The closed beta period of the legend is very short, only about 10 days. Pen "Fun" Pavilion www.biquge.info

The scope of the test was limited to a few dozen Internet cafes in Qiantang City, as well as the neighboring first-tier city of Hujiang and the neighboring provincial capital Jinling.

As for the means of issuing activation codes online, it will not be used for the time being - because there will not be many people who will grab the activation code for the closed beta in just half a month, and the players themselves feel that it is not cost-effective.

The cooperative Internet cafes in each city were personally run out by Gu Cheng himself and even the only few management and sales staff of Legend Entertainment - stuffing a few boxes of cigarettes for the Internet café owner and pre-installing the packaged beta version of the client for all the machines. Then put up a game poster at the door to encourage players in the Internet café to try out the new game, and click to report a bug if there is a problem with the game.

Legend Entertainment will also give test allowances to Internet café owners based on the value of the test data collected by each Internet café. This trick further stimulated the enthusiasm of Internet café owners to recommend "Legend", and when almost everyone came to open the machine, the boss would remind: "Hey, there is a new online game Legend recently, I don't need money at the moment, do you want to try it?" ”

It's all about rushing for time.

When the 11th National Day approached, the legend finally entered the one-and-a-half-month deleted internal test.

In addition to attending classes these days, Pan Jieying is helping her cousin run a loan with her mother.

Several houses of the family and the company have been mortgaged, and more than 600,000 loans have been raised. Most of this money was invested in the advertising and promotion of the game - 300,000 yuan was spent on "Popular Software", 100,000 yuan for "Computer News", and the rest was spent on posters, website advertising and marketing expenses.

Especially on "Popular Software", Gu Cheng not only asked the other party to do legendary color page advertisements, but also had to ensure that each issue had a special content strategy, and kept the saturation of this public opinion bombardment until the end of the year.

People are originally a computer game strategy magazine, and it is better to do "paid news" than to do pure hard publicity.

The reason why he is so willing to spend money on paper media is entirely because Gu Cheng fully listened to his cousin's previous research opinions:

Nowadays, the vast majority of potential online game players do not have a computer at home. Their time on the plane is precious, and they all pay four dollars an hour in the Internet café. So it's only used to play games, and rarely goes to forums and reads web pages.

For these people, all the steps of "looking up the strategy" and "watching the game news" are done in the school library - in the school library in 2000, the strategy book "Popular Software" was almost always borrowed. Even if some schools don't allow loans, students have to rush quickly after class to get their hands, which is more active than queuing up in the cafeteria.

Moreover, after other books are in the hands of classmates, everyone will choose to give up. Only things like "Popular Software", even if someone takes it, there will still be people standing behind the book picker and watching-at that time, anyone who could see a group of people gathered around reading a book in the school reading room was basically a game guide book.

"Popular Software" was stopped in later generations when Gu Cheng was just in elementary school. So if it weren't for his cousin giving him so many down-to-earth suggestions, he, a guy with a pure air force route, really couldn't have thought of this kind of promotion channel for the next three roads.

The eleventh holiday ended quickly, and it was the middle of the day in a blink of an eye.

The deleted internal test of "Legend" has also been carried out for half a month.

At that time, "Popular Software" was still a semi-monthly magazine, so "Legend" had already published two special issues on it, and Ranger Network and Demon Mountain were also very hard.

Thanks to the promotion of the game, the game quickly surpassed the 10,000 simultaneous online and 150,000 registered accounts. Looking at the trend, at the end of the month, there will be an opportunity to rush 30,000 online and 500,000 accounts at the same time.

As a representative of the new generation of MMORPG online games, today's "Legend" has hardly been hindered by any competitors, and has been staking for half a month.

Until October 18th.

On the 18th day after the "Legend" internal test, Gu Cheng saw a group of peer news on the online game station of Demon Qi Mountain.

"Dongyi's heavyweight professional MMORPG online game "Dragon Family" has landed in China! Represented by Hujiang Shengda and injected by Wanwan Hongji Valley Company. Starting today, the activation code collection channel will be opened, and the limited closed beta will be held! ”

"Affected by the popular trend of 'Legend' internal beta, domestic Internet giants have turned their attention to the introduction of Dongyi online games. According to sources, it is expected that domestic mystery investors will introduce two online games that have been proven to have market prospects in Dongyi, such as "Millennium" and "Red Moon", within this year. ”

"The leading work of the previous generation of online games in China, 'Stone Age', is about to launch a new expansion pack to meet the challenges from RTS-based MMORPG peers."

Finally, there are homogeneous competitors, are they going to enter the market?

Gu Cheng immediately inquired about the relevant news and gossip, and preliminarily found out Chen Tianqiao's actions.

Sure enough, because of Gu Cheng's butterfly effect, Chen Tianqiao, who didn't buy the "legend", actually chose the "Dragon Clan".

However, Shengda's funds were not enough to buy the expensive dragon franchise, so in the end, Chen Tianqiao chose to make a joint venture with Hongji, a company that was also interested in this. At the price of selling a part of Shengda's equity, in exchange for Hongji injecting millions of capital into the project.

Gu Cheng has never been afraid of challenges, but he is not a light opponent.

After the closed beta of the dragon family, he immediately asked the company's only market researchers to keep an eye on the dynamics of these peers and report every day.

……

Liu Shuqin is Pan Jieying's roommate and a first-year MBA student at Qianjiang University. I used to study marketing -- to be honest, I couldn't do anything with the little knowledge I didn't have in school.

Although she and Pan Jieying have different majors, they are also in the same college, and they have become more familiar with each other after studying together in graduate school.

Now Legendary Entertainment has just rolled out its stalls, and the expenses are relatively large. In addition, the signboard is not loud, and she can't recruit any capable talents, so Pan Jieying turned her brains to her classmates and girlfriends - she applied to the tutor and asked her classmates to help with the research, and Legend Entertainment could give some funds appropriately.

The tutor readily agreed, and by the way, he did a market research project in the online game industry, and he could also set some scientific research funds for the paper in the future.

That's how Liu Shuqin was caught. A monthly allowance of 800 yuan, and there is no limit to work and rest time, just collect information, do some market research work, and write reports.

She cherishes this internship opportunity and is ready to do it. Today's report is what she came up with after staying up for several nights and doing a lot of research.

"Mr. Gu, the competitive product analysis report you want."

After knocking on the door and walking into Gu Cheng's office, Liu Shuqin held the report in both hands and gently placed it on the table.

Gu Cheng didn't look up immediately, but only reacted after crackling and typing a string of things on the computer.

"Oh, and the differentiation analysis of the Legend and the Dragons has been done? It's not easy, you sit first, I'll watch slowly. ”

Gu Cheng glanced at the catalog and felt quite satisfied.

In general, a complete competitor report should definitely include market research and differentiation analysis, but differentiation analysis is often the responsibility of someone in the technical support department, not the marketing department. Liu Shuqin works so hard, it seems to be quite motivated.

Gu Cheng took a closer look, and the report showed that the "Dragon Family" was only a few days after the closed beta, and the development trend data of the first-tier city market in the same period can already be compared with the legend.

Sure enough, the attraction of dragons to players who have seen the world is not covered.

The simple and rough style of the legend can't be changed at all, and Gu Cheng doesn't plan to change it.

Since it is a legend, it is the route of the countryside to surround the city, and the one who wins the little white wins the world.

Most of the data in the back of the report is basically the same as Gu Cheng's prediction at the beginning.

It wasn't until he saw the end that he found something that made him not calm.

"Huh? What do you mean by this last part of the outlook? Why do you think there's a big problem with our legendary paying user conversion rate? Gu Cheng pointed to a certain paragraph in the report, his face was a little ugly.

Liu Shuqin's face turned pale, and she defended crampedly: "Huh? Mr. Gu, do you think there is a problem with this analysis? I based on the current precedents of my company and other competitors with the same user classification, combined with channel data analysis. ”

"Then why do you think that 'Legend only promotes the dominant pattern in third- and fourth-tier cities, which will lead to a low conversion rate of paying users in the future'?"

"Because the same is true of the old nets and stone tools. The target market they are targeting lacks distribution channels for game recharge point cards, and most of the kiosk owners in fourth-tier cities are unwilling to stock because of the extremely unstable sales of game point cards, resulting in great restrictions on the access channels for players in remote areas - so I think Legend may not be very optimistic in the face of competition from dragons. Liu Shuqin said as she stepped forward and flipped through the report to a few positions and showed the evidence to Gu Cheng.

"There is still a situation in this world where you want to play games but can't buy point cards? Oh my God, what a primitive age this is! Buy some cards on the ...... Well, it looks like that thing doesn't exist yet. ”

The sentence just now, fortunately, also circled around Gu Cheng's mind and didn't say it.

He found that he really didn't know much about this era. It will take a lot of time to get used to the way primitive people trade.

Today, he is like a computer in the pre-artificial intelligence era, he may be very powerful in solving and dealing with problems, but he doesn't know how to define and find problems by himself, and he still needs to be reminded by the people around him.