News on February 27, the new game of Giant Network will be launched. The company held an internal kick-off meeting, which was attended by the company's founder, Shi Yuzhu. Shi Yuzhu said that RMB players should not be too strong, but not too weak. Spending money is almost the same as not spending money. He also delved into the planning of game development, saying that the most difficult degree to grasp is an art rather than a science.
Although Shi Yuzhu has been low-key for a long time, his legend has always existed. For example, how he earned the first pot of brain platinum by disgusting all Chinese TV viewers, how he collapsed and owed huge debts due to blind expansion, and even more miraculously, how he paid off all debts through a game and reshaped the Giant Group.
And this game is the original work of the giant network: "Journey".
In the era of point card charging, netizens had to play games by paying the point card fee. And "Journey" opened the door to the era of free-to-play games, and since then free online games have been popular. Although Journey is not the first free-to-play game, it is the first game that has been successful for free.
Netizens jokingly called this game too fierce, full of hatred, and "summoning the instinct of human evil".
"The game is killing people everywhere, if you want to upgrade you have to kill, kill others and rewards, the more you kill, the greater the reward, encourage killing, want to play, you must be vicious, ruthless; It is also necessary to be killed everywhere, even if it is not safe to stay in the royal city of your own country, someone is waiting for an opportunity to give a knife at any time, hang up the opportunity to be killed, the neutral zone collection is killed, the boss is killed, in short, killing everywhere, at any time will stimulate ruthless bestiality. If you don't team up, have no friends in the game, or don't hug your thighs, it's hard to move an inch in the game and can't be played. - Zhihu netizens "expelled people".
It is such a game that supports almost all of the giant network. In 2019, Giant achieved a main business income of about 2.57 billion yuan, operating costs of about 430 million yuan, and a gross profit margin of 83.13%.
Such a high profit margin, as 360 boss Zhou Hongwei said: Anyone who does the Internet, there is no one who does not like to make games, because games have the huge profits of drugs, but there is no risk of drugs.
Someone on the Internet calculated an account:
A game goes through three links: development, distribution, and channels:
Development: A development team of about 30 people, the monthly labor salary cost is 300,000, and the annual labor salary is about 3.6 million.
Office costs: 200 square meters of office building, the maximum gross amount of water and electricity rent for a year is 600,000. Administrative costs, that is, office consumables, computer hardware maintenance and loss, game servers, tour group construction, etc., are 800,000 a year.
The overall operating cost of the team is about 5 million a year. The development cycle of a product is one to three years, and the simplest game is developed in 2 years, with an investment of about 10 million.
The opening animation of the game is about 400,000 in 4 minutes. 200,000 poster illustrations, soundtracks, sound effects, etc. The total investment does not exceed 11 million. Of course, this is the simplest game development, and many wonderful games have no upper limit, such as the development cost of "Genshin" is claimed to be 100 million US dollars, and the glory of the king is 1.3 billion.
So let's calculate the income.
As of June 2022, the size of mainland Internet users is 1.051 billion, and the Internet penetration rate has reached 74.4%. If 1 out of 100 people play our game, that's 10 million people, as long as each person charges 2 yuan, it's 20 million. Obviously, at present, there are almost no bankrupt companies in domestic online games, telling us that the number of Chinese people recharging is definitely not so much. In addition, game monetization can also continuously develop commercial value through large advertising revenue and peripheral IP products.
Therefore, no matter how you do it, China's game development is very profitable, so the most difficult thing now is not the game development and marketing side, the main difficulty is the game license. In the past few years, it is said that a number of game companies have died, not at the development and sales end, mainly because they have not obtained game licenses. It's too profitable, so the state has to take care of it.
Obviously, Shi Yuzhu's giant did not have this worry, his new game license is down, it is going online, and this time the news is obviously also promoting his new game. Today is not only Zhihu, I also saw in the headlines that Shi Yuzhu came back to carefully polish the new game, especially focusing on Shi Yuzhu also played carefully, and also put forward a lot of opinions, one of which is how to charge with a degree.
In fact, Shi Yuzhu has always been the originator of Chinese marketing, and the core key point of marketing is to play with human nature. From brain platinum to the human evil of the journey, this time Shi Yuzhu focused on the "degree", you must know that "Journey" has a second title, which is the most money-burning game in China...
All the rights in the game need to be solved by charging money, Shi Yuzhu is very insightful about human nature, he will be very good at the packaging of rights, status and hatred in human nature, such as the treasure chest in the journey is very cheap, a dollar can open one, but the probability of you driving to the best is quite low, no less than you buy lottery tickets, many people are unconscious, in this game krypton thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan, the most important thing is that people also made a leaderboard, through the way of lure players to pay more money.
Even in the end, the currency in "Journey" is more inflation-resistant than the renminbi.
The success of "Journey" lies in its unprecedented naked amplification of the role of "money", as long as players are willing to throw money, they can easily enjoy the king style of "one person on top, ten thousand people below".
Obviously, Cheng Ye Xiao is also Xiao He, and the current journey has long been completely cold in the hearts of the 90s and 00s ...
As for Shi Yuzhu's statement that "RMB players can't be too strong, but they can't be too weak", it is clear that he has begun to play with human nature again. The generation of the post-80s, the background of life and growth is a black and white era, at that time there were only good people or bad people in society, serious inferiority complex is easy to self-denial or over-affirmation, looking for ways to vent on online games, and now the post-00s grow up in a diversified social and cultural background, they treat things more tolerantly, that is, recognize the advantages of others, but also accommodate shortcomings (think about how homosexuality was socially unacceptable at that time, and now), they like freedom and innovation, If you still want to use the original krypton gold means, it is obviously impossible to adapt to the development of the times.
Shi Yuzhu said that this degree is to hope to reflect both RMB players and retain the vast majority of free players, at this point, many games have been sampled, such as Honor of Kings only through skins, limited edition heroes to charge, etc. At present, the unified understanding of the game market is that the RMB can have, but it cannot destroy the balance of the game mechanism, that is, the original set of ironclad rules is invalid, and the balance is Shi Yuzhu's "degree".
This news hot search, at least Shi Yuzhu's new game publicity degree is found...