1980, end of March. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

A new start-up electronics company completed the design of the "Chinese Cube" arcade machine and entrusted a lawyer to register a patent.

Although the game has been successfully developed, Lin Qi has not contacted the factory for mass production for the time being, and still asks the new start-up electronics company to produce it in small batches, changing and changing. After avoiding mass production and sales, there was a big bug, which affected the company's reputation.

In addition, there is currently no factory that can quickly mass-produce arcade machines except in the United States and Japan. And to find factories in Japan and the United States, Lin Qi is not going to do it!

Because, that is the base camp of competitors, how can the production lifeline be so easily placed under the noses of potential competitors?!

Lin Qi would rather save his own parts and find skilled workers for slow production than go to arcade factories in the United States and Japan to OEM.

The core of the arcade machine is undoubtedly the motherboard of the arcade machine, and the industrial mass requires high-precision and automated equipment to produce printed circuit boards with high efficiency. The small batch manual production has high technical requirements for workers, not just recruit some ordinary workers, and they can get started quickly, and the yield rate is far less than that of mature industrial production.

However, there are no factories in Hong Kong that can produce gaming motherboards, and semiconductor motherboards in this era, like CPUs, are considered high-tech.

Just like IBM later developed PC technology, but only announced the standards of CPU, hard disk, floppy disk, memory, power supply and other hardware to the industry, but IBM did not plan to publish the BIOS source code of PC motherboards.

Later, Compaq, Dell and other compatible machine manufacturers cracked IBM's BIOS and designed and produced motherboards on their own. This also provoked IBM to sue, and in the end, compatible machine manufacturers banded together to force IBM to give up pursuing its responsibility with the sword of anti-monopoly.

Since then, PC motherboards have become cabbage, whether it is hardware manufacturers such as Intel and AMD, or compatible machine manufacturers, as long as they want to make their own motherboards, they can establish their own motherboard factories.

An arcade machine is much like a personal computer, and it is also a motherboard with chips embedded in different functions to fulfill its functions.

In the absence of industrial mass production, if you want to explode production capacity, you can only rely on crowd tactics to recruit a large number of skilled workers. In Europe, the United States and Japan, it will definitely not work, after all, the labor cost is too expensive. In addition to those entrepreneurs who are willing to make their own products, normal enterprises are using such a primitive and backward production method, and they will definitely be dragged down to bankruptcy by labor costs!

Hong Kong, a city dominated by low-end industries, has the advantage of cheap labor compared with Europe, the United States and Japan. For the salary of an American, you can hire five or six Hong Kong people.

Hong Kong's manufacturing industry, during World War II, could make a lot of money because of cheap labor, so it was a bit unenterprising. Eventually, as the cost of land and labor continued to rise, most of them died like a frog boiled in warm water.

Having said that, what will happen to Hong Kong in the future has nothing to do with Lin Qi. The problem is that there is really no company in Hong Kong that has the ability to mass-produce the base version of the arcade machine.

Therefore, Lin Qi had no choice but to let the technicians of the new venture electronics company produce small batches for the time being.

Then, rent a storefront on Apliu Street and run a game arcade. By running your own arcade, making a little profit is secondary, and by the way, collecting feedback from players to improve the game.

So at the same time, Lin Qi even had the idea of monopolizing the Hong Kong game hall!

If you want to monopolize the global game hall market, it is impossible, and international giants can't do it.

But...... Lin Qi feels that it is not very difficult to monopolize Hong Kong's game halls...... It only takes more than 100 stores to cover the market of most of Hong Kong's population and population. And 100 game halls, each need 50 new games a year, and a year is also the basic market for 5,000 game consoles.

If an arcade machine makes a net profit of 3,000 yuan, 5,000 units can already provide a profit of 1.5 million Hong Kong dollars. That is to say. The cost of game research and development does not exceed 1.5 million Hong Kong dollars, monopolizing the Hong Kong market, relying on self-operated channel procurement, you can recover the game research and development costs, and sell to overseas markets, it is pure profit!

What's more, the gross profit of the game hall is very high, and if 5,000 arcade machines are operated in their own game hall, the annual profit may exceed 5 million yuan.

The R&D cost of 5 million Hong Kong dollars is already about the same as the budget of Japanese game manufacturers. As long as it's not a money-burning blockbuster, such a budget can already meet the development costs of most games in the 80s.

Imagine a game company that can recoup its R&D costs by relying solely on the local basic market. Selling overseas, not only can it make a net profit, but it is almost equivalent to being invincible in the market competition.

This is also the fundamental reason why Lin Qi wants to produce and sell his own games, decide to open a game hall in Hong Kong, and have the intention of monopolizing the Hong Kong game market.

……

April 1, 1980. Apliu Street.

Lin Qi rented a 300-square-meter shop and converted it into a game hall.

Originally, the store was a two-storey mall, but due to insufficient income to pay the rent, the store was closed when the contract expired, and the store remained empty without choosing to renew the contract.

has not rented out, also because the landlord is going to increase too high, the monthly rent of 50,000 yuan is enough, and the rent for half a year has to be paid in advance, which naturally makes many potential tenants timid.

Lin Qi readily agreed to the landlord's conditions, but added a few points, the lease period is 10 years, and the annual rent can be increased by 10%. At the same time, if the landlord wants to sell the property within ten years, it will be sold to a start-up electronics company first.

Maybe it was because he didn't rent out for a few months and lost a lot of rent, so the landlord couldn't wait to sign the contract and agreed to all the conditions.

After renting the store, Lin Qi did not decorate the store excessively, but only asked people to clean the room, and at the same time, customized the signboard of the game hall.

At the same time, several employees of the new venture electronics company are also producing two arcade machines at a speed of three days.

Relying on this slow processing speed, on April 1, the company produced six arcade machines equipped with "Chinese Cubes".

Of course, there was not just one game to open a game arcade, so the company bought some consoles made by other companies in the market, such as "Space Invaders" and "Little Bees", which were released in the late 70s and achieved amazing popularity around the world.

These two games are already the hottest games in the global market, but in Lin Qi's eyes, they are not enough, as long as there are enough R&D personnel to cooperate, he can make a bunch of explosive new games that explode the N dimensions of "Space Invaders" at any time.

It's just that the new entrepreneurial electronics team is still unstable, so the steps can not be too big, step on small steps, and gradually upgrade the technical content of the company's research and development of new products, so that employees have the psychological preparation and time to gradually improve their skills, which is the king.

On April 1st, the new venture game hall opened, with a total of 20 game consoles in the store.

6 sets are the company's own research and development of "Chinese squares", the production cost of the self-developed machine is unstable, but in any case, it is difficult to exceed the cost of 4,000 yuan.

The remaining 12 are arcade machines purchased from the market, and the price of each arcade machine is as high as 15,000 yuan, which not only makes Lin Qi feel like he is grabbing money, but also makes Lin Qi feel that the game market has great prospects......