Video Game Empire

After this round of hype, Dongfang Electronics has been assured that the local sales of new game consoles in Hong Kong, but the market in Hong Kong is limited after all. Li Xuan estimates that he can sell 500 arcade machines in the next month, which is already the limit.

In contrast, the market in Taiwan and Southeast Asia is much larger, but Li Xuan has no plans to develop it himself, but still prepares to hand over the agency rights to Scar Qiang.

Compared with Europe, America and Japan, these places do not have a complete intellectual property protection system. If you go through the official agency channel, tariffs plus the profits of distributors at all levels, the price of an arcade machine sold to the game hall bosses will be at least 15,000 Hong Kong dollars.

The per capita income levels in these regions are simply not comparable to those of developed countries such as Europe and the United States. Taiwan and Taiwan are better, but such high prices are still too high for arcade shop owners.

This leaves a huge operating space for Shanzhai factories. They don’t need to develop new games by themselves, they just need to crack other companies’ best-selling games, just like what Li Xuan’s Keji company did before.

Although the quality of the game console is not as good as the genuine arcade machine, it is cheaper. Li Xuan himself started out as a pirate, and naturally he would not leave such an opportunity to others.

He made full preparations at the beginning of the development of new games. During the development of the game, he paid special attention to the anti-cracking of the game data. For this reason, he specially added a control chip with a suicide program to the design of the circuit board, which greatly improved the performance of the game. It makes it difficult for pirates to crack the game.

But as the saying goes, one foot is taller than the devil is taller, and Li Xuan never imagined that he would be able to prevent others from pirating Dongfang Electronics' games by these means. His approach only slightly raised the technical threshold for cracking, and real technical experts are still capable of solving these problems.

Therefore, the key to completely eliminating piracy is to make pirates unprofitable. Li Xuan's price for Scar Qiang was 7,000 yuan per unit. Through Heletang's smuggling channel, he tried to control the price of game consoles to the arcade room at less than 10,000 Hong Kong dollars.

In this way, if the inferior game consoles from other knockoff arcade manufacturers want to compete with the genuine arcade machines from Dongfang Electronics, the price must be lower. In this way, the profit margins of these cottage workshops can be effectively squeezed.

This is the best way Li Xuan can think of to develop an immature market. Because this is not just a problem faced by Dongfang Electronics, including big game companies such as Sega, Taidong, Atari, etc. have the same problem. Li Xuan took advantage of the current lack of awareness of property rights protection in Hong Kong, and quickly accumulated his first pot of gold.

This problem, even after 30 years, is still a long-standing problem for many large companies in Europe and the United States. For example, in the Chinese market, Microsoft can eliminate pirated software in the field of complete machines by forcing computer manufacturers to pre-install Windows. But in the assembled machine market, it can only let it go, and every year, it urges the Chinese government to strengthen copyright protection.

While Hong Kong colleagues were enjoying the joy of victory, Liang Ning was driving around San Francisco with three men on the other side of the Pacific Ocean in San Francisco, California.

Although the Western Electronics Show will not open in Mountain View until January 3, Liang Ning was sent by Li Xuan to San Francisco to do some preliminary work before Christmas. He and three other employees packed parts for two arcade machines to fly non-stop from Hong Kong to San Francisco.

A few days before arriving in San Francisco, the work of the four of them was to split up and wander around various cities in the greater San Francisco area. In small towns grocery stores, in front of supermarkets, bars, movie theaters, gas stations, all places with arcade machines, they will stop to collect information.

From these bosses, they inquired about many arcade agents. Then Liang Ning contacted these secondary agents one by one and collected a lot of information about the game console sales industry. Of course, the most important thing is that Liang Ning obtained the information of several first-level agents from these second-level agents.

Next, Liang Ning did something that Li Xuan had just done not long ago, which was to contact the owner of a supermarket that was crowded with people. The owner is called York, and his store is located in a small town called Daly City, south of downtown San Francisco. Daly City is a middle-class town with a population of 100,000 in the southern suburbs of San Francisco.

Liang Ning put the two newly assembled tank battles and the Hong Kong cube arcade machine at the door of York's owner's store for players to try. All the income during the period belongs to York.

The two new game consoles in front of the York Boss's store are not like their Hong Kong brothers. They have childcare, newspaper advertisments, and a whole team behind the planning and promotion. They can only rely on the charm of the game itself and the fun and excellent playability to accumulate popularity day by day through word of mouth among players.

At the same time, Liang Ning began to actively contact Mr. Tony Cousins, the owner of Cousins ​​Entertainment, the largest arcade agency sales company in the western United States. And Li Xuan finally set foot on the flight to the United States before New Year's Day.

"Brother Ning, you've worked hard!"

Li Xuan came out of the airport and met Liang Ning, who came to pick up the airport. He found that he had not seen him for more than ten days. He was quite haggard. He could also guess how hard the other party was in the United States during this time. move.

"Hehe, Young Master Xuan, just give me a big red envelope for the year-end award!" Liang Ning said with a smile.

"How's it going with that Cousins ​​Entertainment Company?"

When Li Xuan spoke with Liang Ning for the last time before getting on the plane, the other party said that he was going to meet the owner of Cousins ​​Entertainment, the largest arcade dealer on the West Coast of the United States. Therefore, what Li Xuan was most concerned about after getting off the plane was the outcome of this meeting.

"This time I have come to realize what it means to be courteous in the past, and have the same virtue as those record company managers in Hong Kong!" When Liang Ning used to play an underground band, he wanted to develop a formal business in the past, but several times he interviewed Hong Kong record companies. Being turned away, there is still a sigh of anger in my heart.

"My original plan was to assemble the two game consoles and ship them directly to Cousins ​​Company~www.wuxiahere.com~ In your words, Mr. Xuan, facts speak louder than words. Our company wins by the quality of games. !

But those Yankees are so irritating, I clearly made an appointment with their boss in advance. But when we arrived at Cousins ​​Entertainment, a fat woman with a big **** at the front desk said that their boss had gone to play golf with an important client and didn't have time to see me.

Let me talk to another sales manager, the manager didn't even let us lift the game consoles out of the car, only heard me say two game consoles, one is a tank shooting game, and the other is a brick puzzle game , and rejected us directly!

I couldn't be more angry. Later, Mr. Xuan, you said on the phone that you guys in Hong Kong are going to try it out at the cinema. As soon as I thought this method was good, I decided to try it with a grocery store with high family traffic, and when our arcades gathered a certain amount of popularity, I would talk to these agents.

Initially, our two game machines were put together with a little bee and another arcade machine called Balloon, and not many people paid attention. But from the second day, many people came to try it out, and the third day was even more queuing, and the fourth day was the weekend, and there was a long queue of people playing games!

So I rented a Polaroid camera, took a few pictures, and squeezed myself into Cousins. As a result, the other party called the next day, and his attitude took a 180-degree turn. The enthusiasm was unbearable! "

While walking out of the airport, Liang Ning told Li Xuan next to him about his experience in the United States during this period.

PS: Everyone, go to the book review area and tell me which Pharaoh recommended my book so much that I woke up in the morning and found that I have more than 200 in my collection. I want to dedicate the chrysanthemum to him, wow haha!