany Hockenberry还是这方面待发展的新手。

“当你和游戏开发团队合作时，尤其是新团队或者从没有发行过游戏的人，他们不了解市场真正是如何运作的，”Bekah这么说道。“他们觉得你周末发行一个游戏，然后就没有然后了，就像你觉得你把你的产品卖掉了，确认一下赚了多少就完了，然后就要开始下一单生意了。但是不是这样的，在接下来的五年里你仍然能通过这款游戏赚钱，然而要想把这个解释给那些不知道游戏市场运作方式的人来说真的很难……我认为这从长期上来讲多少能补贴一点日资金损耗，所以我们每谈论这个话题时总会很激动”

feedback(from baike.so)

Adam还更深入确切地解释了一下这个想法的情感影响力，他说：“这么说吧，你终于越过了终点线，人们给出了你想要的反应，而且你还能搬进更豪华的公寓，或者可以负担起每个月的医疗保健。接下来你的项目可能就不一定要再靠Kickstarter来众筹了，你不是有一些做承包演出、跟你一样在艰苦奋斗的艺术家朋友们嘛?你就可以跟他们合作、雇佣他们来做一些其他他们从没做过的狂拽酷炫美上天的东西。而我们，就是为此而来的。”

“这是我们这样做的首要原因，”Bekah补充说。“我们要在这些所有疯狂的工作量中投入很多很多很多年，并且要放缓很多我们自己做的游戏方面工作……我们要做的就是让游戏继续存在，这真的是一件很神奇的事。所以如果有什么我们做得到的，可以让这些具有不可思议天赋的人免去资金方面的后顾之忧，我们到底他丫的有什么理由不做这样的好事？这真的很酷啊。”

《Night in Woods》的成功发行对Finji来说标志着类似的“使命达成”的一刻，其本质上来说相当于是Saltsmans对2014年前收入旗下的几家公司的转型重塑，包括Semi-Secret Software和Last Chance Media。这次重塑标志着公司项目方向将从像《屋顶狂奔》和《圆点100》这样的高端手游项目撤出。

“我们在那个阶段处于一个主攻移动平台游戏的公司，但是正在走下坡路。在那时高端手游收益能力处于下降趋势，就算是热门榜前10的游戏也是如此。”Bekah这么说。

无休止跑酷游戏《屋顶狂奔》发行于2009年，但至今仍旧享有长尾效应有着不菲的收入。《圆点100》则是在2013年初发行的，尽管拥有最好的环境，包括好评如潮和希望得到游戏推广权的平台持有者，游戏的长尾效应还是下降了，而且幅度比《屋顶狂奔》要大很多，几乎只能做到把投入的钱收回来的程度。

“高端游戏的收益能力已经大不如从前了，”Bekah说了有关当时他们转做Finji时的心态：“你投入的时间已经基本无法得到回报了。想在6个月内做出一款手机游戏是不可能的；一个5到10人的开发团队也必须花2年的时间来完成一款游戏。”

Adam补充说：“我们有一堆酷炫的手机小游戏点子，但是如果游戏做得太小就很容易被抄袭，那我们就非常有可能为其他公司的上位做了垫脚石。所以如果我们想要做比较难被抄袭（对别人来说难）、不容易被淘汰的较大型游戏，那就需要我们投入更多的时间。而如果投入了更多的时间，我们就不得不找出不太容易被抄袭还能回本赚钱的大型游戏项目。”

1010 (from develop-online)

他们明确了手游已经不再是可持续发展项目以后，他们转向了PC和主机游戏的开发世界，尽管他们对该领域大量独立游戏崛起持担忧态度。但跟独立游戏狂潮比起来，他们更关注这个领域的未来可能性。一大堆平庸游戏在STEAM平台上蜂拥发行是一方面，不过Finji进入的市场里有像《Gone Home（回家）》、《肯德基0号路(Kentucky Route Zero)》以及《无限工厂（infinifactory）》这样的好游戏，惊人的是他们的发行相当有规律。Adam说：“这种趋势会愈演愈烈，《Overland》和《Night in the Woods》受到的影响都比较小，但是一旦人们意识到还有更酷的游戏那它们就大势已去了，所以我们必须对这些项目进行加强否则他们将不再如我们所愿地脱颖而出……没有人会为他们不了解的东西买单；如果我们的游戏已经渐渐没落到其他出色、深入人心的作品光环背后，也就不会有人想去了解我们的作品。在这里，要担心的不是玩家数量或者市场流动货币不够，而是要担心你上架的商家那里上周刚上了12款其他同样棒极了的游戏。”

这造成了有关自身可见性的问题，他们试图从选择游戏项目的方式入手来解决这个问题。Bekah说他们在选择对他们要合作的对象非常挑剔，因为他们知道这个团队不仅要出色，而且本身要对将做的游戏项目有足够的激情和信仰，只有这样，他们才能跟这个团队一样努力地去做这个项目。他们这个解决方法的一个效果体现在Finji出品的游戏在外观上往往能脱颖而出。Bekah提到Finji的游戏产品目录里，有四个游戏是一个次做美术指导的成员在他带来的新方法下完成的，这个方法也让Finji在工作过程中轻松了很多。

“我们的市场覆盖范围很小因为我们的团队非常小，”Bekah说。“我们没有庞大的预算来包揽所有营销费用，所以我们游戏的每一个截图都要够吸引眼球。是的，每一个GIF截图都要让看到的人说，‘哇！太漂亮了吧！’”

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Getting emotional about monthly burn rate

Finji’s Bekah and Adam Saltsman talk about fleeing the mobile space for the sustainability of a supposedly indiepocalyptic PC and console world

Brendan Sinclair
Senior Editor
Wednesday 22nd March 2017

If there’s one thing you’re likely to take away from talking with game developers, it’s that they’re a passionate bunch. They’re passionate about making great games. They’re passionate about pushing the medium forward. They’re passionate about whether “video games” is one word or two. (It’s two.) But until a recent conversation with Bekah and Adam Saltsman at the Game Developers Conference last month, I had never heard a developer tell me they were passionate about burn rate.

The topic came up in relation to Night in the Woods, one of the first projects the couple picked up for their publishing label Finji, which was founded three years ago. Developed by three-person indie team Infinite Fall, Night in the Woods launched in February on Steam and PlayStation 4. The game was critically well received, but its financial performance was the focus of their attention, despite sales running “almost eerily” in line with their expectations, according to Adam. But their expectations and those of the team differed greatly. While Infinite Fall’s Alec Holowka had plenty of experience working on and releasing indie games (notably the IGF-winning Aquaria), animator Scott Benson and writer Bethany Hockenberry were comparatively new to development.

“When you work with especially new game developers, or people who’ve never launched a game, they don’t really understand how the marketplace works,” Bekah said. “You have this launch weekend and it’s out, and it’s almost like you think you’ve sold your product so you’ll get this one check and then you’re done and you move on. But no, you’ll still get money for this game in five years. This stuff will trickle in on this weird long tail forever, and that’s a really hard thing to explain to somebody who’s never seen the way it works… I think this will subsidize a bit of your monthly burn for a really long time, and we get really emotional talking about that.”

Adam further explained exactly the emotional heft of that idea, saying, “You crossed the finish line, people are responding to work in the way you hoped. But also you can get a nicer apartment, or afford your health care every month. Your next project might not have to be a Kickstarter project. Some of your artist friends who are constantly doing gigs and contract work, struggling in the same way you were? You may be able to work with them, and provide employment for them to make some other cool, beautiful thing they wouldn’t have been able to do before. And that’s what we’re here for.”

“That’s why we did it in the first place,” Bekah added. “We’ll put in all this crazy amount of work for years and years and years, and postpone a lot of our work on our own game… It just needed to exist. It’s a magical thing, and if any of our work could help provide financial security for this incredibly talented group of people, why the hell wouldn’t you do something like that? It’s cool.”

Night in the Woods’ successful launch marks a sort of “mission accomplished” moment for Finji, which was essentially a rebranding of a handful of companies the Saltsmans had been running before 2014, like Semi-Secret Software and Last Chance Media. The rebranding also marked a change in direction away from premium mobile projects like Canabalt and Hundreds.

“We were a mobile-centric company at that point, and we were already tracking the downward trajectory,” Bekah said. “The earning capacity of premium games had already decreased, even if you were a top 10 game.”

The endless runner Canabalt came out in 2009, but has enjoyed a lengthy tail and still brings in a bit of money. Hundreds launched in early 2013, but even with a best-case scenario including critical acclaim and platform holders eager to feature it, the game’s long tail declined considerably steeper than Canabalt’s, and it merely wound up making its money back.

“The earning capacity of a premium game is not what it once was,” Bekah said of their mindset when they pivoted to Finji. “You can barely pay back the time you have to put into it. You can’t just do a mobile game in six months; you have to spend two years and have a development team of five or 10 people.”

Adam added, “We had a bunch of cool little mobile game ideas, but if we leave them really small and easy to copy, then the odds our work will just fund a bunch of other companies seems pretty high. So if we want to make larger projects that are harder [for others] to duplicate and out-market us, those things require a bigger time commitment. And if they require a bigger time commitment, now we have to start looking at the kinds of returns we saw on our last larger project that wasn’t super-easy to copy.”

They decided mobile wasn’t sustainable any longer, so they jumped to the world of PC and console development even as concerns about the abundance of indie game releases were ramping up. But their concerns were less about an indiepocalypse than an indie rapture. A flood of mediocre titles on Steam would be one thing, but Finji was jumping into a market where great games like Gone Home, Kentucky Route Zero, and Infinifactory release at an almost alarmingly regular clip. “The bar continues to go up,” Adam said. “Overland and Night in the Woods were both specced smaller, but it’s become clear as those projects have gone on how cool everything else is, so we needed to find a way to afford to beef these projects up a bit more or else they’re not going to stand out like we need them to… Nobody’s going to buy our thing if they don’t know about it. And nobody’s going to know about our thing if it just fades into the background behind all these other marvelous, inspiring pieces. It’s not a worry that there’s a limited number of players or money in the market. It’s more like every store they go to is going to have the same 12 awesome games that came out last week.”

That’s created its own visibility problem, one that they’ve tried to solve in how they select their projects. Bekah said they’ve been very picky about who they work with because they know they not only need something outstanding, but they need to have projects they’re personally excited about and believe in because they simply couldn’t work as hard on them otherwise. One side effect of that approach has been that Finji’s games tend to stand out on looks alone. Bekah noted that Finji’s catalog includes four games with first-time art directors who have brought new approaches to their projects, and made Finji’s job a little easier in the process.

“We have a very low market reach because we’re such a small team,” Bekah said. “We don’t have a giant budget to throw in to marketing things everywhere, so every single screenshot of our game needs to be a way to draw people in. Every .gif, every screenshot needs to make people say, ‘Whoa, that’s beautiful.’”（source：gamesindustry.biz  ）