F2P游戏时代，对游戏经济设计师的需求将日益增加

原作者：Pietro Guardascione 译者：Vivian Xue

2000年末，免费游戏获得了十分成功的发展，能够根据玩家行为数据运营游戏的专业人才成为了行业需求。游戏销售经理、数据科学家和商业智能经理等新角色随之诞生。随着行业的成熟以及实践经验的累积，这块领域的工具和标准日益完善起来。

如今游戏制作方、销售经理和数据科学家之间已形成较为专业化的分工，此外游戏数据应用方式也相对标准化。

我相信在接下来的几年内，另一种职业将获得同样的发展——游戏经济设计师：负责游戏模拟测试（work with simulations）并协助总设计师改进关键系统的“分析型游戏设计师”。我将在本文中阐述原因。

F2P游戏的机制存在的特殊问题

制作成功的F2P游戏包含了一项非常特殊的挑战：让游戏系统具备长年的吸引力以及强大的盈利能力。F2P游戏的收入是由一小部分玩家的少量消费金额慢慢累积起来的，因此提高长期留存的同时避免设置过低的消费上限至关重要。

为了打造长生命周期游戏，F2P游戏激励玩家为自己设定（游戏邦注短期，中期和长期）目标，然后为他们提供一种逐渐朝着目标“前进”的感觉，这种体验可以持续数年。这通常意味着游戏需要大量的“内容”，无论是新关卡，新道具或是其它新的“玩意儿”。如今由于F2P游戏的大部分消费金额来自想要加快进度的玩家，再者由于之前提到的避免消费上限过低很重要，因此游戏对“内容”的需求成倍增加。

解决这类问题通常不能仅靠“创造更多内容”。生产高质量的“内容”既昂贵又耗时，还必须考虑维护成本。拿手游来说，如果想要支持旧设备，开发者必须注意在加载时间甚至磁盘空间方面的设备限制。

这种“内容”方面的压力使得制作F2P游戏成为游戏开发中最困难和最有趣的挑战之一。

Puzzle & Dragons(from joyme.com)

尽早检查游戏系统是关键

系统是内容生成的源头，在发行游戏前明确而细致地检查游戏系统很重要。一些出色的、创新性的IP游戏引起了玩家的注意（并进入了下载量和收入排行榜），却在几个月之后消失了。缺乏足够的进度或消费深度阻断了它们的成功之路。

此外，最好在开发早期就进行这些工作。手游已成为了大制作项目，开发团队达到数十人。一旦团队规模变大，两件事将阻碍他们快速或成功地改变方向：

1. 主设计师们忙于日常工作，以至于他们很难暂时停下来、把精力放在改变游戏关键系统这样重大的工作上。

2. 鉴于改变关键游戏系统从某种程度上意味着改变游戏的“本质”，三番两次地更改它们是一件很困难的事，会导致你失去团队或利益攸关者的信任。

检查游戏系统的问题

尝试在开发早期检查游戏系统的问题是，F2P游戏既复杂又抽象。检查游戏系统通常是通过对话和演示，有时是一些高级的原型，但是这些工具不适合用来深入描述和分析“内容”问题。对同一段演示或者语言描述，不同的人很可能有不同的解读方式，如果我们不去仔细研究这个问题就直接进入游戏制作阶段，项目会因缺乏可靠计划而陷入风险。

让经济设计师加入游戏制作

在King公司，游戏经济设计师是“分析型游戏设计师”，他们将游戏视为机器并与主设计师合作将某个游戏项目的愿景和理想的玩家体验转化为机制和参数。他们构建模拟的游戏机制并试图寻找答案，例如“玩家打完一款游戏需要多长时间？”或者“这款游戏可以怎样盈利？”

在开发早期让游戏经济设计师在团队中工作能够加速游戏系统的迭代，在这些系统被应用到游戏中之前的几个月完成这项工作。接着我们便能进入制作阶段并且对游戏“内容”的丰富性和盈利能力充满信心。

举一个RPG游戏的例子

例如，为了加速我们的一个RPG游戏中的装备系统的迭代，我们的一位经济设计师用Python（我们首选的经济设计语言）开发了一个小型模拟器。

该工具对与装备系统有关的机制（物品掉落、装备升级、gacha系统）进行了编码。设计师可以与它互动，并且无需经历游戏核心玩法就可以模拟游戏里的进展。

这帮助我们将研究玩家长期状态所需的时间从几天或几周缩短到几分钟之内。因此该项目可以快速迭代装备系统的不同设计方案，并且淘汰那些导致玩家长期体验不佳的方案。

一个休闲游戏的例子

对于休闲游戏来说模拟也是一项很有价值的工具。在我们一款最新的休闲游戏中，玩家通过（不可购买的）神秘盒子获得奖励。盒中物品的随机性，再加上玩家们不同的升级速度、技能水平和游戏频率，使得计算玩家应该获得多少奖励以及什么时候获得奖励变得很困难。

在一款大规模的热门休闲游戏中，给“一小部分玩家”带来糟糕的体验可能意味着影响数百万玩家，因此能够掌控玩家的体验是非常有价值的。

通过运用真实的玩家数据模拟玩家的游戏过程，我们弄清了一些游戏逻辑决策是如何影响玩家体验和内容节奏，因此能够在市场测试之前进行更快的迭代。
对游戏经济设计师的需求不断增长

手游产业仍在发展中。成为顶尖产品所需的创新水平一如既往的高涨，高质量是最低要求，上市时间也至关重要。为了满足这些需求，游戏公司正在努力增加他们制作成功游戏的尝试，并在游戏投入制作后扩充团队的规模。这些趋势的持续时间越长，对投资项目的早期验证的需求就越强烈，对游戏经济设计师的需求就越大。

这是一门年轻的学科，许多工具和实践尚待挖掘，但这个领域的潜在价值是巨大的，我相信这块领域的专业人士将日益增加。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

When freemium games started being very successful in the late 2000s, the industry began to need professionals who knew how to run a game informed by data on in-game player behavior. New roles like business performance manager, data scientist, and business intelligence manager were created. Initially, there were no tools and standards, but as the industry matured, so did the practices.

Now there is a relatively standardized understanding of what it means to be a producer versus a business performance manager versus a data scientist, as well as what good use of in-game data looks like.

I believe in the next few years we will see a similar development for game economy designers: ‘analytical game designers’ who work with simulations and support lead designers in iterating on the key game systems. In this article I will explain why.

The special problems of freemium mobile game mechanics

Building successful freemium games includes a very special type of challenge: creating systems that engage players for years and that allow for very deep monetization. All the revenue of a freemium game comes from the slow trickle of small in-game purchases made by a small fraction of the playerbase. This makes it necessary for freemium games to retain players for a long time and avoid putting too low a cap on how much spenders can pay.

In order to achieve a long lifetime, freemium games are built so that players can set strong (short-, medium-, and long-term) goals for themselves. They are then tuned to gradually provide players with a sense of “progression” towards these goals for an experience that can last for years. This generally translates into a need for a lot of “content,” be it new levels, new items, or generally new “things” to get in the game. Now, since most spend in freemium games comes from players who want to accelerate their progression, and since as we said it is important to avoid putting a low cap on how much spenders can spend, this need for “content” is multiplied.

The solution to this type of problem often cannot just be “create more content.” Production of good quality “content” can be both expensive and time-consuming, and that has to be factored in the cost of maintaining a live game. In the case of mobile games, developers also need to keep in mind that there are device limitations in terms of loading times and even disk space in case they want to support old devices.

This pressure on “content” makes freemium system building one of the most difficult and interesting challenges in game development.

It’s important to review game systems early

It is important to look at this “content” dynamic explicitly and in detail before launching a game. There have been a few examples of beautiful, innovative, IP-powered games that have burst into players’ attention (and into the Top Downloads and Top Grossing charts), only to then disappear just a few months later. Not having enough progression or spending depth impeded these titles from becoming new runaway successes.

Furthermore, work on those systems is also best done early in the development process. Mobile games have become big production efforts, with teams of dozens of people. Once a game team becomes that big, two things hinder fast or successful pivots:

Lead designers become very busy with day-to-day work, which makes it hard for them to take a step back and focus on tasks as big as changing key game systems.
Since changing key game systems means changing somewhat the “nature” of a game, it is hard to do that more than once or twice before losing the faith of the team or the key game stakeholders.

The problem with reviewing game systems

The issue with trying to review game systems early in the development process is that freemium game systems are both very complicated and abstract. Game system reviews typically happen via conversations and presentations, and sometimes with some high-level prototypes, but those tools are not fit to describe and analyze “content” problems in-depth. Different people are likely to interpret the same presentation or the same words in different ways, and without looking into this in detail, there is the risk of moving to production games lacking a solid plan.

Enter the economy designers

Game economy designers at King are “analytical game designers” who look at games as machines and partner with the lead designer on a game title to transform a vision and a desired player experience into mechanics and parameters. They build simulations of the game mechanics and find answers to questions like, “How long will players need to complete a game?” or “How deep can monetization be in this game?”

Having a game economy designer working in a game team early in the development process allows for the game team to iterate much faster on game systems, months before having these systems implemented in game. A game can then move in production with confidence that enough “content” will be available to allow for years of play and for enough monetization depth.

RPG example

For example, in order to accelerate our iterations on the development of a gear system in an RPG, one of our economy designers developed a small simulator in Python (our preferred language for economy design).

The tool encoded all the mechanics related to the gear system (item drops, gear progression, gacha system). A designer could interact with it and simulate the progression in the game without going through the core mechanics of the gameplay.

This allowed exploring the long-term state of players in a matter of minutes, rather than days or weeks. The project could therefore quickly iterate on different variations on the design of the gear system and eliminate solutions that would have given a poor long-term player experience.

Casual game example

Simulation is a valuable tool for casual games as well. In one of our latest casual games, players receive many of their rewards through (non-purchasable) mystery boxes. The inherent randomness in the boxes combined with variable progression speeds, skill levels, and play frequencies of players makes it hard to calculate how many rewards players get and when they get them.

In a game as big as a popular casual game, giving a bad experience to “a small percentage of players” could mean impacting millions, so having more control over the player experience becomes very valuable.

Using actual player data to simulate players’ journeys allows us to see how some game logic decisions impact player experience and content pacing, thus allowing for faster iterations before in-market tests.

The rising need for game economy designers

The mobile game industry is still developing. The level of innovation to become a top title is as high as ever before, high quality is a minimum requirement and time to market is critical. To respond to these demands, game companies are trying to multiply their attempts at making successful games and are increasing the size of the teams once the games move to production. The more these trends will continue, the stronger the need will be to validate project investments early on, and the more there will be a need for game economy designers.

The discipline is young, with tools and practices still to be discovered, but the potential value to be created in this space is great, and I am convinced that we will have more and more people becoming specialists in this role.（source：Gamasutra  ）