美游戏人自称欲打破Zynga的社交游戏神话

　　理查德·盖瑞特(Richard Garriott)被誉为视频游戏的先驱，他同时还是一名海底潜水员和宇航员。如今他又放出豪言，声称希望在社交游戏领域超越Zynga的《FarmVille》和《CityVille》。据记者了解，加利奥特的新游戏公司Portalarium将于未来一个月内推出它的首款大型社交游戏。

　　盖瑞特并非在说空话，如果说有人会对拥有2亿多月活跃用户的Zynga构成威胁，那么这个人必当是像盖瑞特这样的视频游戏元老。他们进入这一行的资本在于，他们对游戏机制设置了如指掌，知道如何开发富有创意，古怪而有趣的游戏。Zynga目前正忙于广纳贤才，就连盖瑞特的好友布鲁斯·雪莱(Bruce Shelley)也已经和Zynga签约，不过Zynga还没有将所有英才一网打尽。这场人才之争的胜负，仍旧颇具悬念，因为社交游戏的最美好时代还未到来。

richard-garriott-dice-2011

　　盖瑞特雄心勃勃，作为一名宇航员，他曾真的冲上云霄，踏上国际太空站，还曾开发了业内最大的在线游戏《Tabula Rasa》，但最终却以失败告终，这令他瞬时跌入谷底。

　　如今他正打算通过新公司Portalarium推出“第三代电子游戏”。

　　那么其他几代游戏又有什么特点呢?对那些并非从小玩游戏的人来说，他们可能不知道盖瑞特曾推出《Ultima》这种单人模式的第一代电子游戏。1997年，盖瑞特将这款角色扮演类游戏项目延伸至在线多人模式游戏《Ultima Online》。在他看来，基于互联网的游戏是第二代电子游戏。第三代电子游戏则是以Zynga的《FarmVille》为代表的这种简单易上手的Facebook社交游戏。

　　记者获悉，盖瑞特在拉斯维加斯Dice峰会的访谈中表示，他知道自己来迟了，没有及时赶上社交游戏的热潮。 Portalarium 至今已在Facebook上发行了两款简单的博彩类游戏，目的是想试验下公司在用户黏性或者吸引用户长时间玩游戏方面的成就。盖瑞特表示，公司在未来一个月内将会在Facebook、Hi5及其他社交网站上发行它的首款社交游戏。

　　盖瑞特表示，他的游戏绝非其他游戏的翻版。这仿佛是在影射人们早期对Zynga的看法——有人认为Zynga主要是靠模仿其他社交游戏发展起来的。他表示，事实证明模仿是一个非常有利可图的商业模式(当然，Zynga可能无法同意这一观点，因为它发行了很多成功的原创游戏，如《FrontierVille》和《CityVille》。《CityVille》曾获Interactive Entertainment Awards最佳社交游戏大奖。尽管如此，还是有人指出《CityVille》明显是模仿早期的城市建设游戏《SimCity》。)

　　盖瑞特并未对其新游戏进行过多描述，因为他担心有人会抄袭自己的创意(电子游戏领域的版权法和商标法，仍未像其他传媒行业那样明确，这对开发商来说实在是一大风险)，这也正是社交游戏和传统游戏的区别之一。传统游戏经营者会在发行早期，就开始为游戏做大量的宣传工作，以便引起人们的关注，而社交游戏公司发行游戏时极其低调，只有等到游戏形成一定气候时才开始大力宣传。

　　盖瑞特表示进入这一新领域，他迟到了两年。他劝告传致力于传统游戏开发的同行们，最好加入社交游戏的开发热潮，否则他们将会处境艰难，因为即便是加大投入，传统游戏的营收也仍然在走下坡路。

garriott-at-dice-2011

　　他认为，“游戏公司是时候采取行动了，第一代电子游戏的发展花了10年时间才成熟，在线游戏花了5年。社交游戏可能会成熟得更快，这扇市场大门很快就会关闭了。”

　　他表示踏进社交游戏领域的开发商很了解如何通过开发休闲小游戏赚钱。每进入一个游戏发展新时期，用户数量都会增长10倍。不论是女性，还是男性，几乎所有人都可以自封为游戏玩家，“这个时期的游戏发展令人兴奋，我们正步入一个新时代。”

　　据记者了解，盖瑞特的上款游戏《Tabula Rasa》凝聚了好几百个游戏开发者的心血，是一款高投入、大制作的游戏。该游戏于2007年发行，但最终未能在大型多人在线游戏市场中打败《魔兽世界》(World of WarCraft)。2009年盖瑞特刚从其太空探险之旅回来，发行商NCSoft就宣布倒闭了。盖瑞特的这趟太空之旅花了他3000万美元，不过NCSoft赔偿了他2800万美元，因为公司解雇他时并没有给原来承诺的股份。

　　虽然盖瑞特并未充分参与《Tabula Rasa》的开发工作，但他认为，“我觉得作为苹果2代的程序员，我已经掌握了应有的技能，我已经参与游戏的编程近10年了，我很享受这种工作。”

　　他表示，设置游戏机制不仅仅是经营宠物商店，农场或者村庄，“我曾研究过《FarmVille》，但它对玩家来说太简单了。用户界面很粗糙，游戏设置并不怎么有意义。随后出现的《FrontierVille》就有意思得多。 但现在又有了《CityVille》，用户的选择就很多了。后者正好是前面两款游戏的中和，《FarmVille》太简单，而《FrontierVille》又太复杂。

　　据记者了解，Portalarium研发了一系列的开发工具，这些工具可以“破除开发不同游戏的障碍”，简便开发过程。他觉得，现在要向正在玩其他游戏的用户推广自己的游戏并不容易，所以必须了解身边的朋友都在玩什么游戏。

　　盖瑞特究竟是否在向Zynga等社交游戏开发商发出挑战的信号?那么Zynga是否需要担心Portalarium这个微不足道的新兴社交游戏公司呢?这种担心暂时没有什么必要，因为它其实没那么快可以赶上Zynga。不过Zynga现在也许能无视Portalarium，但是也不能排除某天发现自己已经被超越的可能。

　　Richard Garriott: My plan to beat FarmVille and CityVille

　　Garriott is known as a video-game pioneer, an undersea diver and an astronaut. Now he wants to outdo Zynga, the creator of FarmVille and CItyVille, in social games. His new game company, Portalarium, will debut its first major game in a month.

　　Garriott doesn’t make empty promises. If anyone poses a threat to Zynga — which has more than 276 million monthly active users on Facebook — it is a veteran of video games like Garriott. What the industry’s old-timers bring is their knowledge of game mechanics — the elegant, creative, quirky details that make a game fun — to bear on social games. Zynga is busy acquiring talented game designers — including Garriott’s friend Bruce Shelley, now a contractor for Zynga — but it hasn’t locked up all the talent yet. There are huge stakes for whoever wins this talent war, since the best days of social gaming are likely still to come.

　　Garriott is no stranger to ambition. He has soared into the heavens, literally — all the way to the International Space Station as an astronaut. He has plummeted to despair with the launch and failure of one of the game industry’s biggest online games, Tabula Rasa.

　　Now he is trying to launch the “third age of video games” through his new company, Portalarium, which we wrote about a year ago.

　　What were those ages? For those of you who didn’t grow up playing games, it may help to know that Garriott was present for the first age of video games, with the debut of great single-player games such as Ultima, which was followed by many sequels. In 1997, under his alter ego Lord British, Garriott extended his role-playing fantasy world to the online multiplayer game Ultima Online.

　　Garriott considers the rise of Internet-connected games to be the second age of video games. The third age began with the explosive growth of simple, quickly played social games like Zynga’s FarmVille on Facebook.

　　In an interview at the Dice Summit game conference in Las Vegas, Garriott said he knows he is late and the gold rush into social games has happened without him so far. Portalarium launched two simple casino games on Facebook so far in order to test the company’s theories about player engagement, or the trick of getting gamers to play games for a long time. Within a month or so, Garriott says Portalarium will unveil its first social game on Facebook, Hi5, and other social networks.

　　This game won’t be an act of “plagiarism,” Garriott said, alluding to charges some have laid against Zynga that the social games maker’s success derives from mimicking other social games.

　　Plagiarism has proven to be a very lucrative business model, Garriott said. (Zynga begs to differ, of course, since it has created successful original games such as FrontierVille and CityVille. CityVille won the award at the Interactive Entertainment Awards for best social game. Even so, some point to the inspiration CityVille apparently took from the early city-building game SimCity.)

　　Garriott isn’t describing his new game now because he worries that someone will take the idea and plagiarize it. (Copyright and trademark law are not as clear-cut in video games as they are in other media, which makes this a real risk.) That’s one difference between social games and traditional console games. While traditional game marketers tease their games early and dole out the details far ahead of a launch to build buzz, social game companies launch their games quietly and then tweak them until they start taking off like wildfire. Then they announce them.

　　Garriott says he feels he arrived two years late in the new social game era. And he warns his colleagues in traditional games that they had better join into the gold rush or find themselves in a very difficult position, as revenues for traditional games will likely go down even as budgets soar.

　　“It’s time for game companies to act,” Garriott said. “The first age of games took 10 years to mature. Online games took five years. Social games may mature much more rapidly. The door is closing quickly.”

　　Those who make the jump to social games will discover how to make money with casual, bite-sized titles, he said. With each new age of gaming, the audience size grows by a factor of 10, Garriott said. Women, men and pretty much all demographics can now count themselves as gamers.

　　“This is a particularly exciting period for the game industry,” he said. “We are about to begin a new time of invention.”

　　Garriott’s last game, Tabula Rasa, required the work of hundreds of game developers and it had a huge budget. The game launched in 2007 but it failed to unseat rival World of WarCraft in the

　　massively multiplayer online game market. Publisher NCSoft shut it down in 2009, just after Garriott returned from his Space Adventures trip to the space station. Garriott spent $30 million of his own personal fortune for the space trip. But he won a $28 million judgment from NCSoft because it fired him without awarding him promised stock.

　　Garriott was very far removed from the programming process in Tabula Rasa. But at Portalarium, he can now get involved at that level.

　　“I once felt like I had mastered every byte of the Apple II as a programmer,” he said. “It’s been a decade since I have worked at this level in a game and I am truly enjoying it.”

　　The game mechanics won’t be something familiar like running a pet shop or a farm or a town, Garriott said.

　　“I looked at FarmVille, but it was too simple for me as a player,” he said. “The user interface was awkward and the game play was not rewarding. When FrontierVille came out, it was much more interesting. But now with CityVille, there is way too much going on. So now we have bracketed this new experience. One is too simple, and one is too complicated.”

　　Eventually, Garriott promises that he will move on to “Lord British’s brave new world, or a spiritual successor to my previous work.”

　　Garriott said that Portalarium has built a suite of tools to make it easier to build games that can “break down the barriers between games.” That is, he thinks it is too hard right now to promote a game to a person who is playing another game. You should, he said, be able to easily find out what your friends are playing.

　　Is there a tiny bit of bluster in Garriott’s words? Sure. Should Zynga be scared of a puny company in Austin, Texas? Not yet. But objects in the rear view mirror may be closer than they appear to be. Yes, Zynga may look over its shoulder and find that one day Lord British is gaining on them.(Source：GamesBeat)