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Netmarble公司高管谈本地化策略与进军西方游戏市场

发布时间:2019-04-03 08:51:25 Tags:,

Netmarble公司高管谈本地化策略与进军西方游戏市场

原作者:Brendan Sinclair 译者:Willow Wu

在上个月的DICE Summit上,Netmarble美国公司总裁Simon Sim接受了GamesIndustry.biz的采访,谈到了他们的三步式成功:多元化、创新能力以及本地化。

有关注Netmarble公司动态的人都应该知道他们在推动多元化方面所做的努力。几年来,Netmarble一直拓展在RPG手游之外的领域:收购了《漫威:超级争霸战》的开发公司Kabam Vancouver,投资休闲游戏公司Jam City(当时还是SGN)、《黑色沙漠》发行商Kakao Games以及韩国热门组合防弹少年团的经纪公司Big Hit Entertainment。

Marvel-Future-Fight(from venturebeat.com)

Marvel-Future-Fight(from venturebeat.com)

他们的步伐当然不止于此。两年前,公司拨出44亿美元用于收购,目前仍在寻找大鱼。为了争夺收购Nexon,Netmarble最近专门组建了一个财团,企图打消这家韩国公司在海外寻找新买主的念头。虽说他们并不在四月初的竞价邀请之列,但与MBK Partners联手表示他们仍有强烈的收购欲望。

“我们想要走多元化路线,而不是只专注于单个游戏类型。我们认为不同用户群体之间的喜好是不一样的,而且也会随着时间发生改变。选择投资这些公司就是出于多元化考虑。” Sim说。

至于创新,这可以说是所有游戏公司的宗旨吧。

“Netmarble成功的关键原因之一就是我们不会盲目跟随潮流,”Sim说。“我们关注的是两到三年后的趋势和设备规格,针对这一时期开发新游戏。”

Netmarble的本地化处理方式也非常有趣。如何将亚洲产品成功实现西方本地化(或者反过来)一直都是游戏业内的一个难题。也许是因为现在还没有大家一致认同的最佳本地化方式。

“有些游戏我们觉得没必要完全本地化,”Sim说,“因为中西方玩家的行为差不多。在这种情况下,你就不用在本地化方面耗费过多的精力。”

“至于其它游戏,我们认为好的本地化非常重要。举个例子,在MMORPG手游中,中西方市场的玩家行为、内容消耗速度以及潜在用户情况都存在着很大差异。你要怎么满足两边市场的需求?本地化不仅仅是在表现在游戏画面以及翻译上,还有系统中的机制、难度和学习曲线。”

当然,弄清楚哪些部分可以跨市场运行,哪些部分需要微调或彻底重组是至关重要的。

“亚洲玩家和西方玩家所接触画面或者是UI/UX在一定程度上是有所区别的,因为他们平常的游戏类型偏好就不同,接受程度也不一样,”Sim说。“所以我们在着手MMORPG的本地化工作时,我们会对UI、游戏画面、UX、菜单等等做很多调整。此外,某些进阶系统在东方市场是可以接受的,但在西方市场就不太可行,因为他们之前所玩的游戏不是这样的。因此这一部分就你就得花很多功夫了。”

“但是与此同时,你看应用商店中的下载榜和盈利榜,有不少亚洲风格手游都在靠前的位置。这就说明有部分亚洲手游设计在西方市场也能吃香。”

Sim举了个例子:亚洲玩家一般对反复刷任务、练级这样的机制比较能够接受。这也是为什么自动玩法和自动导航这样的设计在会亚洲游戏中流行起来的原因之一。但是当Netmarble发行《漫威:未来之战》时,他们决定让游戏保持原样,看看西方玩家是会觉得这是一个很好的创新还是糟糕的累赘。Sim说他们接受了,反映出市场偏好的改变,同时也表明了本地化的最佳做法也并非如以前大家所认为的那样。

“关键是你得明白哪一部分是需要彻底本地化的,哪一部分是能够被西方玩家所接受的,”Sim说。“如果你理解错了,玩家也无法明白这个游戏的趣味所在。”

Sim认为Loot boxes也是需要本地化的部分。虽然开箱机制在亚洲很受欢迎,但是他觉得在西方这还算是具有一定挑战性的商业模式,需要根据当地的市场情况做出修改。

“有些西方玩家对随机设定是持消极态度的,所以我们参考了很多获得过成功的竞争产品,研究了我们游戏中的玩家行为,西方玩家确实是不太喜欢这种设计,”他说。“我们需要调整这种商业模式。”

Sim展示了几个游戏,说玩家能够看到付费宝箱中的内容,游戏中也会提供有限刷新机会,提供给玩家不同的商品。有时候,本地化可以只是标明在宝箱中找到特定物品的几率这样简单。

虽然Sim在主机市场没有移动市场这么活跃,但是他也知道几个热门主机游戏所引发的开箱机制争议,他认为发行商们或许会考虑采取Netmarble这样的本地化措施。

“玩家的行为正在发生变化,但玩家的接受程度并没有因此提高,开发者们应该根据不同情况调整游戏机制以满足玩家的期望。”Sim说。“这也是我们经常在思考的,‘玩家会接受这个机制吗?’‘这样会不会太不友好了?’‘太轻松了?’我们会反复斟酌、测试。”

本文由游戏邦编译,转载请注明来源,或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz at last month’s DICE Summit in Las Vegas, Netmarble US president Simon Sim lays out the company’s three-pronged approach to success: diversification, innovation, and culturalization.

The diversification push should be clear to anyone who has followed Netmarble’s corporate maneuvering. The company has been branching out well beyond its mobile RPG wheelhouse for several years, acquiring Kabam Vancouver (developer of the mobile fighting game Marvel: Contest of Champions) and investing in casual game studio Jam City (then known as SGN), Black Desert Online publisher Kakao Games, and Big Hit Entertainment, the label representing K-pop boy band BTS.

There’s likely more to come. The company set aside $4.4 billion for acquisitions two years ago, and is still looking to land some big fish. Netmarble recently assembled a consortium of companies to acquire Nexon and keep the fellow South Korean company from finding new owners overseas. Even though it seems to have fallen short in that bid, it evidently still has an appetite for acquisitions.

“We diversify our genres,” Sim says. “We’re not just focused on one specific genre. We think users’ tastes are different by segment, and it can change as time goes on… When we invest in some companies, we’re thinking about diversification.”

As for innovation, that’s a staple tenet of virtually every game company.

“One of the key reasons for the success of our company is we’re not just following other trends,” Sim says. “We’re focusing on trends and device specs two or three years later than … and we start to develop new games aiming for that period.”

The company’s approach to culturalization is more interesting. The question of how to best adapt successful Asian titles to the West and vice versa is a constant in the industry, perhaps because best practices on that front have yet to be agreed upon.

“Some games we don’t think need to be fully culturalized,” Sim says. “For some genres, the player behavior is similar whether they’re Eastern or Western. In that case, you don’t need to put in too much effort for culturalization; the behavior should be similar.

“But in some other games, we think true culturalization is very important. For example, in mobile MMORPGs, player behavior, content consumption speed, and accessibility is very different from Asia to the Western market. So how to meet those territories together? We need to fully culturalize not only the visuals and translation, but the mechanics across systems, difficulty, and learning curve.”

Naturally, figuring out which parts will work across markets and which need to be tweaked or completely overhauled is crucial.

“Visuals or UI/UX could be somewhat different between Asian gamers and Western gamers because they’ve been playing different genre games before; the acceptance level is different,” Sim says. “So when we culturalize MMORPG games, for example, we do a lot of tweaks about UI and visuals, or UX and menu structures, things like that. Also, some growth systems are somewhat acceptable in Eastern markets, but less acceptable in the West because the games they’ve been playing before have been different. So that part you need to culturalize a lot.

“But at the same time, since you watch the currently popular mobile games on the download and top grossing charts, there are many Asian-style games that hit the market. So some Asian mechanics are acceptable to the Western market.”

For example, Sim says Asian markets have traditionally been more accepting of heavy grinding needed to develop character skills. It was part of the reason the auto-play or auto-pilot mechanic first became popular in Asian games. But when Netmarble released Marvel Future Fight, it decided to try out that same mechanic to see if it would be seen as a welcome innovation by Western audiences or a distasteful addition. People accepted it, Sim says, which has helped show how market tastes — and as a result the best ways to culturalize games — change over time.

“The important part is to figure out which part needs to be totally culturalized, and which part could be acceptable in the Western market,” Sim says. “If you misunderstand that, then the core fun could be misdelivered.”

Loot boxes are another part of game design that needs culturalization, Sim believes. While they have been very popular in Asia, he still sees them as “a somewhat challenging business model” in the West, one that needs to be adapted to the market.

“Western gamers are less accepting of randomness, so we benchmarked a lot of our competitors which were successful before, and we learned from user behavior on our games that that’s true,” he says. “We need to tailor that business model to be more acceptable to the Western market.”

For example, Sim points to games that show players the contents of the loot box they can buy, and gives them some limited mechanism for refreshing its contents with different items. Sometimes the culturalization can be as modest as a more clearly communicated rundown of the odds involved for finding specific items in loot boxes.

While Sim isn’t active in the console market the way he is with mobile, he sees the recent controversy over loot boxes in a number of popular games as a sign that the publishers of those titles might want to consider the same approach to culturalization Netmarble takes.

“Behavior is changing, but the acceptance level is not there, and the way to deliver the mechanic should be tailored to meet the players’ expectations,” Sim says. “That’s what we keep thinking. Is this mechanic acceptable or not? Too aggressive? Too light? We keep thinking and testing that.”

(source: gamesindustry.biz


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