来源地址：http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15369
Think every aspect of your game play has to be customized for regional players? Blizzard disagrees, and in his keynote for the Austin GDC, president Mike Morhaime discussed this and other lessons learned throughout the company's release history.
Morhaime's keynote speech focused on the ten lessons Blizzard has learned in globalizing its IP, and started with a brief rundown of the company history, starting with him and his 2 recent UCLA graduate friends in 1991, and the $10,000 each they got as graduation presents or borrowed from their grandmothers.
Blizzard: The Beginning
Cutting their teeth and learning about game development by doing Amiga and Mac conversions of PC games and moving to 16 bit console titles, the decline of the console market focused the company on PC games, where it began with Warcraft.
World of Warcraft, said Morhaime, has "really transformed the company in ways we couldn’t possibly have imagined at the time, but through that process and all these years, we've really stayed committed to the same core philosophies that we were committed to at the beginning."
First and foremost was "gameplay first," "one of our mantras," said Morhaime, and though he admitted it wasn't going to be a design talk as with the previous Austin GDC, "I should say right off the bat that if we don’t get this part right, none of the rest of this matters."
Morhaime said Blizzard uses a model of the market of a donut, with core gamers in the middle -- the opinion makers, and casual players as the ring around.
"In order to be real successful we want to hit both of those markets," he said, achievable by trying to build games "deep and replayable while being accessible to wide market," through low system requirements, and the separate mantra, "easy to learn, difficult to master."
On Brand Protection Above All
The next philosophy is to "build and protect the brand" –- "The Blizzard name is our most important property," he said, and it stands for "high quality, fun, and polish." The company thinks of its brand as a bank account, constantly trying to "make 'brand deposits' and avoid 'brand withdrawals.'"
Next, Morhaime said the company always resists the pressure to ship early. Pressure, he said, comes from all around to ship the game as soon as possible, something Blizzard tries to resist as shipping early is "very risky," and, referring to the last point, "shipping a game early can do tremendous damage to a brand or a franchise."
He pleaded that the industry "think long term" and said "shipping early and losing players is very short term mentality." The company fought this battle in 1996 when Diablo missed its holiday release schedule, which, in the end, perhaps impacted day one sales, but went on to sell well throughout 1997.
"Nobody looks back at Diablo and says 'if only they’d released it 3 weeks earlier'," said Morhaime, and through that experience the company was able to educate its parent company that it's quality that matters -- something Blizzard had to deal with again as Burning Crusade missed its own holiday deadline.
Morhaime: Focus On Specifics
Next, Morhaime said developers should “resist the pressure to do everything at once”: there's a lot of pressure to do everything, to compete everywhere, to not miss an opportunity, but he instead said to "build on your successes, gain expertise, then get more ambitious – if you try to do everything at once, your risk goes up at not getting anything right."
Morhaime then looked specifically at how Blizzard has evolved as a global company. When the company stated, the U.S. was its most important market, and it would complete a game in English and then go on to localize it for other markets.
It found, though, as Europe became more important, that the grey market of importers was having an impact on sales -- hardcore fans would have already imported the game on its U.S. release, so the company worked to shorten the delay between regional launches.
Asia developed quite differently, he said, noting that in the region game rooms were very important, with some 20,000 in Korea, and 200,000 in China. By contrast, he said, "there are about 30,000 McDonalds in the whole world," and said making sure your game operates well in game rooms is very important.
The 'Myth Of Regional Taste'
Morhaime then turned to the “myth of regional taste” -- something he said might be a controversial point. "You hear a lot of talk that the way to succeed internationally is to localize and customize your game for local tastes, to have people in each region to tell you local tastes, and that’s the key. We don’t think about it like that."
"We think there are different styles of play that exist everywhere, just in different concentrations," he continued, such as the prevalence of PVP versus PVE players in Korea, "but you still have both, and you still have both here."
Instead Blizzard takes the approach that there are different styles of play that exist everywhere, "so instead of creating 15 different versions, we look at what the different styles are and make sure the game provides something for the different styles," striving to "make everyone feel welcome in the game."
Morhaime did note that it was important to "think globally," noting its experience in adding a samurai panda race in Warcraft 3, upsetting Chinese players as they saw their own animal in Japanese garb. Blizzard quickly changed the race to wear Chinese armor and weaponry, and got a lot of appreciative response that Blizzard was actually listening.
Global thinking leads to global challenges, though, and Morhaime noted that the company was very wrong about its estimates of World of Warcraft demand, which it always considered would fall under the ceiling of Warcraft 3, previously its best-selling game.
"We had to stop shipping boxes to retail because we didn’t have capacity to support them," he said, and immediately after launching the game Blizzard was "in the fire of trying to play catch up."
The Difficulties Of Scaling
That's when the company learned its next lesson that "HR is really important" in scaling up entire business overnight. Blizzard also found at that time that "running a MMORPG is not just game development."
Though it'd already had experience running BattleNet, "when you go to running a subscription based service with paying subscribers, it’s really a whole new ballgame. We thought we understood this."
"It’s all of these other things that impact players experience that are maybe just as important as the game itself," said Morhaime, saying the company had to "shift our mindset that we weren’t just a game developer, we were a service company, and we needed to apply things that service companies do."
Those things included, most importantly, communication. Blizzard frequently had to deal with a doubly bad situation where the developers couldn't yet identify a bug, so therefore community managers couldn't relate the problem to players, falling into a "holding pattern of not saying anything, while the community is 'wigging out', which is what communities do when you don’t talk with them."
Blizzard set up a process to keep both the community and international staff informed through formalized email lists, and by adding a "layer of people around the development team to keep internal people informed."
'Never Trust Version 1.0'
Next, Morhaime said the company strove to "avoid financial incentives," not internally but with this player. He said, simply, "What happens if there’s a financial reward for doing something is many people go out and do that thing."
In the real world, he said, if it's possible to sell gold to make money, people will farm gold to sell, and of course this has implications in the game world as well. Between sweatshops to farm gold, trojans to steal accounts and stolen credit cards, all to sell gold and items to "rich Americans," Blizzard said it was the company's duty to "protect our players" and "minimize the financial rewards from behaving in this way," which he characterized as "a constant battle."
Morhaime concluded with his key point, that testing was also of the utmost importance, and to "never trust version 1.0." "Everyone at Blizzard tests," he said, from private alphas to public betas.
He said you will always "find out a few things you don’t find out internally" through public betas, not just in server loads, but in what Blizzard refers to as "cheese."
"If there’s a most efficient way to play the game that will get you accomplishments faster, that’s what people will do, even if it’s boring and tedious," he said. "They’ll do it and think your game is boring and tedious and not fun –- try to eliminate those."
For the Burning Crusade launch, Morhaime said they applied all of the rules, padding forecasts for day one demand, and, happily, "This time we were prepared – servers withstood initial demand very well, and our customer service guys felt Burning Crusade launched like a very smooth patch release," the best case scenario for the company.
中文来源：http://www.it.com.cn/f/games/079/7/474276.htm
【暴雪新作推荐】：《魔兽世界：巫妖王之怒》专区 《星际争霸2》游戏资料专区
暴雪创办人兼总裁Michael Morhaime在GDC Austin上发表了演讲，谈论他从《魔兽世界》和其他暴雪游戏中总结出来的十条经验。
1·游戏性第一。如果你了解暴雪，那你知道他们在游戏平衡性上力尽完美，或者说比任何人做的都好。暴雪哲学好懂但难掌握。他们希望你入门容易而维持长时间的兴趣，用同一款产品同时吸引休闲和核心玩家。
2·打造并保护品牌。暴雪的目标是要消费者进入商店，看到暴雪的商标就知道那是好东西。但个人认为暴雪这方面做的不好，为何？他们欺负了可怜的BNetD（战网私服）人员，控告一群没有反抗能力的开发者。暴雪真坏。
3·抗拒提早上市的诱惑。这一点很多人都做不到。游戏是要在完成之后再推出，而不是当日历上某个时候到来。如果照着日历办事，那你的结果就是创世纪9，更糟糕的，就是多bug的微软恶梦般的操作系统。
Michael指出，公司应该用长远的目光去看，而不是考虑短期。短期考虑通常不会有好结果。《暗黑破坏神》错过了圣诞假期，在12月31日推出。你会觉得暗黑是个错过了圣诞的游戏，还是个卖了几百万的游戏？《燃烧远征》也错过了圣诞假期，但在第一天就卖出了240万份。
4·不要所有东西都同时做。知道自己能做什么，然后把它做好。《魔兽世界》并不是他们第一款在线游戏，《魔兽3》就有大量在线内容，《暗黑2》也是。从它们之中吸取经验，WOW就诞生了。
5·暴雪是一个全球性的企业。它曾经只是美国的公司。东西先做好英文的再去做其它地区的。游戏先在北美发售，然后到欧洲，然后到其它地方。这种做法有好些弊端。
星际争霸，韩国的国家级游戏，显示的却不是本地语言。唯一有本地语言的是日本版，但这个版本又与其它的冲突，韩国人玩的是英文版。而北美和欧洲的灰色市场意味着当游戏在美国发售，那在欧洲发售日期之前人们就能拿到它，而当游戏正式在欧洲发售的时候，人们已经买到了，销售自然不好，零售商也不高兴。
解决方法就是平等的对待所有玩家。进行全球范围的同步发售。这需要更多时间，但绝对值得。《暗黑2》便是全球同时发售，而结果也相当好。
6·地区性口味的神话。暴雪不相信有地区性口味这玩意儿，全球兴趣都是一样的，只是人数不同。如果你制作一款适合所有人口味得游戏，那你就不用针对每个市场各做一个版本了。
有一件事还是得注意，就是文化问题，比如魔兽3里的熊猫。游戏里的熊猫穿着日本服装拿着日本武器。中国玩家对此颇有怨言。因此它后来就改穿了中式服装和中式武器，问题就解决了。
7·运营网络游戏不属于游戏开发。你在三个大陆上24小时不停得运行着数千台服务器。你还需要管理一群活跃但虚拟的社区。
举个例子，你的开发小组在为游戏增加内容，但如果小组需要修正服务器的问题，他们就不能继续开发那些内容，哪个更重要？暴雪特别成立了一个小组专门应付游戏里的问题，这样开发小组就可以专注于他们的工作了。
8·交流。内部交流、外部交流。如果你有社区，跟他们交谈，经常的，清楚的。如果有个大bug，或者服务器挂了，工作人员马上就开始工作，他们不会到论坛里解释问题，时间就这样浪费了。
因为这样，内部无关人员不知道发生了什么事，外面的人也不知道发生了什么事，然后人们开始抓狂，在论坛上疯狂发贴然后论坛就挂了。
为了解决这个问题，暴雪建立了一个正式的邮件系统。开发小组可以与内部人员交流，消息可以有秩序的传播开去。
9·避免涉及金钱。只要你在WOW里显露出一点商机，人们就会滥用它。如果你把它隐藏，问题就变小了。如果坏人不能赚钱，淘金、窃取帐号、伪造信用卡等等这些问题就不再存在了。
10·持续测试游戏，不要相信Ver.1.0。你测试的越多就越好，但很少人能做到。在暴雪，每时每刻每人都在测试。先有封测，然后公测，然后发售，希望游戏到了发售日的时候能有平衡性、流畅、无bug。
暴雪在燃烧远征的发售上相当接近这个目标。服务器的结构升级以减少网络延迟，并提升了容量。他们补充了很多的内容，最后把发售日期推迟到完成的那一天。
最后，他们在当地时间凌晨发售了。一天卖掉了240万份，这是很好的成绩。有管理员表示当他看着服务器的灯一个接一个亮起来的时候他感到非常欣慰。
暴雪奋斗了16年，现在有数百万玩家在线游戏，他们做出了不错的成绩。任何技术都会出现问题，但暴雪总能把它们减轻。希望日后的网络游戏可以从他们的错误和成功中学到一些经验。
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