《Chip Chain》本土化版本编辑本段回目录
作者：Aaron Isaksen
《Chip Chain》登录iOS平台后，我们首先注意到，它在每个国家的表现各不相同，因此我们有必要记录每个用户的来源地，否则当前数据极易被曲解。同样，在修改该应用内容时，我们有必要查看这些不同之处。幸好，我已经将这部分信息输入数据追踪器，借此，我可以查看各个国家的盈利情况，由于报告结果均以当地货币形式显示，因此，我们的所有追踪事件均能指示来源地。我可以预计，大部分追踪器均包含这一特性（游戏邦注：比如Flurry的功能），而且你不应该使用无法支持基于地区或其它分类的追踪器。
Chip Chains(from maclife.com)
我们在分析数据时将此称为“分割”过程，因为它们属于完整用户组的一个子集。你可以依据年龄、性别、消费习性、国家、语言等因素进行划分。但在本文中，我主要探讨两个部分，其一是美国用户，其二是中国用户，因为这两个国家可以称为《Chip Chain》这款游戏的主流市场。
在用户方面，美国占据26.57%的比例，中国占有31.08%。在根据IAP购买情况了解各个国家的获利情况时（苹果每天都会提供相应的数据报告），我们得知，美国市场创下更多收益……实际上，尽管中国拥有更多用户，美国市场的获利情况仍是中国地区的7.16倍，而从每用户平均收益情况看，美国用户创下的“平均”收益是中国市场的8.17倍。如果你正在调查ARPU（每用户平均收益）这类数据，那么上述情况十分关键，因为如果将中国或美国计算在内，那么这些数据值会发生重大改变。当然，这两个地区购买真版与盗版内容的态度也存在差异，但我们可以通过研究更多数据发现，除付费态度以外，两个国家在购买IAP方面还有哪些不同。
比如，我们可以调查用户每次玩游戏的时间。如果某个用户打开游戏后，体验两道关卡，而后关闭，并不再进入，那么基本上他们只有一个体验时间段。如果用户在较短时间内又回到游戏进程，比如10分钟，这仍然算是同一次游戏时间。通过观察可知，40.6%的美国玩家会在10多分钟后回到游戏进程，而只有31.7%的中国玩家有此行为。我并不清楚原因何在，但总存在某些因素导致该游戏对中国玩家的吸引力逊于美国玩家。
也许，是各地玩家兴趣造成这种不同点：因为不同地方的玩家喜欢不同类型的游戏，因此，可能某款游戏在这个国家属于小众市场，而在另一国家则成为主流作品。而且，这还能够解释他们体验时长与何时体验游戏这些方面存在差异的原因。也许，这可以归结为本土化问题——《Chip Chain》已被翻译为9种语言，包括简体中文，但其首发版可能存在某些翻译误差。我们今后应该聚集一批粉丝，让他们找出翻译中的差错，以便我们修改。此外，在首发的两个版本中，游戏中的某些漏洞只在某些语言版本内出现，而这会影响到那些特定语言用户的留存问题，不过这种情况并没有发生在中文或英文版本中。
我们从中获得的重要启发是，你应从不同视角关注各个地区，只有当你发现某些相似的用户行为模式，你才能推出各个国家都能接受的作品。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译）
The Importance of Tracking by Country
by Aaron Isaksen
One of the first things we noticed the day Chip Chain launched on iOS was that each country acts very differently, so it’s essential that you track which country a user comes from, or else your data can easily be corrupted. And it’s equally important to look at these differences when deciding to make a change in your app. Luckily, I had put this information in the tracker data for purposes of figuring out revenue from each country, since this is reported in the local currency, so all our tracking events come with a country identifier. I expect that almost all trackers already do this (for example Flurry does), and you should not use a tracker that doesn’t allow easy separation by country and other factors.
When analyzing your data, this is called a “segment” which is a subset of the complete set of users. You can do segments based on all sorts of things like age, gender, spending habits, country, language, etc. But for this discussion, I’ll focus on two segments, one for all users from the US and one for all users from China, since those are the top two markets for Chip Chain.
The US is home to 26.57% of our users, and China is home to 31.08% of our users. When we look at how much revenue I get from IAP from each country, since Apple reports this to us on a daily basis, we get significantly more revenue from the US…in fact it’s currently 7.16x more total revenue from US, even though we have more users in China, and on a per user average, it’s 8.17x times more revenue from an “average” US user. This is pretty critical if you are looking at stats like ARPU (average revenue per user) since the numbers are so different depending if you include China or US.
Attitudes to paid content and piracy are certainly different in these two regions, but we can look at more data and see there is still more going on than just differences in attitudes to paying for IAP.
For example, we can look at the number of sessions a user has played the game. A single session is basically if someone opens the game, plays a couple of levels, then closes the game and doesn’t come back for a while. If the user returns within a short period of time, lets say 10 minutes, it still counts as the same session. I see that 40.6% of US players have come back for 10+ sessions, while only 31.7% of Chinese players have come back for 10+ sessions. I don’t know what it is, but there is some reason the game isn’t yet as compelling for Chinese users as US users.
Perhaps the difference is just due to local tastes: gamers in different parts of the world prefer different types of games, so it’s possible that a game is niche in one country while it’s mainstream in another. Local tastes can also explain why there are differences in the amount of time played or when the games are played. Or it could be localization issues – Chip Chain is translated into 9 languages, including Simplified Chinese, but perhaps it has mistranslations or confusing translations on it’s first release. Over time, we should build up enough fans that would tell us when a translation is incorrect so that we can tune this up. Furthermore, In our first 2 builds we had some bugs that only showed up in certain languages, so this could affect retention for those specific languages, although this didn’t occur for Chinese or English.
The important lesson is that you need to pay attention to each region differently, and only lump countries together if you notice similar patterns of behavior.(source:gamasutra)
