扎克伯格一句话捧红的游戏

    SongPop是最近风行一时的在线游戏，其发迹史进一步证明有两个因素使得社交游戏具有独特优势，即脱胎于经典，容易上手。

    与此前的《你画我猜》（Draw Something）以及《与朋友猜词》（Words With Friends）一样，SongPop依托于一个老的理念：它基本上就是Name That Tune——这档电视游戏节目曾在50年代初期至80年代推出了各种版本。当然，《你画我猜》的基础是室内游戏《看图说词》（Pictionary），而《与朋友猜词》本质上是拼词游戏Scrabble，只不过平台略有不同而已。这三款游戏都没有复杂的规则，也没有什么太大的难度——马上就可以上手。SongPop的玩法是：音乐开始，玩家从四个选项中进行选择，尽快猜出歌曲名或歌手名。

    这款游戏浑然天成，无论如何，它至少都会小有所成。而现在它又得到马克•扎克伯格的力捧，扎克伯格于6月21日在自己的Facebook主页上写道：“SongPop太有趣了，我有一阵子没玩过这么好玩的Facebook游戏了。”

    游戏网站Inside Social Games的首席撰稿人麦克•汤普森称，在扎克伯格一番评头论足后，SongPop的使用量“暴涨”。“我们很少看到游戏能这样迅速蹿红。”

    SongPop的上升势头目前仍在延续。根据AppData的数据，该游戏在Facebook上已经拥有1,810万月度活跃用户，每日访问量也已达420万次。而在8月13日，这两项数字还分别为1,460万和340万。SongPop在iOS和Android移动平台上也同样大受欢迎。

    面对SongPop的迅速窜红，游戏的联合创作者马修•洛扎雷斯本人也大感意外。洛扎雷斯和兄弟罗曼一道创立了FreshPlanet公司，进而推出了SongPop。洛扎雷斯说：“根本没想到SongPop会这么成功。我们之前也就只能做做白日梦而已。”

    洛扎雷斯称，在扎克伯格发表言论的当天，“我们发现流量几乎瞬间暴涨。起初我们认为是被黑客袭击了，或是软件出了问题。”几乎同时，我们接到无数电话，邮箱也瞬间被个人简历塞满。

    大约三分之二的SongPop用户通过移动设备联入Facebook进行游戏。洛扎雷斯称，我们最开始的想法是开发一个融合了社交媒体和移动技术各自优势的游戏。许多游戏都会偏向特定平台，例如《愤怒的小鸟》（Angry Birds），其用户几乎完全来自移动平台；而社交游戏公司Zynga的许多热门游戏，如《虚拟农场》（Farmville），定位都局限于Facebook社交游戏。“我希望在不远的将来，能有更多游戏能融合两者所长。”确实，SongPop在“融合”上成功借鉴了《你画我猜》和《与朋友猜词》两款游戏，这是它大获成功的另一大关键。

    不过目前为止，SongPop仍处于亏本状态。洛扎雷斯承认，在服务器等方面，“开销非常非常高。数字大得让人崩溃。”不过，洛扎雷斯认为在未来数月，SongPop的营收将有望实现平衡。

    营收将主要来自以下方面：广告；游戏内购买（例如购买更多的歌曲和游戏）；为iTunes音乐购买所带来的流量收入。洛扎雷斯并未透露公司从音乐销售中获取了多少收益，不过他表示“比例很低”。 洛扎雷斯也不愿透露SongPop的总营收。

    The rise of SongPop, the latest online game to make it into the "craze" category, is further evidence that two factors give special advantages to social-media games: a basis in the classics, and simplicity.

    Like Draw Something and Words With Friends before it, SongPop is based on an old idea: in this case, it's basically Name That Tune, a TV game show that ran in various incarnations from the early '50s to the mid-'80s. Draw Something, of course, is based on the parlor game Pictionary and Words With Friends is essentially Scrabble on a slightly different board. In all three cases, there are no complicated rules and there are no steep learning curves -- you just start playing. SongPop presents players with a set of four choices of song titles or artists: the music starts and players make their guesses as quickly as they can.

    The game is a natural, and it probably would have been at least a middling success no matter what. But it got an extra boost after Mark Zuckerburg wrote on his Facebook (FB) page on June 21: "SongPop is one of the most fun Facebook games I've played in a while."

    Usage "skyrocketed" after that post, says Mike Thompson, the lead writer for Inside Social Games. "We very rarely see a game take off like that."

    And the trend still seems to be up. As of Wednesday, SongPop had 18.1 million monthly active users on Facebook, and 4.2 million daily users, according to AppData. That's up from 14.6 million and 3.4 million, respectively, on August 13. The game is also popular on both iOS (AAPL) and Android (GOOG) mobile platforms.

    Nobody is as surprised by how quickly people have taken to the game as its co-creator Mathieu Nouzareth. He founded FreshPlanet, the company that owns SongPop, along with his brother Romain. "This is not the kind of success you can predict," he says. "You can hope for it and dream about it, maybe."

    On the day of Zuckerberg's post, "we saw the traffic jump within seconds," he says. "We thought maybe we were under attack or there was a bug." Almost as quickly, the phone lines were jammed and the resumes started flowing in.

    About two thirds of those playing via mobile devices log in through Facebook. The idea from the beginning, Nouzareth says, was to create a game that combines the strengths of social media and mobile technology. Many games are designed more for one platform than the other -- for instance, Angry Birds is a huge mobile game that users play by themselves, while many of Zynga's (ZNGA) most popular games, such as Farmville, are social and limited mainly to Facebook. "I expect that in the future, there will be a lot more games that combine the two," Nouzareth says. And indeed, that combination is another thing that SongPop shares with other big successes like Draw Something and Words With Friends.

    So far, the game isn't profitable. "Costs are very, very high," Nouzareth says, particularly server costs -- "it's insane how high they are." But he says the break-even point should be reached within the next few months.

    Revenue comes in the form of advertising, in-game purchases (for, among other things, access to more songs and more genres), and traffic the game sends to iTunes for music purchases. Nouzareth won't say how big a cut the company gets from music sales, but called it a "tiny percentage." He also declined to talk about total revenues.