In the summer of 1982, a children's science fiction movie, starting from Hollywood, swept the global market, just in the United States, it got a box office of 435 million US dollars, and the global box office was as high as 800 million US dollars.

This movie, called ET Aliens, tells the story of a group of children and an alien, almost all children in the United States fell in love with this movie, and in the hearts of many children, ET Aliens is as well-known as Star Wars 6 years ago.

Since the advent of video games in the early '70s, many of Hollywood's most famous movies have been adapted into video games every year, at a cost ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

Game companies are willing to pay such a large amount of money because they like the fame of the movie itself and the huge audience, which are very likely to become potential customers.

The movie ET is not only famous, but also the main audience is children, and it is a big duplication with the customers of the game company.

In order to deal with the rivals on the other side of the ocean, Midea and Sony, Atari was ruthless and spent $25 million to buy the game development rights of ET Alien.

Originally, although the deal was expensive, with the huge influence of ET, Atari could make a huge profit from developing a game that was not bad to play, far more than $25 million in royalties.

But Atari made the most naïve mistake, the company's top management only valued the name of the game, but did not care about the quality of the game, and the negotiations with Warner to acquire the rights to the ET Alien game dragged on for too long, until the end of October.

In time for the Christmas carnival two months later, CEO Caesar ordered his technical engineers to develop a game within six weeks.

The game developers were severely short of time and delivered a very bad answer, and Atari's entire company management had problems, and after the technical department developed a game, it didn't even have a trial program, and began to arrange for the factory to be mass-produced.

The ending of the matter is very simple, "ET Alien" is the most rubbish of all game cartridges, in addition to the low playability, there are also a large number of game crashes, character cartridges, screen blue screen phenomenon, the fundamental reason is, in the process of production, because the time is too tight, resulting in serious mass quality problems.

For years, Atari has been trying to win by volume, and the flood of low-quality games has caused dissatisfaction among most people. Players finally waited for a well-known "good game" promised by Atari to buy it at a high price, only to find out that it was an even more garbage game.

So, after Christmas, the enraged buyer went to the Atari game store with the Atari game console and all the game cartridges at home, and directly smashed his game console and smashed the game cartridges.

This incident was published by the local newspaper again, and in the next few days, some people also joined in, and went directly to the game store, without even mentioning the return request, and directly smashed their own game consoles.

Soon, like the spread of the virus, the incident became more and more noisy, more people joined in, some TV stations even came to film, and eventually, many game stores throughout the United States became popular in the door of smashing game consoles, burning game consoles, and driving game consoles.

In later generations, many people thought that Atari's collapse was due to the unsalable ET cartridges, but this was only one of the reasons, this group of crazy players scared all the game store owners, they were no longer willing to represent any of Atari's products, and even asked for a large number of returns, coupled with the media's fuel, Atari's products were no longer cared for, and under the blows of many parties, Atari's entire sales industry chain and brand completely collapsed.

After the collapse of Atari, the vacant market left behind was naturally occupied by other brands, and now the game market is full of flowers, because the threshold for entry is not high, countless companies have entered the industry, intending to take a piece of the huge market.

January 20, 1983.

Xu Zhi once again set foot on the land of Los Angeles.

"Chairman, welcome to Los Angeles. "Midea's headquarters in the United States is in Los Angeles, and when I learned that the big boss was coming, several branch executives came to the airport early in the morning to greet them.

Xu Zhi smiled and shook hands with a few people who came to pick up the plane, and said with a smile: "A few people have worked hard, because of the weather, the plane was delayed a lot." ”

Although you are flying on your own private jet, the airport is not your home, and if you want to land, you have to listen to the tower, at this moment, it is snowing heavily in Los Angeles, and the plane hovers in the air for more than an hour before finally landing.

"I've lived in Los Angeles for more than ten years, and this is the first time I've encountered such a heavy snowfall. One of the people who came to pick him up said with a smile that he was the CEO of Midea in the United States, named Sloan.

When any large multinational company sets up a branch overseas, the most common problem is that it is not adaptable, which is very common in the mainland in later generations, and countless top enterprises in Europe and the United States have encountered such problems in China.

The United States is the largest market for Midea companies, and in order to develop more efficiently, He Guoyuan did not arrange a Chinese to control the American branch, but selected Sloan from countless American candidates.

The group went directly from the airport lobby to the underground parking lot, and soon several cars left the airport and headed for downtown Los Angeles.

Outside the window, the snow was fluttering, the cold wind was cold, but the inside of the car was as warm as spring, Xu Zhi gently shook the glass lifting knob counterclockwise, and a cold wind blew in, and the person immediately sobered up a lot from the jet lag.

After a while, Xu Zhi turned the knob clockwise, and after the window closed, he asked, "What's the situation with Atari now?"

Sloan replied, "Atari basically lost completely this time, with a large number of suppliers asking for returns, all the media going down, and the whole company operating at a complete standstill." ”

"Atari has made a lot of mistakes, but since it has been the largest game company in the United States for several years in a row, it makes sense, and their in-house technicians and some of the elite people in the marketing department are also what our company needs. Xu Zhi reminded.

Sloan smiled: "Boss, don't worry, I have already arranged two headhunting companies to prepare to poach people from Atari Company." ”

"Good. Xu Zhi nodded with a smile and asked again, "Is Sony doing the same thing?"

One of the main purposes of this visit to the United States is to provide a large number of game design talents within Atari, which has been established for more than ten years, and is also the first video game company in the history of human business.

Although Atari has not produced any classic games over the years, it is not a problem of technical personnel, but the result of the entire management focusing only on quantity and ignoring quality.

Sloan replied: "Yes, Sony has been poaching people all this time, and now many of the Atari engineers who have been in contact with us are also being targeted by Sony or other game companies, which makes it more difficult for us to recruit than before." ”

Xu Zhi thought for a while and said: "It's okay, just an ordinary technician, some people with experience as a game development project director, you can promise to give him an agreement on the game development ladder, as long as the person comes, it won't be a problem." ”

Midea company for the internal engineers who can develop their own games,Give a very high treatment,The highest one is the profit ladder share,As long as the minimum sales volume is reached,Then the remaining profits,The company will give developers a certain share。

This kind of contract is naturally the company's lion's share of the profits, but for employees, if a good game is developed, even a small share of the profits is a huge amount of income, which is much better than in the current environment, where most people in other game companies are paid dead wages.

Although employees are given a share, it also stimulates the motivation of employees, and the company also obtains higher profits as a result.

In the past two years, Xu Zhi has rarely come up with games for later generations, and Midea has also relied on this strategy to develop a lot of new games, avoiding the company from relying too much on those simple games.

Sloan nodded in agreement, "OK, boss, there are a lot of people in Atari who have a lot of experience developing games, and our company's policy is obviously more suitable for them." ”

Xu Zhi smiled: "Then you have to work harder in this matter, at present, the arcade market has begun to shrink, and the focus of our company's game business has become computer games and home console games, which are different from arcades, and require a large number of new games to stabilize the current market." ”

Although the sales of arcade machines are very limited, the profits are high enough, and this piece has always been the largest profit business of Midea. However, the limitations of the market are inevitable, and every time a game is played with money, how can it be played comfortably on a home console or computer.

With the development of semiconductor technology, the gaming experience of home game consoles is not much weaker than that of arcade machines, and if it is not for some fighting games, the arcade market may shrink at a faster rate.

The market size of home consoles is actually much larger than that of arcade consoles, but the problem that comes with it is that after buying consoles and cartridges, users will experience visual fatigue when they play a free game for a long time, so the only way to keep the market is to offer more games.

Atari's management actually understood this, but they were too focused on quantity, which eventually led to the company's bankruptcy.

And Midea's large-scale takeover of Atari this time is to use these people to develop more games and stabilize the dominant market position of game consoles. At the same time, in the field of personal computers, a good game can also make huge profits.

Sloan said: "Don't worry, boss, Atari's game console sales have actually been surpassed by us at the end of last year, even if there is no ET game **, our beauty can gradually monopolize the entire game console market." ”

Xu Zhi asked: "What about Sony's game consoles, and what about the quality and sales?"

Sloan said: "In terms of product quality, Sony's console hardware configuration is indeed very good, but the quality of games is poor, in recent years, although there have been a lot of games, some sales are not bad, but a real classic game has never been born." ”

"It's not to be underestimated that you can grow to the third place in the world in a few years without a classic game. Xu Zhi sighed in his heart, the current market share of Sony's game consoles is not comparable to Midea, but Sony, which has absorbed the Nintendo team, will always be an awe-inspiring opponent.

Although Midea has begun to focus on the field of personal computers and terminal sales, the gaming industry is the foundation of all expansion.

After a while, Xu Zhi asked, "Has Currie from Goldman Sachs arrived in Los Angeles?"

Sloan said, "He's already here, and he's staying at the Intercontinental Hotel, do you want to see him tonight?"

"No need, I'm going to have a day off, you make an appointment with him for me, and I'll pick him up at the Intercontinental Hotel tomorrow." Xu Zhi waved his hand and refused, although he has his own private jet, but no matter how comfortable the configuration is, it can only alleviate, but not completely remove the fatigue of the body, from Asia to the United States, across 13 time zones, day and night have been reversed, people are still a little uncomfortable.

Sloan took out his eldest brother and promised, "Okay, I'll let him know right away." ”

……