A company's R&D capabilities are limited by the total population, total number of talents, educational environment and other factors in the region. As a city with only 5 million people, Hong Kong is currently shifting from real to virtual and real estate financialization. In terms of electronics and IT Talents are naturally far from enough.
There are two ways to solve this problem. The first is to attract overseas talents to Hong Kong. Over the years, Midea has been poaching people from Japan and Taiwan. However, 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 just by poaching 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 with Deep Sea University, it will take several years before it can create talents in batches, and it will not be effective until the late 1980s at the earliest.
The second natural step is to build various R&D 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 relevant laboratories in the United States. However, in the context of the rapid development of personal computers and chips, most scientific and technological talents have been poached by these large companies. Even if Midea The treatment offered is no less than that of IBM and Apple, but it is still not attractive enough.
But now that Atari has collapsed, a large number of gaming talents have suddenly lost their jobs. They can absorb them here, which can just 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 positions, they may start their own businesses. No one knows that Atari has hundreds of Among the R&D 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 conducive to him. In the field of gaming, even a garage, once it develops a hit game, can immediately overtake other giant companies. This is the characteristic of the technology industry. Otherwise, it would not attract so many people to start a business.
This is a bit different from computers.
"Okay, I will focus on tracking some of Atari's technical experts and product managers." Lei Shengli nodded and said.
Chen Zhiwen added: "Now that Atari is bankrupt, we are basically the only one in the entire game market, 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 millions of users, and everyone has different hobbies. Whether it’s [Tank Battle] or even [Mario] we are developing, there will always be many people who don’t like it, but we don’t have the ability to satisfy so many different interests. Hobby.
The second is that if our game categories are not large enough and wide enough, it will be unlikely to attract these people to buy our game consoles. Making less money is secondary, but this market will easily cultivate other competitors. "
"Chen Sheng, what do you mean, we want to open our console platform to other game companies?" Lei Shengli quickly understood what his boss meant.
"What problems do you think there are?" 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 the market is full of all kinds of junk games. Many people also believe that Atari’s own games must have guaranteed quality, and the reputation of [ET Alien] is very attractive. The greater the expectations, the greater the disappointment. It was so big that it finally led to the current situation of being forced to go bankrupt." Lei Shengli thought for a while and said.
Atari became famous earlier than Midea. Although it failed to gain an advantage in the face of strong competition from Midea, it still won a part of the home game console market. Its open policy resulted in a wide variety of games. , can rival the beauty.
Such a company still has sufficient financial resources. Although this time the game fails and the losses are huge, it is no problem to be exhausted, but no matter what, it will not go bankrupt all at once.
The most fundamental reason is that the quality of games on the market has not been controlled for a long time, which has caused deep complaints from players. In the end, the large return of [ET Alien] was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
“Atari’s lessons learned from the past are indeed worthy of our attention. An American company, with many large American consortiums behind it, still cannot cope with so many third-party junk games. So while we accept third-party games, we also need to There is 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.
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 ways to restrict these junk games. He even took some game production companies to court. But it was too late. Even if Atari won the lawsuit, it would only prevent one company from doing this. There are still thousands of others. Many company headquarters are not in the United States, or they don't know where they are? It is impossible for Atari to sue each company or file a cross-border lawsuit.
When they don't install a special identification chip in their own game consoles, nothing they do later will be useful.
"In other words, we provide identification chips for all third-party game cards, and then the finished products are given to us first, and then we sell them to the global market?" Lei Shengli understood.
Midea's game console has an identification chip from the beginning, which only recognizes its own game cards, and the card slot design is different from other games, and is protected by applied patents. Even if someone with technical ability makes appropriate modifications, it cannot be circumvented. Past the chip level.
Of course, this is not insurmountable. As long as someone ignores the law, the identification chip can also be bypassed. However, the cost of this method is not low. It must be of sufficient scale to be profitable. Once it reaches a large scale, it will be easy to be discovered. Small-scale operations are not cost-effective and will not have a big impact on Midea.
In the past few years, only Midea game cards can be played on Midea game consoles.
In fact, Atari also wanted to learn this model, but was unable to do so. It was not because of technical incompetence, but because the market did not allow it. Only Midea, which had several popular games and could attract a large number of buyers and customers, could be so strong.
But as the boss said, this model is fine in the early stage, but it will limit itself when it grows in scale.
"Thinking more broadly, we at Midea have complete production capabilities for game electronic products. We can directly OEM and produce various game cards. In this way, in addition to game playability, quality 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 even like Apple a few years ago, they are companies in garages. It is already very easy for them to develop games. It’s a lot of effort, let alone trying to produce it. Even if they find an OEM, it’s hard for them to do it themselves. It’s better for us to come forward to solve this trouble, and they can just design the game with peace of mind.”
"What a great idea. In this way, the difficulty of starting a company will be greatly reduced." Lei Shengli said in surprise.
"It can be regarded as maximizing the use of resources. In the future, what we at Midea need is not to continue to launch hit games, but to stabilize our hardware position in the home game console market. This requires a large number of high-quality, non-high-quality, To fill various gaps with niche games, what we have to do is to provide certain convenience to game developers, so that they can just 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 considered 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 is 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 significantly, and a large number of users have become accustomed to interesting and complex games, and their requirements for games are getting higher and higher. No matter how big the scale of Midea is, It’s unlikely to meet even half of the population’s needs.
Moreover, in the original history, even if the top ten games were added together, they only accounted for a part of the entire game market. The rankings from 11th to 100 and even later were 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.
Maybe in the future, this platform will be impacted by computers or challenged by other companies, but that will be a long time later. Let’s conquer this market first.
"Then, how will the profits be divided?" Lei Shengli asked.
"70% to 30%, I think there are two scenarios!" 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. These are two different things.
The second is that there is no exclusive authorization. Our platform is just 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 tonight, please give me a monthly pass
(End of chapter)
