原文作者：Will Freeman 译者：Megan Shieh

毫无疑问，实体街机游戏和手游在可移动性方面存在巨大差异；但它们之间最有趣的区别其实是玩家的感知方式。

直至今日，实体街机游戏仍被认为是游戏设计纯洁性的巅峰；而它们的玩家被认为是最忠实、最骨灰级的“真正玩家”。

与此同时，移动领域正在经受着休闲玩家的“困扰”。部分人认为移动游戏属于用后即扔的类型，它们的存在只是为了骗玩家花钱，“真正的玩家”根本不会在乎移动游戏。

吸引玩家

街机和手游都试图以容易上手的游戏来吸引玩家。

世界上第一款电子游戏《Pong》，为了让当时从未接触过此类设备的玩家能够快点上手，设计上显得非常简单，整个游戏就只有两支棍和一个球，只要一直击中球就能得高分。

然而最经常被拿来作比较的其实是两者的盈利机制。虽然投币街机游戏并不完全属于‘小额交易’模式，但街机玩家也确实是每次支付少量硬币来慢慢地消化游戏内容。

投币模式不算是F2P，也不是IAP，不过这种盈利模式为许多街机游戏建立了基础。

对比之下，手游却很少能享受到这种结合带来的好处，我们时常会听到业内创意精英抱怨说：“F2P是高质量游戏设计的末日”。

那么硬币、Credit（可玩次数）和连贯式结构是如何服务于街机游戏设计的呢?

成为当代独立场景的宠儿之前，2D射击游戏被像《Asteroids》和《Space Invaders》这样的游戏一下子推入了主流意识，几十年来一直被像Moss和Cave这样的游戏公司所延续。

经典2D射击游戏《Space Invaders》

2D射击游戏后来又被称为射击技能游戏，这类游戏的主要核心是得分机制，玩家最在意的就是排位。

那些追求进步和高分的玩家会多次返回，花更多的钱来刷技能。而顶尖的玩家们会想要一次性击败游戏——在街机社区里被称为“1CC”（1 Credit Clear），只需一枚硬币就能通关，无需多花一分一毫。然而达到这个高度之后，剩下的就只是刷新1CC高分记录了。

这意味着要想成功，街机游戏就必须给玩家提供更多反复回到游戏的理由，例如：更细致的得分系统、更多的秘密、更多思考策略和爆发的空间，等等。

寻找乐趣

1971 年参与街机业务时，Atari联合创始人Bushnell提出，好游戏应该是“容易上手，难以精通”的。这后来被称为“Bushnell 法则”。

这个法则同样适用于其他的街机类型和游戏——从《Time Crisis》到《Pac-Man》再到后来的《Donkey Kong》系列，甚至是《beat ‘em-up》里的多玩家竞技场。

与此同时在移动领域，玩法设计的质量和盈利机制之间的关系存在着形象问题。那么问题来了，早期建立的电子游戏结构难道就没有更多值得借鉴的地方了吗？

有一群专注于玩法设计的手游工作室一直都在思考这个问题。

Marek Wyszynski是波兰游戏工作室Infinite Dreams的副总裁兼联合创始人，该工作室制作了射击技能系列游戏《Sky Force》。

在该系列游戏中，Infinite Dreams适当地将传统和当代盈利机制与游戏设计结合在了一起，成效显著。

值得注意的是，Infinite Dreams于2014年首次将《Sky Force》移植到移动设备上，这给了他们足够的时间来考虑手游设计和街机模式的磨合程度。

Wyszynski说道：“我认为盈利策略对游戏设计有很大的影响。让玩家在一个游戏里花费数千美元的想法是非常有说服力的，因此游戏设计往往更注重盈利机制，而非玩法。”

他解释说，移动领域上的某些游戏类型几乎都没有高质量的例子，这仅仅是因为还没有人想出一个可行的盈利策略，其中很多游戏都是直接复制经典的街机盈利机制，因此成功的几率不大。

Wyszynski也承认，以前的街机“付费游戏”模式在今天几乎不适用。

他说：“在《Sky Force》的设计过程中我们也遇到了这个问题。我们很想再造以前在游戏盒子上玩《shoot’em-ups》时令人兴奋的感觉，但我们也知道自己必须让游戏融入当前的货币化趋势。”

“因此我们决定在游戏里设置有限数量的关卡，希望玩家们能反复地刷这些关卡，直到把它们刷爆为止。就像之前提到的旧街机模式一样。另一方面，我们必须引入游戏货币和飞机升级，这样玩家才能感觉到进步，并多次重复游戏。”

增加credit功能

手游和街机游戏不同，它们在地点、时间框架和货币方面的自由性都较高。开发团队需要仔细地考虑这些差异，然后将玩法和商业系统设计为一体。

近期发布的《Sky Force Reloaded》拥有一个多样化的盈利结构，允许玩家将现金兑换成游戏中的虚拟货币，它们可以用来购买独立credit（类似旧街机游戏里的credit）和加速升级（Power ups），等等。

重要的是在该游戏中，玩家的进步局限于技巧而非货币。多玩多进步，就算花很少钱也可以取得很高的分数。

《Sky Force Reloaded》的盈利模式虽然没有什么革命性的变化，但与游戏结合在一起，就能让游戏设计和玩家体验得以蓬勃发展。

而英国工作室State of Play在制作弹球游戏《INKS》时则采用了一种截然不同的手法。弹球是一种历史悠久的投币娱乐游戏，它给State of Play提供了一次独特的机会。

《INKS》的研发团队在不模仿投币盈利机制的情况下，捕捉了投币弹球游戏的大部分真实性，并建立了一个成功的移动游戏。

State of Play联合创始人兼首席设计师Luke Whittaker说道：“在我看来，街机和手游之间的关系已经被打破了，因为人们不再愿意反复地‘投入硬币’来玩手机游戏。”

“这种机制目前也许是比较吃香，但一旦游戏公司意识到他们可以通过其他方式在IAP中赚更多钱，‘每玩一次支付一次’的机制就不会起作用了。然后当这些游戏变成F2P的时候，手游的感知价值就会下降，人们就会想要得到更多免费的东西。”

他继续说道：“我认为这确实意味着手游市场还存在未开发的潜力，而街机游戏玩法的张力是我们可以从中学习的东西。在《INKS》中，游戏开始时我们首先给玩家一个金色的弹球，然后如果他们没有接到球，那么后面给的就是银色的球，接着是铜色，然后是黑色。这种手法给了玩家一种‘坐如针灸’的感觉，就像以前玩弹球游戏的时候一样，失去一个球就等于失去一英镑。”

付费压力

街机游戏玩法的戏剧性张力以及‘付过钱’的压力，既可以是积极的，也可以是消极的。

Whittaker说：“我个人认为1英镑换3个弹球的机制太贵了，而且给玩家带来的压力也太大。赌注太大，游戏又太难。这是一个恶性循环，我可能永远都没办法把这个游戏玩好，因为要刷爆实在是得花太多的钱。在开发《INKS》的时候，这就是我们想要解决的问题，也是我们制作这个游戏的原因之一。我们认为街机盈利系统实际上是在阻止人们享受游戏。因此，我们想要技巧性地利用盈利机制来展现游戏的乐趣，恰到好处地削减付费带来的压力。”

《INKS》属于付费购买游戏，并带有额外的等级礼包作为IAP出售。你也可以购买credit，这些credit的使用方式与传统街机游戏不同，它允许玩家激活短暂的加速升级，例如:限时慢动作，从而使玩家能够作出最好的尝试。

就像街机游戏里的credit一样，它们的价值很高，也能为游戏增加趣味。不需要credit的时候能让玩家自我感觉良好，决定‘要不要用，什么时候用’的紧张感也十分有趣。

应对传统街机游戏形式的过程中，该工作室发现，找到两者间的平衡才能让创新性盈利机制发挥出最出色的表现。

这里的经验法则也许就是“尊重现在，记住过去”。近期刚刚发布了街机游戏《Home Arcade》的Big Blue Bubble工作室首席执行官Damir Slogar认为，这是一个随着手游货币化观念的改变而演变的进程。

他说:“人们的看法正在慢慢地朝着积极方向发展，不过我要强调一下“慢慢”这个词。目前市场上的游戏和人们以前体验过的街机或零售游戏并不存在天壤之别。在过去的三十多年里，我一直在开发和体验游戏。买过的游戏中，有上千个游戏都没办法坚持玩下去，其中有两个原因，要么是我厌倦了游戏，要么是游戏突然变得太难，所以我就不玩了。”

新旧结合

Wyszynski将话题转换到了未来，他补充说道：“我认为我们正在等待更具突破性意义的创新。一方面，人们已经厌倦了大同小异的游戏（基于现在的F2P趋势）。而另一方面，发行商不会放弃在一个玩家手中多次赚钱的想法。订阅模式可能会为发行商带来创造性的自由，并维持高收入流。”

盈利机制的趋势正在改变，那些结合了旧街机模式的移动游戏，在玩法设计和盈利机制的进化创新方面似乎表现得最好。

从根本上说，‘价值’是游戏定价最重要的基础，而这是结合投币模式时需要考虑的另一个问题。

Wyszynski继续说道：“实体街机游戏和手游间最大的区别就是，人们把去游戏厅玩游戏看作是一种真实的活动，他们会为此抽出时间，因此也会愿意掏钱。F2P手游的设计目的通常是方便玩家在任何时间，任何地点玩游戏，因此他们觉得无需为此特地抽出时间。”

“所以手游开发者的任务是：确保人们把你的游戏看作是有价值的东西，让它成为人们想要投入时间和金钱的活动。”

事实证明，要学习街机游戏的盈利机制很容易，但是要合理地利用它却很难。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

To many, mobile and arcade gaming are so distinct they may as well be entirely different media.

In this case we are talking about real arcades; those increasingly rare physical spaces where the games industry itself was first forged – neon-lit places where players push coins through slots and chase high scores.

Certainly, arcade and mobile sit at opposite ends of the portability spectrum, but the most interesting distinction comes in how they are perceived.

Arcade gameplay is still generally seen as the peak of game design purity, with the players that stand at a cabinet, stick in hand, deemed to be perhaps the most devoted, most hardcore and – significantly – most authentic players.

Mobile, meanwhile, is a place still haunted by the ghost of the ‘casual’ movement. You don’t have to go far to find somebody who will tell you mobile games are throwaway, financially manipulative and not of concern to ‘real gamers’, whatever they might be.

Captivating audiences

In reality, the division bears little scrutiny. Both forms strive to captivate vast and diverse audiences, using accessible gameplay that can be picked up without reams of written instruction or learning. The originalPong cabinet bore the engraved message ‘avoid missing ball for high score’.

It’s the kind of tutorial simplicity mobile game designers should greatly admire.

The most valuable – and perhaps least recognised – comparison to be made, however, is around monetisation. It would be inaccurate to claim that arcade coin-op is a true ‘microtransactions’ model, but still, arcade gamers digest content by paying in modest amounts.

Coin-op is neither free-to-play nor in-app purchase – a few edge case releases aside – but the arcade monetisation model is the foundation for so much of what gives cabinet-based games their credibility. Mobile gaming, meanwhile, rarely enjoys such an association. We’ve all heard the creative elite cry out ‘F2P is the death of quality game design’.

So how does the coin, credit and continue structure serve arcade game design so well? Consider the 2D shooter genre; one thrust into the mainstream consciousness by icons like Asteroids and Space Invaders, and continued for decades by cult outfits like Moss and Cave, before becoming a darling of the contemporary indie scene.

2D shooters – or shmups, as they have become known – are predominantly about scoring. Leaderboard position is everything to their players. And they are competitive with good business reason.
Players that strive for improvement and high scores come back and put more coins through slots. The best players, then, will want to beat a game on just one credit – known in the arcade community as achieving a ’1CC’. With a single coin in, the best players could play through a whole game without paying a penny more.

Once they had done that, though, the battle became one of getting as much score from a single credit play-through as possible. That meant that for games to be successful, they had to offer more for the players; more nuance to scoring systems, more secrets, more capacity for player strategies and flare.

Those factors would assure an arcade release commercial success. There had to be reasons to come back over and over.

Finding the fun

As Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell famously put it in 1971: “all the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth.”

The same could be applied to numerous other arcade genres and titles, from Time Crisis to Pac-Man via Donkey Kong and even the multiplayer arena of the beat ‘em-up.

Over in mobile, meanwhile, the relationship between gameplay design quality and monetisation method at best has an image problem. Which brings about a question; can’t more be learned from funding the original video game form?

It seems the answer is yes, and a band of gameplay-focused mobile studios have been pondering the challenge for some time.

Marek Wyszynski is the VP and co-founder of Infinite Dreams, the Polish studio behind the Sky Force shmup series, which presently thrives on mobile as two free titles, and carefully blends traditional and contemporary monetisation and game design to great effect.

It is worth noting that Infinite Dreams first took Sky Force to mobile in 2004, so they’ve have plenty of time to mull over how much a mobile game should mimic the arcade model.
“I think that current monetisation strategies influence the game design in a big way,” Wyszynski suggests.

“You can see how certain types of games have dominated the charts completely. The idea of letting the player to spend thousands of dollars on one title is very compelling, and as a consequence the games are frequently designed around the monetisation, not the other way around.”

Quality examples of some genres, he argues, are now almost non-existent on mobile, simply because nobody has conceived of a workable monetisation strategy for them. And many of those are classic arcade forms.

Yet Wyszynski concedes that the old ‘pay-per-play’ arcade model is rarely suitable today.

“We’ve faced this challenge with Sky Force,” he admits. “We definitely wanted to recreate the same sense of excitement that we had playing the old shoot ’em-ups on the cabinets, while we were aware that we need to make the game fit into current monetisation trends.

“So a lot of design decisions had to be made. We’ve decided that we really want to have a limited number of levels that can be replayed many times to be eventually mastered by the player – just like in the old times.

“On the other hand we knew that we have to introduce in-game currency and upgrades of the ships so that the player can feel the progress and replay the game multiple times.”

Insert credit

For Wyszynski and his team, then, it became about recognising the differences. Mobile games are not anchored to a location, a time frame or a physical currency. Considering those differences carefully let the team design the gameplay and commercial system as one.

The recent Sky Force Reloaded has a diverse monetisation structure that lets players convert cash into in-game currency, which can in turn be spent on many things, from individual credits – just like back in the day – to accelerating power ups.

Importantly, though, on the whole the limitations to player progress are about skill and not monetisation. Play more, get better, and higher scores can be achieved while putting a minimum spend into the game.

As with real arcade gaming, Sky Force Reloaded’s monetisation model – while nothing revolutionarily different – is coupled with the game in a way that allows both the game design and player experience to flourish.

Over at UK studio State of Play, they took a rather different approach when building their visually delicious mobile pinball game INKS. Pinball, of course, is a coin-operated amusement that predates electronic gaming, and it presented State of Play with a distinct opportunity.

As with Sky Force, it was identifying the differences between arcade and mobile monetisation that let the team build a successful game that captured much of the authenticity of its source medium, without digitally aping coin-op monetisation.

“It seems like the link [between arcade and mobile] has been broken to me, with people not willing to repeatedly ‘put in coins’ to mobile games to play it repeatedly,” offers Luke Whittaker, Co-founder and Lead Designer at State of Play.

“Perhaps the mechanic might have taken hold, but as soon as companies realised they could make money by other means within IAPs, and that these were more profitable, paying to play each time wasn’t going to work. And then when these games were free, perceived value of mobile games fell and people came to expect a lot for free.”

He continues: “I think it does mean there’s untapped potential and that the tension that arcade games bring to the gameplay is something we can learn from.

“In INKS, which is based on pinball, we tapped into that, giving people a gold ball to start with, then a silver if they lose it, then bronze, then black. It gives you that same ‘edge of your seat’ feeling you used to get from the fact that you’d lose a pound if you lost a ball.”

Under pressure

Arcade gameplay’s dramatic tension – and the pressure having paid for a single coin brings – can be both a positive and a negative, however.

“Personally I find real pinball too stressful and expensive due to this ‘£1 for three balls’ mechanic,” Whittaker admits.

“Too much is at stake and the game is too hard – and it’s a vicious circle I can never afford to get good at it. That was what we tried to solve withINKS, and one reason we made the game – we thought that the arcade monetisation system was actually preventing people from enjoying the game.

“We wanted to show the pleasure in the skill of the mechanic, taking the stress away just enough.”

As such, INKS is a premium purchase, with additional level packs for sale as IAPs. And then there are credits available. Those credits are not used in the traditional sense, but rather to allow players to activate brief power ups such as temporary slow motion, enabling them to best a trying table.

And just like arcade credits, they are valuable, and as such offer the gameplay much; both the chance to enjoy the ego-boost of not needing them and the tension of deciding when it’s time to let a precious INKScredit go.

Certainly, studios tackling traditional arcade gameplay forms are finding that a measured approach to innovating monetisation works best.

‘Respect the present; remember the past’ might be the rule of thumb here. And it’s an evolution progressing in tandem with a change in perception of mobile monetisation, believes Damir Slogar, CEO at Big Blue Bubble, which has recently released its Home Arcade mobile game.

“Perception is slowly moving in a positive direction,” he states. “I emphasise slowly, though. There is nothing significantly different that consumers didn’t already experience in the arcades or with retail games.

“I have been developing and playing games for over three decades now and I bought thousands of games that I never finished for one of two reasons; either I got bored by the game or the game became too hard at some point so I gave up.”

Something old, something new

Which brings us back to the only true founding rule of mobile game success: make a good, fair game.

“I think we are now waiting for something new,” adds Wyszynski, turning the conversation to the future.

“On one hand people are getting fed up of playing the same games – based on current F2P trends – over and over again. On the other hand, publishers will not give up the idea of monetising one player multiple times.

“The subscription model is something that could potentially enable creative freedom and maintain a high revenue stream for publishers. Are we heading in this direction? I think it’s too early to say.”

It does seem that monetisation is changing, and it is those that are considering and adapting conventions born in the arcades of the 1970s that are doing some of the best work in evolving gameplay and monetisation, not just together, but as one.
Ultimately, putting a price on games comes down to one thing; value. And there, concludes Whittaker, is something else to consider about coin-op.

“The one major difference I see is that people saw going to arcades as a real event; one they’d make time for, which they’d therefore be willing to pay for,” he says. “Free-to-play mobile games are often, to generalise, designed to be played anytime and for you not to make so much conscious investment.

“So it’s a task to make sure that people see your game as something of value, make it an event to play it, to make it something people will want to invest their time and money in.”

It turns out that embracing arcade monetisation is ‘easy to learn, hard to master’. （Source: pocketgamer.biz  ）