竞猜游戏QuizUp靠什么摆脱昙花一现的命运

    一句老生常谈的话：游戏是个靠大热产品推动的行业。Zynga就是最好的例子，虽然它开发了《虚拟农场》（Farmville）和《虚拟城市》（CityVille）等曾经风靡一时的游戏，随后又成功上市，但如今却已深陷泥潭。OMGPop也好不到哪去，《你画我猜》（Draw Something）曾在一夜间聚了百万用户，但又在一夜间落得门庭冷落（当然，在以2亿美元出售给Zynga前，一切看起来还算正常）。热门游戏《愤怒的小鸟》（Angry Birds）可有些年头了，最近，它的开发商Rovio迫于用户不断流失之痛，不得不宣布游戏免费。《糖果粉碎传奇》（Candy Crush）是2012年的大热游戏，它的母公司打算在今年晚些时候上市。但值得警惕的是，互联网用户搜索趋势报告指出，用户对这款游戏的热度正在减退。

    游戏玩家，尤其是休闲游戏玩家，向来善变。

    QuizUp是一款在线社交知识竞猜游戏，一经推出，就迅速挤进了苹果（Apple）应用程序商店前列，现在已经坚持了大概4个月。如今，用户的口味变化之快就在电光火石之间，因此，我们不得不对QuizUp竖起大拇指。虽然4个月不算太长，但对应用程序而言已经是好几个世代了。我上个月曾撰文表示，热门社交应用Secret正成为最新一批“昙花一现”的应用，热得快，冷得更快。应用排名网站App Annie表示，推出后仅仅两个月后，Secret在应用程序商店的排名就已经呈现出下滑的趋势。

    托尔•弗雷德里克森是QuizUp母公司Plain Vanilla Games的首席执行官，他说：“游戏的生命周期通常非常非常短。一款游戏如果能有所突破，那么会在几天之内迅速大热，一段时间后便到达顶峰。但只要一周左右，它便会跌到排行榜100名开外。这样的游戏太多太多了，但幸好我们坚持下来了。”

    QuizUp只用了仅仅4个月时间就发展了1000万注册用户，后者平均每天花在这款游戏上的时间长达30分钟。这些人中包括那些只玩了一次的用户，由此可见QuizUp的核心用户有多么投入——他们几乎是一轮又一轮的在答题。

    QuizUp一直保持在最受欢迎的25大游戏以及最受欢迎的50大应用之列。这家公司从最初的7名员工发展到了现在的45人，从风投手中也募集到了2200万美元投资。QuizUp的投资者包括红杉资本（Sequoia Capital）、腾讯（Tencent）、Greycroft Partners、BOLDstart Ventures和e.venture。这家公司最近还和猎头公司WME合作，一起拓展QuizUp品牌，目前正在准备向电视等新领域进军。

    QuizUp是一夜成名的典范，在应用程序商店一经发布便迅速窜红。弗雷德里克森认为这是公司多年以来不断调整和完善游戏的结果。QuizUp的做法与如今流行的“精益创业”方法论背道而驰。后者主张发布有缺点的产品，然后根据用户的反馈不断迭代。“完成比完美更重要”这条法则对QuizUp不适用，而完美主义几乎曾令QuizUp胎死腹中。就在两年前，破产的弗雷德里克森还住在出生地冰岛。他之前发布过一款游戏，但最终以惨败告终。

    所幸的是弗雷德里克森将竞猜游戏一直坚持下来，他一共发行了8款不同的竞猜游戏以研究用户行为。而这就是QuizUp最后成功的关键——这是一款有备而来的作品。弗雷德里克森将成功归功于“不同寻常的漫长研发过程”。

    弗雷德里克森说：“说到一夜成名，QuizUp自去年11月发布以来的表现可以算是，但它是我们两年辛勤工作的成果。”

    自发布以来，Plain Vanilla Games可就一直没闲着。最开始的一个月，他们在竭尽全力地确保服务器不崩溃；接下来，他们又忙着募资，招募新人；然后，QuizUp的竞猜主题从150个扩展到了420个【围绕《贱女孩》（Mean Girls）的新主题最近开始大受欢迎。】QuizUp最新的动作是在3月7日正式推出Android版。

    QuizUp的下一个计划是拓展国际市场。因为竞猜类游戏和文化关系密切，非常本地化，QuizUp对于进军非英语市场一直有些犹豫。

    虽然QuizUp在英国的应用程序商店名列前茅，但用户的评分不高，因为它的内容过于美国化。弗雷德里克森表示，QuizUp最近加入了很多有关皇室和英国X-Factor选秀的问题，英国用户们非常高兴。Plain Vanilla Games在新市场将雇佣本地团队，推出更多符合当地风土人情的专题。

    弗雷德里克森表示，过去四个月感觉“不太真实”，因为QuizUp获得的资金和估值在冰岛可谓史无前例。他说：“我希望激励未来的北欧创业者前往美国实现自己的梦想。勇者事成。”（财富中文网）

    译者：项航

    You've heard the cliché a million times: gaming is a hits-driven business. Just ask our friends at Zynga (ZNGA), which rode Farmville, and then CityVille, to an IPO and subsequent collapse. Or OMGPop, whose hit app Draw Something lost millions of users just as fast as it acquired them (but not before selling to Zynga for $200 million). Or Rovio, which had to make its hit Angry Birds games free in recent months to keep users interested in the aging franchise. Search trends even show a waning interest in Candy Crush, the hit of 2012 whose parent company has filed to go public later this year.

    Gamers, especially casual gamers, are a fickle bunch.

    That's why the staying power of QuizUp, a social media-enabled trivia game that hasn't left the top of the Apple (APPL) App Store Rankings since it launched four months ago, all the more impressive. Four months isn't terribly long, but in app time, it's ages. As I wrote last month, hot social networking app Secret became the latest in a line of faddish apps, and we're burning through fads faster than ever. Just two months after its launch, Secret has begun to decline in App Store rankings, according to ranking service App Annie.

    "Games usually have a very, very short life cycle, where if they break on through, they will get super popular for a couple of days, then they hit a cliff. In a week or so they just plummet off of the top 100," says Thor Fridriksson, CEO of QuizUp's parent company, Plain Vanilla Games. "We have seen so many games come and go like that while we were hanging in there."

    In just four months, QuizUp hit ten million registered users who spend an average of 30 minutes per day playing the game. That includes people who've only played it once, which shows just how much the top users – who have played tens of thousands of rounds of trivia, are engaging.

    QuizUp has maintained its position in the top 25 game apps and top 50 or so overall apps in the US Market. In that time, the company has grown from seven to 45 employees and raised a big $22 million round of venture funding from Sequoia Capital, Tencent, Greycroft Partners BOLDstart Ventures and e.ventures. The company recently partnered with talent agency WME to develop QuizUp-branded content for other channels, like TV.

    QuizUp was a hit from the moment it launched in the App Store. Fridriksson says it's a result of years of tweaking and perfecting the game. That method runs counter to the popular "lean startup" methodology of launching an imperfect product and iterating on it based on user behavior. The "done is better than perfect" philosophy did not apply with QuizUp, and perfectionism almost killed the game. Two years ago, Fridriksson was living in Iceland (where he was born) and bankrupt. He'd published one title and it was a total failure.

    But he persisted with the trivia app idea, launching eight different quiz apps to test out user behavior. That way when QuizUp finally did launch, it was fully optimized. Fridriksson attributes QuizUp's success to his company's "abnormally long development cycle."

    "When people talk about overnight successes, QuizUp kind of was when we launched in November, he says. But it was two years in the making."

    Since the launch, the company has been on a sprint to keep up. For the first month, the team struggled to keep servers afloat. Then they were busy raising money and scaling up the team. Then they expanded QuizUp's trivia offerings from 150 topics to 420 topics (A recent new category around the moving Mean Girls has surged in popularity). The latest update, announced today, brings the game to Android devices.

    QuizUp's next move will be to expand internationally. Since trivia is tied to culture and can be very local, the company has held back on international launches in non-English speaking countries.

    In the UK, where QuizUp has topped the App Store charts, users have given the app lower ratings because the content is too Americanized. QuizUp recently introduced more questions on the royal family and the X-Factor UK, which users quickly embraced, says Fridriksson. The company will hire local teams to introduce relevant content for each new region, he says.

    Fridriksson says the last four months have felt "a bit unreal," since the kind of funding and valuation numbers his company have garnered are unheardof in Iceland. "I hope to inspire future entrepreneurs from the Nordics that you can just go to America and get lucky," he says. "Fortune favors the bold and all that."