Game Development Giant

Those who love this game will be delighted!

Jester, who had been deeply hurt by it, thought this way, and it can't be said that he was deeply hurt by it. He just felt that it was hateful to brag about these settings of Nintendo, but it was indeed an excellent way to cultivate players' gaming habits. .

Although it is still far from the future, community-based games in the future are already an inevitable thing to do.

Communityization does not only refer to the concept of online games that have not yet appeared. Although the first network cable in the world has been connected and used for a long time, online games can only be said to be a type of community-based games and cannot be equally referred to. In this era, future games are not so much networked as they must be community-based. Of course, networked here does not refer to the networked nature of online games alone.

Although a community mechanism that encourages players to play games together will not be loved by some purely stand-alone parties, this is the general trend. In the future, all games of Mars Entertainment must be networked.

The release of "Pocket Monsters" in Japan is extremely popular. The popularity of the cartoon for nearly a month has given "Pocket Monsters" a large number of new fans. Moreover, the accumulation of Pokémon electronic pet machines over the past four or five years , there are countless people who are interested in this game, just like those little girls from elementary school to high school, who are even more interested in this game.

And Jester's reputation also made Jester's fans extremely curious about this game. They wanted to see what was different about this game that Jester had considered for four or five years before starting to make it. at.

Jester, who has a lot of historical memories from later generations, knows that although "Pokemon" is just a game for children on the surface, and the market scope does not seem to be large, in fact, this game is a real game. All the young and old were killed. This game has fans of almost every age group. Many Nintendo fans that Jester knew in his previous life also started playing "Pokemon".

Like what's going on in North America, it's even madder in Japan.

North American time is still the 24th, while Japanese time is already the 25th. At eight o'clock in the morning, half an hour before Mars Entertainment's Tokyo flagship store officially opens, in front of the flagship store , already filled with thousands of enthusiastic players. There are children who are only four or five years old, there are also primary school students who are seven or eight years old who have just entered elementary school, junior high school students who are 12 or 13 years old, high school students who are 17 or 18 years old, college students who are 21 or 2 years old, and even many three-year-olds. Teenagers are not uncommon either.

They are all waiting for the official release of "Pokemon".

Jester's status in the minds of gamers is undoubted, and gameboy is indeed a very suitable Christmas gift. Many children pester their parents to give themselves one as a gift. In order to carry out promotion this time, Mars Entertainment has also set up a discount method, which is to purchase any "Pokemon" at the same time as buying Gameboy. Then you can get an overall discount of 10%. If you buy two "Pokemon", you can get an overall discount of 20%.

This is also very attractive to players.

Naturally, it is difficult to provide trial play for handheld games, so this time Mars Entertainment did not prepare to trial it. Games like "Pokemon" are really not suitable for trial play. The trial time is only ten to thirty minutes. It is simply impossible for players who are new to this type of game to experience the appeal of this game.

This kind of game must be played at home, leaning on the sofa or nestled in bed. Dozens or hundreds of hours of game time accumulate a lot of game time. Before you know it, the day passes quietly. If I didn't feel that I was too hungry, I wouldn't even realize that I had just woken up and played straight into the middle of the night without any investigation.

That feeling, that feeling of not being able to feel the passage of time at all and being completely immersed in the game, is something that other games are hard to give.

This kind of experience can only be given by a game similar to 'brushing', and this is where the pleasure of brushing lies. Of course, brushing - to be precise, according to Hiroshi Yamauchi, it should be collecting, and it needs to be done It is happy and interesting, and allows players to take the initiative to play. If they do not play for a while, they will feel uncomfortable once they stop. If this can be done, then this game with "grinding" as its selling point can be said to be perfect.

This type of game seems simple, but it is very difficult to really do it well. Basically, based on so much experience in later generations, Jester has been able to reach the pinnacle in brush games, but it is "Pokemon". ”, “Monster Hunter” and “Diablo 2”.

Prior to this, Jester had not specially prepared too many game cartridges and Gameboy handheld phones. This was not because he did not want to, but because the production capacity of Hon Hai Instruments had reached its maximum limit, and Guo had already He gritted his teeth and stopped cooperating with many PC manufacturers in order to ensure the production capacity required by Jester as much as possible. Jester even gave Guo an order for 20 million units of Dreambox 2 in one go.

Now, almost half of the production lines of the entire Hon Hai Precision foundry are being repaired and upgraded for Dreambox 2.

As for gamboy's ability to maintain the previous production capacity, or even a small increase, it is still because a large number of the first-generation production lines of dreambox have been stopped. According to Jester's experience, although dreambox is already on the verge of becoming obsolete, this This console, just like the FC consoles in history, has only just passed half of its service life.

For example, FC still maintained a good sales figure until 1994. It was not until 2000 that Nintendo announced an official discontinuation of production.

Of course, after Dreambox has fully entered the 16-bit era in the home gaming industry, it is inevitable that its competitiveness will decline significantly. Jester also feels that instead of wasting production capacity to produce such old-fashioned consoles, it is better to directly produce them. Dreambox2 allows you to gain profits, because if Dreambox2 enters the competition stage, in order to maintain Mars Entertainment’s dominance in the current video game industry, you will almost certainly transfer all of your development energy to Dreambox2. For Dreambox The attention paid to the first-generation machine is basically negligible.

And a game console without new games has almost no future.

In this case, if you don’t want to give up the remaining wealth contained in Dreambox, it is better to directly authorize it, allow several manufacturers to produce Dreambox machines, and then let those who are willing to develop games on Dreambox continue to develop games on it.

Of course, even if it is authorized, it will only happen after Dreambox2 is on the right track, not now. If you want Dreambox2 to be on the right track and inherit the dominance of Dreambox, next year, or even the year after two consecutive years, will be the most critical. moment, because whether it is Sega, the alliance between Nintendo and Sony, or NEC, Namco, and Hudson's PC-E, which are watching covetously from the sidelines and have not officially stated that they will join the fight for 16-bit machines. When this home game console is being upgraded, I want to compete for dominance in the home console market.

In the eight-bit computer era, he relied on his advantages of first launch and ultra-high-quality games to sweep all the way and establish his current dominance. Now, he is about to face a competition. In his memory, the competition Back then, Nintendo and Sega's War of the Century was twice as bloody as the melee. Thinking about it, it was really exciting.

Gameboy was almost sold out in Japan on Christmas Day.

A total of 1.1 million units were sold. You know, before Christmas, the Japanese branch of Mars Entertainment carried out a replenishment. The original survival in Japan was only 600,000 units. In the end, the stock was doubled. 1.2 million units have been replenished. According to Mars Entertainment's prediction, the inventory of 1.2 million units will be enough to last until New Year's Day, and maybe even early January.

In their predictions, the markets where sales will explode are concentrated in North America. They have shipped 60% of their inventory to North America, and the remaining 40% is from Japan and Europe. This is based on Judgments based on previous sales figures.

But they never expected that Japanese players would be so enthusiastic about gameboys that they would rush to buy them almost like crazy. Many people even bought ten units of ten units, because they had not expected this situation before, and there was no such thing. There was no restriction on purchase, so more than one million units were sold in one day, which is really a staggering number.

You know, in the nearly five months of sales of Gameboy in Japan, the total sales did not exceed 1.5 million.

When Jester received this number reported to him by the Japanese branch in the United States, he was waiting for the release of "Pokemon" in North America. His first reaction when he heard this number was that it could not be from the Japanese branch. There was a mistake. How could it reach 1.1 million units? Even in their predictions for the entire North American market, the total sales volume on the first day will not exceed 800,000 units at most.

You know, this is a market several times larger than Japan.

Now, for Mars Entertainment, the most serious problem has come. Based on the crazy sales on the first day, even if the second sales volume will shrink, it will not shrink too much. And now Japan has less than 100,000 units left in stock. (To be continued...)