my return 2002

Chapter 257 Free is the most expensive
On the second day after YY and QQ teamed up to completely destroy MSN, another big news came out on the Internet. It was announced grandly that Legendary World would launch a free server.

As soon as the news of "Legendary Free" was exposed, it immediately caused a shock in the entire online game market. Although there have been many high-quality games such as Fantasy Westward Journey, Sword Rain Jianghu, and World of Warcraft in the mainland online game market in recent years, when it comes to influence, Legendary is still Well deserved first.

On the one hand, Legendary is the earliest online game that domestic gamers came into contact with, and it has extra points for sentimentality. On the other hand, it is a bit ridiculous to say that it is because of the proliferation of private servers, and private servers have helped Legendary retain many lost players.

Therefore, when the news that the legend was free came out, it immediately aroused the response of many legend players.

However, the reaction of the capital market was: Shanda was about to end, and Chen Tianqiao was out of play.

In fact, it is not difficult to understand that the capital market will react in this way. Before that, no free-to-play game in the mainland has been successful, but Legend has accounted for more than half of Shanda’s revenue, with an annual net profit of more than 3 million yuan. Can the income after free fill this pit?

Suddenly, Shanda's share price fell by more than ten points on the day of Nasdaq, and Chen Tianqiao hurriedly stood up to speak out.

"Legendary only adopts point card and free dual zone parallelism. The previous point card revenue will not be affected, and free is just creating a new growth point."

It's a pity that the capital market didn't buy Chen Tianqiao's explanation. A game is divided into two charging modes. What should I do if I update it in the future?Players have a free card, why do they need to recharge the card?

In fact, the root of these problems is that the capital market is not optimistic about the prospects of free games. In their view, point cards are currently the most effective charging method.

However, Chen Tianqiao turned a deaf ear to the interference from the outside world. He is a person who is determined to do it to the end, and the reason why he let Legendary Free is through rigorous market research.

The popular performance of Zhengtu internal test made Chen Tianqiao see the huge potential of free games. At the same time, the existence of many legendary private servers also made him firmly believe that free games can be profitable.

Moreover, Chen Tianqiao has always been hard to let go of Shi Yuzhu's poaching. Seeing that Zhengtu is about to be officially launched, Legend has announced that it will be free in advance, which can also suppress Zhengtu very well, killing two birds with one stone.

I have to admit that Chen Tianqiao's judgment is actually very accurate. On the first day of the opening of the Legendary free area, the number of simultaneous online users exceeded 20. Although many players complained that the value-added items sold in the mall were too buggy and affected the balance of the game, this did not hinder , Countless rich players frantically poured money into it.

In just one day, Legend's revenue in the free zone exceeded 300 million yuan, Shanda's stock price also began to rise in response, and the previous doubts about Chen Tianqiao gradually turned into praise. The capital market is so realistic.

Chen Tianqiao's move to take the first step for free also made Shi Yuzhu very depressed. Originally, the advertising of Zhengtu had been completed, and the main focus was the banner of "the first free online game for life", but now Legend has taken the lead. It is useful, but the impact on game players is not so great.

However, Shi Yuzhu was not discouraged. He accelerated the construction of the Zhengtu local promotion team and recruited [-] local promotion personnel in mid-March, and Shi Yuzhu did not send these local promotion personnel to major first- and second-tier cities. , but let them start from third- and fourth-tier cities and radiate downward.

At the end of March, Zhengtu was officially launched. Shi Yuzhu spent more than 100 million in one go, and carried out large-scale charter flights in various third- and fourth-tier cities across the country. In some cities, all large Internet cafes were chartered. Players who play World of Warcraft enter Internet cafes and find that they can only play Zhengtu, and go to those small Internet cafes to configure and can't carry it, which is very depressing.

However, just relying on this way of playing from the countryside to encircle the cities, Zhengtu had more than 100 million simultaneous online players just eight hours after its launch, surpassing Jianyu Jianghu in one fell swoop to become the game with the highest number of concurrent online games in the mainland.

Magic City.

In the conference room, Lei Jun and Wang Tao looked at each other in admiration and said, "Shi Yuzhu is really a marketing genius."

Shen Lang agrees deeply. The picture quality of this game is mediocre, and there is no technical content. From a professional point of view, this game is a skin-changing game of the age of heroes.

However, Zhengtu's grasp of human nature has gone deep to the extreme.

First of all, after entering the game and choosing the national camp, the player finds that he has entered an era of chaos in the world. Through the reminder of the heirloom dragon-shaped jade pendant, he is a descendant of the royal family. world.

So the player started to upgrade the main task all the way. This game is very simple to upgrade, and soon passed the [-]th level. Visible to the naked eye has become stronger.

Just when the player thought "I'm invincible" smugly, tasks that can only be completed by going to other countries appear in the task bar. Compared with other tasks, the rewards of these tasks are much richer.

Players are naturally happy to do the mission. However, the various national camps in the game are opposed to each other. Not only is there no penalty for killing players from other countries, but there are rewards.

Then the player found that his screen turned gray, so the player fell into thinking.

"What's going on? Am I already very strong? Why did I get knocked out all at once?"

The gap in the middle made it difficult for players to accept, so players began to think of ways to become stronger. If it was a point card game, it would take a long time to upgrade to become stronger, but in Zhengtu, it was easy. Want to become stronger?Just recharge.

So the player became much stronger after recharging the money. Along the way to the place where he was just killed, a single skill kills the person who just killed him, revenge, great!
But soon, before the player could find the NPC who completed the task, he was attacked by a player with the word "King" on his head.

This is also a special way of playing the Journey game. Once a player from another country kills a player from his own country, the system will issue an announcement. The player who becomes the king must protect his people and go for reinforcements.

Moreover, as a king, one must have a strong enough combat power, otherwise, once the king is killed, the system will issue an announcement: *The king of the country was killed by an unknown pawn.

King, where to save face?What if you don't want to be killed?To be strong enough, to become strong, easy, just charge money.

Not only that, Shi Yuzhu also tailor-made considerate VVIP services for rich players, the top material "Heaven-Mending God Stone", the effect of Mending God Stone is to directly increase the attributes of equipment with bonuses, that is to say, a weapon with After obtaining the Heaven-Mending Divine Stone, the attack power is increased by a percentage, and the higher the attribute of the equipment, the higher the enhancement will be.

But this Heaven-replenishing God Stone is not available in the mall, there is only one piece per day, and it can only be obtained by the player with the highest daily recharge amount.

In order to compete for the scarce resource of the Heaven-Mending Divine Stone, local tyrants from all walks of life poured money into it one after another, and some recharged hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single day.

Thanks to the generosity of local tyrants from all walks of life, Zhengtu's revenue has also soared, and the revenue in the first month exceeded 4000 million yuan.

The success of Zhengtu also opened a Pandora's box, allowing domestic game manufacturers to discover that free games are so profitable?
For a while, many games that were originally based on point cards have also been changed to a free game item charging model.

It is worth mentioning that the free model of Zhengtu has brought about the demand for local tyrants to recharge. After all, it is impossible to buy recharge cards and scratch them one by one.

This has allowed NetDragon, which has mastered the online recharge business of Zhengtu, to win the favor of many rich players. At the same time, Shen Lang also asked 360 Payment to offer a certain amount of discount for the first recharge to new registered users.

The big fire of Zhengtu also brought 360 payment to acquire many users, and the scale has quietly exceeded one million, becoming the third-party payment software with the largest number of users in the market besides Alipay.

At the same time, the [Ghost Blowing Lamp], which has been developed for a year, has also completed the final internal test and officially started the internal test.

Just a week before the closed beta, an advertisement for the upcoming closed beta of the online game of the same name [Ghost Blowing Lantern] was posted on the homepage of Xingchen Chinese website, and book lovers began to spread the news.

"Damn it, the game adapted from Ghost Blowing Lantern is about to be released."

"Looking forward, after waiting for so long, it finally came out."

"Don't say anything, just charge directly."

[Ghost Blowing Lantern] The author Tianxia Bachang is also the online game platform of the same name himself. In an interview with Xingchen Chinese website, he said that he has already experienced the demo version.

In addition, 360 security guards, Internet cafe management software, 360 navigation, and YY all gave the highest standard pop-up recommendations.

360 Smart Input also launched the same interface as the [Ghost Blowing Lantern] game. On 360 search, as long as you enter keywords such as horizontal version, fighting, and treasure hunting, the official website of Ghost Blowing Lantern will be ranked first.

Under such an indiscriminate publicity campaign, on the day of the [Ghost Blowing Lantern] internal test, it only took two hours to break 25 concurrently online, and the highest simultaneous online breakthrough on that day was 30. Not a problem either, many players need to queue to get into the game.

In 2006, the player’s concept of horizontal version of the game was still on MapleStory, but different from the cartoon style of MapleStory, [Ghost Blowing Lantern] took another route. The painting style and modeling tended to be realistic. Of course, A certain amount of beautification has also been done, otherwise, if it is really made to be eerie, it is estimated that many female players will be discouraged.

During this period, the players were quite patient, and had a deep sense of substituting the plot. Unlike the later players who desperately pressed the ESC exit button when entering the game plot stage, Gui Blowing Lantern also spent a lot of energy in the plot CG To do it, each plot basically restores the original work, which is equivalent to a few minutes of animation work, and the cost of this item alone is as high as more than 200 million.

Players can easily feel whether a game is sincere or not. Although [Ghost Blowing Lantern] side-scrolling action game is not considered mainstream in the current game market, many players are curious about the original work, try it out and leave , but for players who like horizontal action games, the stickiness is extremely high.

At the same time, in addition to the dungeon story mode, the arena mode has also become a paradise for many hardcore players to exercise their skills.

Compared with brushing dungeons, fighting in the arena is the source of happiness for men, and it even attracts many arcade masters into the pit.

The matchmaking mode of the arena is also very user-friendly. From bronze to king, the players matched at each stage are different, and there will be no such situation where veterans beat rookies to death.

Rookies can also have a lot of fun pecking at each other, especially if you invite a group of classmates, sit in an Internet cafe five times in a row, get on the number, open a room for a big scuffle, it's not too exciting.

And those students with good skills will also become "star figures" in the class. The students compete to curry favor and even offer to help with homework, which has also prompted many students to start practicing skills hard.

Of course, in addition to technology, equipment is also the key to the outcome of the arena. No matter how good the technology is without the support of equipment, you can’t become the king. Just imagine, if someone is wearing top-level equipment and you are wearing a blank board, you can beat others in single digits Injury, someone will give you a second with one move, how can you score?

Just after the half-month internal test of [Ghost Blowing Lantern] ended, Zhuang Yan came to Shen Lang's office with a report.

Shen Lang looked at the data in the report and nodded in satisfaction.

"You can start the next Internet cafe league and college league plans, and I will let Lu Bin cooperate with you."

Zhuang Yan left happily.

Shen Lang called Lu Bin back to the company, and then handed him the plan prepared by the [Ghost Blowing Lamp] project team.

Lu Bin flipped through it and suggested revisions to some of the details.

Shen Lang poured a cup of tea for Lu Bin: "How about it, is there any difficulty in reorganizing the salesman?"

Lu Bin smiled wryly: "Many salesmen with excellent performance refused to join the team and left directly."

In fact, it is no wonder that the reason why the salesmen are desperately developing their business is to get the commission of the point card, which is equivalent to working for themselves. Although there is a basic salary now, the commission is gone, and it has become a performance system. If other people work part-time, the more capable salesmen are naturally unwilling to do it.

Shen Lang patted Lu Bin on the shoulder and comforted him: "Everyone has their own ambitions, so don't force it. You have already brought down the country in the past few years. What you need to do next is not to expand the territory, but to stabilize the construction and stabilize the team. The most important thing is that this Internet cafe league and college league are just a foreground, what you have to do is to accumulate experience in handling offline competitions and prepare for the follow-up professional league.”

Lu Bin immediately patted his chest and said, "I promise to complete the task."

"Okay, let's do this first, you keep in touch with Zhuang Yan, and communicate with you whenever you have any ideas."

As soon as Lu Bin was sent away here, the phone rang suddenly. Shen Lang saw that it was actually the call from his mother, so he quickly pressed the answer button.

"Xiaolang, tomorrow you go to the Shanghai Airport to pick up someone for me. Your dad will text you the flight information later, don't forget."

Before Shen Lang could ask, the phone was hung up, and within half a minute, a text message from my father came.

Shen Lang always felt that the two elders were hiding something from him.

(End of this chapter)