Gu Biao was not keen on archaeology in his previous life, so his understanding of the development history of the early game console industry was almost limited to watching the video of Director Ao at station B.

For example, the famous "Atari Collapse" is a big event, of course he knows, after all, there are at least tens of thousands of UP masters on station B who have fried a bowl of gossip cold rice - it is said that in the 1982 Christmas season, Atari Company released an epic rotten product "ET Alien", which destroyed the credibility of the industry and buried the entire American game console industry.

Previously, Atari had more than 10 million units in the United States and tens of millions of units sold worldwide, 28% of American families bought their game consoles, and the global home console market share exceeded 80%......

Then because "ET the Extra-Terrestrial" exploded instantly, he died on the spot, and the output value of the American game industry fell by 97% in one year...... (Sales fell from more than $300 million to just $100 million.) ）

It gave Nintendo and other Japanese manufacturers, which were almost in the embryonic state, a chance to rise miraculously.

It can be seen that at least until 1982, Japanese companies such as Nintendo were very weak in the global game industry, and even just started.

In his previous life, when Director Ao explained the origin of the game industry, he said that there was a game called "Space Invaders", which is said to be the first officially released interactive shooting game in history, and it also opened the door to the "shooting game" category.

(Note: The so-called "interactive shooting" here emphasizes that "the enemy will also shoot bullets against the player.") Because before the appearance of the space invaders, there were already other one-sided shooters, but the enemy would only be beaten and would not fight back, so it was not exciting and did not catch fire. ）

This game appeared vaguely at the end of '78 or '79, and then it should explode and drive the entire Japanese manufacturers to really follow suit and embark on the video game console industry.

At the same time, because the concept of "shooting games" has become the first initiative of Yue, Japanese manufacturers have accumulated more depth in this area, and they have also left a frontier position for Yue, who is competing with the Americans. And with this advantage, after 3 years of development in small steps, it is a good time to catch up with the demise of the American system.

But now Gu Biao's investigation of the market results are that he has not found any trace of the "space invaders".

Other followers who were induced by this fuse naturally had no way to follow.

However, after talking and researching with Akihabara's arcade bosses such as Takasa Yasunari, Gu Biao caught a clue: in the first half of the year, there was indeed a market researcher and new product developer of an arcade company who came to sell them some ideas, the content of which was "electronic shooter games with screens", to test their willingness to invest in new products.

But maybe the customer feedback was bad, and then the matter was gone.

Gu Biao spent a few cigarettes, some small gifts, and found out that the arcade company was called "TAITO", and even found out that the person in charge of the product idea was called "Xijiaojun".

"Thank you so much, Gao Shasan, and I wish you a prosperous business. ”

After getting useful information, Gu Biao generously stuffed a pack of cigarettes at the end, and inquired about the location of Taidong Company, and then went straight with Yang Xin.

……

After going around the streets of Tokyo for two hours, Gu Biao and his entourage finally arrived at Taidong Electric in the suburbs.

In the electronics/electrical industry in this era, the separation of production, R&D and marketing departments is not very clear, and there is almost no habit of looking for foundries. (Because the electronic processing industry in Wanwan and South Korea has not yet risen to a sufficient scale, it is said that I am still producing by myself.) Southeast Asia is even further behind. ）

Therefore, the office building of Taidong Electric is a wonderful building integrated with the assembly workshop and warehouse. The bottom three floors are factory storage and transportation, and the upper floors are offices.

Gu Biao brought a business card, and the title was from the copyright agency, so after a little communication, he asked where the office of the technical department was located, and he came in smoothly - there are no strict visit procedures and confidentiality systems here. It should be that the company is inconspicuous and not a leader in the industry, so I don't think anyone will make up my mind.

The first floor is full of pachinko machines and slot machines, all of which are electric gambling equipment or quasi-gambling equipment, which is the electric entertainment equipment with the highest profit margin and the best sales in this era.

Especially the pachinko machine, although the gambling is not as serious as the slot machine, and the speed of scraping money is not fast, but it is better than not need any business authority, any electrical house, bar, discotheque, shopping mall...... can be concurrent, naturally no one is willing to let go.

This is a machine that does not need the qualifications to operate the gambling industry, but can share the profits from the gambling industry, who would be too much.

"May I ask if you are Mr. Tomohiro Xijiao?" Gu Biao went straight into the office of the technical department, and no one stopped him, and he directly found the table with the name tag "Xijiao" written on it.

It seems that this Xijiaojun is not in a very favored situation at the moment.

"I am, which one are you?" Tomohiro Nishikaku was a little confused, not understanding why someone from outside the company would visit him directly.

Aren't you usually looking for colleagues from the marketing department or the purchasing department?

Moreover, Gu Xiao and Yang Xin are fluent in Japanese, and the appearance gap between the Chinese and Yue himself is not large, so that he can't recognize this as a foreigner at all.

At most, I just think these two visitors are so handsome and tall.

"Let me introduce myself - contemptible Gu Xiao, Chinese, this is my business card, I run an intellectual property agency in Xiangjiang. ”

Xijiao Tomohiro looked at the business card in a daze: "I don't know what Gu Sang is looking for me?"

Gu Biao didn't show an eager posture either, and asked unhurriedly: "I inquired from the boss of Takasa Yasunari in Akihabara, that you were in charge of your company in the first half of the year to try to launch a video game that shoots at each other?"

This is a basic negotiation technique, and it should not give the impression that you are interested in this thing, so as not to increase the psychological price of the other party.

"Yes, indeed, but it was later rejected by the marketing department's customer research......"

"Can you talk more about that? Maybe we'll be interested after we analyze it. ”

"Okay" Tomohiro Nishikaku didn't think there was anything wrong with it, after all, it was a project that had already been shot.

……

Half an hour later, Gu Biao heard a classic case that was enough to be written into "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen.

Christensen, a professor of management at Harvard University, has studied countless iterations of the U.S. hard disk drive industry - each generation of hard disk companies, after 20 years, 20 companies will go bankrupt and close 19, leaving only 1 to live to the next 20 years.

And so on, with a 9% mortality rate for each generation.

The main culprit of Christensen's analysis of this situation is the "inertia of market research".

When a company that produces 14-inch hard disks asks its customers "We can now develop 8-inch hard disks, do you need them?", its customers must answer "no".

Because the customer's existing products are used to 14-inch hard drives, and the structure is stable, there is no need to pay more for greater storage density. So the companies that survived best in the 14-inch era died in the 8-inch era.

The 8-inch era was the best alive, and the 5.25 era died again. 5.25 gets the best, 3.5 inch era is dead again......

Companies that make hard disks for mainframes will never go to the manufacturers who make PCs for research, and companies that make hard disks for PCs will not go to the developers of the next generation of IPOD products. No one can see the capacity of the emerging model market.

On Tomohiro's side in the West Corner, Gu Biao didn't know what was going on. Maybe in another time and space, he walked the dog S luck and met a marketing leader who dared to gamble his life, just like a writer who wrote innovative articles, and the dog S Yun met an editor who didn't look at the "big data of works". So the innovation succeeded.

Now I have met a mediocre talent who looks at market research big data, so I have become a dog routine dog.

Who made the underlying innovation of Geming always subvert market research and big data. It is to be the corner of big data that is "not cost-effective" that is worthy of the birth of an innovative driving force that overturns the entire table.

"The owners of the electric arcade machine all say that this machine is a scammer. There is only one circuit board, which should not be sold at such a high price, and it is said that even if it is mass-produced, it will not be purchased, so the marketing department feedback and canceled the mass production.

But Intel's 8080/8086, as well as Zilog's Z80, these CPUs are very expensive, and if they are made into video game consoles, the price cannot be lower. It is the downstream business customers who cannot understand the value of this new thing, so they feel that they have lost money and feel uncomfortable. I can't change anything. ”

This is Tomohiro Nishikaku's last complaint.

Gu Biao had already heard the problem.

It is said that this national character is not respectful of intellectual property rights.

This is not to say that I am unwilling to pay for virtual items - compared to Americans, I am actually very willing to pay for virtual items, otherwise in the years when Americans desperately climbed over the wall to "Youku" to watch pirated movies, the proportion of people who went over the wall was much lower.

However, from the perspective of cultural attributes, although Americans are more able to pay less, they feel that they should pay.

Although I am physically honest and have paid for it, I don't feel it is worth it culturally.

This can be seen from the style of Japanese IP manufacturers such as BANDAI - I have put the profit points of anime and games at the beginning on selling Gundam, figurines, and peripherals. Unlike Americans, who think that the bulk of the profits should come from the sale of virtual items themselves.

At this time, when the arcade owners saw a new thing like "CPU", they felt that they had been cheated, and they did not think about it in terms of how much money they could make by introducing these machines.

This is also human nature - the Chinese are actually the same in this regard. When Gu Biao went to the computer market for the first time to match the machine, after looking at the price of each component, his parents were stunned to find that the thing that was only the size of a fingernail was more expensive than a huge hard disk and motherboard, which was also unacceptable.

Gu Biao spent a lot of words and explained to his parents, "Don't look at this thing as small, this is the 'brain' of the computer, it should be so expensive", and finally reversed the thinking of the older generation.

Otherwise, the old man may really think that "the cooling fan on the CPU should be more expensive than the CPU itself"

Just like the bosses of the 79-year-old Akihabara Electric Store, they think that the roaring big motor should be more expensive than the CPU.

But when the words came to his mouth, Gu Biao would definitely not tell the truth, he would only say:

"You are really not well packaged, and the content is not well designed. However, I met a colleague with considerable design skills in Xiangjiang. Would you like to let this semi-finished product exert some residual heat? ”

Xijiao Youhong looked at Gu Biao vigilantly: "I don't count if I say this, don't talk to me, go to my colleagues in the marketing department." ”