"Today's meeting is mainly to discuss the project verification of follow-up products after PLAY-BOX is put into production. Some of the preparations have already been preliminarily planned, and you will not be able to understand the situation at a different pace. Therefore, when discussing for a while, if you have doubts about the feasibility, you can also raise them together. ”

Gu Biao cleared his throat and personally set the tone for the meeting.

The research and development of PLAY-BOX was completed in May, and the software group represented by Yang Hao had already begun to free up their hands to prepare for follow-up projects at that time.

Lu Yunda and other electronic engineers, but a little more troublesome, they had to temporarily make a cameo appearance of a production line and process engineer, follow the line, to ensure the final test flow and formal production - people who have been engaged in electronics know that hardware must be the busiest at the last moment, especially small companies do not have a special person to follow the line, but let the hardware engineer directly participate in the line adjustment.

So, these people, and Professor Erikson, basically didn't get empty until late June.

Gu Biao didn't rush too much at that time, after all, after being busy with such a big project, benefits such as half a month off were necessary.

At that time, he waved a big pen, whether it was the hardware group or the software group, all of them were reimbursed by the company for a two-week trip to Grenada, horse killing chickens and other health care services, not to mention ordinary eating, drinking and playing.

Well, Gu Biao's only requirement for them is that they must pay attention to personal hygiene, if they are not hygienic, not only will they not be reimbursed, but they may also have other ends.

On June 5, 1981, the world's first case of Ai, which was recorded by the academic community, was discovered in the African Black Uncle tribe. '82 was the first year it was introduced to Europe and the United States. Almost no one in the private sector has paid attention to this kind of thing, but Gu Biao explained that the company's supervision department pays attention to discipline construction, carries out health education, and popularizes cutting-edge medical knowledge.

Well, that's a bit far.

In addition to travel and reimbursement, he also gave the R&D team a $30,000 project red envelope each, and promised to take out 2% of the PLAY-BOX sales excluding tax in the next six months as a year-end bonus for the technical team, so that they can distribute it proportionally - here we are talking about sales, not net profits, so it is very considerable, a little more than 5% net profits.

If 1.7 million units are sold this year, the total prize money will be $3 million.

The technical team has now officially hired 2 Stanford professors full-time, as well as several American graduate students originally brought by these professors, as well as 4 Chinese commission trainees who have been studying for one year, 4 new committee trainees who have just arrived, and more than 20 undergraduate graduates and current students who are still in China to provide peripheral chores and "R&D manual work".

The contribution of the peripheral personnel in China is not large, and Gu Biao thought that it was best not to exceed 10,000 US dollars per person, so as not to scare them to death, or instead drift off and slack off - sometimes, there is too much money to spend, and it will also be confused.

There are a total of eight students in the two sessions, and according to the level of contribution, it is more reasonable to divide each person from 3 million miles to 5~100,000 yuan. As for those Americans, they have indeed seen the world, although the years of making game consoles may be shorter, but they do have a solid foundation and a wide range of knowledge.

As for the two professors, more than 500,000 yuan per person must be in the market - they will play a demonstration effect of a thousand gold bones, once they form a reputation in the circle, those pretentious people in Silicon Valley are willing to be used by Gu Biao.

On the sales team's side, such as Shi Yuzhu and others, Gu Biao was also tied to the performance commission model, and only promised President Schulhoff a 2% after-tax net profit dividend.

After all, Gu Biao's company has not received external investment so far. He can only rely on the direct promise of dividends to pull the team and ensure the cohesion of the core. After this time, you can consider formally dividing a little bit of shares and promising more profit dividends (equivalent to dry shares, that is, the core technical backbone does not own shares, but can share dividends)

In Silicon Valley in the 80s, there were still many such small but beautiful companies with amazing profit margins. After all, it has not yet reached the Internet era, and the virtual assets of technology companies are relatively small, and there is no "relying on the number of users for valuation".

Today's enterprise value can be priced with real fixed assets plus technology, brand and channels. Gu Biao took out all the funds needed for the company's development, and used the upper-level relationship to personally brand the company's products and mediate cooperation channels, and everyone was very convinced of this spoils model within a year or two.

When running with the boss, the contradictions can always be covered up, and it is always after the big devil of Atari is removed, everyone will put their minds on the internal combing.

……

Everyone digressed for a while to chat about the spoils and questions about the strategic direction of the company's products, and then finally retracted the topic.

The software group represented by Yang Hao, when Gu Biao consulted about the overall direction, he mentioned that "according to what the boss said last month, the development is the same as Atari's cartridge home machine, it is better to engage in another popular integrated game handheld, anyway, the boss has a lot of ideas for good games in his head."

When Yang Hao said this, it caused all seven or eight core technical backbones in the audience to laugh in unison, and felt that what he said was quite reasonable.

Because the experience of the past two years has shown that there are indeed so many golden ideas in Gu Wei's mind that the company's R&D department has not had a strong creative team so far, and has become responsible for technical implementation.

However, Gu Biao unified his thoughts very seriously: "You suggest this, it must be to make good money, and if you want to continue to pick soft persimmons, I can understand this mentality - our handheld machine, in fact, is the same as the arcade machine, and it belongs to the 'integrated game console', that is, the game software is directly burned on the motherboard." Unlike Atari's home machines, the cassette can be changed.

We're used to integrated consoles, and the first time we wanted to develop an 'open standard system' console, of course there would be difficulties, and I expected some people to be intimidated - well, especially I think the difficulty should be on the software side of developing the console system.

Because for the hardware, as long as the interface is left, compared with the original integrated type, the difficulty is not much. On the software side, for the first time, we are faced with a system that builds a standard interface and needs to be compatible with games that will change N in the future, which is a challenge that we have never encountered, and we have to go through the road of Atari's technology accumulation again.

But have you ever thought about it, you can't change the integrated machine of the game, and it's no problem to sell it to the arcade owner, because of the consumption environment there, the machine is for a large number of players to take turns to play, there is no idleness, and there is no reason why you feel tired of playing - if you are tired of playing, you can change to a machine, 25 cents, and the cost of abandoning the pit is very low.

If it's sold to the average player, then there must be American Cubes, Snakes, which I have carefully deduced to ensure that the variability of the outcome of the game is enough to make a person play for several years without getting tired of it. Otherwise, if he buys it home and plays it for less than 200 hours and leaves it there to eat ashes, what will they think next time? Will they think that 'buying a machine from Tiankun Entertainment is to be cheated out of money, so it is better to borrow it for a while to have a good time, or simply go to the arcade hall to play'?

So, if we were to move side-scrolling games like 'Earth Defenders' and 'Maplestory', which are still playing in arcades, to an integrated console – regardless of whether the hardware and technology of the current console would be up to the task – just saying that players were tired of backboarding would be enough to make them feel 'buy at a loss'. ”

The so-called "backboard", people who have played action or shooting games are no strangers, that is, players play repeatedly to the level of "so skilled that it makes people feel distressed", and finally even "where to go, where will the enemy appear" such information have been memorized, and the enemy has not appeared before shooting and killing.

For hardcore brain-dead enthusiasts, the backboard may still have some meaning and is a worthy challenge. But for the vast majority of players, it's boring and detracting from the gaming experience.

Therefore, when Gu Biao made PLAY-BOX, he carefully selected the three types of blocks, snakes and bomberman - he didn't even dare to choose Pac-Man, because Pac-Man's beans and maps were written every level, which was not random enough.

Only enough random and unexpected things can survive on the handheld of the dead game, so that the player will not have the rebellious mentality of blaming the manufacturer for "buying a loss", and play until the physical life of the machine is broken, and still addicted.

This truth is not difficult to understand, Gu Biao analyzed it a little, and successfully unified everyone's thoughts.

"Alas, although it makes a lot of sense, but the easy money can't be earned, and it's always a pity to make the hard money. Although the backbone of several software groups accepted it, they still had a slight regret in their hearts.

"You guys feel sorry, I will adjust the incentive plan in the future, this will be said later, let's confirm the development plan and progress first: according to the use of the new version of the Motorola 68000 series of CPU, Zilog memory and audio chips, under this framework, to build a next-generation card insert machine with a higher performance than the Atari 2600, how much time do your departments estimate?

"The hardware group estimates that it will take at least 6 months, and maybe a month or two of trial flow and process adjustment. Professor Erickson spoke on behalf of all colleagues in hardware.

Another computer science professor from Stanford, Lucas, who was proud of their former mentor, said:

"We can only make the first version in 6 months, but as a standard interface card game console, I think the safest way is to develop the first version to about 4~5 months, as long as the interface instruction standards are all set, immediately add a group of people, parallel development of several test games, and even test the limit of image and sound processing stress test games.

Then plug in the trial game and test the whole machine, change the second version, and then repeat the previous process. This is the first time we have made a plug-in card game console, and if the system compatibility is not tested so rigorously, the quality and stability cannot be guaranteed at all.

And I suggest that it may be better to poach some technicians from Atari with high salaries - Atari is now in a period of crazy profit squeezing, and does not attach much importance to research and development, and the 2600 game consoles have been on the market for 5 years, there are no new research and development tasks, and the company simply refuses to give engineers high salaries and heavy rewards. ”

Gu Biao listened to it and nodded frequently: "This proposal is good, in two months, when your infrastructure here is good, I will find a headhunting company to let out the wind: in Tiankun Entertainment, the best engineers and technical backbones can earn $500,000 a year."

If you have other talent referrals, the company will also give you a 'team building award'. But there is one thing I want you to insist on: you have to do the underlying architecture of the product yourself, and the people recruited by Atari with high salaries only provide rich testing experience, and we can't let them dominate our design concept. ”

Everyone rustled and wrote down the boss's key care in a small notebook.

Gu Biao was very satisfied, and then began to say that everyone was actually most concerned about the distribution of interests.

"I know that you will have questions about 'why you should make long-term money if you don't make easy money', so today we are going to talk about moving from project bonuses and commission incentives to equity incentives. ”

Equity is not something that should be taken out rashly from the beginning. Only when the short-term interests of the company are not consistent with the long-term interests themselves, it has to be taken out.

Otherwise, before that, there are other better and more appropriate ways to complete team cohesion and motivation.