For Zhou Xin, games are just a means, and increasing the download rate of the Riot Games client and finding new payment scenarios for NewPay are the goals.
The bursting of the Nasdaq bubble has intensified, and Internet companies of all sizes and in any field have been severely affected. 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. What better story to tell than electronic payments?
Amazon, eBay and other e-commerce companies have made various hints and expressions to NewPay through different channels, hoping to acquire NewPay. If NewPay does not accept the acquisition, they need to reconsider the current partnership.
Zhou Xin needs to prepare. Once Amazon and eBay kick NewPay out of electronic payment channels, and Quora is not under his control, what application scenarios will NewPay have to survive.
Although this has not happened yet, eBay and Amazon's self-developed electronic payment software 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 to acquire the 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 Riot Online Game Store has always used 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.
Taking Steam in the future as an example, the number of simultaneous online users exceeded 30 million, and the number of monthly active users was 132 million, but the total number of purchases for the year was also 137.6 million.
In other words, 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 very well.
Riot Games client and NewPay can be regarded as the infrastructure of online games. What Zhou Xin has to do now is to let game manufacturers see the profit value of online games.
Having just one "Teamfight Tactics" is not enough. More online games are needed to support Riot Games and NewPay.
Therefore, "Teamfight Tactics" is just the horse bones from the horse bones.
When choosing a game, there were many options, but considering network latency and computer performance issues, I finally selected "Teamfight Tactics", which is also preparation for the subsequent League of Legends.
The Auto Chess model is time-tested, and Dota Auto Chess quickly became a hit once it was launched.
Later, almost all MOBA games launched their own auto chess, including Honor of Kings, League of Legends, Battle of Heianjing, 300 Heroes, etc.
Auto Chess seemed to be the target of following the trend 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" launched Crimson Tide Auto Chess based on their mobile game Crimson Tide.
As an evergreen tree in the auto-chess war, "TFT" has been surviving and doing well. Even within Riot, resources are allocated to "TFT" year by year.
The reputation of Zhou Xin and Flamingo Games, as well as the now monopolized online distribution channels like Riot Games, and the Riot Games professional forum, Zhou Xin has too many cards to play, all of which determine the fate of "Genting" "The Game" cannot fail.
Just a pile of publicity resources can make it popular, not to mention that the auto chess model itself is a market-proven model.
In the future, if Dota Auto Chess is made by a company owned by the founder of Steam, it will definitely be much more popular than one made by an unknown small factory.
At the same time, the two previous games released by Flamingo Games are both masterpieces of the year.
This is just like MiHoYo having made two well-received games, "Honkai" and "Genshin Impact" in succession. When it launched "Star Rail", the spontaneous enthusiasm of players was enough to attract 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 dares to say that after "TFT" 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 are well-known IPs that come with enough characters, so they are naturally suitable for transitioning into auto chess.
There is no threshold for gameplay and it is the easiest to plagiarize. After Dota Auto Chess became popular in later generations, Valve officially released an Auto Chess game called Dota Hegemony in Chinese, which has a lot of similarities with Dota Auto Chess.
But Zhou Xin doesn’t mind being copied at all, as long as your game is launched through Riot Games.
I wish there were more online games to support NewPay’s payment scenario.
"The server is finally launched. I have been eager for it for more than ten days. As a player who has been a loyal supporter of Riot Games since Angry Birds, do you know how much I long for "Teamfight Tactics"?"
Veteran players, two years have not seemed very old. In short, players who know the history of Flamingo are still accustomed to calling it a Riot game.
In addition, the actual controllers of Riot Games and Flamingo Games are Zhou Xin. Not only players think so, but the outside world also thinks so.
"I download the game of TFT every night before going to bed, and then watch it when I get home from get off work the next day. I am already familiar with its strategies, and no one can stop me from reaching 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 China with the mainstream chess sports of the West. It just looks very attractive. .”
May 15th of the new millennium is Monday. As a loyal fan of Riot Games, Rex took time off on this day to wait for the launch of the Genting server.
As far as he knew, there were many such people.
Before the official launch of the server at ten o'clock in the morning, Rex sat in front of the computer and browsed the posts in the Riot Games TFT section.
The game has not yet been officially launched, but this section has quickly reached the top three positions on Riot Games’ section popularity rankings. You can see many players like him in this section, who took time off to wait at home for the server to open.
There are a large number of posts discussing the game itself, and some players who have participated in the E3 exhibition and queued up to experience the game have come forward to give their own opinions.
"This is a completely new type of game, and yes, it's completely different from the games that came before it.
"Teamfight Tactics" combines strategy, card collection, and board game elements to form a unique gaming experience. It gave me an extremely fresh feeling when I played it for the first time.
It combines strategy and depth, learning curve, competition and game pace.
Its gameplay emphasizes strategy and depth. When I first started playing, I mainly considered the bonds between the chess pieces, and wanted to create as many bonds as possible. Later I discovered that we also need to consider the restraint relationship between the lineups and the position of the chess pieces.
By the time you play for the second time, economic management has also become a factor that determines victory or defeat. After the E3 exhibition, I went home and watched game videos, and found that economic management and when to spend money are more important than bonds.
The game rules and gameplay of Teamfight Tactics are relatively unique, but it doesn’t take newbies much time to understand and adapt. There is a certain degree of difficulty in mastering or mastering this game. Similar to the strategic depth mentioned above, there are too many points you need to consider.
There are 7 competitors besides you 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 entire game full of competition and give the game extra appeal.
While waiting at the E3 site, I felt that the pace of the game of "Team Tactics" was too slow. Each game took thirty minutes or more to complete. After queuing up and it was my turn to play, I felt that the time was so slow. Short, it ended before I could fully appreciate its subtleties.
Overall this is the most fun game I've played this year. "
Rex prefers to read posts with a certain density of information compared to posts that are clever.
While browsing the forum, he glanced at the time in the lower right corner from time to time. At nine fifty-five, he had already opened the Riot game.
As a result, he found that the login button was already lit. "What's going on? Can you log in already?"
After he clicked, he found that he could 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.
In another game, when he was about to win, his opponent successfully chased the Samsung hardware card, making his efforts in the game in vain.
Nowadays, everyone is not used to surrendering and not letting the other party feel happy. Rex watched helplessly as his little hero was defeated, and then the words "second place" were printed on the screen.
He found that the most painful thing about playing this game is second place. If you are eighth, you will only want to rush to the next one. If you are second, you will always be worried about being almost first.
After the second round of the game, Rex calmed down and looked at the time. It was already six o'clock in the afternoon.
"I only ate bread for lunch, so no wonder I'm starting to feel hungry." He thought to himself, "I'd better go out to eat something in the evening. What I just did was really unpleasant."
Before leaving, he took a look at the Riot Games forum and found that the "Top Tactics" section had quickly reached the top spot.
Players have discussed the game itself in it, and thanks to the video, the game itself has fully met their expectations.
"I almost won that one just now. Although I got the deal, why are I so unhappy?" Rex smiled knowingly when he saw the posts of players who had the same experience as him.
"Have you bought the communication certificate? I saw that the communication certificate costs 9.9 US dollars, and you can get a total of 4 chessboards, as well as some small heroes and corresponding attack special effects. I kind of want to buy it.
The chessboard alone costs $9.9. "Rex hasn't noticed where the charging link is.
In his opinion, it is unimaginable that such a good game is free.
After seeing this post, Rex returned to the game interface and discovered the monthly ticket purchase introduction on the homepage.
The monthly pass is similar to Genting tickets in later generations. After you buy it, you will get corresponding points as you complete tasks, and the points will unlock rewards.
You can get up to 4 chessboards and some other items.
This mechanism determines, to a certain extent, the length of the game for players.
Rex looked at other pricing. There are three levels of chessboards, ranging from $9.9 to $29.9.
The first three chessboards obtained through monthly tickets are all 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 excited. He opened the payment interface and wanted to take another look at the responses from other players in the forum.
"Buy it. I've already bought it. Compared with simply buying a chessboard, the monthly ticket is much more cost-effective."
"Such a game is released as a paid game, and the price of $9.9 is too cheap. I bought it anyway. If no one buys it, what will happen if Newman stops making 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 pass points of TFT. According to its rules, you can unlock all the rewards by playing once a day. So I plan to buy it. It is not a loss at all for so many things at US$9.9."
Rex was already moved by what he saw.
Many of these payment-inducing posts are posted by official personnel pretending to be players, and some are posted by 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.
There were more than 90,000 players online at the same time in the United States that day, just shy of 100,000.
The payment rate among these players is as high as 20%, which means that about 20,000 people have paid, and this is only the first day.
“Fortunately, we temporarily adopted CDN technology and deployed server nodes in major cities.
Otherwise, the server and broadband resources would really be overwhelmed by players today. "Johnson looked frightened.
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 connect them in parallel.
Ensure that the network is trouble-free through technologies such as redundancy and load balancing, caching and content distribution networks.
"This is just the beginning. As word of mouth ferments, there will only be more and more players. And players in the Europa region are also a problem.
We still need to continue to expand here. Zhou Xin said.
What Zhou Xin is most concerned about is how many new users and number of payments TFT can add to NewPay.
He was less concerned with the success of the game itself.
However, while working on Teamfight Tactics, Zhou Xin realized that he could be the first to create a public cloud.
Public cloud, Nvidia, Riot Games, and the semiconductor industry, these can be completely connected in a line.
Simply put, Internet companies need to use hardware resources. They need to have enough server resources to carry their Internet services so that they can be provided to users.
Similar to the development of integrated circuits, companies first built their own computer rooms, and all costs from servers to storage to networks were borne by the Internet companies themselves.
When there are few users, we use computers to support it first. When there are more users, we talk to venture capitalists. If we attract investment, we buy servers and build computer rooms.
Later, it became a server hosting model. There are dedicated data centers to help with this. You can just rent a server directly, and 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&T, etc., all providing similar services.
Then came the public cloud, which was equivalent to giving you whatever cloud services you wanted. In the past, you could only purchase server resources based on the server model.
For example, for an 8-core 16G server, you can only buy this model, even if you only need 4 cores and 8G at the beginning to meet your needs.
With public cloud services, you can have as many cores as you want, and as many gigabytes as you want. Completely personalized services, coupled with all-inclusive services, have greatly reduced the startup costs of Internet companies.
The all-inclusive service means that you originally use server hosting. The server operator only manages the hardware for you, and you still need to do the system-level operation and maintenance work. After the arrival of public cloud services, the operation and maintenance work is also outsourced to public cloud vendors.
You just need to deploy the service.
The public cloud business is not that high-end, it is also a concept with a long history.
In the 1990s, telecommunications companies that had previously primarily provided private networks began to offer virtual private network services. By switching traffic as they see fit to balance server usage, telcos use overall network bandwidth more efficiently.
Cloud computing extends the boundaries of the cloud to cover all servers and network infrastructure.
With the popularity of computers, researchers have explored ways to provide large-scale computing capabilities to more users through distribution. They have tried 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 cloud was fully proposed in 1994, and Amazon originally 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. You can buy as many virtual server resources from me corresponding to computing power, bandwidth and storage space 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 buyers for the chip supply chain he will build in China in the future.
Matrix and the public cloud walk on two legs, which is enough to support China's chip development to 7nm.
It also has a lot to do with Riot Games and Nvidia.
After TFT becomes popular, many companies will also want to make online games, but making online games means a lot of infrastructure requirements.
and a huge cost for SMEs.
But they want to enter the field of online games, what should they do? Just purchase virtual resources from Zhouxin’s public cloud and you’re done.
At the same time, they will use Riot Games channels to purchase cloud services through Riot Games and provide certain discounts.
If there are enough online games on Zhou Xin's public cloud, Zhou Xin can find NVIDIA to customize a GPU optimized for online games.
After the GPU computing power reaches a certain point, it will detonate virtual currency and start working on 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 first 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 largest share in the world, and it was the earliest and best.
And now is a good time to do public cloud. When the Nasdaq bubble bursts, these server hosting providers that rely on the Internet will also go bankrupt.
"Johnson, please remember to communicate with AT&T that our network bandwidth needs to be increased by at least 50%.
From the data point of view, we have achieved initial success.
But don’t be careless. We will continue to pay attention to the bugs reported by players and the balance issues of the game itself.
The most important thing about this kind of game is balance. Every gameplay needs to have a certain winning rate, and there cannot be a certain gameplay that particularly disrupts the balance.
In addition, we can increase investment in Internet marketing. Since its data performance is good, we must let more players see and experience our game. "
After connecting cloud computing, Riot Games, NVIDIA, and integrated circuits, Zhou Xin became more determined to make Teamfight Tactics a golden brand.
"Hello, Dr. Wang, I have long admired your name. 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, I specially want to invite you to work at Amerikan. He has a new idea and wants to establish a great company, which means 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 see it.
"That's what the boss meant. I'm not exaggerating. I know you work as a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Asia.
But compared with the chief technology officer position and option incentives that our boss is willing to provide you, Microsoft's job is not worth mentioning. "
Wu Shiqiang's words were full of sincerity. Zhou Xin promised an investment of one billion US dollars at the Internet Conference, and naturally the money was not fully invested in those few days.
But this proves that emerging investors are willing to invest money in China, and they are willing to support the development of China's Internet industry with real money even when they know that the Internet winter has not passed yet. This has led to emerging investments now being hot in China’s Internet sector.
This also caused Wu Shiqiang to feel a little proud. However, he was still very attentive to the tasks assigned by Zhou Xin.
Wu Shiqiang personally took action and brought Wang Jian for an interview.
Wang Jian is the future technical leader of Alibaba Cloud and the chief technology officer of Alibaba. Zhou Xin plans to recruit him in advance to take charge of the research and development of public cloud business.
Originally, Wang Jian was just Plan B. Plan B was only launched when the top candidate didn't come.
Games are just a means. If you think Genting is not popular, you can replace it with any game that you think will be popular at the time and that the hardware equipment can support.
And to be honest, I haven’t played Genting very much. The auto chess I play more is Crimson Tide Auto Chess. I don’t know if anyone has played it.
I chose Genting because it has indeed been relatively popular to this day, which shows that it has merits.
(End of chapter)
