If there is anyone in the world who cares more about the rise and fall of his business than the owner himself, it must be his competitors.

At the same time that Gu Biao himself was paying close attention to the progress of the launch of the Tiankun Ps game console, far away in Kyoto on the other side of the ocean, Nintendo's Yamauchi Pu paid more attention than him.

Yamauchi was just 60 years old last year, so now he is facing a new wave of competition, and his mentality is quite different from when he first entered the home computer market five years ago, and he is more open-minded.

Five years ago, Yamauchi Pu, who was only 56 years old, was still relatively radical at that time, and when he saw what his opponent had launched, he immediately wanted to engage in a benchmark competitor to grab business. Five years later, when you are over sixty years old, you will see things more according to your own established rhythm, and you will not be so easy to get angry, and you will not see that your opponent has a new gadget and must immediately compare with each other.

The old man has been at the helm of Nintendo for almost 40 years, and if history has not changed, he can continue to be at the helm for another 13 years, until he retires at the beginning of the 21st century. It can be regarded as spending his whole life on Nintendo's business, from the age of 24 to the age of 76.

Historically, Sega failed miserably to Nintendo's Fc on the SG-1000 project in the 8-bit era, so it rushed to launch the 16-bit game console mD in 1988.

Nintendo also realized that the upgrading of game consoles must be necessary, just like the replacement of the Atari 2600 by 8-bit consoles back then, which is the nature of history.

It's just that since the Fc era, Nintendo has used cPu to be a relatively low-end and cheap model, and the chips of the Ricoh6502 series did not have new products with enough expressiveness around 1988.

If the next-generation console is rashly launched at this time, there will inevitably be problems such as replacing the CPU and affecting the inheritance of the full set of hair opening instructions, and it will also lead to Nintendo's consistent low-end price war line being unsustainable, and the price of the whole machine will definitely increase.

After all, it must be reasonable for today's Gu Biao, as well as the historical Sega, to radically choose the latest 10mhZ cPu of the Motorola 68000 series to develop game consoles at this juncture in 1988.

Tiankun and Sega of the original time and space have the high price of cPu, and the figure is that at this point in time, there is no other cost-effective cPu that can achieve this effect.

This is not to say that Motorola is better than Intel or other cPu manufacturers, but in that era, because of the low frequency of new product launches, it is normal to gain a competitive advantage of one or two years at a good point in time - until 586, Intel only launched a new cPu every 3 years, rather than a new model every year like the era of the PC explosion in later generations.

This means that in the three-year time gap, if other cPu manufacturers plug in with the latest technology and design, it is likely to be better than Intel.

Historically, after seeing the success of Sega's mD game consoles, Nintendo was still forced to follow its own pace unhurriedly and launched the 16-bit sFc to replace Fc in 1990, and it is not surprising that it lost a considerable part of the share advantage left by the previous generation in the competition.

The inheritance of technical routes and instruction sets forces those game manufacturers to go far after the first generation, and it is impossible for the second generation to switch tracks casually.

Therefore, in this life, seeing the advent of Tiankun's Ps1 game console, Yamauchi Pu also adopted a mode of indifferent observance.

He didn't choose to force the R&D team to come up with sFc immediately - in fact, this thing didn't even complete the project demonstration, and even if it was forced, it would take a year, and it was impossible to get it out immediately this year. At most, it is a year and a half earlier than the same period in the original space-time history.

Nintendo's response strategy is to continue to explore the possibility of reducing costs at the business level and fight a price war with outdated 8-bit phones.

At the same time, on the premise of not changing the overall architecture of 8 bits, the circuit is slightly modified, such as adding an independent audio processing chip to the motherboard.

Or discover more efficient pre-processing on game cartridges,

Develop more efficient recording battery cartridges to cope with the mushrooming of savable strategy games and war chess RPg games that have sprung up in the past two years.

After all, even if it is the same Fc red and white machine, the game launched in the early 1990s has a much better effect than around 1985, and the advantage of the cassette game console is that it is highly scalable.

It is not like a game machine with magnetic sheets and discs, where all data processing is done by machines. Part of the audio of the cassette machine, even refresh processing, can be done with an additional chip in the cassette. It's kind of like a "standalone sound card" or something.

The downside to this is that game cartridges can be very expensive to produce - if you can get extra processing power by upgrading your machine, you just need to add an extra audio card chip to your machine. And if you don't upgrade the machine and rely on the cassette to complete it, at least it means that each game cartridge that needs this performance must be equipped with a separate audio card chip.

Elementary school students understand that if you just run one or two new-age high-performance games on an old machine, the general ledger is still cost-effective.

Once you're a die-hard gamer and want to experience eight out of ten games with the latest display and sound effects, the total cost of an old machine with a new cartridge is sure to kill you.

In the end, I figured out the general ledger and found that I saved a hundred yuan by buying a game console, but I spent an extra fifty dollars per game, and the total money to buy a game was many times more expensive than buying a game console itself.

……

After Yamauchi made all the preparations for the price war and soft upgrade competition, on July 1, his subordinates finally learned about the initial pricing of Tiankun Ps1 from formal channels, and reported it to him as soon as possible.

When he was about to leave work that night, Masayuki Uemura, who had been transferred to the position of Nintendo's marketing director, handed a detailed fax to Yamauchi's desk:

"President, this is the retail guide price of Tiankun's Ps game console, the whole machine does not include keyboards, vibration handles and other peripherals, it is 298 US dollars. For a full set of peripherals, there are two pricing levels, $368 and $398, depending on the level of the peripherals, with the highest-end deluxe version also coming with additional membership value-added services. ”

"$298? Gu Biao really dares to raise the price. Yamauchi Pu looked at the price and sighed a little, "The year before last, I pushed the learning machine, a little upgrade, and supported archive games, and it increased by $50." Now there is a big generation, and it has risen by $100 directly compared to the learning machine. ”

Historically, when Sega's mD console debuted, it was not so high, about 30,000 yen. Considering that in 1988, when the exchange rate of the yen against the US dollar was close to the highest point after the Plaza Accord, it was only worth more than 120 yen per dollar, so the price of the Sega mD US version was only $250.

In 1990, when the Nintendo sFc was released, the official debut price was 25,000 yen, which folded into 210~220 US dollars. Sega's mD was also immediately reduced to $24,000 after a two-year sales period of relative profiteering to cope with Nintendo's competition.

After 92 years, as the cost of hardware fell and components such as cPu became cheaper, Sega's mD was lowered to 21,000 yen, which is equivalent to 180 US dollars or 1,500 yuan. Since then, this official retail price has never been lowered.

However, because of the rampant piracy machines of Sega mD, many of the so-called Sega machines bought in China are owned by pirates, and the pirated goods are up to 1200 yuan, and 800 yuan are sold in the later period.

{800 is basically 95 years later, foreign countries even Sony Ps game consoles appeared, only to drop to such a low, at that time Motorola 68000 series has been discontinued, Motorola's cPu business has also been dragged off by the "Iridium Project". The small cottage factories are all produced by recovering and repairing second-hand materials cPu and backlog of processed inventory, so the cost is so low. }

But no matter how it falls, after all, this is the Motorola 68000 platform, and the base cost is there, not comparable to the bargains of the 6502 route. No matter how the board is stolen, the new machine is still maintained for 800 yuan, and it is not rotten to the extent of Xiaobawang.

Now the first generation of Ps of Tiankun is at least 20% higher than the price of Sega mD in the same period in history.

In fact, Gu's profit margin will only be higher than that of Sega in the same period in history. Because all of his production is done in China, it is much more comfortable than those Japanese companies that have remained in their home country for final assembly and structural production, and have endured the sharp rise in costs after the yen's appreciation.

Gu Ao's original Ps, except for the cPu, which is the same as the historical Sega mD, the other peripheral designs are more sophisticated, audio processing chips and special picture refresh scanning assistant chips, which are much more solid than Sega mD. When users play, they basically don't see the problem of other arcade games being ported to the TV, and the screen flashes randomly due to the lack of refresh rate.

In general,According to the late 80s and early 90s,Users' requirements for the picture,The performance of Tian Kun Ps can already be described as silky,The extra dozens of dollars in hardware costs,It's all spent on this blade。

"President, what adjustments are we going to make now?" Masayuki Uemura looked at Yamauchi and muttered for a long time, but he sighed, and he didn't have any instructions, so he couldn't help but feel a little worried.

Yamauchi raised his hand: "Don't worry, wait and see, I don't believe that American consumers will be so popular." A game console, $300, or even a little better with peripherals close to $400, is there a lot of people cheering around? It's only been a few years, and Americans' consumption level is so high? So they have to spend money on game consoles?

With this amount of money, we can buy two or three of our old-fashioned Fc. Our machine, as long as it costs 10 or 20 dollars more per game on the cassette, can't it also play turn-based strategy and war chess games? ”

"However, in the field of action games, the graphics and sound effects are almost all, and it is useless for us to only have game mechanics to keep up with the Tiankun. Masayuki Uemura wanted to persuade him, but he held back.

Anyway, it's not bad for these two months, let's see how Tiankun performs.

If it really doesn't work, then completely abandon the U.S. market and shrink into a life of being a gangster. I still like Japanese RPg, as long as the game mechanics are interesting, they are willing to level up.