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2019年F2P面临的风险:游戏关停后可能引发大规模玩家抵制

发布时间:2019-02-20 08:55:36 Tags:,

2019年F2P模式面临的风险:游戏关停后可能引发大规模玩家抵制

原作者:Rob Fahey 译者:Vivian Xue

2010年后的五年间,由手游引发的“淘金热”使得无数商家争相在这个领域占领一席之地。无论是新进入者还是行业内的老开发商,每个人都希望获取这个快速增长的市场的一块份额。

其结果是短期内大批的F2P手游涌入了市场,输赢立见分晓。在每一款《部落冲突》或《糖果粉碎传奇》月收入千万美金的现象级游戏诞生背后,是数百款炮灰游戏;那些从未获得过玩家,或无法留住玩家(或从他们身上盈利)的游戏。

这些失败的游戏大多已经消失了,早就被开发者关闭,或者干脆被抛弃和忽视,以至于随着iOS和安卓系统的升级它们变得无法使用并被应用商店淘汰。这些游戏由于没有忠实的玩家,所以离开时没有引起什么轰动;不知他们是否应为此感到庆幸,因为这使他们避免了一个棘手的问题:如何在关闭游戏的过程中妥善管理玩家。

同样地,他们也从未考虑过一个与F2P模式相伴而生的隐性问题:消费者对他们在游戏中“拥有”的物品的实际感受如何,以及面对这些物品随游戏一同消失的重大事件他们会作何反应?

theme park(from gamesindustry.biz)

theme park(from gamesindustry.biz)

要知道,这不是一个法律问题。在大多数司法裁决中,游戏世界内虚拟物品的所有权问题已经得到了公正的解决并且偏向游戏商。事实上,这是一个信誉和期望管理的问题,无论是对各个游戏公司还是对于整个行业来说。

当然,游戏关停不是什么新鲜的现象了。每一款基于服务器运行的游戏都会不可避免地因关服而消失(除非服务器的源代码是公开的,这非常罕见)。游戏关停是一个问题,原因有几个,其中最大的问题在于它造成了重要游戏文化的消亡,但它从来不会真正引发玩家觉得自己损失了“财产”的问题。MMORPG玩家可能在游戏中积攒了各种高级物品,但大家都清楚买卖意义;花钱是为了玩游戏而不是为了物品本身。

F2P游戏颠覆了这种状况,尽管它非常有效地吸引了一部分消费者,但它也造成了玩家对游戏物品的依恋,而这种依恋是一把双刃剑。玩家在游戏中购买物品和货币从某种程度上创造了一种良性循环——在游戏里花了钱的玩家更有可能继续消费,因为他们购买的物品形成了沉没成本,这使他们从心理上更加难以放弃游戏。

但从另一方面来看,如果你是开发商,你想关闭一个表现不佳的游戏,这时你面临的挑战是,你的玩家感觉他们“拥有”这些物品,他们花了真钱在你的游戏里购买了它们——你正打算单方面删除掉的物品。

为什么我们现在要提到这个问题呢?因为2019年很可能是这个问题浮出水面的一年。多年来,表现不佳的F2P游戏被关闭,从未引发什么严重的问题,但行业对“表现不佳”的认定标准无疑是越来越高了。在热门游戏和彻底失败的游戏之间有一个“中间地带”,在这个领域里不同级别的F2P游戏一直融洽地共存着——从没上过头条,而是默默地、持续地赚钱。

有几个不同类型的游戏都属于这个很少被谈及的领域:那些玩家数量虽少但忠实的游戏,通常基于某个IP,因此其中高消费玩家的比例要高于平常;那些玩家基数大但属于休闲玩家的游戏,这种游戏虽然人气高但出于一些原因盈利欠佳(这类游戏包括孩童F2P游戏,可以理解它们采取的盈利方式更为小心谨慎);最后,还有那些曾经一度火爆的游戏,由于一些原因它们被挤出了下载和收入排行榜,成为了“中间地带”的一员。

对于一家小公司来说,这些游戏大概能让他们体面的运营下去。你永远无法像Supercell一样日进斗金或像Niantic一样登上头条,但你可以维持生计和支付工资。然而,如果你们公司规模较大,这样的游戏不久后就要被淘汰了,如今这种情况似乎极为常见。

淘金热过后的整合是不可避免的。在某种程度上它已经发生了,但2019年整合速度会加快,因为很多大型公司(发行商和IP持有者)都不看好 “中间地带”的游戏——这些游戏由于保持低调,不至于让他们亏本,因此至今还没被他们砍掉。但如同十多年前中端主机游戏的命运,这些中端手游即将面临大公司冷酷的机会成本计算。这些游戏可能不会赔钱,但也赚不了大钱,因此它们背后的资源可以更好地转移到有潜力的游戏上。

如果这个预测是正确的、与市场的风向一致,那么它将极大地影响围绕玩家对游戏物品拥有权的认知的讨论、或者说我们仍缺乏这方面的讨论。依据经验判断,关闭一个更大、更受欢迎的游戏——即便它只是一个中等的游戏——比关闭一个失败的游戏造成的虚拟财产“毁灭”数量要大得多。同时,正如前面所提到的,该行为的合法性至今没有得到严肃讨论,消费者将作何反应也不得而知。之前被关停的游戏规模要小得多,没能引发大规模的反应。

消费者反应的激烈程度可能是F2P商业模式迄今为止面临的最严峻的考验之一,因为如果开发商要被迫考虑他们对所销售的游戏物品的责任,这将改变围绕整个商业模式的计算。更糟的是这个问题出现在当下——人们对战利品箱的争议还远未结束,并且它已经吸引了媒体、公众和监管机构对该行业如何销售虚拟物品和货币的大量关注。

人们对F2P游戏普遍抱着敌意的态度,此时最好不要再让人们关注到传送带另一端的情况,以免再次引发消费者的愤怒——在传送带的另一端,一旦游戏整体盈利不佳,所有这些昂贵的物品会被游戏运营商即刻清空。这样做可能是合法的、光明正大的,但这个问题从未被公开地辩论或讨论过,而是在法律免责条款和用户许可协议中被一笔带过——并且二者的标题已解释了一切。

如何更好地处理这些情况是一个棘手的问题。毕竟,没有厂商会为了保护玩家的游戏物品而继续运营一款无利可图的游戏。但在缺乏大众一致认可的情况下,虚拟财产遭破坏引发的强烈抗议是行业即将面对的新难题。

本文由游戏邦编译,转载请注明来源,或咨询微信zhengjintiao

As the gold rush mentality gripped the mobile games market in this first half of this decade, countless businesses rushed to plant their flags in this space. From brand new entrants to long-time stalwarts of the industry, everyone was keen to own a piece of this rapidly growing new market.

The result was the appearance of a vast array of free-to-play mobile titles in a pretty short space of time, and the market quickly picked winners and losers. For every Clash of Clans or Candy Crush that became a cultural phenomenon and grossed tens of millions in monthly revenue, there were a hundred failures; games that never found an audience at all, or couldn’t keep (or monetise) the audience they did find.

Most of those failed games are already gone, long since shut down by their creators, or simply abandoned and neglected such that the march of progress on iOS and Android rendered them unusable and deprecated from the app stores. Having failed to garner a devoted audience, these games departed without fanfare; they avoided tricky questions over how to manage an audience through the shutdown of their game simply by dubious merit of not having much of an audience at all.

As such, they didn’t ever have to ask the question that has quietly loomed in the background of the free-to-play model from the outset: how do consumers actually feel about the items they “own” in the game, and how will they react to serious instances of those items disappearing with the game itself?

This is not, to be clear, a legal question. In most jurisdictions the question of ownership of virtual items in game worlds is fairly settled and very much in favour of the game operator. Rather, it is a question of reputation and expectation management, both for individual companies and for the industry as a whole.

Game shutdowns are nothing new, of course. Every game that depends on the operation of servers will inevitably disappear when those servers go offline (unless of course the server source code is made public, which is rare). This is a problem for several reasons, not least of which is the cultural loss of important milestones in the gaming medium, but it’s never really caused a problem in terms of consumers feeling like they’d lost their property in the shutdown. People may have accumulated all kinds of high-level items in an MMORPG, but the business model was clear; you were paying for time in the game, not for the items themselves.

Free-to-play games turn that on its head in a way that’s proved to be very effective and clearly very attractive to some consumers, but which creates an attachment to in-game items that may yet transpire to be a double-edged sword. In-game spend on items and currency creates a virtuous circle for developers in some regards; players who spend money in the game are easier to retain as customers, because the items they’ve bought trigger a sunk-cost reaction and make it much more psychologically difficult to quit the game.

On the other hand, if you’re the developer of an underperforming game that you want to close, you now have the challenge of an audience that feels like they own items, purchased for real money, in your game — items which you’re now proposing to unilaterally delete.

Why raise this now? Because 2019 could well be the year when this issue starts to break the surface. Underperforming free-to-play games have been shut down for many years without serious issue, but the industry’s standards for what counts as “underperforming” are unquestionably getting higher. There’s a whole middle ground in the mobile space between hit titles and hard flops, an area in which several tiers of free-to-play game have been getting on reasonably well — never making headlines, but quietly and consistently making some money.

A few different types of game fall into this little-discussed zone; those with small but dedicated audiences, often based on a licensed property of some kind and thus attracting more than the usual share of high-paying customers; those with large but very casual player bases, which are popular but don’t monetise well for various reasons (this includes a pretty decent segment of the kids free-to-play market, which is understandably more circumspect in its monetisation approach); and finally, the big hit titles of yesteryear, games that did very well for some amount of time and then, for various reasons, descended the download and revenue charts to end up rubbing shoulder with the mid-tier titles.

If you’re a small company operating a few games like this, you can probably make a decent living out of it. You’ll never have Supercell’s billions or Niantic’s headlines, but you can keep the lights on and the salaries paid. However, if you’re a bigger player and you’ve got games like this, their days are numbered, and that’s the situation that seems to be coming to a head.

Consolidation is inevitable after any gold rush. Some degree of that has already happened, but there’s likely to be an acceleration in 2019 as a lot of larger players (publishers and license holders alike) give the thumbs down to mid-tier titles that have thus far survived the chop by virtue of keeping their heads down and not filling balance sheets with red ink. Just like the fate faced by mid-tier console titles over a decade ago, mid-tier mobile titles are about to run into the cold logic of major companies’ opportunity cost calculations. These games may not be losing money, but they’ll also never make serious money, so the resources behind them could be better employed trying out new things that might actually be hits.

If this hypothesis is correct, and certainly it seems to be the way the wind is blowing, then it’s going to have a powerful impact on the discussion, or lack of discussion, around players’ perceived ownership of in-game items. Think about it in purely empirical terms; a larger, more popular game shutting down, even if it’s still only a mid-tier title, will naturally result in the “destruction” of a vastly larger amount (both in terms of simple counting and in terms of dollar value) of virtual property than the shutting down of failed games ever would. While, as previously mentioned, there’s no serious debate over the legality of that action, there’s also little clarity over how consumers will react. Previous instances have all been on a much smaller scale and had no opportunity to boil over into a large-scale response.

The severity of that response could be one of the toughest tests the free-to-play model has yet faced, because if developers are forced to consider their responsibility for “looking after” the in-game items they sell, that changes the entire calculus around the business model itself. The problem is exacerbated by timing; the loot boxes controversy is far from over, and has drawn a huge amount of media, public and regulatory attention to how the industry sells virtual items and currencies to its customers.

While that baleful eye continues to sweep across the industry, it would be best not to incite further consumer outrage by drawing attention to what happens at the other end of the conveyor belt, where all those expensive items are summarily deleted by the game operator once the game overall is no longer sufficiently profitable. Legal and above board it may be, but this has never really been debated or discussed in public, instead being swept away in boilerplate legal disclaimers and click-through EULAs — and the headlines practically write themselves.

How to better handle these situations is a tricky problem. No operator can be expected to keep running an unprofitable game just to maintain consumers’ in-game items, after all. But in the absence of public acknowledgement and consent for that, the outcry over the destruction of virtual property is a new industry headache just waiting around the corner this year.(source:Gamesindustry.biz

 


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