The total development cycle of the "Ancient Guardian Alliance", including the open beta, is expected to take more than a year. It will not be until the end of 2008 or the beginning of 09 that there will be commercial shipments. During this period of time, Hatsune Entertainment has only developed some small indie games, and even continued upgrade and maintenance tasks such as Hatsune Entertainment and World of Warcraft.

Gu Mojie deeply felt that Hatsune Entertainment's game development team was a little weak.

If it were a year ago, this situation would not be anything, after all, at that time, Hatsune Entertainment's main façade work in the game industry was just a daughter-in-law Hatsune singer, and no matter how you get it, nothing will happen. However, after swallowing World of Warcraft and expecting to split and list this part of the game-based business in the coming year, Hatsune Entertainment obviously has a shortage of talent.

Only those who do music, film and television will be divided, and first of all, there is a large piece of shortcoming.

And Zou Sheng, who Gu Mojie relied on before, is a guy who does download tools and BT, cloud disks and the like, although he is an old man in the IT circle, after all, he is not specialized in games, so he can only rely on experience to grasp the overall situation.

Gu Mojie thought in his heart, now that the email business of Hatsune Network Technology has become larger and larger, the cloud disk will definitely be officially put on the agenda in the future, and it is better to leave the transmission/storage business to Zou Sheng, the most professional person, to concentrate on it - after all, he was the founder of "Xunlei" in the first place.

As for the issue of equity, there is no hidden danger - at the beginning of the year, Gu Mojie used the equity exchange incentive plan of the new CFO Gu Yongjiang to replace Zou Sheng's Hatsune Entertainment holdings with group-level shares.

The internal and external factors of Qiē show that it is necessary for Hatsune Entertainment to carry out a major change of talent layout to meet the needs of a listed game company.

It's too slow to recruit people one by one, and to be honest, the domestic game market in 07 years is basically still occupied by foreigners' international big names, and no one plays domestic stand-alone machines - except for the martial arts theme that foreigners will never do.

As the hardest hit area of the piracy atmosphere for many years, China's game talent is scarce. If you dig it from China, it is not as good as the group of people cultivated by Hatsune herself, Gu Mojie can't look down on it at all - who makes Hatsune Entertainment already the first echelon of domestic game research and development.

The most convenient way is to buy one or several foreign original game development teams.

Buy American's? Japanese? French? Counting with his fingers, there are only a few goods in the international market that can enter Gu Mojie's eyes.

(Lao Maozi's war game company was still inconspicuous in '07.) And to be honest, the woolly bear does not win the war game at all, but because the woolly bear company does not need to worry about the political-political-correct problem of the historical view, so it can let go of its hands. Europe and the United States are tied to death by the political authorities, and they cannot be developed at all. ）

"Who's better to buy?" Gu Mojie thought about it for a long time, and also checked some industry information on the Internet on his own, but he still had no clue, so he could only make a phone call and call COO Ye Weilun.

When Ye Weilun came, he was still at a loss as to what Gu Mojie was going to talk to him.

"Mr. Ye, you usually play games, right?"

Gu Mojie's opening remarks made Ye Weilun feel that his thinking jumped far away.

"Play, of course, but not so much."

"Do you think that to be a 'Ancient Guardian Alliance', it should also fit the current path of Hatsune's self-developed games, if you want to buy one or even several game development teams, which companies are currently worth starting with on the market? It can be a company within one or two hundred million yuan that can be bought at present, or it can be a relatively large company that can only raise enough money to buy after we go public, but it doesn't hurt to say it. ”

"The Alliance of Ancient Guardians...... The plan for this game is currently changing back and forth, and there is no conclusion. I really haven't played much of anything like it before, so it's hard to say. But according to the people below, this game is adapted from a game called DOTA, and it is only made into an online game model - in that case, why haven't we considered incorporating the private R&D team that did DOTA in the first place?

I've been concerned about this question, and I know that DOTA was taken over by several open-source script editing groups. One of the early developers, led by an American named Steven, has now formed a small independent company called riot-games. Translated as 'fist game' or 'fire fist game'.

He's ready to start another branch of DOTA, and recently invested in California, where he seems to have offered $8 million in Series A funding and a 20% stake in the company — if you're interested, you can learn about the team's technical and planning prowess. ”

When Gu Mojie heard this, he immediately made a decision: "This can be considered, well, go and investigate it immediately, and sign it if it is a little more reliable." If they are willing to give me more equity to take it private, it will be done. Anyway, with less than 100 million pocket money, there is nothing to think about. ”

Ye Weilun waited for Gu Mojie to finish talking to himself before he continued to add: "Don't worry, DOTA is an open source, and there is more than one volunteer R&D team that has been taken over before and after. If we see one and buy one, although we can afford to burn it, after all, it is a waste of money. It's better to think about it holistically.

FOR EXAMPLE, AS FAR AS I KNOW, THE BIGGEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSON IN THE HISTORY OF DOTA DEVELOPMENT IS NOT THAT STEVEN, BUT A GUY WITH THE SCREEN NAME ICE-FROG, WHOSE NICKNAME TRANSLATES TO 'ICE FROG'. This man has been insisting on updating DOTA independently, which is still being updated, but at the beginning of the year his people were taken over by Welford Software. ”

"This person only has a screen name? How can we talk without a real name? For this, Gu Mojie is obviously very puzzled.

Ye Weilun thought for a while, scratched his head and said, "Of course I have my real name, isn't that annoying." In short, it's called something. Abdullah. Ismail, anyway, there is a whole bunch of prefixes in front of the name - Arabic names are like that, you know. ”

"Is it a Harmony Sect?"

"Immigrant, citizenship is American." Ye Weilun hurriedly explained, while complaining, "Not all the people with Abdullah in their names are KB elements, what are you afraid of." There are a lot of programmers among those people. ”

Gu Mojie didn't dwell on the other party's race issue, not to mention that Ye Weilun said that this person had been absorbed by Welfort Software, and there was no point in talking about it.

Gu Mojie asked Ye Weilun some more about the soul of the previous DOTA R&D team, but he didn't find anyone again, so he stopped the topic.

He picked up the phone on the table and dialed to the secretary's office: "Sister Xiaoru, prepare coffee and refreshments for Mr. Ye, and then help me check the detailed information of an American company called 'Welford Software'." ”

Then hung up the phone and motioned Ye Weilun to rest on the sofa for a while, and he continued to talk after understanding the situation clearly.

Two minutes later, Ye Minru personally brought refreshments into Gu Mojie's office, put one on the coffee table in front of Ye Weilun, and also put one on Gu Mojie's desk. Ye Weilun was not polite, and rested on his own.

Gu Mojie looked at the information for a while, and soon Ye Minru forwarded an email to him, all of which were business information urgently collected by the secretariat. Gu Mojie drank coffee and looked at it slowly.

"It turns out that the original 'Half-Life' was made by this company called Welford Software? Tsk, I also played CS back then, but I never cared about the developer's problem, and it seems to be a company that is quite experienced in the application and optimization of 3D engines in various eras. ”

"What? Villefort's Half-Life series online update hall STEAM, since 2005, imitated our Hatsune Singer Online Store, and started a mod sales sharing plan? Since last year, it has also introduced several large-scale single-player game development giants and built an online sales sharing platform for single-player games? Still profitable? ”

"The current platform partners already include Ubisoft Software? The R&D director of the STEAM platform is the well-known Bram. Cohen? ”

Hiss...... Seeing this step, Gu Mojie had already begun to gasp.

Bram. Cohen is a geek. Many Chinese may not know who this public is profuse, but there is absolutely nothing that insiders who have done several transmission services do not know - the original architecture of the BT model was designed by this public.

In contrast, Gu Mojie's Zou Sheng was just the original "founder of Thunderbolt Download", and was later accepted by Gu Mojie to develop Hatsune Download, but he stumbled among the Chinese to first make the "Hatsune Download Version that supports BT resources". How can anyone be the originator of BT, Bram Cohen?

If we can recruit such talents and their teams, Hatsune Group will be able to stand at the top of the world not only in games, but also in the business areas of downloading tools, cloud drives, and digital game sales!

Buy, buy, buy!

Gu Mojie has already killed Villefort Software.

"It's a pity that the 'Hatsune Singer MOD Mall' model, which was invented by our Hatsune Entertainment first, was learned by Villefort's STEAM platform, and it took the lead in the application model of the digital version of the stand-alone game sales platform - in the final analysis, it is because the piracy of stand-alone games in China is so fierce that this market does not exist at all. With such a good idea, I can only sell MOD paid props for online games, but I can't sell stand-alone games, alas. ”

Ye Weilun had just finished eating a bowl of coconut milk grapefruit mansago dew, and when he saw Gu Mojie sighing, he put down the bowl and asked: "Is this going to buy Villefort Software Company together?" ”

"Who's to say it isn't. It's also something I haven't seen before, and of course, on the other hand, it's also a shortage of funds at the time, and it's not good to deploy too long-term - although the digital version market of single-player games in China is almost zero, it's hard to guarantee that the system will be optimized one day. What's more, this model was originally made by us, even if we can't make Chinese money, it's good to earn some foreigners' money. ”

Ye Weilun had to give Gu Mojie a vaccination: "But buying a game company like Villefort Software, which has a history of 10 years, is not as good as buying a grass platform team like 'Fire Fist' - the latter can be completely eaten with only a few hundred million yuan of money, while the former may cost billions of yuan." ”

"That can't be helped, let's keep an eye on it first. At the moment, there is no money to buy, and next year, when Hatsune Entertainment is successfully listed, it will be time to start. Even if it is billions, with our current comprehensive layout, we will definitely earn it back - buying Villefort will not only help our game, but also our download software and cloud disk business, which is too suitable for our current industrial structure, and it is completely one fish and three eats. ”

"It's not enough to eat three fish, since you buy Villefort, you definitely can't just focus on their STEAM, Bram Cohen, and even the Ice Frog team - the biggest value of Villefort is its value in the Half-Life or CS series of games. If the company buys it and doesn't plan to develop its own FPS first-person shooter competitive game, it will definitely lose money. ”

"Let's think about it slowly, I really don't have any plans for a shooter right now." (To be continued.) )