Of course, it is impossible for a game to become popular out of thin air, and in addition to the high-quality support, the targeted advertising and marketing of the sales team also plays a great role.

The full NFL season runs from September of the first year to the beginning of February of the following year.

The regular season runs from September to December, with each NFL team playing eight home games and eight away games, for a total of 16 regular season rounds to compete for a playoff spot. And into January, the NFL entered the exciting playoffs. The National League and American League each play a wild card round, followed by a division semifinal and a division final to determine the final National League champion and American League champion team that qualifies for the Super Bowl.

As the most popular sport in the United States, the NFL already has a high level of attention, and its playoff ratings are even more frightening. "NFL Manager" was originally released at this time to support the popularity of the NFL.

And Oriental Game Company even played the slogan of "Play games and get Super Bowl tickets" in the advertisement, which attracted the attention of countless fans. You must know that the Super Bowl is known as the "American Spring Festival Gala", and the cost of its on-site tickets can be imagined. And for most ordinary fans, even if you are willing to spend a lot of money, you may not be able to buy a ticket for a good position.

In addition to using the gimmick of Super Bowl tickets to attract more fans' attention, the game marketing team is also actively using new Internet means to promote it. For example, in the NFL fan discussion community on the AOL website, a screenshot of the game about the Indianapolis Colts' record was widely circulated.

The Colts of the 1991/1992 season were not the Colts who would win the Super Bowl with Peyton Manning in the future. It has a spicy eye record of 1 win and 15 losses in the season just ended. This result not only broke the worst record in the history of his team, but also became a joke used by supporters of more than 30 other teams.

In the screenshot of the game record posted by this netizen, he used the Colts lineup this season, and in the online battle with other players, the entire virtual season played a 15-1 record, entered the playoffs with the first place in the regular season of the United States, and won the final Super Bowl all the way!

This has made many fans question the balance of the new NFL Manager game, with the Colts' lineup this season, although 1 win and 15 losses may not be its true level, but the Colts' current strength is indeed a big gap from the playoff powerhouse, let alone winning the Super Bowl.

As a result, everyone's ridicule of the Colts quickly shifted to the ridicule of the new game of Oriental Games. As the incident unfolded, even many traditional media began to pay attention to it.

You must know that according to the lottery rules previously announced by Oriental Games, only one week before the start of the Super Bowl, players who purchase the game and then open the networking function, complete a virtual season battle, and finally win the Super Bowl are eligible to participate in the lottery of tickets for this year's real Super Bowl game.

Seeing that things were getting worse, Oriental Games finally stood up and clarified. They announced that in the 20 days since the game was launched, a total of 3,484 players have been eligible for the lottery. Among them, there are only 2 players who win the Super Bowl with the Colts as the home team, and the probability is far less than 1 in 1,000.

The Colts run by these two players have a regular season record of 9-7 and 8-8, respectively, and are worthy of qualifying for the playoffs. And the reason why the pony teams of these two players were able to win the cup in the end has a common characteristic, that is, super luck. From the beginning of the regular season, their opponents either made low-level mistakes, had important players injured, or were out of shape, and finally caused the two Colts to stumble, and it was very magical to climb to the top of the throne step by step.

In stark contrast to the Colts' less than 1 in 1,000 chance of winning the championship, both teams have a 25% chance of winning the championship. The two teams that have been selected by many players – the Buffalo Bills and the Washington Redskins – are exactly the two teams that will compete in the Super Bowl this year.

Therefore, at the press conference of Oriental Games, the head of the "NFL Manager" project team proudly boasted that the data algorithm of his game is very intelligent and can accurately determine the actual combat strength of NFL teams.

As for the previous rumors among fans, a certain player used this season's Colts to play a 15-1 super high win rate in the regular season, which was just a prank by some people, and Oriental Games Company generously did not pursue it!

Such a shocking flip in the plot has a huge correlation with the last topic of "Super Bowl" that the current people are concerned about, which naturally aroused great curiosity and heated discussions among the American people about the new game "NFL Manager".

And many people who have been volunteer propagandists for Oriental Games for nothing don't know that the screenshots of the so-called Colts against the sky before, including the previous game screenshots of the so-called Colts' unnatural record, are all fake screenshots from the planner P of the "NFL Manager" game team. Then they acted as a water army on both sides of the rhythm, stirring up the topic step by step, attracting national attention through controversy, and finally letting the official of Oriental Game Company stand up for a wave of whitewashing.

In 1992, American netizens and other people who ate melons saw the Internet marketing techniques 20 years later, and they were unknowingly toyed with applause. Even many traditional media outlets, such as newspapers and television stations, have not seen this new marketing method, and have reported it as a hot event, and have done a lot of publicity for "NFL Manager" for free.

As a result, more than 1 million copies of the single-player version of NFL Manager were sold in the first three months of its release, with a whopping 65% of users also having internet access turned on. You must know that the price of game software in the United States is not cheap, for example, the stand-alone version of "NFL Manager" is priced at $39.

In order to activate the network mode, players will need to pay an additional $4 per month for the connection fee. After all, Oriental Games opened a special real-time online battle platform for NFL Manager, which requires the purchase of a large number of servers and network bandwidth, which requires huge costs.

Fortunately, the core of NFL Manager is actually a word game, and the data required for players to play online is not large. Otherwise, the network speed of this era alone will not be able to support it at all.

The $4 per month internet connection fee is not expensive, but if a player plays online for a year, the fee he pays to Oriental Games is even higher than the cost of buying a copy of the game.

However, according to the background statistics of Oriental Game Company, there are still a lot of local tyrant players who are willing to spend money, and more than 5,000 players have directly purchased the annual networking function service in the first three months.

In addition to the network fee, there are many paid props in the network mode of "NFL Manager". For example, if a player is injured in a match, players can purchase the "Gold Medal Team Medic" item, which reduces the team's injury probability by 20%, for $1.99, valid for 8 games.

Other props include more than a dozen props such as "Super Breaker" - increases the ability to catch and attack by 10%, "King of Grabs" - increases the probability of grabbing quarterbacks by 10%, and "King of Super Raiders" - increases the probability of breaking the ball by 10%, which can slightly increase the team's ability in some aspects, but not too much to disrupt the balance of the game.

Three months after the launch of NFL Manager, Oriental Games earned more than $20 million through monthly online fees and value-added items, which is slightly more than the income from simply selling game copies.

After all, the retail price of a copy of the game is as high as $39, but the actual factory price of Oriental Games is only $19, and the remaining $20 needs to be passed on to distributors and retailers. On the contrary, the monthly fee for game networking and value-added props are paid directly online by binding a credit card. The channel cost that Oriental Game Company needs to pay is much lower than the physical distribution model!

Of course, it is impossible for Oriental Games to invest a lot of manpower and material resources to build an online payment system for a game, and it uses the PayPal online payment system officially launched by AOL (AOL) two years ago.

AOL is now the largest Internet company in the United States, with not only the largest web portal in the United States, AOL, but also the Navigator browser, which has a global market share of more than 90%. In addition, in recent years, the company has also actively expanded into search engines, online payments and other fields.

But don't look at the expansion of AOL in the United States and even the world, but it has actually not made a penny so far, and it has always relied on Li Xuan's continuous investment to make up for its losses. At the same time that Oriental Games went public on the New York Stock Exchange, AOL was also preparing to go public on the NASDAQ.

The topic of the Internet has always been the most concerned topic in the US capital market in the past two years, and the hot sale of "NFL Manager" has not only brought the Oriental Game Company itself to the hot spot of the Internet, but also encouraged countless Internet practitioners and investors.

After all, professionals can roughly estimate the actual revenue and profits brought by this game to Oriental Games based on the sales of "NFL Manager". "NFL Manager" has more than doubled the overall profit just by adding an online battle mode, doesn't it show that the Internet has a lot to offer?

Oriental Games was valued at $27.5 billion before going public and offered 320 million shares at $27.5 per share. Among them, Li Xuan, a major shareholder, reduced his holdings by 240 million shares, and Oriental Game Company issued an additional 80 million new shares.

After removing the listing fee, Li Xuan was able to withdraw almost $6 billion in funds, while Oriental Games Company was able to raise almost 2 billion in cash. After this round of large-scale reduction and cash-out, Li Xuan's shareholding in listed companies has also dropped to only about 65%.

However, although Li Xuan's shareholding ratio has dropped significantly, the scale of his nominal assets has risen rapidly. Because within less than two months of the listing of Oriental Games, the company's stock price has skyrocketed from $27.5 per share at the time of issuance to $55 with the help of a new round of consumer bull market in the U.S. stock market and its own excellent performance, almost doubling.

AOL Company, which was listed more than a month later than Oriental Game Company, was very lucky to catch the high-tech stock market driven by the listing of Oriental Game Company while taking the US stock bull market express. It deliberately announced its PayPal online payment system, and through its cooperation with Oriental Games, it earned more than $1 million in revenue within three months.

Despite the modest $1 million revenue figure, it is AOL's third largest revenue channel in addition to the Navigator browser installation fee charged to computer manufacturers and the advertising fee for AOL in the United States.

For the capital market, they are not unable to accept the huge investment in the early stage of emerging industries such as the Internet, after all, it takes time to cultivate the market, and the most important thing is to see whether they can receive enough returns in the later stage.

Although AOL has been losing money now, its means of making profits are becoming more and more abundant, which is enough for investors! Therefore, AOL has landed in the Dasdaq market, and even ushered in a more crazy pursuit than Oriental Game Company, and no one wants to lose the opportunity in the future Internet tide.

Originally, AOL was going to raise $800 million from the capital market at an offering price of $10 per share. As a result, the response from investors was so enthusiastic that AOL's management decisively raised the offering price to $16 per share, raising the total amount raised to $1.28 billion.

But the $16 share price is far from reaching the psychological bottom line of investors, and on the 82nd day after AOL's listing, the company's stock price has risen to $40 like crazy, and the company's total market capitalization has exceeded the $10 billion mark.

In Li Xuan's view, U.S. stock investors seem to have completely lost their rationality, but all investment managers and market analysts feel that AOL's stock price still has room to rise, because the Internet era has arrived!

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