Video Game Empire

The reason why Atari has released the cassette access threshold for its aar2600 and aar-5200 two generations of home game consoles is to maintain the attractiveness of its own game consoles to players by using a steady stream of new games. + small,

But the rampage of a large number of low-quality games is gradually destroying the image that Atari has built up among players over the years. When the increasingly bad word of mouth reaches a critical value, the market begins to crash. The fuse of the incident was that a middle school student purchased a cassette game called "Comet Attack".

But the poor image quality of the game made him unable to bear it, so he went to the game store and asked for a return. But the owner of the game store refused, so in a rage, he returned home and smashed his aar-2600 game console and dozens of cassettes to the door of the game store.

A second follower soon appeared, and within two days five Atari consoles were smashed in front of the game store. The news quickly made its way to the Lace News section of the Los Angeles Times. As a result, countless players seemed to have found a vent at once, and at the entrance of countless game stores began to appear fragmented Atari game consoles that were smashed by hands, trampled by feet, and crushed by cars.

The anger of players led to panic among game store owners, who refused to purchase any Atari-related products and even demanded that the consoles and cartridges in stock be returned. The collapse of sales channels directly led to the collapse of the entire Atari game industry chain.

Atari itself bore the brunt of the severe impact, and countless third-party production companies that rely on Atari game consoles to issue game cards also suffered annihilation. Even sales of game consoles have been implicated in a slight decline. It's fair to say that all North American gamers questioned the home console.

And Dongfang Game Company, which has been paying attention to the collapse of Atari Company next to it. Immediate action was taken, with a special allocation of $10 million in additional publicity expenses. The money was poured into massive advertising campaigns on major television stations and newspapers across the country.

This time, the advertising war Eastern Games did not invite Hollywood stars to appear. There was no warm-hearted literary promotional film, but the game console and various game cassettes were simply and directly. Sales figures for the past year are listed.

Everyone's choice is your choice, and huge sales represent the quality of full marks. When there is a loss of confidence in the market, this kind of simple and crude advertising can win back the trust of consumers the most. In the first 11 months of 1982, global shipments of game consoles totaled 9.75 million units. With nearly 10 million households casting a vote of confidence in gaming consoles, what are you waiting for!

The vacant market after the collapse of Atari was quickly occupied by the game consoles of Dongfang Game Company. The trend of game consoles dominating the home game console market in the United States and even the world is still irreversible. In fact, because of the appearance of the butterfly Li Xuan, Atari's collapse this time was not as tragic as another time and space.

In another time and space, 1982 was the time when Atari was most proud. The company executives paid a sky-high price of 20 million US dollars to buy the game adaptation rights of "Alien". But the company is reluctant to miss out on the pre-Christmas sales season as negotiations between Atari and Universal have dragged on for too long.

As a result, the game developers came up with a very poor quality game with a serious lack of time. Atari, on the other hand, was intent on making a fortune with the help of "Alien" and started mass production ahead of schedule without waiting for the sales of game cartridges to come back.

As a result, the poor quality of the "Alien" game cartridge caused huge anger among game fans. The countless game cassettes produced at full capacity in the early days have become a backlog that cannot be sold. And these products around them consumed a lot of Atari's book funds, which eventually led to Atari's bankruptcy.

And now. Atari's popularity has long been robbed by Oriental Game Company, and it can only survive by continuously launching new games. Even Atari itself can't be sure which of these new games can be recognized by players, so it has been implementing a strict production system based on sales.

So now Atari is in the home game console market. It was a near-devastating blow, but the large amount of cash on the books at least kept the company from turning around. It's just that it will be difficult for Atari to become a competitor of the Oriental Game Company in the future.

Icon's monopoly dream in the personal computer industry. It was first realized by Dongfang Game Company in the home phone market. Together with a, which accounted for almost 85% of the global handheld game console market, Dongfang Game Machine Company showed its domineering domineering in 1982.

And the collapse of Atari. It has also made countless third-party game development companies desperate, and they have accepted the recruitment of Dongfang Game Company. certainly. Dongfang Game Company did not put forward too harsh requirements because of their distress.

For the current Eastern game companies, for a long time in the future, only themselves, or the US Department of Justice, can defeat them. As long as Dongfang Game Company does not make arrogant mistakes, it will continue to strictly control the quality with modesty and prudence, and continue to launch high-quality games. Other competitors trying to break into the home game console market can be described as extremely difficult.

Another aspect that Dongfang Game Company needs to pay attention to is the antitrust investigation of the US Department of Justice. It is precisely because of this sword of Damocles hanging over the head that Dongfang Game Company needs to carefully exploit other third-party game companies.

To this end, Oriental Games has also established a strong legal department in the United States, and also invited well-known law firms in the United States as legal advisers. At the same time, all the contract terms signed by Oriental Games and other companies have been carefully considered by professional lawyers, and they will never leave the U.S. Department of Justice behind.

At the same time, an Atari fell, and other competitors emerged. The new competitors this time are actually old faces in the PC market. Kemodo company swept the entire low-end personal computer market with a -20 long before the ab-1 computer of icon computer was launched.

And it also offered a magic weapon at a low price this time. The slogan of the newly launched Kemodo-64 computer is. Can learn and play games. spend the same money. Do two things!

And this newly launched Kemodo-64 computer, like the ab-1 computer, uses a 6502 processor as the core. But it's only $595. It's nearly $100 cheaper than the ab-1 computer, which has been slashed many times.

It can be said that Comodo is using this computer to compete with game consoles and ab-1 computers at the same time. In fact, the home game console of Dongfang Game Company did not feel much pressure. For starters, the console retails for just $199 in the U.S., one-third the price of the Comodo-64 computer.

Second, the real core competencies of consoles are those good games. At the same time, the positioning of the game console is a home game console, so its operation is simple, and it can be used when connected to a TV.

The Kemodo-64 is positioned as a computer that can play games. If you want to play games, you must at least learn to control the computer proficiently. This makes a large part of the users of game consoles, young children excluded.

In contrast, Ikon felt much more pressure. In the past, Kemodo's -20 was positioned in the low-end market and did not compete with Aikang's products. But the newly released Kemodo-64 computer is obviously aimed at the mid-range market.

The price butcher of Kemodo, the retail price of $595 for the new computer, directly disrupted the market order. What's more, the management of Kemodo Company is really firm on this price war. In order to reduce the cost of purchasing parts for new computers, they directly acquired the company o, the manufacturer of the 6502 processor.

If Aikang follows the price cut. The ab-1 computer enters the low-profit mode. Therefore, Aikang has been considering gradually reducing the production of ab-1 computers, and slowly withdrawing from sales except for the educational computer market. Then put more energy. Concentrate on the more lucrative ab-2, ab-3, ab-p4 and other models of computers.

There will be no lack of competition in any market, and Dongfang Electronics has never been afraid of competition. None of these things prevented Li Xuan from saying goodbye to 1982 with a good mood. Step into the brand new 1983.

In the first week of the new year, the US semiconductor industry ushered in its first major transaction. Eastern Holdings for $300 million. Take over Fairchild Semiconductor from Schlumberger in France.

Schlumberger spent $350 million to acquire Fairchild Semiconductor in the summer of 1979, and it took only three and a half years to leave the market with a cut of $50 million. In fact, the U.S. industry was generally not optimistic about this transaction at the beginning. No one thinks that a foreign company operating in the oil services industry is capable of saving the aging Fairchild Semiconductor.

The acquisition of Dongfang Electronics Co., Ltd. also caused heated discussions in the US semiconductor industry, and everyone's views were divided. Many people think that Eastern can play with digital chips, but not necessarily with analog chips. But more people believe that Dongfang Electronics, a newly rising semiconductor dark horse, can inject fresh vitality into Fairchild Semiconductor.

Some people are optimistic and some are bad. This is normal. Every acquisition is actually an adventure. And Li Xuan has made several major acquisitions so far, all of which have been relatively successful. Another thing that makes him happy is that at least no one in the industry believes that Dongfang Electronics is not qualified to acquire Fairchild Semiconductor.

You must know that two years ago, when Schlumberger of France acquired Fairchild Semiconductor, it was questioned by the industry and the media. There are even extremists who wrote to the White House asking the president to come forward to stop the French from tainting the American semiconductor industry.

But now, relying on the r architecture and the ps architecture, Dongfang Electronics has successfully established its own position in the US semiconductor industry. In the high-tech field, technological innovators are always admired.

Dongfang Electronics has qualified to become a heavyweight player in this competition game. What Dongfang Electronics lacked most in the past was technology accumulation, but after completing the acquisition of Fairchild Semiconductor, Dongfang Electronics made up a lot of its shortcomings.

According to Li Xuan's review of the development history of Fairchild Semiconductor in the past ten years, he found that the company's mistake in the first half of the process was that the parent company kept drawing blood. The profits created by Fairchild Semiconductor were not used to continue investment and research and development, and to further consolidate their advantages when they were in an advantageous position. Instead, they were stagnant and constantly caught up or even surpassed by other competitors.

In the second half, Fairchild Semiconductor was lost in catching up with others. When the memory market was hot, it started investing in research and development of memory. When the processor market started to explode, it moved on to processors, and even developed a game console product.

This kind of changeable thinking not only did not bring any turning point for it, but it gradually lost its advantages in the field of analog semiconductors, and finally became a mediocre company.

What Fairchild needs most right now is not change, but persistence. For example, after the French company Schlumberger acquired Fairchild, it invested a lot of money in the field of artificial intelligence. Not only will Li Xuan not cut off these projects, but will set up an independent intelligence research institute under Fairchild. Continue to invest a lot of money to carry out research on intelligent industrial robots, and lay the foundation for entering the field of automation in the future.

Fairchild's focus in the semiconductor field has shifted back to the field of analog semiconductors. In addition to the semiconductor discrete device field where Fairchild still has advantages, it will focus on tackling key problems in the two sub-fields of amplifiers and power supplies~www.readwn.com~ At the same time, with the support of the Oriental Research Institute, Fairchild Semiconductor will also logarithmically Research on die-mixed semiconductors. Li Xuan does not ask how much profit Fairchild can contribute in the short term, but first formulates a forward-looking long-term scientific research plan.

With Li Xuan's strong financial resources, he doesn't care about Fairchild's losses in three or even five years. Taking the power supply as an example, with the advent of the era of electrical intelligence, the power supply has an extremely broad market in the fields of computers, home appliances, and automobiles in the future.

And Li Xuan believes that the only thing Fairchild Semiconductor needs to change now is the recognition of the value of technology developers. This is also a stubborn problem of Fairchild, which cannot pay R&D personnel in line with the value they create, so that talents continue to drain.

Although the name of the "Western Military Academy" in Silicon Valley is an affirmation of Fairchild's technological strength, it is not an irony. Fairchild is a commercial company, not a public school, and shouldn't be tasked with developing talent for other businesses.

Therefore, the only change that Li Xuan has to make after taking over Fairchild is to comprehensively adjust the company's salary setting standards, align with the mainstream companies in Silicon Valley, and give powerful R&D personnel favorable treatment. (To be continued..)