Chapter 55 Ma Huateng surfing game Jianghu heroes

When it comes to online games, one has to talk about Shanda. The word Shanda covers almost all topics in the field of online games.Gambling, getting rich overnight, charging for props, China-Korea dispute, going public... These words seem to be branded with Chen Tianqiao.No field is so glamorous yet so controversial as the Internet industry, which is irrationally attacked by its consumer groups and at the same time receives the highest continuous consumption support. Before October 1993, Chen Tianqiao was a well-behaved boy and a good student in the eyes of his parents and teachers. He had excellent academic performance and ranked first in every compulsory exam. He was a student party member and an official of the student union.He is one of the only 18 outstanding graduates of Fudan University who graduated early. After graduation, Chen Tianqiao went to a large state-owned enterprise. After working for 5 years, he changed the trajectory of his life and joined a trust and investment company.

In 1999, Shanda Network was established.It was also that year that Jun Zhu from Ninetowns, another big game player in China, returned to China with some of the capital he had accumulated in the United States.Before that, Jun Zhu's experience was an inspirational story. The popular version is that when Zhu Jun was in college, he rode a yellow croaker around half of Shanghai in order to make money. In 1994, Jun Zhu came to the United States, "While working, I saw what good ways to make money can be brought to China." In the late 1990s, with the development and maturity of information technology, the Internet industry began to rise in the United States.The barriers to entry in other industries are very high, requiring capital and background.Jun Zhu thinks there will be a big gold mine in the IT industry.It is worth emphasizing that at this time, Jun Zhu knew nothing about computers and network technology, neither turning on the computer nor typing.

Zhu Jun invested US$500,000, accounting for 60% of the shares, and invested in a game community website called "Gamenow.com", which was later renamed "The Ninth City". Gamenow was initially positioned as a virtual network community, with leisure and entertainment content such as fishing, online marriage, and answering questions.It started relatively smoothly. According to the data of CNNIC, it ranked 13th among website traffic and No. 1 among entertainment websites.However, this did not generate any cash income for the company.Attempts to charge users with payment cards have been met with cold reception.

Compared to Zhu Jun's confusion, Chen Tianqiao has discovered the direction of the treasure.Taking community games as his main business, he established a virtual community, which has about 1 million registered users in just a few months, and thus obtained a venture capital investment of US$3 million from CDC. In the spring of 2001, South Korea's Actoz was looking for a network operator for it.The sensitive Chen Tianqiao hit it off with Actoz, obtained the exclusive agency right in China for US$300,000, and resolutely broke off from CDC.The US$300,000 was left by China.com in proportion to its shareholding, and Chen Tianqiao can be said to be on the verge of dying.

Chen Tianqiao took a risky move. After signing the agency, Shanda's funds could not survive for three months, and he had no money to buy the hardware needed to test the game. Chen Tianqiao took the contract signed with South Korea and found Inspur, Dell told them that Shanda would operate a Korean game and applied for a two-month trial of the machine.When the other party saw that it was an international formal contract, he agreed. Then, he took the server contract and found China Telecom in the same way.China Telecom eventually gave Shanda a free bandwidth trial for a two-month testing period.With the Korean contract and the support of the server manufacturer and China Telecom, Chen Tianqiao won the trust of Shanghai Ubisoft, the leading stand-alone game distributor in China at that time, and sold Shanda game point cards on an agency basis, with a share of 33%.

The number of people increased explosively, but at this time, Ubisoft's sales did not keep up in time.Ubisoft did not expect the number of online users to grow so fast, so there are not many sales cards prepared, players cannot buy cards, and many provinces and cities are out of stock.Ubisoft also gave distributors all over the country a very long payment period, resulting in a slow return of cash, and constant friction between Shanda and Ubisoft.At this time, Ubisoft's personnel changed, and the original contract was not recognized. There were many crises, and Chen Tianqiao decided to go it alone.

Dozens of people, spread across the country, is simply impossible.Therefore, in the eyes of many people, Shanda's "break" with Ubisoft at this time is tantamount to suicide.At this time, Chen Tianqiao began to notice the function of Internet cafes.At that time, the players who played the "Legend" online game were basically concentrated in Internet cafes.After some discussion, Shanda decided to establish a sales channel centered on Internet cafes: take Internet cafes in various places as the vertical line, regard Internet cafes as the base for game card sales, and use the general agents and distributors in various places as the horizontal line to establish Shanda’s own sales center.

In the process of establishing a sales center, Shanda developed an online sales system, which directly spread sales channels into Internet cafes.The user only needs to tell the owner of the Internet cafe how much time he needs to buy, and the Internet cafe can transfer the time to the user's account within 2 minutes after paying the money.Let thousands of players play roles in the virtual game space, open and close, and enjoy themselves.Players invest time and money to compete in the virtual world, while Shanda counts money in the real world.One month later, the number of people online at the same time quickly exceeded 400,000, and the investment was fully recovered.

In 2002, Shanda's revenue and net profit reached an astonishing 326 million yuan and 139 million yuan; in 2003, its revenue and net profit nearly doubled compared with the previous year, reaching 633 million yuan and 273 million yuan respectively.Chen Tianqiao's Shanda has gone through a difficult entrepreneurial period. Shanda's success came and went quickly. By 2003, in less than two years, there were already rampant cheating and private servers, and lawsuits with developers made Shanda fall into a quagmire. At this time, Shanda was facing great challenges. From the beginning of a little fame, it was frequently attacked by hackers. In the worst case, Shanda's entire sales system was almost paralyzed.After being attacked by hackers, the staff of Shanda Company called Chen Tianqiao several times a month at most. This kind of attack had a great impact on Shanda Company and Chen Tianqiao. I had a problem, and my heart would beat rapidly when I received a phone call at home.In the face of wanton attacks by hackers, someone asked Chen Tianqiao to compromise, and life might be easier, but Chen Tianqiao firmly disagreed.He started from two aspects. On the one hand, he installed a new server, on the other hand, he used a spare server, constantly looking for loopholes when he was attacked, and repaired them in time.Through this tempering, Chen Tianqiao has accumulated a set of anti-hacking experience to prevent problems before they happen. In order to deal with various hacker attacks, Shanda Company has prepared various plans in advance.Almost a year later, hackers who attacked Shanda began to stop.

But Chen Tianqiao's life didn't seem to stop, there was a wave of unrest, and another wave - private server appeared. At the end of September 2002, due to management negligence by the Korean developer of the game, the early English version server-side installation program located in Italy leaked and flowed into China. This program caused tens of millions of losses to Shanda.According to the contract, the South Korean Actoz company should provide technical support to solve the "private server" problem, but Actoz company is not very enthusiastic about this.In a rage, Chen Tianqiao stopped the cooperation with Actoz and delayed the payment of 10 million US dollars to Actoz.As a result, the "fight" between Chen Tianqiao and the Korean company put Chen Tianqiao and Shanda in the midst of internal and external troubles.

Due to the "private server" incident, Actoz and Shanda went to court.Throughout the process, the South Korean side took a tough attitude and unilaterally terminated the agency agreement in January 2003, seven months before the expiration of the contract between the two parties.Shanda decided to fight back.Chen Tianqiao's attitude is also very tough. He said in public: "If the South Korean side does not apologize to me and does not lower the share ratio, I, Chen Tianqiao, will never pay them another penny!" In this interest dispute, Chen Tianqiao seems to be taking a risky move, because for Shanda, the Korean company has many trump cards to restrict Shanda.In Chen Tianqiao's view, if the Korean company does not provide technical support, Shanda will be finished; if it does not provide a new version, Shanda will be finished.Compared with the many knives that the Korean company restricts Shanda, Chen Tianqiao has the only trump card-no payment. On February 17, 2003, Shanda announced the launch of a new product "Legendary World" independently developed by Shanda.This is a game designed to replace.The design and content of this game are very similar to the Korean version, and players can move their previous data and records to the new game. On October 8, 2003, "Legendary World" began to charge fees, and the research and development costs were recovered within one day, with an income of over 10 million yuan.Interestingly, when Shanda started acting as an agent for Korean games, Chen Tianqiao had set an internal rule: whoever suggested Shanda’s research and development would be fired.At the same time, Chen Tianqiao continued to negotiate with Actoz. In the end, the two "meeted and smiled and lost their grievances". In August 2003, the two companies renewed their contract again. In fact, for Chen Tianqiao in 2003, it was not only the bitter cold wind, but also the warm spring breeze. In January 2003, while Shanda was threatened by Actoz, it received an investment of US$40 million from Softbank.With Softbank's investment of 40 million US dollars and the huge profits it brought, Shanda began to strengthen its independent research and development capabilities. In 2003, Shanda invested in BOTHTEC, a game development company in Japan. One year later, Shanda acquired 100% equity of ZONA in the United States. "Before 2001, Shanda was likely to die almost every day. In 2002, Shanda was likely to die every month. In 2003, Shanda was likely to die every quarter." When Chen Tianqiao was looking for the living in the footsteps of death While hoping, Jun Zhu also encountered a cold snap.The return on the investment has not been seen for a long time, which makes Zhu Jun, an investor, both anxious and dissatisfied, "I think I have more experience than these young guys."After "dissuading" the CEO at the time, Jun Zhu came from behind the scenes to the front of the stage.The personnel changes made the management relationship once tense. "At that time, I asked the technical director to give me a work report. He said he would email it to me. I said I couldn't use it. He said it was your own business." There is no business income, and there is no way to find the direction. The salary cannot be paid for several months, and people in the company are panicked.Zhu Jun increased the investment, taking care of ordinary employees first when paying wages, and paying later for management personnel.Zhu Jun wants to use such a gesture to tell his employees that the boss is willing to tide over the difficulties with everyone. Before 2002, there were fifty or sixty people left in the company, but neither the vice president nor the middle-level technical backbones left. Everyone knows the story after that.Zhu Jun saw what Chen Tianqiao was doing. In July 2002, Ninth City won the agency right of South Korean Webzen Company in China for 2 million US dollars. At that time, the two parties jointly invested 1.5 million US dollars to establish Ninetowns Entertainment Company. 51%, and the South Korean side accounted for 49%. The days when Jun Zhu struggled in the cold and looked for his direction.Ding Lei of Netease is outside the portal, looking for another profitable tentacles of Netease. "Damn! I convinced YOU!" On the last day of 2001, when Zhou Xingchi appeared in Guangzhou Tianhe Computer City and stood next to Ding Lei, what would he say to the richest man in China who brought NetEase out of desperation? On behalf of his inner feelings, this classic line in "A Chinese Journey to the West" is very appropriate. The "King of Comedy" Zhou Xingchi appeared in front of people as an agent of the online game "A Westward Journey" developed by Ding Lei. There were crowds of people and the flashing lights frequently flashed. Be brilliant anytime.Just a few hours ago, Ding Lei received the notice that NASDAQ resumed listing transactions. In the early days of China's Internet development, NetEase made great contributions to the listing of Chinese concept stocks on NASDAQ, and "Journey to the West" as the representative Several online games made great contributions to the future of NetEase. Regarding Zhou Xingchi's movies and Ding Lei's entrepreneurial journey, there is one thing that can be compared, that is, the ups and downs of the protagonist in the movie and the bitterness of starting a business in reality.Not long after NetEase's first online game "A Chinese Journey to the West" was launched, it attracted thousands of complaints from netizens and the game failed.The reason for the failure was that an engineer wanted to innovate and embedded an IE browser in the game client. As a result, the IE browser often jumped out to cause trouble, and often caused the client to crash. But Ding Lei did not give up. "I said to our colleagues, can you rewrite it, my goal is stability. My colleagues said, boss, no problem, give us 6 months." Ding Lei said. In June 2002, Netease's "Journey to the West 2" was born, and both the client and the server are very stable.At the beginning, there were not many users, less than 3,000 in total.Ding Lei encouraged his subordinates that as long as the product is good, he can do marketing by himself. Regarding marketing, Ding Lei did not stop at words. He opened his address book, looking for business cards one by one, and even visiting for advice. Later, Ding Lei found Duan Yongping, the boss of Backgammon.Ding Lei called Duan Yongping to ask him for advice, and asked if he could visit him face to face.Duan Yongping said very politely: "Then you come here." In this way, he consulted experts on marketing knowledge, and then set two marketing principles: first, set the highest price in the market, Korean game 30 cents 1 Hours, NetEase 40 cents an hour, because people who really like this game will not care about the extra dime, and increasing the dime actually increases the company's profit by 33%; second, do not do things for short-term interests , do not implement a monthly subscription system, so that people who play Netease games will be more rational, and the life of the game will be very long. At that time, there were more than 140 games on the market, but only five or six companies really did well, and only a few companies really made money. "Westward Journey 2" because Ding Lei "stepped back" in formulating the marketing principles, made the profit space and time "a step forward", and the user scale also increased from the initial 3,000 to the highest scale of 550,000.With the increase of the company's profitability, as the first profitable portal website, Netease's stock price began to "sesame blossom" on the Nasdaq market, with the highest value close to 70 US dollars. Ding Lei also became Forbes in 2003 richest man in China. Ding Lei smiled brilliantly; Zhu Jun also smiled. On February 5, 2003, China began to charge fees officially. "Ninetowns' daily income from products is about 2 million RMB. It can also be said that Ninetowns made a profit in the first minute of launch." At the end of 2003 , Ninetowns, who turned to be a game agent, finally found his own gold mine.That year, Sohu and Sina began to enter the field of online games, launching "Knight Online" and "Paradise" respectively. In the field of domestic instant messaging, Tencent is undoubtedly the leader, but in terms of online games, facing such competitors as the cloud, Tencent's start seems a little late. In 2002, when Chen Tianqiao's games were booming, Ma Huateng dragged Zhang Zhidong and Zeng Liqing to the United States to investigate the online game market. Zhang Zhidong didn't travel because of work, but Zeng Liqing thought it was fun. People set sail immediately.At that time, the online game market in the United States was already in full swing. After that investigation, Ma Huateng and Zeng Liqing felt that the game was a gold mine waiting to be developed, and began to consider the feasibility of entering the game field. Just in October 2002, Wang Yuan, the then general manager of Tencent's game operation business department, presented a "Feasibility Study Report on Tencent's Entering the Domestic Game Market" to Tencent's management. There are many factors in the business, including culture, interface, core technology, etc. To judge whether a game has vitality, selecting any of these factors alone is one-sided, and users will not understand the hard work and labor behind it, they only care about the game. The comprehensive user experience effect they bring, and make a decision to pay or not.” Since then, seeing Internet cafe users spending more and more time on games, Tencent’s management has sensed a crisis. Entering 2003, Tencent began to investigate domestic game companies. After many heated discussions among the management, Tencent’s management decided to enter the game field. Therefore, Zeng Liqing recruited horses in Shanghai and started the establishment of Tencent’s game team.In this regard, Ma Huateng also agreed: "At the beginning of 2003, we began to understand the market and decided to enter this market." Ma Huateng said that when he first set foot in the game, he did not consider how to use Tencent's own advantages. , so I took some detours, and the biggest confusion I faced at the time was "whether to make a large-scale online game or a system online game". Since then, Tencent's game division was established in Shanghai.In May of that year, Tencent represented the full 3D online game "Triumph" developed by the famous Korean developer Imazic. Like Tencent's entry into other Internet businesses, Tencent this time is still quietly.Regarding Tencent's entry into the game industry, there are still two voices in the industry: one is that the foundation of Tencent is the combination of the value of netizens, and whether Tencent can make good use of its customer resources; the other is that the domestic online game companies at that time were all In the initial stage, how fast can Tencent go after entering the game, and how will it go in the future? At the same time as the launch of Triumph, Tencent also launched another mini-game platform, QQ Games, which integrates small online games. On August 18, ten days after the public beta test of "Triumph", the QQ game platform was released, focusing on the online casual game market mainly based on chess and cards.At that time, there were already strong competitors such as Lianzhong and China Game Center in the casual game market. How to make QQ users like QQ games, Tencent developers and designers paid a lot of attention to details, such as the sound when playing cards, touch The flashes of the cards, etc.With the development of QQ games, the platform has introduced prop design, combined with virtual images such as QQ show to make Tencent's casual game products more friendly. 2003 was a very warm year for the entire game industry.