The Industrial Giant Reborn

A company's research and development capabilities are limited by factors such as the total population, the total number of talents, and the educational environment in the area. As a city with a population of only 5 million, Hong Kong is currently moving from the real to the virtual and the real estate is being financialized. Electronics, IT Talented people are naturally far from enough.

To solve this problem, there are two ways. The first is to attract overseas talents to Hong Kong. Over the years, Midea has been poaching people from Japan and Wanwan. Although Midea is not short of money, the number of people required for research and development is also very large. , large companies at the same level have tens of thousands of people. Obviously, it is difficult to meet this demand only by recruiting people from overseas. Most people are still reluctant to leave their hometowns, including the mainland. Although there are some talents, But the total number is not enough. Even if there is a deep-sea university, it will take a few years before it can create talents in batches, and it will not be effective until the end of the 1980s at the earliest.

The second is naturally to build various R\u0026D centers around the world and recruit various talents locally to serve the headquarters.

In the short term, the second model is more realistic. Midea has long established related laboratories in the United States. The treatment given is not lower than that of IBM and Apple, but the attraction is still not enough.

But now that Atari has closed down, a large number of game talents have suddenly lost their jobs. They have absorbed them here, just to make up for their own shortcomings, and the recruitment cost can be reduced a lot.

The most important thing is that these talents cannot fall into the hands of competitors, especially some American game companies or even Japanese companies, or if these people cannot find suitable jobs, they may start their own businesses. No one knows that Atari has hundreds of Among the R\u0026D talents, will anyone develop a work comparable to "Mario".

History has changed, and no one knows what will happen in the future. Chen Zhiwen just tries to avoid situations that are not good for him. In the field of games, even if it is a garage, once a blockbuster game is developed, it can immediately dominate other giant companies. This is the nature of the technology industry, otherwise, it would not have attracted so many people to enter the market to start a business.

This is a bit different from computers.

"Okay, I will focus on tracking down some of Atari's technical experts and product managers." Lei Shengli nodded.

Chen Zhiwen also said: "Now that Atari is bankrupt, the entire game market is basically dominated by us, but this model is still not stable. The first is that our game development speed cannot keep up with the needs of users. There are tens of thousands of users, and everyone has different hobbies. Whether it is [Tank Battle] or even [Mario] we are developing, there will always be many people who don’t like it, but we are not capable of satisfying so many different interests. Hobby.

And the second is that if our game categories are not wide enough, it is unlikely to attract these people to buy our game consoles. Making less money is secondary, but this market is easy to cultivate other competitors. "

"Chen Sheng, what do you mean, we want to open up our host platform to other game companies?" Lei Shengli quickly understood what the boss meant.

"What problems do you think are there?" Chen Zhiwen asked.

"Theoretically, there is no big problem, but in fact, it is difficult for us to control the quality of other games on the market. Although Atari's problem this time was directly caused by itself, the essence is because of the Atari game console platform. It was opened very early, and there are all kinds of garbage games on the market. Many people also believe that the quality of Atari's own games must be guaranteed, and the reputation of [ET Aliens] is very attractive. The greater the expectation, the greater the disappointment. Big, that finally led to the current situation of being forced to go bankrupt." Lei Shengli thought for a while and said.

Atari Corporation, became famous earlier than Midea. Although it did not gain an advantage in the face of Midea’s fierce competition, it still won a part of the home game console market. Its open policy has led to a wide variety of games. Relying on these , can rival the United States.

Such a company still has sufficient financial resources. Although it is okay to lose a lot of money if the game fails this time, it will not go bankrupt no matter what.

The most fundamental reason is that the quality of games on the market cannot be controlled for a long time, causing players to complain deeply. In the end, the big return of [ET Aliens] is just the last straw that broke the camel's back.

"Atari's lesson from the past is indeed worthy of our attention. A local American company, and there are many large American consortia behind it, but it still can't handle so many third-party garbage games, so we accept third-party games. At the same time, we also need With a strict control system, even third-party games need to go through our sales channels, and everything needs to be controlled by us." Chen Zhiwen nodded and said.

Atari is not a fool. A long time ago, when the first batch of junk games appeared, he discovered something was wrong, and tried to find a way to limit these junk games, and even sued some game production companies to the court. But it was too late. Even if Atari won the lawsuit, it only prevented one company from doing so. There are thousands of other companies. Many companies are not headquartered in the United States, or do not know where? It is also impossible for Atari to sue one by one, or to fight a transnational lawsuit.

When they don't install a special identification chip in their game consoles, it's useless to do anything later.

"That is to say, we give identification chips to all third-party game cards, and then we have to give us the finished products first, and then we sell them to the global market?" Lei Shengli understood.

Midea’s game consoles have identification chips at the very beginning, and only recognize their own game cards, and the card slot design is different from other games, and are protected by patent applications. In the past, the chip was off.

Of course, this is not insurmountable. As long as someone ignores the law, the identification chip can also be bypassed, but the cost of this method is not low, and it must be made on a large enough scale to be profitable. Once it becomes large, it is easy to be discovered. Small-scale operations are not cost-effective, and will not have a great impact on Midea.

In the past few years, only Midea game cards can be played on Midea game consoles.

In fact, Atari also wants to learn this model, but it can’t do anything about it. It’s not because it’s technically incapable, but because the market doesn’t allow it. Only Midea, which has several hit games and can attract a large number of buyers, can be so strong.

However, as the boss said, this model is fine at the beginning, but when the scale grows, it will limit itself.

"Thinking a little more broadly, Midea has a complete production capacity of game electronic products, and can directly produce various game cards directly. In this way, in addition to game playability and quality, it can also be well controlled. "Chen Zhiwen smiled and said: "And for third-party game companies, the scale is generally not very large. Many of them are companies in garages, just like Apple a few years ago. It is already very easy for them to develop games. It’s hard work, not to mention trying to produce, even if it’s difficult for them to find an OEM, it’s better for us to come forward to solve this problem, and they can design the game with peace of mind.”

"It's a good idea. In this way, the difficulty of starting a company will be greatly reduced." Lei Shengli said pleasantly.

"It can be regarded as maximizing the utilization of resources. In the future, what we need for Midea is not to continuously launch popular games, but to stabilize our hardware position in the home game console market. This requires a large number of high-quality, non-high-quality, Niche games are used to fill various gaps. What we have to do is to give game developers a certain amount of convenience, so that they only need to create games with peace of mind. Even if they have no money, as long as they have the ability, we can invest some money. As long as we stabilize the hardware market, we can be regarded as a semi-monopoly in the field of home game consoles." Chen Zhiwen paused, and then said: "Of course, we also need to develop new games ourselves, so it's better if we can develop them ourselves! "

In Chen Zhiwen's memory, there are still some classic games, but now the chip industry has developed greatly, and a large number of users have become accustomed to interesting and complex games, and the requirements for games are getting higher and higher. Just Midea, no matter how big it is It is also unlikely to meet the needs of even half of the population.

What's more, in the original history, even if the top ten games add up, they only occupy a part of the entire game market. The rankings from 11th to 100th and beyond are definitely higher than the top ten. After all, game cards are not like cars or mobile phones. They are highly exclusive, and many people can buy many sets if they have money.

What Midea needs to do now is to use countless third parties to develop games for itself and complete the first game platform in global history.

Perhaps in the future, this platform will be challenged by computers or other companies, but that will be a long time later, and I will eat this market first.

"Then, how to divide the profits?" Lei Shengli asked.

"70% to 30%, I think there are two situations!" Chen Zhiwen said: "If the game company signs an exclusive licensing agreement with us, that is, its games are only used on our game consoles, then 70% of the profits will be given to their developers." , we only need 30%, and various marketing expenses and OEM expenses are calculated separately. This is two different things.

The second is that there is no exclusive authorization. Our platform is only one of the alternative platforms for the other party's games. In this case, we want 70% of the profit and give the other party 30%. The marketing or OEM costs are still the same! "

PS: There is another one at night, ask for a monthly ticket