For Zhou Xin, the game is just a means, and the goal is to increase the download rate of Riot Games and find new payment scenarios for NewPay.

The bursting of the Nasdaq bubble has intensified, and Internet companies of all sizes and fields have been severely affected. eBay, which was in talks about a merger with Yahoo, was shut down, and Amazon's market value fell by 80%.

Both eBay and Amazon need to be accountable to their investors and need to find new stories to excite Wall Street. What better story could there be than electronic payments?

Amazon, ebay and other e-commerce companies have made various hints and explicit statements to NewPay through different channels that they want to buy NewPay, and if NewPay does not accept the acquisition, they need to reconsider their current partnership.

Zhou Xin needs to prepare, once Amazon and ebay kick NewPay out of the electronic payment channel, and quora is not in their control, what application scenarios can NewPay survive.

Although such a thing has not happened yet, ebay and Amazon's self-developed electronic payment software, the number of users is small, the user experience is not good, they can't get rid of NewPay for the time being, but the future is not easy to say.

Especially recently, Zhou Xin heard from Peter Thiel that eBay is talking about the acquisition of an electronic payment website founded by Musk.

This made Zhou Xin feel a sense of urgency, and he needed an online game to help NewPay find a new payment scenario.

Riot's online game store has always been the only payment channel for NewPay, but this is not enough, as for most users, the purchase frequency of single-player games is low.

Steam in the future era, for example, exceeded 30 million simultaneous online users, with 132 million monthly active users, but the total number of purchases for the year was also 137.6 million.

This means that the average number of games purchased by users per year is less than 1. The sample data taken here is the number of monthly active users of Steam, excluding users who have registered an account but do not use it.

Online games will bring more frequent payments, and online games around the world alone are enough to support an electronic payment software.

Coupled with NewPay's deep involvement in Alibaba's cross-border trade, NewPay can live very well.

Riot Games and NewPay can be seen as the infrastructure of online games, and what Zhou Xin needs to do now is to let game manufacturers see the value of online games.

It's not enough to have just one game of Genting, and more online games are needed to support Riot Games and NewPay.

Therefore, "Genting Game" is just a horse bone in the horse bones.

When it came to choosing a game, there were a lot of options, but considering the network latency and computer performance issues, I finally chose Genting Game, which is also to prepare for the subsequent League of Legends.

The auto-chess mode is time-tested, and Dota auto-chess quickly exploded as soon as it was introduced.

Later, almost all MOBA games launched their own auto-chess, Honor of Kings, League of Legends, Battle of Heianjing, 300 Heroes and so on.

Auto-chess became the target of game manufacturers at that time, just like a large number of two-dimensional mobile games appeared on the market after FGO became popular.

Even the developers of "Black Myth Wukong" have launched Red Tide Auto Chess based on their mobile game Red Tide.

And "Genting Game", as an evergreen tree in the auto-chess battle, has survived and is alive and well, and even the internal Riot is tilting resources towards "Genting Game" year by year.

The fame of Zhou Xin and Flamingo Games, as well as the now monopolized online distribution channels such as Fist Games, and the fact that Riot Games has too many cards to play on Riot Games' professional forums, all determine that Genting Game is unlikely to fail.

Just a pile of propaganda resources can push it to the fire, not to mention that the auto-chess model itself is a market-proven model.

In later generations, if Dota Auto Chess was made by the company owned by the founder of Steam, it would definitely be much more popular than that of an unknown small factory.

At the same time, the two games previously launched by Flamingo Games are both masterpieces of the year.

It's like miHoYo made two critically acclaimed games, "Honkai" and "Genshin Impact", and then launched "Star Railway", the spontaneous enthusiasm of players was enough to bring the first wave of audiences.

Of course, whether it can continue to be popular in the future depends on the quality of the game itself.

Zhou Xin dared to say that after the explosion of "Genting Game", other game manufacturers will also launch their own auto-chess.

For example, Nintendo's Pokémon IP and Sega's Three Kingdoms series, these well-known IPs have enough characters and are naturally suitable for transformation into auto-chess.

There is no threshold for playing and it is the easiest to plagiarize. After the popularity of Dota auto-chess, the official V Society released an auto-chess called Dota Baye in Chinese, which has a lot of similarities with Dota auto-chess.

But Zhou Xin doesn't mind being plagiarized in the slightest, as long as your game is logged in through Riot Games.

I wish there were more online games to support NewPay's payment scene.

"It's finally open, and I've been hungry for more than ten days. As a Riot game fan since Angry Birds, do you know how much I crave Genting Game? ”

Veteran players, two years doesn't seem to be very old, in short, players who know the history of Flamingo are still used to calling it Riot Games.

In addition, the actual controller of Riot Games and Flamingo Games is Zhou Xin, not only players think so, but the outside world also thinks so.

"I download the game of Genting every night before I go to bed, and then when I come home from work the next day, I know the strategy by heart, and no one can stop me from rushing to the sky!"

"As a mahjong lover, I feel that it is very similar to the combination of mahjong and chess, worthy of Newman, which combines the quintessence of China with the mainstream chess sports of the West, and it is full of attraction just by looking at it."

May 15th of the millennium was a Monday, and Rex, a big fan of Riot Games, took a day off work to wait for Genting's launch.

As far as he knew, there were quite a few such people.

Before the official launch of the server at 10 a.m., Rex sat in front of his computer and browsed the posts in the Genting Game section of Riot Games.

The game hasn't officially launched yet, but the segment has quickly risen to the top three spots on Riot's sector popularity charts. You can see many players like him in this section, who deliberately asked for leave to wait at home for the server to open.

There were a lot of posts about the game itself, as well as a few testimonials from players who had attended the E3 show and queued up to experience the game.

"It's a completely innovative genre, and yes, it's very different from the previous games.

Genting Game combines strategy, card collecting, and board game elements to create a unique gaming experience that was incredibly fresh for me when I first experienced it.

It jugs strategy and depth, a learning curve, competition, and a pace of play.

Its gameplay emphasizes strategy and depth. When I first started, I mainly thought about the bonds between the chess pieces, and I wanted to make up as many bonds as possible. Later, it was found that it was also necessary to consider the restraint relationship between the lineups and the position of the chess pieces.

When it comes to the second game, economic management also becomes a factor that determines the outcome of the game. After E3, I went home to watch the game video and realized that the management of the economy and when to spend money is more important than the bond.

The rules and gameplay of Genting Game are relatively unique, but it doesn't take much for beginners to understand and get used to it. There is a certain amount of difficulty in mastering or mastering the game, and similar to the strategic depth discussed above, there are so many points to consider.

With 7 competitors in addition to you, you need to not only consider your own strategy, but also adjust your strategy to the strategies of others.

The ranking mechanism and the battles in each round make the whole game full of competition and give the game a special appeal.

While waiting at E3, I would feel that the pace of the game was too slow, each game took 30 minutes or more to complete, and when it was my turn to play, I felt that the time was so short, and I was already over before I could fully appreciate its subtleties.

All in all, it was the most fun game I've played this year. ”

Rex prefers to read posts with a certain amount of information density rather than witty posts.

As he browsed the forums, he glanced at the time in the lower right corner from time to time, and by 9:55 he had already opened Riot Games.

As a result, he found that the landing button had lit up. "What's going on? Is it already possible to log in? ”

After he clicked, he realized that he could actually log in, five minutes earlier than the original time.

Rex quickly got hooked on the game and just nibbled on a few bites of bread at noon.

In another set, seeing that he was about to win, the opponent successfully chased out the Samsung hardware card, so that his efforts in one game would be in vain.

Now everyone is not used to surrendering and not letting the other party be happy, Rex watched his little hero defeat, and then typed the words second place on the screen.

He found that the most painful thing about playing this game is the second, you are the eighth place and you will only want to hurry to the next hand, and you are the second place and will always be haunted by the almost first place.

After the second inning, Rex calmed down and looked at the time, it was already six o'clock in the afternoon.

"I only ate bread at noon, so it's no wonder my stomach is starting to get hungry." He thought to himself, "Let's go out for something in the evening, this one was so unpleasant." ”

Before leaving, he glanced at Riot's forums and found that he had quickly reached the top of the game in the game of Genting.

Players were discussing the game itself, and thanks to the video, the game itself lived up to their expectations.

"I almost won the one just now, although I got it, but why is it so unhappy?" Rex smiled when he saw a player who had the same thing going through as him.

"Did you buy a communication card? I look at the communication card for $9.9, and I can get a total of 4 boards, as well as some small heroes and corresponding offensive effects, and I kind of want to buy them.

It costs $9.9 to buy a chessboard alone. "Rex hasn't paid attention to where the toll is.

In his opinion, it is unimaginable that such a good game is actually free.

After seeing this post, Rex returned to the game interface, only to find the introduction to the purchase of monthly passes on the homepage.

The monthly pass, similar to the Genting ticket in later generations, will be purchased as you complete the task, get the corresponding points, and the points will unlock rewards.

Up to 4 boards and some other items can be obtained.

This mechanism determines that to a certain extent, the player's game time is guaranteed.

Rex took a look at the other pricing, and the board has three tiers, ranging from $9.9 to $29.9.

The first 3 boards are $9.9 at the store, and the grand prize is a $19.9 board at the store.

Rex was already impressed, and he opened the payment screen, thinking about taking another look at the replies of other players in the forum.

"Buy, I've already bought it, compared with simply buying a chessboard, a monthly pass is much more cost-effective."

"Such a game is released as a paid game, and the price of $9.9 is too cheap, so I bought it anyway. If everyone doesn't buy it, what if Newman doesn't make games in the future? ”

There are not only such irrational voices in the forum, but also rational voices, but the rational voices are also calling on everyone to buy:

"I took a closer look at the rules for upgrading the points of the Genting Game monthly pass, and according to its rules, you can unlock all the rewards by playing one game every day. So I'm going to buy it, $9.9 so much stuff is not a loss at all. ”

Rex was already impressed.

Many of these inducement payment stickers are sent by officials pretending to be players, and some are sent by players themselves.

In short, the atmosphere created by the whole forum is that such a good game is not tolerated by spending money on it.

More than 90,000 players were online at the same time in the U.S. that day, just shy of 100,000.

The rate of payment among these players is as high as 20%, which means that about 20,000 people are paying, and this is only the first day.

"Fortunately, we temporarily adopted CDN technology and deployed server nodes in major cities.

Otherwise, players will really be overwhelmed with servers and broadband resources today. Johnson looked distraught.

Before the server was launched, Zhou Xin repeatedly told them the importance of ensuring network stability and smoothness, and asked them to deploy servers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, etc., and then do parallel connection.

Technologies such as redundancy and load balancing, caching, and content delivery networks are used to ensure that the network is not trouble-free.

"This is the beginning, when word of mouth ferments, there will only be more and more players. And players in the Europa region are also a problem.

This side needs to continue to expand. Zhou Xin said.

Zhou Xin is most concerned about how many new users and payment times "Genting Game" can add to NewPay.

He didn't take the success of the game itself that seriously.

However, in the process of doing "The Game of Genting", Zhou Xin realized that he could take the first step to get out of the public cloud.

Public cloud, NVIDIA, Riot Games, and the semiconductor industry can be strung together in one line.

To put it simply, Internet companies need to use hardware resources, and they need to have enough server resources to host their Internet services in order to provide them to users.

Similar to the development of integrated circuits, the earliest companies built their own computer rooms, from servers to storage to networks, all these costs were borne by the Internet companies themselves.

When there are few users, use the computer to support it first, talk to venture capital when there are more users, and buy servers to build computer rooms when they attract investment.

Later, it became a server hosting model, with a dedicated data center to help with this, you just go and rent a server, and they will temporarily help expand the network bandwidth according to your needs.

While the Internet bubble gave birth to a large number of Internet companies, a large number of server operators, including Equinix, Rackspace, Verizon, AT&T, etc., all provide similar services.

Then there is the public cloud, which is equivalent to giving you whatever cloud service you want, and you can only buy server resources according to the server model before.

For example, with an 8-core 16G server, you can only buy this model, even if you only need 4-core 8G to meet your needs at the beginning.

With public cloud services, you can have as many cores as you want, as many Gigs as you want, fully personalized services, plus all-inclusive services, so that the start-up cost of Internet companies is greatly reduced.

The all-inclusive service means that you originally take the way of server hosting, and the server operator only manages the hardware for you, and you still need to do the operation and maintenance work at the system level. After the public cloud service, the operation and maintenance work is also outsourced to the public cloud vendor.

You just need to deploy the service and you're good to go.

The public cloud business is not that big, and it's also a concept with a long history.

In the 90s, telecommunications companies, which previously mainly provided private networks, began to offer virtual private network services. By switching the traffic they see fit to balance server usage, telcos use overall network bandwidth more efficiently.

Cloud computing, on the other hand, extends the boundaries of the cloud to cover all servers as well as network infrastructure.

As computers became more ubiquitous, developers explored ways to distribute computing power to more users at scale, experimenting with algorithms to optimize infrastructure, platforms, and applications, prioritize tasks to be performed by CPUs, and improve efficiency for end users.

The concept of cloud was fully proposed in '94, and Amazon was supposed to launch an elastic cloud computing service in 2002.

Such a cloud service can minimize the upfront IT infrastructure costs.

It is equivalent to you taking over the servers of other companies by yourself, and you can buy as many servers as you need from me for virtual server resources corresponding to computing power, bandwidth and storage space.

This requires a large number of servers, which means a large number of chips, and chips are computing power.

Doing a good job in cloud computing means that the chip supply chain he will build in China in the future has buyers.

Matrix and public cloud walk on two legs, which is enough to support the development of Huaguo's chips to 7nm.

And it also has a lot to do with Riot Games and Nvidia.

After the popularity of Genting Game, there will be many companies that also want to make online games, but making online games means a lot of infrastructure needs.

and is a huge cost for small and medium-sized enterprises.

But they want to enter the field of online games, so what to do? Purchase virtual resources from Zhouxin's public cloud and you're done.

At the same time, they want to go through the channel of Riot Games, buy cloud services through Riot Games, and give a certain discount.

If there are enough online games on Zhouxin's public cloud, Zhouxin can find NVIDIA to customize a GPU optimized for online games.

After the GPU computing power reaches a certain point, it will detonate the virtual currency and then start to engage in AI.

It's perfect, Zhou Xin quickly went through the plan in his mind and found that there were not too many loopholes.

He thought to himself, it seems that Bezos's road will be taken by me first, if Amazon does not have cloud services, the market value will be cut by at least one-third.

In the future, Amazon's cloud services accounted for the first place in the world, which was the earliest and the best.

And now is the right time to do public cloud, the Nasdaq bubble bursts, and these server hosters who rely on the existence of the Internet will also go bankrupt in large numbers.

"Johnson, you remember talking to AT&T, we need to increase our network bandwidth by at least 50 percent.

Looking at the numbers, we have achieved phased success.

But don't be careless, and continue to pay attention to the bugs reported by players, as well as the balance of the game itself.

The most important thing in this kind of game is balance, each way of playing needs to have a certain winning rate, and there can be no one kind of play that particularly disrupts the balance.

In addition, we can increase the investment in Internet marketing, and since its data performance is good, then we need to let more players see it and experience our game. ”

After connecting cloud computing, Riot Games, NVIDIA, and integrated circuits into a single line, Zhou Xin became even more determined to make the game of Genting into a golden signboard.

"Dr. Wang, hello, I have been looking up to the name for a long time, the boss asked me to invite you personally, and he said that he had always known that you had profound attainments in computer distributed computing.

This time, I would like to invite you to work at Ameriken, and he has a new idea to build a great company, saying that the creation of this great company needs your support. After Wu Shiqiang finished speaking, he turned the computer screen to Wang Jian and motioned for him to look.

"That's what the boss meant, I'm not exaggerating, I know you work as a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Asia.

But compared to the CTO position that our boss is willing to offer you, as well as the option incentives, Microsoft's job is nothing compared to that. ”

Wu Shiqiang's words were full of sincerity. Zhou Xin promised a billion-dollar investment at the Internet conference, and the money was naturally not invested in those days.

However, this proves that emerging investment in China will invest money, and they are willing to support the development of China's Internet industry with real money knowing that the Internet winter has not yet passed. As a result, emerging investments are now hot in China's internet scene.

This also caused Wu Shiqiang to feel a little proud. However, he is still very concerned about the tasks assigned by Zhou Xin.

Wu Shiqiang personally went out and brought Wang Jian for an interview.

Wang Jian is the technical lead of Alibaba Cloud and the chief technology officer of Alibaba. Zhou Xin plans to poach him in advance and preside over the research and development of the public cloud business.

Originally, Wang Jian was only Plan B, and the No. 1 candidate did not come, so he started Plan B.

The game is just a means, if you think that Genting can't be popular, you can replace it with any game that you think can be popular at the time, and the hardware equipment can support it.

And to be honest, I haven't played Genting before, and the auto chess I play a lot is Chichao auto chess, I don't know if you have played it.

Genting was also chosen because it does have a relatively high level of popularity until today, indicating that there is something to be desired.

(End of chapter)