Kabam公司首席执行官周凯文 如何打造一款热门游戏

A game that feels seamless and easy to play is often far from easy to make.

一款看起来流畅好玩的游戏，在开发的时候往往没那么简单。

That’s the idea behind the addictive mobile games developed by Kabam, which has harnessed the “free to play” model of offering free games but while layering on extra content for a fee. In eight years, co-founder and CEO Kevin Chou has taken the company from a tiny startup to $360 million in revenue and a $1 billion valuation. Last month, the company reported a $120 million investment from Alibaba.

这也正是Kabam公司开发令人爱不释手的手游时遵循的理念。Kabam公司通过免费模式提供游戏，然后通过额外的付费内容赚钱。8年时间里，在联合创始人兼CEO周凯文的领导下，Kabam已经从一家名不见经传的小公司成长为一家年收入3.6亿美元、估值超10亿美元的大企业。据报道，就在上个月，Kabam还获得了一笔来自阿里巴巴(Alibaba)的1.2亿美元投资。

Just days after landing at no. 25 on our 2014 40 under 40 list, Chou spoke to Fortune about nearly going under during the 2008 financial crisis, the secret sauce to a great game, and how the company is setting its sights on China for future growth.

周凯文位列《财富》“40位40岁以下商业精英”榜单第25名。在该名单发布几天后，他接受了《财富》专访，畅谈了他挺过2008年金融危机的经历、开发一款成功游戏的秘诀，以及该公司准备如何将中国作为下一个增长点。

Fortune: Not every gaming executive is a gamer themselves. Have you always been one?

《财富》：并非每个游戏公司高管自己都爱玩游戏。你是个游戏玩家吗？

Kevin Chou:I’ve loved games since I was a little kid. In high school, I was a world-ranked StarCraft player. It’s funny, just the other day, my wife was showing me this YouTube video where a dad took all his son’s games and threw them out on the lawn in a big pile and drove a lawn mower over them. When I was a kid, it wasn’t quite that bad, but certainly my parents wanted me to do something productive. So it’s been a great dream come true to turn something I loved into a great business.

周凯文：我从小就很喜欢游戏。高中时我还是一个有世界排名的《星际争霸》(StarCraft)玩家。它很有意思，就在前几天，我妻子让我看了一段YouTube上的视频：一个父亲把他儿子的所有游戏光盘扔到了草坪上，然后开着割草机碾过去。当我还小的时候，情况并没那么糟，不过我父母当然希望我做一些有意义的事。所以现在我把自己喜欢的事情变成一笔大生意，也算是美梦成真了。

What was Kabam’s first big hit?

Kabam的第一款热卖游戏是什么？

The first game to become a runaway success was Kingdoms of Camelot [distributed over Facebook]. It was a medieval strategy game about being a knight—it was the type of game I love. There were complications back then, in terms of the technology of delivering a game over the Internet. You couldn’t create the type of games you would expect to see on an Xbox or PlayStation. So we couldn’t create a sports game. We couldn’t deliver that level of graphic capability over the Internet. So we went with a strategy game because, if you think about playing Settlers of Catan, or Risk, there aren’t a whole lot of cool graphics you need. It’s much more about making decisions, working through consequences of those decisions, and battling against other players.

第一款特别成功的游戏是通过Facebook分销的《亚瑟王国》(Kingdoms of Camelot)。它是一款描述中世纪骑士的战略游戏——也是我喜欢的那种。当时也生出了一些枝节，尤其是在通过互联网交付游戏的技术方面。我们当时不可能开发出你在Xbox或PlayStation上看到的那种游戏。所以我们没法开发体育竞技游戏。我们当时无法通过互联网交付那种水平的图形能力。所以我们选择了即时战略游戏。比如你可以想想《卡坦岛》(Settlers of Catan)或者《风险》(Risk)这种战略游戏，它们不需要很多很酷的图形效果，而更多的是决策，然后经历这些决策的结果，并且与其它玩家进行对战。

You’ve said your decision to move into the pay-to-play environment was influenced by the 2008 financial crisis. Can you talk about that?

你说过你进军付费游戏是受了2008年金融危机的影响，你能谈谈这方面吗？

We lost 90 percent of our revenue from 2008 to 2009. That’s a lot of salaries you can’t afford to pay anymore. We said, “We’re not going to recover our advertising revenue anytime soon. So what do we do about this?” Meanwhile, “mini games” were driving a lot of engagement. And we saw a broader trend that gaming was coming to Facebook and using this free-to-play model. That is kind of when we went all in on gaming. We decided to just build games and not depend on on ad revenue—just ask the players to pay for the (premium content) on the games. And it turned out to be a great business over time.

从2008年到2009年，我们损失了90%的收入，都没钱发工资了。我们说：“我们的广告收入短期内没法恢复，该怎么办？”与此同时，所谓的“迷你游戏”正在吸引很高的参与度。而且我们发现了一个更大的趋势，那就是很多游戏正在涌向Facebook，并且采用免费模式。当时我们把所有赌注压在了游戏上，决定只开发游戏，不依赖广告收入——也就是只让玩家为游戏（的高级内容）付费。时间证明，这是一笔很好的生意。

How did you end up working with Hollywood on some of your games?

你后来怎么会和好莱坞合作开发游戏？

The gaming business used to work a lot with Hollywood, but more recently the companies are more focused on their own games. So a lot of the big Hollywood companies were looking for new types of gaming companies to do deals with. When they launch a movie, they generally want a game to go with it. So they started coming to us, noticing we were making good Facebook games. After a couple of those kinds of calls, we actually said, “let’s explore what this looks like.” We started with The Godfather. In the beginning, we were really concerned because, if we made a game ourselves, we could make money and not have to share it with anybody. We were tiptoeing our way into it. But The Godfather was a great deal for everyone because it wasn’t that premium sort of title where the legal team felt like they needed to extract every last pound of flesh to do a deal. We loved the I.P. involved. We love games about crime and houses fighting with each other. So we made that game a huge success with Paramount. Warner Brothers started calling us, and then MGM. That is when we did a Hobbit game. Universal gave us a call, and we did Fast and Furious 6. We just announced we are doing a big Marvel project. We understand the model now, we understand what we can bring to the table.

游戏行业过去一直与好莱坞有很多合作，不过最近很多游戏公司都把重点放在了自己的游戏上，所以很多好莱坞大公司也在寻找新的游戏公司来合作。当他们推出一部电影时，基本上都希望有一款游戏和它搭配。所以他们找到我们，说我们在Facebook上做的游戏很不错。接了几个这样的电话之后，我们才说：“让我们尝试一下，看看会怎么样吧。”我们首先尝试的是《教父》(The Godfather)，一开始我们很担心，因为如果我们自己开发一款游戏的话，我们完全可以自己赚钱，不必跟任何人分账。第一次做电影游戏时，我们真的有如履薄冰的感觉。但是《教父》对各方来说都很成功，因为它不是那种律师团队想榨干你最后一滴血来签协议的高端游戏。我们喜欢犯罪和家族恩仇的游戏。所以我们那次与派拉蒙影业（Paramount）的合作获得了巨大成功。后来华纳兄弟（Warner Brothers）也给我们打来电话，然后是美高梅影业（MGM）。那时我们开始做《霍比特人》(Hobbit)游戏。环球电影公司（Universal）也给我们打了电话，然后我们开始做《速度与激情6》(Fast and Furious 6)。最近我们刚刚宣布，我们将与漫威影业（Marvel）合作一个大项目。我们现在已经理解了这个模式，也知道我们可以给玩家带来什么。

Is the goal of these games to mimic the movie, or go further?

这些游戏的目标是模拟电影情节，还是让故事进一步发展？

There are other game companies that have tried to mimic the movie, where the appeal is to relive the movie and immerse yourself in it. There are certain types of games that do well with that. That is not our strategy. Our strategy is always to explore another element of the movie that you may see touched on a little bit in the movie or the book. We basically take that and create a whole new storyline around it. We still obviously want to use the characters and story and environment that made the movie so great. But we don’t want to be limited to the content that is in the movie. Ideally, a big success for us is to have a game that is still running for five to 10 years. Our very first game that we released almost five years ago, Kingdoms of Camelot is still going very strong today with hundreds of thousands of people playing it every month. If you just follow the script of a movie, you can stretch a two-hour movie into a hundred hours. But you can’t make a game that lasts for years.

有些公司的游戏试着模拟电影情节，它们的吸引力在于把电影重演一遍，让你产生沉浸于情节之中的感觉。有些游戏在这方面做得很不错，但那并不是我们的战略。我们的战略是开发电影的其它元素，这些元素可能只在电影或原著中体现了一部分。我们基本上可以围绕这一点创造出一个全新的故事线索。显然我们仍然希望采用这部电影的精华，比如一些让它非常成功的角色、故事和环境，但是我们不想被限制在电影的内容里。对于我们来说，最理想的情况是，一部游戏可以风行5到10年。我们的第一部游戏《亚瑟王国》差不多是5年前推出的，现在它的表现依然非常抢眼，每个月都有几十万玩家在玩。如果你仅仅按照电影的脚本走，你可以把一部两小时的电影延伸到100个小时，但它的吸引力维持不了几年。

Are there any types of movies that you wouldn’t turn into a game?

有没有哪些电影是你不想改编成游戏的？

Certainly, we think about the demographics of a movie. Documentaries are not something that we would create a game around—that’s probably super obvious. Something like a comedy would be harder to create a game play around. Game of Thrones is good example: there’s a lot of sexual content and extreme violence in that show. If we made a game about it, those things probably wouldn’t appear in our games. Or The Godfather is a good example. We will show a horse’s head in a bed, but we won’t go through the actual, more graphical parts.

当然，我们会考虑一部电影的受众群体。首先我们不会把纪录片改编成游戏——原因是显而易见的。相对来说，像喜剧之类的也难以改编成游戏。《权力的游戏》(Game of Thrones)则是一个很好的例子：该剧有很多性和暴力的场面。如果我们把它改编成游戏，这些东西可能不会出现在游戏里。《教父》是另一个很好的例子。我们会展现一张床上放着一个马头，但我们不会展现更真实、更生动的画面。

Has there been any character or storyline that got you into trouble?

有没有哪个角色或故事让你陷入麻烦？

When you are trying to sell a video game for $60 dollars at Best Buy, you see more of that. “Wow, did you hear you can go into an airport and mow down a bunch of civilians in this game,” or something. Everyone gets up in arms about that, but guess what? It makes people go to Best Buy and pay $60 to see what it’s all about. With our games, it’s very different. We turn the model around. You can download the game for free, so it’s easy to check out the game and start playing it, see if you like it or not. But it’s our job to kind of make sure we are doing really cool stuff within the game to keep you coming back tomorrow and the day after that. It doesn’t really serve us that well to create this crazy thing in the game that causes an uproar. We have to do the math in terms of whether it might turn off our current player basis or not.

当你试图在百思买（Best Buy）里以60美元的价格卖一张游戏光盘时，你可能会听到诸如“哇，你听说了吗，这个游戏可以让你闯进机场，用电锯扫倒一片人”之类的话。人人都反对这种暴力，但你猜怎么着？它真能吸引人们到百思买花60美元买张光盘一探究竟。但我们的游戏不一样，我们的模式是相反的，你可以免费下载游戏，安装和上手都很简单，然后再看你是否喜欢玩。我们的职责就是做出非常好的东西，确保你今天玩了明天还会回来。在游戏里做那种噱头对我们来说用处不大。我们必须计算的是，它是否会让我们现有的玩家群体流失。

What makes a great game that people will want to pay for?

开发一款人们愿意掏钱来玩的游戏有什么诀窍？

You have to create a game with what we call chase. You want to pick up the game and be able play it within a few minutes. There needs to be something about the game that hooks you. From there, you need the chase: you feel like you really want to do whatever it is you’re doing in the game. Maybe you want be the most badass superhero, a certain type of superhero that you love. That is what we are doing for Marvel. We want to create something that makes you say “wow” and leaves you willing to play the game for several months to get that thing in the game. We want it to be exciting from the very first few minutes. We aren’t expecting people to pick up a game and play it for two hours and never play it again. To make our business work, we have to build a long-term relationship with the player.

你的游戏必须要有我们所谓的“追求感”。你安装一款游戏，能够玩上几分钟。但是游戏里必须有能够勾住你的东西。然后你就产生了想要追求的感觉：你非常想完成你在游戏里要做的事情。可能你想当一个不好对付的超级英雄，因为你就喜欢这样的超级英雄——我们正在做的漫威项目就是这样的。我们想做出一些让你惊叹的东西，然后让你愿意花几个月的时间来追求那个东西。我们想要它在头几分钟里就非常振奋人心。我们不想做那种人们上手两个小时就不想再玩的游戏。为了使我们的生意成功，我们必须与玩家建立长期关系。

Where is the next big market you need to conquer?

你下一个需要征服哪个大市场？

To become a truly global gaming company, especially with the assets we have and talent that we have, we look at Asia. My family grew up in Asia and it’s an area where you have to understand the cultural aspects. You have to understand how to do business there. You have to understand how to build and manage a studio there. Those are all things we have done. We’ve put together some great partnerships with Alibaba, plus a few others that we should be announcing soon. So you will see us putting a huge amount of focus on that region of the world.

为了成为一家真正全球化的公司，尤其是考虑到我们目前拥有的资产和人才，我们把眼光投向了亚洲。我的家人是在亚洲长大的，在亚洲你必须要懂文化层面，你必须搞清楚如何在那里做生意，必须要懂如何在那里建立和管理一个工作室。那些事情我们都已经做好了。我们已经与阿里巴巴建立了很好的合作关系，另外我们也和其他伙伴建立了合作关系，下一步很快就会对外宣布。所以你会发现，我们把很大一部分精力放在了这个地区。

What types of games do you plan to roll out in the future?

下一步你打算推出什么类型的游戏？

We have been really focused on strategic games. We’ve done a racing game. We’ve done a couple of sort of light action games. Now you will see us expand to a few other categories of games beyond our core. It’s almost like we have been making comedies our whole life and we are now going to make action movies, or something like that. We feel very confident about moving into a few other types of games. One of the big ones will be a fighting game. Our Marvel game will be a fighting game: your superhero against another superhero, kind of Street Fighter 2 style. We are really excited.

我们对即时战略游戏投入了很多关注，我们也做过一款赛车游戏和几款动作游戏。以后我们会扩展到核心业务以外的其它游戏类别。这就好像我们拍了一辈子喜剧片，现在开始拍动作片了一样。其中的重头戏之一是一款战斗游戏。我们的漫威项目就是一款战斗游戏，由你的超级英雄对战其他超级英雄，有点像《街头霸王2》(Street Fighter 2)的风格。我们对此非常兴奋。