Kabam公司首席执行官周凯文：如何打造一款热门游戏

    你后来怎么会和好莱坞合作开发游戏？

    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。

    这些游戏的目标是模拟电影情节，还是让故事进一步发展？

    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。

    有没有哪些电影是你不想改编成游戏的？

    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。

    有没有哪个角色或故事让你陷入麻烦？

    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。

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

    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.

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

    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.

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

    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.

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

    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.