看起来，华尔街可能终于吃到了“坏糖果”——这次是一些表现糟糕的科技股。

    风靡一时的手游《糖果传奇》（Candy Crush Saga）开发商King Digital Entertainment周二宣布最近一个季度增长乏力、业绩平平，导致其尾盘股价下跌超过20%。这家手游界标杆公司的新游戏显然未能创造充足的现金，无法弥补进入市场饱和期的《糖果传奇》游戏收入的“出乎意料地”大幅下降。由于用户喜新厌旧、技术迅速迭代以及准入门槛低到近乎不存在，King以及手游行业的其他公司已被证明是糟糕的股权投资。或许，现在是时候让它们回到创业之初的硅谷车库里去了，直到它们足够成熟后再重返华尔街。

    过去几年的IPO热潮已将很多有问题的公司引入公开市场。虽然还没有一家公司的估值达到上世纪90年代末互联网泡沫时期荒谬的估值，但有一些已经相当接近了。在所有这些公开上市的公司中，King Digital Entertainment显然是最草草上场的一家。该公司搭上了最近一轮“web 2.0”上市浪潮的便车，获得了高估值。

    作为手游产品开发商，King几乎处于科技产业链的底端。该公司曾拥有爆炸式的增长，2013年收入较前一年增长了11倍，创造了近5.67亿美元的利润。但约80%的收入来自这家公司旗下的一个单一类别游戏——《糖果传奇》。King试图说服投资者相信，该公司将重现《糖果传奇》的成功，但没什么人买账。其股票价格首日上市即下跌16%。

    尽管困难重重，King作为上市公司发布的首个季度业绩仍有些鼓舞人心的亮点。该公司在收入多样化上取得了进展，《糖果传奇》占其收入的比例降至68%。或许市场看错了King？它的股价大幅反弹。投资银行纷纷设定了高高在上的目标价，并给予“买进”评级。

    King Digital周二公布实现盈利，并向股东派发1.50亿美元的巨额特殊股息，但股价未能达到华尔街激进的目标价格。该公司其他的游戏表现欠佳，来自《糖果传奇》的收入也持续下降。德意志银行（Deutsche Bank）将目标价从27美元降至12美元（该股周三盘后交易价格在14.50美元附近。）

    那么，这是因为华尔街期望太高太早？还是King Digital根本没有与科技巨头竞争的实力呢？看起来，两者皆有。

    手游业尚处于婴儿期，它能否为投资者创造持续收益仍有很多疑问。这一领域可能有巨大的增长潜力，比如亚洲的智能手机使用数量正在快速增长，但是那些曾经开发出热门游戏的公司或许无法从这些未来的增长中获得回报。市值一度达到70多亿美元的竞争对手Zynga也在试图重现其《开心农场》（Farmville）系列游戏的成功，结果并不顺利，为此该公司股价已连续多月下跌，今年已跌去30%，较2011年12月的IPO价格下跌超过70%。

    It looks like Wall Street may have finally had its fill of bad candy—and bad tech stocks.

    King Digital Entertainment , maker of the (once) popular mobile gaming app “Candy Crush Saga,” saw its shares fall over 20% late Tuesday after the company reported sluggish growth and tepid earnings for the previous quarter. The mobile gaming kingpin’s new titles apparently failed to generate sufficient cash to cover the “unexpectedly” steep drop in revenue from its maturing Candy Crush franchise. With a fickle audience, rapidly changing technology, and almost no barriers to entry, King as well as the rest of the mobile gaming space have proven to be terrible equity investments. It may be time for them to head back to their garages in Silicon Valley and stay there until they are mature enough to come back to Wall Street.

    The recent IPO boom has brought a lot of questionable companies to the public markets in the last couple of years. While none have boasted the absurd bubble-like valuations that characterized the Internet IPO boom of the late 1990s, a few have come pretty close. Of all the companies that went public, King Digital Entertainment, was clearly among the sketchiest. It was riding the wave of other “web 2.0″ properties that had recently gone to the market and garnered strong valuations.

    King, as a maker of “mobile gaming” products, was pretty much the bottom of the tech barrel. It had explosive growth, with 2013 revenues up 11-fold over the previous year, yielding profits of around $567 million. But around 80% of that revenue came from only one of its various games—Candy Crush. King tried to sell investors on the notion that it could repeat and build on Candy Crush’s success, but few took the bait. Its stock fell 16% on its first day of trading.

    Despite the odds, King posted some encouraging profits in its first quarterly earnings as a public company. It had been able to diversify its revenue so that Candy Crush only accounted for 68% of its revenue, instead of 80%. Maybe the market misjudged King after all? Its stock price rallied. The investment banks set lofty price targets and slapped a “buy” rating on the stock.

    King Digital posted a profit on Tuesday and issued a sizable $150 million special dividend to its shareholders, but it failed to meet Wall Street’s aggressive price targets. Its other games still aren’t doing well, while revenues from Candy Crush have continued to fall. Deutsche Bank lowered its earnings target from $27 a share to $12 a share (the stock was trading around $14.50 in the after hours markets).

    So, is this a case of Wall Street simply expecting too much, too soon, or does King Digital simply not have what it takes to compete with the big boys of the tech world? It seems to be a little bit of both.

    Mobile gaming is in its infancy and there are a lot of questions about its ability to generate consistent profits for its investors. The sector may have great potential to grow, amid the proliferation of smartphones in Asia for example, but companies that have managed to produce hit games in the past may not reap the rewards of such future growth. Rival game maker Zynga , which at one point commanded a market valuation of over $7 billion, has had a hard time repeating the success of its Farmville franchise and has seen its share price tumble month after month as a result—down 30% this year and down over 70% since its IPO in December 2011.

    为什么在这个市场很难重复成功？让我们回想一下，过去行得通的是哪些游戏模式。像《愤怒的小鸟》（Angry Birds）、《开心农场》和《糖果传奇》这样的成功手游吸引了广泛的用户群体：这些游戏足够简单，儿童都可以玩，但又足够有趣，能够吸引青少年和成人。这些游戏都不是非常复杂，每一关的时间在5至15分钟之间，而且没有一个游戏“图像浩大”，可以在尽可能多的智能手机上运行。

    所有这些游戏都非常简单。真的不存在任何重大的技术壁垒，这意味着几乎任何中级水平的程序员都有机会一举成名。这给像Zynga这样功成名就的手游公司带来了重大挑战。比如，《糖果传奇》到2012年下半年才上市。几乎不知是从哪里冒出来的，令行业领导者Zynga大吃一惊。一夜之间，这家拥有数十亿美元投资的公司突然被一家初创企业夺走了市场份额。这样的市场冲击是颠覆性的，导致高预期和公司破产。

    更加糟糕的是，这些手游公司无一能掌控产品分销渠道，都依赖Facebook、谷歌（Google）、苹果（Apple）或微软（Microsoft）的应用商店。这些公司非常容易在分销渠道受到挤压。假设说，如果谷歌要求Zynga交出一半的利润来换取其最新游戏的分销，Zynga真的不能拒绝。这是因为，约80%的手机用户使用谷歌的安卓（Android）操作系统来运行他们的智能手机。数字分销市场的集中化可能是所有应用软件公司的软肋，特别是像King Digital和Zynga这样依赖众多应用软件内购买的公司。

    King Digital很可能尽快发布下一款轰动性游戏，但它也可能被证明是一大失败。看起来，手游公司的运营类似于风险投资公司：它们仅仅期望每8个或更多的游戏中有1个能热销。对于一家拥有高速增长预期的公司，这是个问题，因为这可能意味着收入不稳定。

    如果一家公司的产品属于一个成熟市场，投资者群体拥有长期增长预期，这样的不稳定在预料之内，但手游行业显然不是这样。收益不稳定是灾难性的，这最终会疏远公司与投资者之间的关系，无论其风险偏好高低。因此，在游戏公司找到出路之前，最好的办法或许是让它们重归私有化，到硅谷再修炼一番。（财富中文网）

    译者：早稻米

Why is it so hard to repeat success in this market? Let’s think about what has worked in the past. Successful mobile games like Angry Birds, Farmville, and Candy Crush have appealed to a wide audience: they are simple enough for children to play but interesting enough to draw in teens and adults. The games weren’t overly complex, lasting between five and 15 minutes per round and none were “graphic hogs,” allowing them to be used on as many smartphones as possible.

These games are all very simple. There are really no major skill barriers here, meaning that just about any mid-level programmer has a shot at making it big. This presents major competition issues for established mobile gaming companies like Zynga. Candy Crush, for instance, only hit the scene in late 2012. It basically came out of nowhere, taking Zynga, the leader in the space, totally by surprise. Overnight, the company, with its billions of dollars of investor capital, was suddenly losing market share to some startup. This level of market disruption is chaotic, leading to lofty expectations and broken companies.

To make matters worse, none of these mobile gaming companies control the distribution of their product, relying on Facebook or app stores owned by Google, Apple, or Microsoft to do it for them. These companies are highly vulnerable to being squeezed at the distribution end. If Google wants, say, half of Zynga’s profits in exchange for distributing its latest game, Zynga really can’t say no. That’s because around 80% of mobile phone users have Google’s Android operating system running on their smartphones. The concentration of the digital distribution market could be a major impediment for all “app”-based companies, especially those that rely on multiple in-app purchases, like King Digital and Zynga.

King Digital could very well come out with the next blockbuster game tomorrow, but it’s just as likely to come out with a flop. It seems that mobile gaming companies operate like venture capital firms in that they expect only one out of eight or more games they launch to take off. This is a problem for a company with high growth expectations as it could mean major lumpiness in the revenue stream.

Such lumpiness is expected if a product belongs to a mature market with an investor base with long-term growth expectations, but that’s hardly the case with mobile gaming. Erratic earnings is a recipe for disaster as it ultimately alienates investors across the entire risk spectrum. So until these gaming companies can figure out what works, it may be best for them to go private again and tinker around in Silicon Valley until they get it right.