If you want to say that in the Internet era, game manufacturers will undoubtedly be the most favorable nomination competitors. After all, you have been immersed in how to make players willing to pay for money for a long time, so learning "advanced experience" from the game circle

If you want to say that in the Internet era, the most far-reaching enterprise of consumption psychology will undoubtedly be the most favorable nomination competitors. After all, it has been immersed in how to make players willing to pay for money for a long time, so learning "advanced experience" from the game circle has long become a trend. But if we talk about the most successful innovation in the gaming industry in the past decade, in addition to "Free to play", service-oriented games represented by DLC and micro-transactions are now a secret to attracting players to krypton money.

. Such a long-lasting way of making money was quickly followed by other industries. After car manufacturers such as Tesla , BMW , Mercedes-Benz and other services have been provided for paid remote upgrades to seat heating, adaptive cruise, simulated sound waves, etc., Intel took out the "Intel Software Defined Chip (SDSi)" to allow users to pay to activate certain functions in the chip, the Bose, which makes headphones, was unable to sit still a few days ago.

Recently, Bose CEO Lila Snyder talked about the idea of ​​introducing paid subscriptions into the hardware field in an interview with The Verge on a podcast show.

When answering the question about whether Bose will charge users for subscription service fees to get some hardware features of its headsets, Lila Snyder said that we are definitely considering this question, "Is there some features and features that may not everyone want or need, but are very valuable to some people? Can we provide this feature wirelessly to form a subscription model?" And she also said bluntly that the idea was inspired by BMW.

"The process of testing and learning", which is the ultimate reason given by Lila Snyder for Bose to use paid unlocking hardware features as a corporate strategy. In a sense, "subscription services are intended to provide financial flexibility to users who are unwilling to pay for additional features in advance." This sentence when BMW explained that it launched a paid remote upgrade actually expressed the voice of most related companies. After all, in this cold winter, every company hopes to squeeze the last piece of steel in the consumer's pockets as much as possible.

From the perspective of consumer psychology, paid unlocking is far more profitable than dividing products by hardware specifications. If you launch a standard version, Pro version, and Plus version based on different positionings from the beginning, consumers will inevitably decide which product to buy based on their needs and budgets. However, if you use a basic model with a unified specification and a paid upgrade to subsequent functions, although the order has changed a little, consumers' feelings will be very different.

Because in the latter mode, consumers already own this product, and the ownership of property rights here has changed from a manufacturer to a consumer. At this time, the manufacturer provides paid upgrades. Due to the "loss aversion" mentality, it is difficult for people to bear to lose something they already have, and naturally a considerable proportion of users will choose to buy it, which is a very typical negative driver.

Although headphones are completely incomparable in terms of complexity with cars, there are actually quite a lot of operations that can be played on headphones. For example, active noise reduction, spatial audio and other large series of functions will be available for "paid unlocking" in the future. However, from the automotive industry to the headphone industry, the spread of the paid unlocking trend is obviously not a good thing for consumers. Nowadays, resistance and dissatisfaction with such behaviors have long been the mainstream sentiment of users on major social platforms.

Then the question is, why can players accept service-oriented games from game manufacturers, and even enjoy this model? This is actually because game manufacturers are truly able to provide financial flexibility for different types of players. Take the favorite sales DLCs of European and American game manufacturers as an example. At the beginning of the game's release, players basically bought the same game, but over time, game manufacturers will launch different types of DLCs for the game, and players have the right to decide whether to purchase DLCs to expand the game content.

Frugality is done by people. Game manufacturers can be said to have done this with real results. Although various addictive mechanisms may be used to induce players to purchase, few manufacturers will force players to pay. The most important point is that players who are not interested in DLC almost do not have to bear the costs incurred by development.

Yes, the moral dilemma of hardware products launching paid unlocking functions is that it will force all users to bear its costs. Even if users have no desire to upgrade BMW's seat heating and Bose's headphone noise reduction, in fact, when users buy BMW car and Bose headphones, they have already paid for the cost of these functions. Therefore, when launching paid unlocking services, hardware products such as headphones, cars, CPUs, etc. have natural moral risks compared to software such as games, that is, whether the user wants to pay extra or not, the production cost must be borne.

, and games and other software can do paid unlocking business without any burden. The key reason is that they are actually doing addition. For example, game manufacturers sell DLCs, which is equivalent to building a building layer by layer on the foundation, which makes the game content continue to enrich.

and thanks to the Internet communication protocol represented by "TCP/IP", high-speed Internet makes data transmission extremely convenient. Game manufacturers only need to deploy the DLC to their own servers and wait for players to pay for it to download. There is almost no need to consider cost expenditure in terms of distribution.

But hardware manufacturers have no conditions to do addition at all. Every time Bose or BMW wants to launch a new feature, they have to carry out a large-scale product recall, recycle hardware from consumers, and then return to the factory to install relevant functions. Therefore, the paid unlocking of hardware manufacturers actually only unlocks the functions that the hardware itself has already been preset when it leaves the factory.

In the eyes of consumers, the paid unlocking of hardware manufacturers is essentially equivalent to a "secondary sales", which is to sell the function that consumers have already paid for. In other words, if a company wants to not bear the blame, it needs to prove to consumers that the hardware features that need to be paid for later are not included in the initial cost. But the question is how to prove this? There is actually no way to answer the answer. Because consumers and enterprises are not in an equal relationship, consumers cannot participate in the production process of enterprises. They can only say as much as the enterprises say.

What's more, almost no company will do something about publicizing product costs. After all, this is equivalent to giving competitors the opportunity to study themselves. So it can only be said that digital economy is really quite different from the real economy. It is difficult for physical products to get rid of physical restrictions, but virtual products almost do not need to take into account this.