The Millennium Semiconductor Survival Guide

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

The bursting of the NASDAQ bubble has intensified, and Internet companies of different sizes have been seriously affected no matter what field they are in. Ebay, which was originally negotiating a merger with Yahoo, was suspended, and Amazon's market value fell by 80%.

Both eBay and Amazon need to be responsible to investors and need to find new stories to excite Wall Street. Is there a better story than electronic payments?

Amazon, eBay and other e-commerce companies have made various hints and expresses to NewPay through different channels, hoping to acquire NewPay. If NewPay does not accept the acquisition, they need to reconsider the current cooperative relationship.

Zhou Xin needs preparations. Once Amazon and ebay kick NewPay out of the electronic payment channels, and quora is out of their control, what application scenarios can NewPay survive.

Although such a thing has not happened yet, the electronic payment software developed by eBay and Amazon has a small number of users and poor user experience. They cannot get rid of NewPay for the time being, but the future is hard to say.

Especially recently, Zhou Xin heard from Peter Thiel that eBay is negotiating an acquisition with X.com, an electronic payment website founded by Musk.

This gave Zhou Xin a sense of urgency. He needed an online game to help NewPay find new payment scenarios.

The fist online game store has always had NewPay as the only payment channel, but this is not enough, because for most users, the purchase frequency of stand-alone games is very low.

Take steam in the future as an example, the number of concurrent online users has exceeded 30 million, the number of monthly active users is 132 million, but the total number of purchases for the whole year is also 137.6 million.

That is to say, 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 accounts but do not use them.

Online games will bring more frequent payments. Global online games alone are enough to support an electronic payment software.

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

The fist game client and NewPay can be regarded as the infrastructure of online games. What Zhou Xin needs to do now is to let game manufacturers see the profit value of online games.

Only one "Game of Genting" is far from enough, more online games are needed to support Fist Games and NewPay.

Therefore, "Game of Genting" is just a horse bone in a horse bone bought with a thousand dollars.

When choosing a game, there are many options, but considering the network delay and computer performance, I finally chose "Game of Genting", which is also a preparation for the follow-up League of Legends.

The mode of Auto Chess has passed the test of time, and Dota Auto Chess exploded quickly once it was launched.

Later, almost all MOBA games launched their own auto chess, such as Glory 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 after FGO became popular, a large number of two-dimensional mobile games appeared on the market.

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

And "Game of Genting", as an evergreen tree in the auto chess battle, has survived and lived well, and even the internal resources of the fist are tilted to "Game of Genting" year by year.

The reputation of Zhou Xin and Flamingo Games, as well as the now-monopolized online distribution channel of Fist Games, coupled with the fist game professional forum, Zhou Xin has too many cards to play in his hands. Game of Thrones is impossible to fail.

Just a pile of publicity resources can push it to the top, not to mention that the Auto Chess model itself is a market-proven model.

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

At the same time, the two previous games launched by Flamingo Games are both excellent works of the year.

This is like Mihayou’s two well-received games, “Honkai” and “Yuanshin”, and then launched “Star Railway”, the spontaneous enthusiasm of the players was enough to bring the first wave of audience.

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 "Game of Thrones" becomes popular, other game manufacturers will also launch their own auto chess.

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

There is no threshold for the gameplay, and it is the easiest to copy. After Dota Auto Chess became popular in later generations, V Agency officially released an auto chess game named Dota Ba Ye in Chinese, which has a lot of similarities with Dota Auto Chess.

But Zhou Xin doesn't mind being plagiarized at all, as long as your game is available through Riot Games.

Looking forward to more online games to support NewPay's payment scene.

"The server is finally open. I have been hungry for more than ten days. As a player who has been a loyal supporter of Riot Games since the beginning of Angry Birds, do you know how eager I am for "Teamfight Tactics"?"

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 a fist game.

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

"I download the player matches of "Teamfight Tactics" every night before going to bed, and then watch it when I get home from get off work the next day. I'm already familiar with its strategies, and no one can stop me from climbing the ladder!"

"As a mahjong lover, I feel that it is very similar to the combination of mahjong and chess. As expected of Newman, it combines the quintessence of Huaguo with the mainstream Western chess. It is full of attraction just by looking at it. .”

May 15th of the millennium is a Monday. As a loyal fan of Riot Games, Rex asked for leave on this day to wait for the opening of Genting's server.

As far as he knew, there were many such people.

Before the official opening of the server at 10:00 in the morning, Rex sat in front of the computer and browsed through the posts on the Riot Games Genting Game of Thrones section.

The game has not yet been officially launched, but this section has quickly rushed to the top three positions in the hottest section of the fist game. You can see many players like him in this section, and they deliberately asked for leave to wait for the server to open at home.

A large number of posts discussing the game itself are full of it, and some players who have participated in the E3 exhibition and queued up to experience the game have spoken out.

"It's a completely new type of game, and yes, it's very different from anything that's come before it.

"Teamfight Tactics" combines strategy, card collection and board game elements to form a unique game experience, which brought me an extremely fresh feeling when I first played it.

It balances strategy with depth, learning curve, competitiveness, and pace of play.

Its gameplay emphasizes strategy and depth. When I first started, I mainly considered the fetters between the chess pieces, and wanted to make as many fetters as possible. It was later discovered that the restraint relationship between the lineups and the position of the chess pieces also need to be considered.

When playing for the second time, economic management has also become a factor in determining the outcome. After the E3 exhibition, I went home and watched the game video, and found that the management of the economy and when to spend money are more important things than fetters.

The game rules and gameplay of Genting Game are relatively unique, but it doesn't take much time for novices to understand and adapt. If you want to master or master this game, there is a certain degree of difficulty. Similar to the strategic depth mentioned above, you need to consider too many points.

In addition to you, there are 7 competitors at the same time. You not only need to consider your own strategy, but also adjust your strategy according to other people's strategies.

The ranking mechanism and each round of battles make the whole game full of competitiveness and also give the game extra appeal.

When I was waiting at E3, I felt that the game rhythm of "Game of Genting" was too slow. It took 30 minutes or even longer to complete each game. After queuing up and it was my turn to play, I felt that the time was so slow It's short, and it's over before I fully appreciate its subtlety.

All in all, this is the funnest game I've played this year. "

Compared with clever posts, Rex prefers to read posts with a certain information density.

While browsing the forum, he glanced at the time in the lower right corner from time to time, and opened the Riot game at 9:55.

As a result, he found that the login button had already lit up. "What's going on? Are you able to log in already?"

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

Rex quickly became addicted to the game, and only took a few bites of bread at noon.

Another game, seeing that he was about to win, the opponent successfully chased out the Samsung hardware card, making his hard work in one game in vain.

Now everyone is not used to surrendering to keep the other party happy, Rex watched his little hero lose the battle, and then the words "second place" were displayed on the screen.

He found that the most painful thing in playing this game is to be second. If you are in eighth place, you will only think about quickly entering the next hand. If you are in second place, you will always be worried about the almost first place.

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

"I only ate bread at noon, no wonder my stomach is starting to get hungry." He thought to himself, "Let's go out to eat something at night, this one just now was really uncomfortable."

Before leaving, he glanced at the Riot Games forum, and he found that the "Game of Genting" section had quickly reached the number one spot.

Players have discussed the game itself in it, and because of the video, the game itself has fully met their expectations.

"I almost won the game just now. Although I got the share, why are you so upset?" Rex smiled knowingly when he saw a post from a player who had encountered the same situation as him.

"Have you bought the communication card? I see that the communication card is $9.9, and you can get a total of 4 chessboards, as well as some little heroes and corresponding attack effects. I want to buy it.

It costs $9.9 to buy the chess board alone. "Rex hasn't noticed yet, where is the charging link.

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

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

The monthly ticket is similar to the Genting ticket of the later generations. After you buy it, you will complete the task and get the corresponding points, and the points will unlock the rewards.

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

This mechanism determines, to a certain extent, guarantees the player's game time.

Rex looked at the other pricing. There are three levels of chess boards, ranging from $9.9 to $29.9.

For the chessboards obtained through the monthly pass, the first three chessboards are priced at $9.9 in the store, and the final grand prize is a chessboard priced at $19.9 in the store.

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

"Buy it, I've already bought it. Compared with simply buying a chess board, the 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. Anyway, I bought it. If everyone doesn't buy it, what should Newman do if he 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 also call on everyone to buy:

"I carefully read the rules for upgrading the monthly ticket points of "Game of Thrones". According to its rules, you can unlock all the rewards once you play once a day. So I plan to buy it. There are so many things worth $9.9.

Rex was already heartbroken.

Many of these inducement payment stickers were posted by officials pretending to be players, and some were posted by the players themselves.

In short, the atmosphere created by the entire forum is that it is unreasonable not to spend money on such a good game.

On that day, the number of players online at the same time in the United States exceeded 90,000, which was only a little short of 100,000.

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

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

Otherwise, the players would really overwhelm the server and broadband resources today. "Johnson looked terrified.

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

Through redundancy and load balancing, caching and content distribution network and other technologies to ensure that the network does not go wrong.

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

There is still a need to continue to expand. " Zhou Xin said.

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

He doesn't place that much emphasis on the success of the game itself.

However, in the process of making "Game of Genting", Zhou Xin realized that he could get the public cloud out of the way first.

Public cloud, Nvidia, Riot Games, and the semiconductor industry can all be linked together.

To put it simply, Internet companies need to use hardware resources. They need to have enough server resources to carry their Internet services so that they can be called by users.

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

When there are few users, use the computer to support it first. If there are more users, chat with venture capitalists. If you attract investment, you will buy servers and build a computer room.

Later, it became a server hosting model. There is a dedicated data center to help with this. You can just rent the server directly. They will also temporarily help expand the network bandwidth according to your needs.

While the Internet bubble gave birth to a large number of Internet companies, it also gave birth to a large number of server operators, including Equinix, Rackspace, Verizon, AT\u0026T, etc., all of which provide similar services.

Then came the public cloud, which is equivalent to giving you whatever cloud service you want. In the past, you could only purchase server resources according to the server model.

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

With public cloud services, you can have as many cores as you want, and you can use as many Gs as you want. Fully personalized services, plus all-inclusive services, greatly reduce the start-up costs of Internet companies.

The all-inclusive service means that you originally took the server hosting method, 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.

The public cloud business is not so grand, it is also a concept with a long history.

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

And cloud computing extends the boundaries of the cloud to cover all servers and network infrastructure.

With the popularization of computers, researchers have explored ways to provide large-scale computing power to more users through distribution. They try to use algorithms to optimize infrastructure, platforms and applications, determine the priority of tasks to be performed by the CPU, and improve End User Efficiency.

The concept of the cloud was fully proposed in 1994. Amazon would have launched elastic cloud computing services in 2002.

Such cloud services can minimize upfront IT infrastructure costs.

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

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 he will have a buyer for the chip supply chain he will build in Huaguo in the future.

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

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

After "Game of Thrones" becomes popular, many companies will also want to make online games, but doing online games means a lot of infrastructure needs.

and a huge cost for SMEs.

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

At the same time, they have to go through the channel of Riot Games to purchase cloud services through Riot Games and give certain discounts.

If enough online games are placed on Zhou Xin's public cloud, Zhou Xin can ask Nvidia to customize a GPU optimized for online games.

After the GPU computing power has reached a certain point, the virtual currency will be detonated according to the trend, and then start to engage in AI.

It was perfect. After Zhou Xin quickly went through the plan in his mind, he found that there were not many loopholes.

He thought to himself, it seems that Bezos's path will be taken by me again. If Amazon does not have cloud services, its market value will be cut by at least one-third.

In later generations, Amazon's cloud services accounted for the first in the world, and it was the earliest and the best.

And now is a good time to do public cloud. The Nasdaq bubble burst, and these server hosting companies that depend on the existence of the Internet will also go bankrupt in large numbers.

"Johnson, you remember communicating with AT\u0026T that our network bandwidth needs to be increased by at least 50%.

From the data point of view, we have achieved phased success.

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

The most important thing about this kind of game is the balance. Each gameplay needs to have a certain winning rate, and there must be no phenomenon that a certain gameplay particularly disrupts the balance.

In addition, we can increase investment in Internet marketing. Since its data is performing well, we need to let more players see and experience our game. "

After connecting cloud computing, Riot Games, Nvidia, and integrated circuits into one line, Zhou Xin became more determined to make Genting Game into a gold-lettered signboard.

"Dr. Wang, hello, I have known you for a long time. The boss asked me to invite you personally. He said that he has always known that you have profound attainments in computer distributed computing.

This time, he specially wants to invite you to work in American. He has a brand new idea to establish a great company, expressing that the establishment 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 watch it.

"The original intention of the boss is like this, I am not exaggerating, I know that you are a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Asia.

But compared with the CTO position and option incentives that our boss is willing to provide you, Microsoft's work is not worth mentioning. "

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 few days.

But this proves that emerging investors will invest money in Huaguo, and they are willing to support the development of Huaguo's Internet industry with real money even when they know that the Internet winter has not yet passed. This has resulted in emerging investments that are now hot in China's Internet world.

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

Wu Shiqiang went out in person and called Wang Jian for an interview.

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

Originally, Wang Jian was just a plan B, and the first-ranked candidate didn't come, so he started plan B.

Games are just a means. If you think Genting is not going to be popular, you can replace it with any game that you think can be popular at that time and the hardware equipment can support it.

And to be honest, I haven't played Genting before. The auto chess I play more is Red Tide Auto Chess. I don't know if you have played it.

I chose Yunding because it has indeed been relatively popular until today, which shows that it has merits.