Room 202, Building 4, Area A, Jinhu Garden, Jinbi Road, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, Jinzhi Tower, Shenzhen......

Zhou Tianwei clicked on ICQ and received a few game development pictures just sent by a colleague, and after the marketing plan of "Very Men and Women" was arranged, their department received a new task, that is, to conceive a pre-marketing strategy for the online mud game "Across the Seas" being developed by Sihai Studio.

The current focus of the development studio of Jin Zhita Company has shifted to the more optimistic online game market, the development of stand-alone games is either subcontracted out, or simply compressed, and the stand-alone games that really come from the game studio directly under Jin Zhita may only be left with "The Legend of the Ancient Dragons" and "1937 Special Forces", one is an imitation of "The Legend of Jin Yong's Heroes", and the other is a plagiarized "Allied Death Squad", of course, according to the company's internal statement, this is not plagiarism but called reference.

In fact, Zhou Tianwei knows that the reason why the company attaches so much importance to online games, is mainly because of piracy, and now the domestic stand-alone game market is basically monopolized by Fengyun Interactive, who makes the game development company signed by the family super strong, and the games represented are all wonderful, except for some companies that are closely related to Fengyun interaction, other game companies can only carve up the remaining scraps, if there is not an Internet café game promotion plan, maybe many companies that love stand-alone games can no longer play.

At this time, Zhou Wu, the general manager of the company, came up with a good idea, that is, the development of online games, stand-alone games can only make money by issuing CD sales, while online games can be continuously charged through monthly cards, and the core of online games is the server side, even if the client gives people pirated copies, the end user still has to log in to the genuine game server to play. For this point, Zhou Tianwei actually agrees, because there have been demonstrations made by "Smiling Proud Jianghu: Loyal to the Country", "King of Kings", etc., even if the membership card sales are not ideal, "Lianzhong Game World" has also pioneered from China Telecom to get a share, which is a very remarkable achievement, think about this era when only China Telecom is charged, it can actually collect China Telecom's fees, how incredible it is.

According to the company's official statement,The original need for 1.2G hard disk space "Jianghu" is the first attempt at Mud games,It's just that there was no such thing as networking at that time,Later, what kind of "Jianghu Biography", "People in Jianghu" and the like were developed, but in Zhou Tianwei are some stand-alone games with the Mud brand,Or just some kind of enhancement of text-based Mud,What can really be regarded as an online game (that is, the so-called graphical Mud),There should only be the soon-to-be-completed "Very Men and Women" and " Across the Seas", and the "Very Men and Women" in it is more like a graphical dating community, and only "Across the Seas" can be called a game.

According to the description of Four Seas Studio, "Across the Seas" is a collection of management, cultivation, adventure and other different game forms of Chinese graphic Mud, the graphics style is the Q version of the cute type, with a variety of different icons or menus to replace a large number of tedious and repetitive keyboard operations in the previous text MUD, just a click of the mouse, you can enter any command you want to execute.

After Zhou Tianwei got the actual development screen and demo of "Across the Seas", he found that it looked too familiar, except that the game screen setting was a little different, and it was the simple online version of "Age of Discovery", and even the background of the game was very close to the "Age of Discovery" series.

“…… In the middle of the 16th century, China was still one of the most powerful and wealthy empires in the world, and the wealth of its homeland naturally caused the covetousness of its powerful neighbors, so it was constantly invaded by Japanese pirates on the eastern coast, making the people uneasy. It has seriously affected China's social, economic and other aspects of development.

Europe was in the late Renaissance at this time, and there was a great deal of development in all aspects. Britain had just replaced the Spanish Armada as the most powerful nation at sea, but it had also sparked hostility with a large number of countries, such as the newly emerging Swedish state in the North Sea and another emerging power, the Netherlands.

The player takes on the role of an adventurous navigator with countless dreams, who accumulates money through constant work and completion of various tasks, and finally acquires his first small boat, and fearlessly rushes into the vast and mysterious ocean to explore the unknown world......"

Of course, the game is still different from "Age of Discovery", because "Across the Seas" is known as a graphical Mud, that is, an online game, according to the introduction of the Four Seas Studio, although "Across the Seas" can be played on a single machine, but more content needs to be connected to the game server to experience, such as some branch plots that require human cooperation, it is said that this is still an innovation of the company's online games, and they intend to call it an online interactive game.

The so-called online interactive game "Across the Seas", in Zhou Tianwei's opinion, is probably another product that the company "borrowed", but what does all this have to do with him, anyway, he is only responsible for marketing, and only needs to use a bunch of colorful gun drafts to promote the game, as for whether the game is fun or not, whether to retain players or not, this is not a problem he can consider. For example, now, what Zhou Tianwei wants to do most is to send a message on ICQ and ask when "Across the Seas" is expected to be completed, so that his marketing plan can be made.

"What a broken game, it's not as fun as "Legend"!" Zhou Tianwei muttered quietly, then clicked on the message window of the contact person of Sihai Studio on ICQ, sent the question he wanted to ask, and then browsed the latest game information on the nomad tribe while waiting for the other party's answer.

Soon, the ICQ icon in the bottom right corner started flashing......

……

At the end of October, No. 62, Shihua West Road, Jida, Xiangzhou District, Zhuhai City, Jinshan Digital Entertainment Co., Ltd. ......

Kingsoft Digital Entertainment Co., Ltd., formerly known as Kingsoft GM's Xishanju Game Development Studio, has expanded to more than 160 people after years of development, becoming one of the important sources of Kingsoft GM's income. Perhaps because Shenzhen was too noisy, at the beginning of the year, Xishanju moved from the lively Shenzhen to the relatively quiet Zhuhai, and was officially upgraded to a company. According to Qiu Bojun's plan, when the future conditions of Jinshan General Allow, he even plans to invest in the establishment of a research and development base in Zhuhai, and he is already optimistic about the place, which is in the area of Shikeng Mountain in Tangjiawan. Today, it is the first plenary meeting since the relocation and renaming of Xishanju, which is a meeting related to the future direction of Xishanju, and at this meeting, it is necessary to make a decision on whether to continue the development of single-player games or find another way in the future.

"First of all, I want to tell you a good news," Qiu Xin, who came from Beijing, stood in front of the whiteboard in the conference room and said with a smile: "According to the latest statistics, our "Swordsman Romance 2" has sold more than 200,000 sets in mainland China, and a total of 220,000 sets have been sold in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, South Korea, Southeast Asia and other regions, with a total sales revenue of 38 million, which is still quite good. ”

Hearing the good news, everyone in the conference room showed a knowing smile and applauded under the leadership of Luo Xiaoyin, the Minister of R&D. Starting from "Zhongguancun Apocalypse", "Swordsman Romance 1", "Anti-Japanese - Mine Warfare", "Decisive Battle of North Korea", etc., until "Swordsman Romance 2" launched a few months ago, everyone in Xishanju can be said to have put a lot of effort into it, and now it is a good encouragement for everyone to achieve such results.

"38 million, that sounds like a lot, but as a development company, we can only get 20% of it according to our current level, which is 7.6 million." As he spoke, Qiu Xin also wrote "38 million", "20%" and "7.6 million" on the whiteboard, and after writing, his eyes turned to the others in the conference room, expecting their reactions.

Maybe I've long been accustomed to the current "20%" share ratio, plus compared with other companies in China, Xishanju is still doing well, many people don't have a strong reaction after hearing "7.6 million", and some people muttered in a low voice: "Isn't there still an Internet café to divide it!" ”

Qiu Xin didn't hear the whispers of some people, and even if he did, he wouldn't be surprised, if he hadn't gone to Beijing to get the scriptures, he would not be much better than these people here. Looking at the indifferent expressions of the participants, he turned around and wrote down the equation on the whiteboard, Qiu Xin pointed on the whiteboard with his hand, while explaining: such a two-line equation "1×0.3×24×28×12=2419.2", "4032×0.7=1693.44".

"I believe some people should have heard of the online games that have just started to be popular, "King of Kings", "Legend", and "Network Three Kingdoms", which are different from the one-time consumption of stand-alone games, and online games are charged according to the operating time. In the equation on the whiteboard, 1 represents an average of 10,000 online online games, 0.3 represents the price of game services of three cents per hour, 24 hours a day, taking into account downtime and maintenance, the average monthly game service is 28 days, and there are 12 months a year, then the market share brought by this online game in a year is 24.2 million yuan, and then considering the 30% channel discount, the game brings a turnover of 16.9 million yuan to the operating company, and a game with 60,000 people online will bring a turnover of more than 100 million yuan a year. ”

"Wow! ......" The mouths of the participants in the conference room have become O-shaped.

"In addition, I have inquired and calculated by myself, including all development, bandwidth, servers, customer service, marketing fees, etc., the cost of a game with 60,000 people online is up to 40 million, that is to say, the gross profit margin can reach more than 60%, much higher than the share we can get for the current stand-alone game. As far as I know, the number of people online for Legend is close to 50,000, and I heard from their technical staff that the goal for Legend next year is to reach 300,000 online. You can do the math for yourself, what a huge number it will be! ”

"Ou! ......" The eyes of the participants in the conference room bulged into a ball.

……

Soon, people who were originally a little dismissive of online games changed their minds and unanimously adopted Qiu's proposal to develop online games, considering that Xishanju has accumulated the most and the most abundant information belongs to "Swordsman Love", so everyone unanimously chose "Swordsman Love" as the first game on the network, that is, on this day, the "Swordsman Love Online" project plan officially started.

……

Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province, Room 601, 6th Floor, Building D, No. 95 Zhongshan Avenue, Tianhe District......

Wu Xisang, general manager of Tianxia Technology Co., Ltd., stood sideways behind producer Liang Yuchong, staring at the background program of "Tianxia" on the screen, the current number of people online shown above is 523, and the number of registered people is 12322, this data is still a big gap with their original expectations, but at this time they can only sigh that they are not born at the right time.

The dream of "Under Heaven" started last year, when Wu Xisang was still in Fairchild Digital, and Liang Yuchong was even overseas. When Wu Xisang happened to hear that Lianzhong had received tens of millions of investments, and then developed rapidly, becoming the world's largest online game website, he couldn't help but be moved, and he also keenly discovered that online games have great development potential, so he and another friend Chen Zhongwen invested, and then pulled Liang Yuchong, so the original team of Tianxia Technology was born.

Today's Tianxia Technology is no longer just the first three musketeers, there are the main program Xu Kang, the main planner Hu Zhihui, Gu Yue, who is responsible for the development of the client, Wu Guoxi, Yunfeng and others joined, the development team quickly swelled to the scale of more than 20 people, with the efforts of everyone, the "world" from scratch slowly took shape little by little, and in June this year, the internal test was carried out, and it was officially opened to the public in July.

That is, since July, the people who have been developing Tianxia Technology suddenly found that things are not as good as they imagined. At the beginning of the development process,They expected the number of online users of the game to reach 1,000 people,This is their estimate based on the previous situation in the text Mud,When the development of "Tianxia" began last year, there was no decent large-scale online game in China, and the only one was the "Network Genesis" imported from abroad.

But when "Under Heaven" was officially launched, first "King of Kings", followed by "Legend" and "Network Three Kingdoms", one after another online games continued to appear in front of everyone, the bad thing is that "Under Heaven" was too conservative in the initial development process, or the technical strength of the development team was not strong enough, the picture effect of "Under Heaven" was obviously much worse than that of "King of Kings", "Legend" and other games, "King of Kings" was slow and stuck, especially during the period when it first started operation, The game process of "Network Three Kingdoms" is very boring, compared to "Under Heaven" with its rich connotation, it can be regarded as half a catty, and the players' reactions are the same, but there is also a "Legend".

The development team of "Legend" comes from the strongest creative workshop in China, and the company responsible for the operation is the strong Fengyun network, with these two pillars behind it, the performance of "Legend" is very perfect, not only is it rarely slow, the situation of stuck, the content of the game is also very rich, and the operation is also very convenient, it can be said that it is the benchmark of domestic online games. With such a strong opponent on the side, Tianxia Technology's initial expectation of 1,000 people online has come to naught, and it can now achieve the scale of 600 people, among which there are many friends who come to cheer, and the operation of "The World" can be said to be very bleak.

And now there is also a problem with the capital of Tianxia Technology, originally planned to wait for "Tianxia" to start operating, and then find a way to raise some money from the venture capital, but the bursting of the Internet bubble has made this wonderful idea fall through, it turns out that the venture capitalists who are looking for people to spend money all over the world are gone, Wu Xisang has tried to take the initiative, but the venture capitalists have now become cautious, and they immediately avoid it when they hear that they are involved with the Internet. Although the company will not close immediately without follow-up funds, it will be able to last for a few months at most.

Thinking of the bleak prospects for the company's future, Wu Xisang couldn't help but sigh softly......

……

In the late autumn and early winter of 2000, countless eyes were focused on the emerging market of online games, some people were planning to come and go, some people were fully committed to making a career, some were still watching the situation of others, trying to find a more suitable time to intervene, and more people were frightened by the bursting of the Internet bubble, not noticing that the eve of the prosperity of online games in a gloomy fog had quietly arrived......

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