In 2003, Shi Yuzhu is addicted to the grand world of online game legends. His game ID is called receiving gifts only , 未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发未发� Late one night, after losing the Nth PK, Shi Yuzhu found the account with the highest game level in this district, and the account owner was a Wenzhou boss. Shi Yuzhu immediately instructed the Wenzhou branch manager to go to the Internet cafe, pay 3,000 yuan, and buy the account.
Although he has a level 70 account, Shi Yuzhu is still a genius in the game. He was so anxious that he directly found Shanda boss Chen Tianqiao . Chen Tianqiao advised him: "Equipment is more important." Shi Yuzhu, who is not short of money, immediately spent 10,000 yuan to buy a set of top-level equipment and enjoyed the happiness of RMB players.
A year later, Shi Yuzhu booked a cruise ship in Shanghai to hold a private reception to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the establishment of Giant Company. At the cocktail party, Shi Yuzhu revealed to the executives that he was preparing to enter the online game industry. At that time, Giant had sufficient cash flow and , and Shi Yuzhu was preparing to take out 200 million to try the waters. What he lacks is not money, but people. After knowing that Shi Yuzhu was going to make an online game, his good friend Chen Tianqiao also asked his elder brother Duan Yongji to tell the story: There are many traps in the road to R&D.
Chen Tianqiao is very thoughtful. Although Shanda had made a lot of money by acting as a legend in a Korean company before, he always felt a sense of crisis, so in 2002, Shanda began to secretly develop the online game Legend World . From an agent to self-development, Chen Tianqiao took many detours and paid a lot of tuition fees. Naturally, he hoped that his good friend Shi Yuzhu could be cautious and cautious. But Chen Tianqiao did not expect that Shi Yuzhu's first step in entering the online game was to poach all the Shanda development team.
It is said that Chen Tianqiao was resentful of this matter and complained privately many times, saying that it was a big mistake he made to attract a wolf into the house.
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In April 2006, the journey of Giant Network began to be publicly tested.
At that time, someone sorted these upstarts who made their fortunes on the Internet. Ding Lei was Chen Tianqiao, Chen Tianqiao was Ma Huateng , and Ma Huateng had a series of people after Ma Huateng, and finally Shi Yuzhu. Perhaps he felt that he was too far behind, Shi Yuzhu protested, "I have no objection to the first few being in line like this. Will my seat be determined by the end of this year?"
Shi Yuzhu was timid, but he was once obeyed Chen Tianqiao. The reason was very simple. Chen Tianqiao was once the boss of the domestic online game industry. Chen and Shi are both senior players, and even their resumes are quite similar. Shi Yuzhu graduated from the Department of Mathematics of Zhejiang University, while Chen Tianqiao came from the Department of Economics of Fudan; after graduation, Shi Yuzhu was assigned to the Anhui Bureau of Statistics, while Chen Tianqiao went to Shanghai Lujiazui Group .
Chen Tianqiao was responsible for screening group data videos in Lujiazui Group , and his work was free, so he ran to the president's office whenever he had time. It was 1994, and most people didn’t know what the Internet was. The President’s Office of Lujiazui Group could access the Internet 24 hours a day. Through the Internet, Chen Tianqiao quickly became obsessed with playing online games. It is said that his highest record of playing games was seven days and seven nights.
Although she loves games, Chen Tianqiao did not delay her work and was soon promoted to the secretary of the group chairman. But Chen Tianqiao was not here. After a year of resignation from Lujiazui Group to a securities company, in 1999, Chen Tianqiao resigned decisively and recruited 20 employees with the 500,000 he earned from stock trading, and founded Shanda. Shanda initially created a virtual community called Paradise Return Valley, where players can farm and raise pets, which is a bit like the QQ farm later. Soon, the registered users of Paradise Guigu exceeded 1 million, and Chen Tianqiao obtained a venture capital of China.com html of 3 million.
With this venture capital, Shanda purchased the copyright of Black Cat Sheriff, set up a cartoon magazine, and jointly held a nationwide cartoon competition with CCTV. He also received an order for animation advertisements for brands such as Audi and Piaorou, with a monthly income of more than 100,000 yuan. The good times did not last long. The millennium Internet bubble has arrived. In 2001, Chen Tianqiao decided to cut off the animation business with a lot of investment and a long return period and focus on online games.
"Entertainment is always an instinctive need of human beings. Online games simulate interpersonal communication in the real world and help people achieve needs that cannot be met in reality. As long as you find fun on the Internet, users are willing to pay."
Just then a Korean company called ActozSOFT came to Shanghai with the goal of finding Chinese agents for the company's online game legend. After being matched by the Shanghai Animation Association, Shanda paid the other party a $300,000 entry fee and a 27% share, and obtained the legendary China operation rights. China.com, an investor who is determined to do animation, decided to withdraw its investment, and Chen Tianqiao took the opportunity to get back Shanda's dominance. Whether a game can be successful depends on the two-month test period that was just launched. Chen Tianqiao first took the contract with ActozSOFT and found Dell and Inspur . He told the other party that we wanted to operate Korean games and applied for trial machines for two months. When the server manufacturer looked at the English contract, he thought Chen Tianqiao was a potential customer, so he agreed.
Then Chen Tianqiao took the server's order and found China Telecom . "Inspur and Dell both provide me with servers, and we need a lot of bandwidth to operate the game." Telecom immediately understood and gave me a free bandwidth trial during the test period. With this trick, Shanda successfully survived the game test period for two months.
After solving the bandwidth problem, Chen Tianqiao noticed that in the Internet cafe at that time, the majority of players played LAN games were playing, and the Internet cafe owners had no money to make except for earning some time fees. Chen Tianqiao chose Chengdu as a breakthrough in promotion, found the Tianfu hotline that controls all Internet cafes in Chengdu, and negotiated with the other party, "Use Internet games instead of LAN games, and you sell point cards on behalf of others, and everyone will have more profits."
A year later, Tianfu Hotline's revenue doubled, Shanda began to copy the Chengdu model and contact Internet cafe associations in various places. At its peak, more than half of the thousands of Internet cafes in Wuhan were playing legends. At this point, Shanda established a sales system that "a sales system centered on Internet cafes, with Internet cafes in various places as the vertical line, and general agents and distributors in various places as the horizontal line." After the establishment of the sales system of
, as the number of online users soared, players continued to report various problems. Chen Tianqiao decisively spent 5 million to build a large-scale call center. This call center can answer an average of 3,000 calls every day, and the player's questions will not exceed 24 hours from submission to reply. At that time, a reporter specially called Shanda's customer service at 1:00 a.m., and successfully connected the manual service after less than 2 minutes of automatic voice service prompt.
In addition to online customer service, Shanda also spent 1 million to rent a 500 square meter customer reception area, specializing in serving users who come to find their account passwords. In Chen Tianqiao's view, these door-to-door users are the most loyal and should provide the best service to these users. For those users who are excited because they cannot provide any information or recover their passwords, Shanda also has a special negotiation room. It should be noted that in order to prevent emotional users from interfering with the normal operation of the company, most Korean online game operators refuse users to come to the door.
Chen Tianqiao believes that the key to the success of online games lies in service. How high is Shanda's service level? Until 2007, after Shi Yuzhu entered the online game industry, Shanda's customer service center was also the winner of the "China's Best Call Center" Award, which is also the fourth consecutive year that Shanda's customer service center won the award. So at that time, Shanda had an advertising slogan: Be a Shanda VIP and be a top online gamer.
Just one year after Legend was launched, Shanda's revenue accounted for 60% of the total scale of more than 900 million yuan in the entire Chinese online game market in 2002. By 2003, the number of legendary online users once exceeded 650,000, which meant that there were at least 700,000 paid users. In 2004, Chen Tianqiao became the richest man in China with a net worth of 8.8 billion, and he was only 31 years old at that time.
That year, Chen Tianqiao changed the signature of MSN to this sentence: Looking back in ten years, who can reach the fore? The passionate Chen Tianqiao didn't know that at this moment, the wealthy Shi Yuzhu was about to climb the mountain. Behind Shi Yuzhu, there was also a Shanghainese Zhu Jun .
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In 2001, when Shanda began to act as a legend, Chen Tianqiao once set internal rules: whoever suggests Shanda will fire whoever is self-developed. The reason is that Chen Tianqiao believed that at that time, the development capabilities of domestic game companies could not be compared with those of South Korea, and independent development could only be a dead end. Just a year later, Chen Tianqiao decided that Shanda must insist on taking the path of independent research and development.
The grand turn is related to Koreans.
During the legendary operation, because the technology belongs to Koreans, Shanda must ask Koreans for help if he wants to modify the game bugs, and Koreans often fail to cooperate, resulting in inefficiency and complaints from players. In 2002, due to poor supervision by South Korea, the legendary source code was leaked on a large scale. Players could download pirated games at will, causing Shanda to lose tens of millions per month. The incident of
made Chen Tianqiao realize the importance of independent research and development. At the end of 2002, Shanda secretly established a R&D center to develop the legendary world of online games. Chen Tianqiao, who came from the Department of Economics, made up the bill.
"The rate of return on self-development of online game industry is 3.8 times that of agency operations, so the Chinese online game industry must reject the hollowing out of industry and gradually embark on the road of independent research and development. A million US dollars can develop a good game, but if you want to continue to represent Korean games, 1 million is only enough for a fraction of it."
In July 2003, Shanda's self-developed legendary world was publicly beta. During the public beta, Chen Tianqiao visited the R&D department once and an employee shouted, "We have finally turned over and become the masters", which attracted cheers from all the people present. This sentence expresses Chen Tianqiao's heart. At the same time, he said in an interview:
"The road is ours, but the car is rented, so it's not good to drive." "Why can the Chinese win in the end? Because they understand the market, know where there are ravines and where there are dangerous slopes. They can find problems, then stalemate, and finally counterattack."
Chen Tianqiao's counterattack is the legendary world.
It is reported that Legend World, which invested 5 million, made a profit on its first day of listing. At that time, Shanda decided to launch the 3D version of Legend World at the end of the year. Chen Tianqiao also gave the 3D version of Legend World demo to the son of Ho Ying-tung . At that time, the other party was the head of the Hong Kong Cultural Bureau. "He praised from upstairs to downstairs, saying that he had never seen such a wonderful 3D game in Hollywood ."
In 2004, Shanda launched the hero era of self-developed online games. At this time, Shi Yuzhu also became a loyal player in the hero era. He had a keen sense of smell and quickly realized that milk and honey were flowing in the online game industry. Shi Yuzhu plans to get a piece of the pie.
It is said that in order to learn from the scriptures, Shi Yuzhu went to Shanda for a special visit and research, and Chen Tianqiao also asked Shi Yuzhu to contact Shanda's game team. Almost as Shi Yuzhu walked forward, Chen Tianqiao received news from the Heroes Project Team resigned almost collectively. At that time, a reporter interviewed an insider in the industry. The other party said, "Today, the core of Zhengtu is still in the heroic era." Although
3 Shi Yuzhu is not kind, according to Shanda's resigned employees, due to the serious differences between Shanda's management and the R&D team in the heroic era in terms of game concepts and model planning, the R&D team was originally planning, and Shi Yuzhu appeared at this time. When the two sides talked, they successfully joined hands.
But who is Chen Tianqiao?
At that time, ActozSOFT, South Korea, signed the proxy rights of Legend 3 to , a subsidiary of CITIC , because it was dissatisfied with the low share given by Shanda.Guangtong was originally Shanda's server supplier, and the two parties cooperated well. After the official announcement of Guangtong's signing of Legend 3, Shanda unilaterally withdrew the game data originally placed in more than 300 servers of Guangtong IDC overnight on the grounds that "there may be lost player information", and refused to pay the IDC fee for that month.
Not only that, at that time, Legend 3 held a dealer conference in Shandong, and many prefecture-level channel dealers received calls from Legend Shandong general agent Qingdao Liyang: Shanda just notified us that channel dealers in various places should not do both Legend and Legend 3. If you have to do this, you will cancel your legend agency rights. Many years later, 360 followed the same example with Tencent , forcing users to choose one of them. It can only be said that there is nothing new under the sunlight.
, Chen Tianqiao, who couldn't afford to suffer, quickly launched a counterattack against Shi Yuzhu. At that time, Shi Yuzhu believed that with legendary pearls and jade in front, it would be too late to make games that rely on point cards to charge for the game, so he came up with the model of "permanent free, making money with props", "making poor students and billionaires equal in front of point cards, which is wrong and does not conform to marketing rules." Shi Yuzhu decided to attract poor students by relying on free, make the game bigger, and then make money from rich people.
Shi Yuzhu wants to be very good, but he has teammates. Once, the deputy director of Giant Network met with Shanda's vice president and accidentally revealed the information that Zhengtu would be free forever. The result is that on November 15, 2005, Zhengtu started internal testing, and on the 28th, it was announced that Legend 2 will be free to players forever from that day.
Let’s talk about it, at that time, Legend 2 had already passed the period of rapid growth, and its contribution to Shanda’s revenue dropped sharply from 100% in 2002 to less than 30%. Therefore, some analysts at that time believed that:
"At this time, a product that is on the decline is decisively changed to free gifts. On the one hand, it can form the upward momentum of new games launched by Jiucheng , NetEase, QQ, etc. Containment and effectively block competitors, and can also give a wake-up call to capital that is preparing to enter the online gaming industry and raise the entry threshold for the online gaming industry. On the other hand, you can also try other value-added service charging models, why not do it? "
, the capital that is preparing to enter the online gaming industry", refers to Shi Yuzhu, "competitor", and the most important thing is , the 9th city, . The most popular online game on the market at that time was World of Warcraft represented by the 9th city. This piece of fat meat in World of Warcraft was chewed down by Zhu Jun from Chen Tianqiao's mouth.
In the online game industry, Chen Tianqiao can be said to be Zhu Jun’s teacher. After dropping out of , Shanghai Jiaotong University , Zhu Jun first entered the East China Company of the Shanghai Materials Bureau, and later switched to Shanghai Shenda Group. "This is an import and export company with a very background. Zhu completed his earliest accumulation by contracting seven import departments." In 1994, Zhu Jun, who could afford to run a jaguar, ran to the United States to look for opportunities. Five years later, in the year Chen Tianqiao founded Shanda, Zhu Jun returned to China to invest in a website called Gamenow.
Gamenow is like Chen Tianqiao's Paradise Reminder Valley. It is both a virtual network community with leisure and entertainment content such as phishing, online marriage, and answering questions. This is Zhu Jun’s first time getting in touch with the game industry, but he has not made any money. By 2002, seeing that Chen Tianqiao made a fortune by acting as a legend, Zhu Jun also bought the agency rights of the Korean online game miracle. Miracle became popular when it was listed in China, with the highest number of online users exceeding 300,000 at the same time.
In 2003, Zhu Jun was on the Forbes China Rich List with his miraculous revenue, ranking 66. The person ranked 99th was Ma Huateng. A year later, Chen Tianqiao ranked first in Forbes' list of rich Chinese people, and Zhu Jun ranked 57.
It is hard to say that Zhu Jun had never envied the throne of the richest man in China. In 2005, Zhu Jun moved the Ninth City headquarters from , CITIC Pacific on Nanjing West Road to Bibo Road, and Shanda next door, "This place is very good. I know that Chen Tianqiao took a whole year to choose this address, considering various factors, and finally made a decision through the board of directors' resolution. So, I must be right after following it."
Just the previous year, Chen Tianqiao gave advice to companies and individuals interested in the game industry in an interview, "If you have hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can do operations, don't stare at South Korea, Japan, the United States, and China." The background of this sentence is that Shanda gave up the competition for agency rights for World of Warcraft in the final quotation stage.
And World of Warcraft, as a new game under the US Blizzard Company, is about to break South Korea The dominant pattern of national online games in China will also bring more variables to the competition between Chen Tianqiao and Zhu Jun and even Shi Yuzhu.
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In 2003, it was once a mystery who would be the Chinese agency of World of Warcraft fallen. Ogilvy Electronics, Guangtong, Shanda, the Ninth City, and even Sohu and Intel have been expected to get this hot commodity. Among them, Ogilvy Electronics is the general agent of Blizzard in China. The two sides have cooperated for six years. Shanda was the leader of domestic online games at that time, and received US$40 million from SoftBank Asia, with sufficient ammunition.
Although Shanda had turned to self-development, due to the great success of the Warcraft series developed by Blizzard in China, Shanda still does not want to miss the potential hit World of Warcraft. One detail can show how much Chen Tianqiao attaches importance to this dispute over agency rights. He once told his subordinates, "Don't talk about anything involved in Warcraft, the company has no explanation yet." Compared with the first two competitors, Jiucheng has nothing to do with money, and some have only four words: it is inevitable. At the negotiation site, Zhu Jun asked each Jiucheng employee who participated in the bid to wear an T shirt and wrote the number 500,000 on it. The highest number of people online at the same time was an astronomical figure in 2003. "In fact, people in Blizzard did not believe this number at all. Later, we did it in less than a year. "
Currently, the vice president of Tencent game and the general manager of League of Legends China, Huang Lingdong was the vice president of the Ninth City back then. He once said in an interview that Boss Zhu is very popular among game developers in South Korea and the United States. Zhu Jun has been in the United States, fluent in English, and better understands international rules, which Chen Tianqiao cannot compare with.
Compared with Zhu Jun's personal ability, the main reason why Jiucheng can defeat Shanda may be that Shanda cannot completely obtain the snow Trust. After the legendary source code was leaked that year, Shanda believed that South Korea should be responsible for this, demanded that the share share be reduced after renewal, and apologized to Shanda. In order to sanction South Korea, Shanda unilaterally stopped paying the share share on the grounds of insufficient technical support. The problem of
is that Koreans are not vegetarians. They proposed that if Shanda wants to renew the contract, the share share must be increased to 30%. As for apology, it is impossible.
Chen Tianqiao, who couldn't swallow this, once filed arbitration at the International Court of Justice of Singapore, "We must tell the Koreans a truth and explain who is right and who is wrong." "Not only that, Shanda's first online game Legend World later developed by itself was considered to be suspected of plagiarizing Legend 2 and Legend 3. Both sides also beat the lawsuit to the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court.
Although Shanda finally shook hands with the South Korean side, and turned to self-development while renewing the contract with Legend, based on Shanda's past disputes, it is hard to say that Blizzard would not tend to look like a softer Nine City. Chen Tianqiao, who came from the Economics Department, also did some calculations, "The agency fee of several million US dollars for this game is It's worth it, but it's wrong to reach $10 million." According to Chen Tianqiao, Shanda chose to give up competition in the final quotation stage.
In April 2004, Jiucheng officially announced that it had won the agency rights of World of Warcraft, with an authorization fee of $3 million. According to the agreement, before the game is officially charged, Jiucheng will still have to spend $6.8 million for certain specific market promotion activities; after that, Jiucheng will pay the developer 22% of the sales share and 4-year royalties, with a total amount of about $51.3 million.
took over Warcraft was a big bet by Zhu Jun. According to the employees of Jiucheng who resigned at the time, "for Warcraft, Jiucheng has invested a lot of manpower and financial resources, and for this, it seems to be sluggish within the company."
. Chen Tianqiao once made an example:
. "It's like you have a good tie, and then you have to buy a new shirt, and you spend all your money in the end. We know when to brake and say, 'I'm sorry, we don't want it anymore'. Besides, users are interested in a game It is not a good thing to have such high expectations. If you have too high expectations, you will definitely be disappointed. If you make him feel bad, come back and come back, it will be a very sad life. Slow-hot games are the best."
3 says this, but facing Jiucheng, which has obtained the agency rights of World of Warcraft, Chen Tianqiao also said that Jiucheng's momentum is very similar to Shanda three years ago. As competitors, they still have a long way to go. Zhu Jun is tit for this. Shanda should think about it three years later. I believe that Shanda will admit that we are the number one in the market after three years.
In June 2005, World of Warcraft was put into operation, and the sniper battle against Jiucheng officially began.
At that time, Shanda strictly informed the agents of all provinces and cities: World of Warcraft is not allowed to be distributed, and Jiucheng cannot be used as an agent, otherwise it will be cancelled. A reporter asked Chen Tianqiao to verify whether this information was true. Chen Tianqiao's answer was very clever, "Shanda's list of agents and detailed contact information have been published on the company's homepage for a long time. If anyone wants to use it, you can contact it directly. Jiucheng is of course no exception."
looks like it has denied, but it did not touch the essence of the problem.
For channel side, Shanda adopted a strategy of carrots and sticks. While warning, it also launched a "Internet Cafe Ten Thousand-yuan Dream Fund" with a total budget of up to 500 million yuan as a cash return to Internet cafe owners. Through application, every Internet cafe owner can get an account with an Dreamland recharge points worth 10,000 yuan for free, and all the income from the account sales will belong to the Internet cafe owner. Such a policy has to make Shanda's original channel merchants treat the games launched by Shanda more loyally, thus squeezing the sales space of Jiucheng.
In addition to suppressing the Nine Cities on the channel side, Shanda has also launched a self-developed online game Dreamland and World of Warcraft.
"Shan has at least two considerations to promote the Dreamland. One is that he really wants to launch a good product; the other more important reason is that he wants to adopt the strategy of Tian Ji horse racing to interfere with and divert users through new games. The key is to protect the number of users of legend. How many effective users it will really bring is secondary, mainly depends on how much interference it has to the Warcraft."
Jiucheng and Shanda's competition has even extended to partners. At that time, Jiucheng announced a strategic partnership with Coca-Cola . According to the agreement, Coca-Cola will create hundreds of Internet cafes themed on World of Warcraft, and also provide special Coke packaging machines in tens of thousands of Internet cafes with business connections with Jiucheng across the country, allowing users to add characters from World of Warcraft to the Coke bottles themselves. At the same time, Coca-Cola also invited SHE as the spokesperson. Two months later, Shanda announced the establishment of a strategic partnership with Coca-Cola's competitor Pepsi . At that time, CCTV-1 and major TV stations across the country began to broadcast the Pepsi commercial starring Louis Koo and F4. Pepsi promoted the grand game in this commercial, and the advertising slogan was "Pepsi Blue Storm, Breakthrough the Dream Country".
looks like the two sides are playing against each other, and Shanda is even slightly better. But the facts quickly forced Chen Tianqiao to admit that "Shanda made a strategic mistake."
Warcraft's first week of public beta, and the number of online players reached 500,000 at the same time. Zhu Jun made this once unbelievable number into reality.In contrast to the popularity of Warcraft, the decline of Legend is the decline of Legend. "One month after its listing, Warcraft's market share has exceeded 10%, while Legend's market share is currently less than 10%.
The popularity of Warcraft was quickly reflected in the company's finances. In 2005, Jiucheng's net income in the third quarter was 184.8 million yuan, an increase of 232% over the second quarter, of which the net income related to Warcraft reached 180.6 million yuan. Shanda's main business online games revenue in the third quarter was 438.1 million yuan, down 6.1% from the previous quarter.
one is moving forward rapidly, and the other is gradually falling. Interestingly, in 2004 when Jiucheng won the Warcraft, Chen Tianqiao commented that Jiucheng's profit in the first three quarters was not as good as Shanda's profit in the first quarter. In August of the same year, Chen Tianqiao, who was once keen on using MSN to communicate with the outside world, never logged in again.
Many years later, facing the logo of World of Warcraft, Chen Tianqiao will remember that when he won the richest man, he modified the MSN signature to "Looking back in ten years, who will come to the forefront" that distant afternoon. At that moment, Shi Yuzhu was preparing to make a grand debut.
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3 Chen Tianqiao of the economics department likes to settle accounts. Under Chen Tianqiao's calculations, instead of acting as a proxy for Korean games and sharing the huge share of Koreans, it is better to do research and development. "Chinese software R&D personnel are so cute, working day and night; Chinese artists are so excellent, you can't imagine the works they make." Afterwards, Chen Tianqiao's choice was correct, but under the impact of World of Warcraft's dimensionality reduction, the legendary world seemed vulnerable. Since the previous online games were 2D, in order to facilitate the 3D Warcraft, Internet cafes in various places upgraded their computer configurations, "If I heard that I could not fight Warcraft without upgrading, some customers would not even enter."
From this perspective, Shanda's defeat is not so much about giving up the Warcraft, but rather that self-developed capabilities are not enough to compete with Blizzard. The giant, who chose to develop himself like Shanda, has taken a different path under the leadership of Shi Yuzhu. Shi Yuzhu from the Department of Mathematics likes to investigate. During the years he worked in the rural sampling survey team of Anhui Statistics Bureau, Shi Yuzhu learned a lot of the latest sampling survey methods from abroad . When he started his journey, Shi Yuzhu once said that his goal was to create a "2D shutdown game". "Anyway, it was either closed our door or closed other people's doors, so that others would never dare to make 2D games again."
For this reason, Shi Yuzhu had in-depth communication with 2,000 players and designed it based on the needs of players as the driving force. In the past, players had to fight monsters if they wanted to upgrade. This process was both boring and tiring, and players complained a lot. On the journey, players don’t have to be in a hurry to fight monsters. Press the key and the computer will automatically hit it. Even if the player is offline, their game characters are also upgraded every minute and every second, and they are upgraded for free.
compares the free upgrade with expensive materials.
"Imagine that if a large number of rich bosses in China play games, under what circumstances will they spend a lot of money and then design the game with this goal." Under this design idea, Zhengtu is free to all players, but if you want to win other players in the PK, you have to recharge your money to buy materials and then use the materials to create equipment. Shi Yuzhu sets the material grade to ninth grade, and it is estimated that the price of a set of ninth grade equipment will be as high as one million yuan.
The reason why players are willing to spend money on equipment is also inseparable from Shi Yuzhu's careful design.
There is a gameplay of the national war of ten thousand people, and players can sneak into other countries to invade other players. This will be punished in games such as miracles and legends; but on the way, players can get rewards through this behavior and may receive corresponding official positions. Coupled with it is the "National War Betting" project, which is similar to a horse betting. The player who bets himself is the party in the game because he can control the outcome, so he doubles his energy and continuously increases equipment investment.
The result is that 3% of high-end players provide 70% of the income of Zhengtu, which means that 30,000 active players spend tens of millions of yuan on the journey every month. On the other hand, in order to attract more non-RMB players to enter, Zhengtu provides them with many casual ways to play. For example, answering questions in intelligence, transporting wards, collecting, planting, riding a bicycle, taking a bath, running a maze, organizing teams and gangs.
It is not difficult to understand that Shi Yuzhu has the confidence to say, "Zhengtu is the most fun in all games, and no player says it is not fun." What Shi Yuzhu didn't say is that Zhengtu is fun, but it costs money. In the words of the player, "This game is almost step by step to teach you how to spend money."
In April 2006, Zhengtu was public beta. At that time, the industry was not optimistic about Shi Yuzhu's attempt. Senior game critic Wang Le believed that Zhengtu would definitely not succeed. "Shi Yuzhu entered the game first, relying on advertising, and second, attracting media hype. His method is the same as Nao Platinum."
From November 2006, Wang Le admitted that the number of people online at the same time in Zhengtu was 150,000, "it was already very profitable." Wang Le made a mistake in prediction, but one thing is right. Shi Yuzhu is indeed using the way he made Naobaijin.
博用线类 is relying on the giant's powerful ground promotion advantages, especially the understanding and in-depth understanding of third- and fourth-tier cities. There is a detail that shows how much effort the Giant has put into this: Giant Vice President Lu Yonghua once lamented in an interview, "If you go deep into a county in the mainland, you will find that the posters before 1956 are still posted on the wall." At that time, Shi Yuzhu decided that we would use the strategy of making Nao Platinum to change the online game channels.
Naobaijin's strategy is to surround the city in the countryside. Shi Yuzhu also found in his communication with players that online games, like health products, have the largest market for online games, not above, and there are much more rural players than those above the county town. To this end, Shi Yuzhu has established 1,800 offices in small and medium-sized cities across the country.
"In the Internet cafes in these small and medium-sized cities, our two families are competing to post posts. You cover mine, I cover yours again. If our posters are covered by our opponents, our people will definitely find out within 24 hours, and the other party will not look at them for a week. For example, everyone covers each other's posters, and our people quickly come up with a trick, which is to make posters. It has to be a bigger circle than the opponent, and write Zhengtu on the side, so that the other party can’t cover it. This is the difference in execution. "
In addition to posting posters for publicity, Shi Yuzhu also uses a charter strategy to seize the rural market. "We sometimes book 50,000 Internet cafes across the country for players to play on weekends." On the day of the reservation, these Internet cafes can only provide Zhengtu with one game for players to play. For many small Internet cafes with less than half of the attendance rate, this transaction is sure to make a profit, while the giant can squeeze the market share of its competitors in this way.
And in subsequent game operations, Shi Yuzhu, who is well versed in human nature, has also gone further than Chen Tianqiao and Zhu Jun.
Zhengtu’s operation strategy is to encourage competition and drive consumption through competition. For this reason, Zhengtu’s service areas are merged very frequently. “Originally, a country operates normally. Once the area is combined, the original environment and order are broken, and conflicts of interest arise. The city is mainly re-arranged. The king must fight for the throne again, and the big and big ones must compete for the ranking again." In order to win in the ranking, players have to recharge their money to get equipment.
also has a "recommendator system", that is, if you bring a new player in, the system will pay you every time the new player is upgraded. Such "signal" nature is similar to that of micro-businesses. Because it drives interests and affects the interpersonal chains around you, more and more people are playing.
I have to say that now Pinduoduo's knife was played thoroughly by Shi Yuzhu more than ten years ago.
Later, Zhengtu shouted the slogan of losing money if it is not fun. Any Zhengtu player who plays to level 70 and feels that the game is not fun and deletes the account and exits. By submitting his own game information to Zhengtu customer service, he will receive 15 yuan of "compensation". It sounds like players have made money, but the problem is that those who can train their accounts to level 70 are likely to spend much more than 15 yuan. I can only say that Shi Yuzhu won again.
By 2006, Zhengtu's sales reached 626 million yuan, becoming the third Chinese online game in the world with more than 1 million online users at the same time. The first two are World of Warcraft and Fantasy Westward Journey . A year later, Chen Tianqiao met Shi Yuzhu. Chen Tianqiao, who has always been vengeful, said:
"To be honest, Zhengtu initially poached people from Shanda, and I had an objection. Later, when I saw Zhengtu doing so well, I couldn't have an objection to you. I told the people in the company that these people stayed in Shanda and could make such a high number of online people? I couldn't do it. Since it couldn't do it, it was right for them to leave."
5
let us pull our time back to 2006. Just before the public beta of Zhengtu, veteran player Shi Yuzhu commented one by one on several online game giants at that time: "NetEase is very scary, but it is not the same as us; I am not afraid of Shanda, its focus is not on the game; the fatal injury of World of Warcraft is in culture, it is only this scale and cannot be reached; I have surpassed all Kingsoft games in one game."
Shi Yuzhu said that Shanda's focus is not on the game because as early as July 2005, with the launch of World of Warcraft, Chen Tianqiao announced that from now on, the market investment of Legend will decrease year by year, and the company's main focus will be shifted to the digital home entertainment development plan in the future. At the end of 2005, Shanda simply announced that the company's legend and self-developed legend world and dreamland were permanently free.
Chen Tianqiao gradually withdrew from the online game industry, which was related to the "electronic heroin" theory at that time, and also to his positioning of himself deep in his heart. A Shanda executive once said in an interview that Chen Tianqiao "had never thought that there were only online games in his destiny, and he wanted the entire society to recognize his value." In that era, the boss of an online game company was destined to bear the heavy pressure of public opinion, even if he was the richest man in China.
Chen Tianqiao has tried hard to do this.
In 2004, Chen Tianqiao said in an interview, "The year before yesterday, some competitors told the tax authorities that Shanda tax evasion and tax evasion. The tax personnel came to check the accounts. They found that we paid 80 million that year, which surprised the tax personnel, so they took the initiative to help us apply and approved the title of a national Class A tax enterprise in about a week."
Chen Tianqiao said again. "Some people say that if you have a charity heart, why never see you donate money to Hope Project or something? You may not believe it. We donated money to fund an endangered puppet theater troupe in Fujian, and now we have won many awards internationally. Shanda also paid for a senior department manager to teach English in Laos."
sounds very convincing, but for angry parents and officials who attach importance to the orientation, this is far from enough.
According to Global Entrepreneurs, Chen Tianqiao once chatted with a friend, and the other party said, you are still very lucky, Shanda has basically not encountered any setbacks. When Chen Tianqiao heard this, he began to complain, "Which one of Shanda has never encountered a disaster that an enterprise may encounter?" Chen Tianqiao, who is sensitive to risks, said early on that one of Shanda's biggest pressures comes from policy risks.
In 2005, the General Administration of Press and Publication formulated the first development standard of the "Online Game Anti-Addiction System" in the country. According to relevant sources, the promoter behind it is Shanda. Some of Shanda’s games are free, and partly related to this. “The competent department once asked Chen Tianqiao to take the lead in making some statements in this regard, and Chen said that the meeting will meet the requirements of the ministries and commissions."
Chen Tianqiao had no choice. The People's Daily's name criticism seemed like yesterday, so he envied NetEase's Ding Lei, "60% of his income now comes from games, but he has not suffered any attacks." Chen Tianqiao envies Ding Lei, while Shi Yuzhu envies Jack Ma.
"We all run businesses, make products, and serve people. I am in the entertainment industry, and I let people entertain here. You are making Alipay, which provides convenience to people, but in fact there is no difference. But in my impression, he contributed to society, so I am not. "
Shanda promoted the development standard of the first "Online Game Anti-Addiction System" in the country, which stipulates that players have accumulated online gameplay time of 3 hours to play games online, and the income of players over 5 hours will be reduced to 0. Shi Yuzhu strictly and even overcomplied with this regulation. In order to prevent players from becoming overly addicted to games, fatigue settings were added during the journey. Once players have too long game time within a day, the experience value and items will be obtained less, and eventually it will become zero. When entering the Zhengtu game, it will be particularly emphasized at the beginning that minors are not allowed to enter. If minors are found in the game, they will be kicked off the line. "We often take sample surveys in the game, and even go to Internet cafes to check. More than 99% of our users are adults, and only less than 1% of minors are. Although we are not satisfied, we are very good compared to our peers. Among the peers, 50%-60% of minors play online games. I feel sleeping very peacefully. "
Shi Yuzhu may be able to exhaust all methods to meet regulatory requirements, but he cannot block the public.
On the way, after the game character enters level 50, players are allowed to make money through some tasks. "Yunbang" is one of them, but money is required to be paid as a deposit. Once robbed, the deposit will be confiscated by the system, and the robbers can get a monetary reward. This design is considered "whether it is from the game balance, social morality, There are great problems even from a legal perspective," and it is even further extended to, "because everything is linked to money, it is easy to lead to a large number of social problems."
In 2008, Zhu Jun once accepted an exclusive interview with Southern People Weekly, mentioning that starting a company requires combining Marxism with China's national conditions. What is China's national conditions like? Chen Tianqiao, Shi Yuzhu and Zhu Jun, who have experienced the storms of the online game industry, should have a very different answer, and the fate of the three companies is the same.
In 2009, after the contract with Jiucheng expired, Blizzard turned around and signed the World of Warcraft agency rights to NetEase, and Jiucheng gradually declined; after 2005, Shanda's transformation to the digital home entertainment development plan was not successful, and Chen Tianqiao is now focusing on brain science; when Zhengtu was the hottest in 2007, Shi Yuzhu said that celebrity endorsements would cause the loss of "potential users who hate this star", so Zhengtu would never invite a spokesperson. Not long ago, at the Zhengtu Carnival, Shi Yuzhu invited Tenger to sing the theme song of "Zhengtu National War", the latter's title is the chief emotional officer of Golden Sauce Liquor under Giant Group.
Shi Yuzhu opened the Pandora box for props and paid for it, and then NetEase and Tencent rushed in this direction, profoundly changing the face of China's online game industry and leaving Giant in place.
can only say that Shi Yi Shibian, just like Zhu Jun said back then, "The Internet is unpredictable, and it is always the best arena for newcomers to come up and knock down their predecessors. There are talented people in the country who have emerged for two or three years. "Whether as the president of Jiucheng or the boss of Shanghai Shenhua, Zhu Jun, who has experienced the wage arrears, should now have more insights into his words. It is difficult for a gambler to leave the gambling table with a smile forever.
As for Chen Tianqiao, at the most glorious time in 2004, Chen Tianqiao said, "We need to focus on doing it. We need to bear all the risks that may arise in the growth history of an emerging industry. Maybe it is our negligence, maybe it is forced by the situation. We have said too little to the outside world, but how many people understand the difficulties of a company's growth? I have traveled thousands of miles in my dream, but I still wake up in bed. Our path was explored in the dark, and running a business is not a romance of dreaming. "
Traveled thousands of miles in the dream, but woke up still in bed. This sentence was once Chen Tianqiao's perception, and in the future it may also be the perception of Ding Lei, Ma Huateng, and even Jack Ma. Ding Lei, who was envied by Chen Tianqiao, and Jack Ma, who was envied by Shi Yuzhu, now has to face the pressure brought by policy risks and public opinion. Under that ceiling, everyone is fair, it has nothing to do with public relations ability, or it has nothing to do with it.
However, the words of old friend Shi Yuzhu should be a little comforting to Chen Tianqiao. Shi Yuzhu, who is familiar with Fan Wenlan's "General History of China", told reporters many years ago, "My position in this generation can be seen in the future because historical materials are there." END
Reference:
① Nine stories about Shi Yuzhu
②Shi Yuzhu: My position in this generation in the future can see
③ "Host Beast" Chen Tianqiao
④ Chen Tianqiao's Grand Legend
⑤ Shanda Treasure Slaughter "Warcraft" Nine Cities Offensive and Defense disrupt the battle
⑥Southern People Weekly Zhu Jun: One-person Nuggets Game
⑦Revealing the Journey Money Making Mode: Whose Money Shi Yuzhu is making
