Guitar Hero: The role played by the Chinese in the game industry

Over the past six months, I have been advocating the idea that the Chinese are playing an increasingly important role in the global gaming industry. Traditionally, the evolution of the game industry was driven by the American and Japanese characters: Sid Meier, would Wright, Richard Garriott, Miyamoto, Rock Iwata ... These people laid the game industry with their own childlike innocence and ingenuity. But to be fair, their achievements have their own background: cultural things are big, only a strong culture can return to entertainment, but not upstream.　　For example, don't say games such pure mental products, and even a slightly less culturally-tinged internet, the Chinese have long been behind the scenes: in addition to Yahoo and YouTube, the vast majority of consumers directly related to the network products, are not Chinese created. But in the game industry, the Chinese are emerging as a fresh force: "Plant vs. Zombies" is the main designer of the Chinese George Fan, the most popular innovation game in Sony PSN from Shanghai Youth Chen (Jenova Chen), the world's most popular farm games originated in Shanghai start-up company five minutes,　　Interestingly, the development team of its American imitators, farm Ville, was founded in Shanghai Yang Sizhao, and the world's third-largest social gaming company Playdom, which was recently sold to Disney, was also Chinese-born.　　However, if there is any Chinese who has changed the game industry to the greatest extent, it must be counted as the two founders of Guitar Hero, Huangzhongyan and Huang Zhongkai.　　A number is enough to explain everything: in the history of home consoles, there is no game or series of games that can earn a 1 billion dollar income on its own, "Guitar Hero" did. Not long ago, Huangzhongyan and Huang Zhongkai to my inauguration of the innovation Workshop, made a small speech, and then I had the honor to chat with them for 40 minutes, benefited.　　Share as follows: 1 "the wise man must find a direction for the company, but don't die early." Huang's brother is not a traditional game player--except for the design of the game, nothing else.　　They are standard entrepreneurs--the funny analogy with Reid Hoffman, "the kind of man who jumps off a cliff and makes a plane in the air." The Wright brothers ' plane dream they started their own business since 1999, initially thinking of doing a Netflix-like E-commerce platform for game rentals. But quickly ushered in the dotcom bust, so only financing 1 million of billions of dollars dried up, they can rely on specific business a little bit to support the company's development. First a year of game leasing, and then found that the dance blanket sales, and then entered the dance blanket production, and then expanded from online game leasing to the offline game sales business, annual income of 3.5 million dollars.　　Until 2005, they began to develop guitar Hero--a few years later, 1 billion dollars in business. The entrepreneurial career is not as fast and brilliant as dazzling success, but as a pioneering, after all, not everyone can meet Google or YouTube, such as "Jack's Peas", real entrepreneurs, it is necessary to "look at the sky" and "down-to-earth." No compromise with reality is the real entrepreneurial spirit.　　[Page] 2 customer service is the best source of information. "Guitar Hero" was born smoothly?　　Of course not. "Flower" designer Chen (Jenova Chen) won a number of prizes in the "flower" money, they want to raise 3 million of dollars, but put almost all the venture capital tried again, no one agreed.　　In the end, they could only gather 1 million dollars from their previous savings and relatives. On sale, they visited 8 of America's largest chain stores, and only two had an interest in advancing. Even the perfect retailer for the market acumen, it is believed that this thing can only sell 30,000 sets.　　After all, there has never been a successful music game in the U.S. market. Are you going to convince your wife to borrow money from a relative for a product that everyone is not optimistic about? Maybe. Then what did you think?　　Desperate？ The world's most popular farm games are from the Chinese hand is not so serious, no matter how retailer said, the Yellow brothers in fact, their products have some basic belief: they believe that the product can sell at least 15.17 million sets. Why?　　Because they have done five years of game sales, five years of customer service, they have to the market how much need to know, how many people willing to pay for this product has a real feeling. What is the best way to grasp the market?　　is to take your products to the user to do the most direct contact, they are annoying or like or indifferent, at a glance. The reality is predictable. When they put guitar hero on retailer's storefront, they sold 3000 sets in the first two hours.　　The next order, like a snowflake. Investors who had not been willing to invest 3 million of billions of dollars were asking for 30 million dollars for a stake.　　[Page] 3 The team must have long-distance running consciousness. As we all know, the game is a movie with a strong volatility of the industry, the success of the previous product can not ensure the next hot sale.　　So it is not difficult to understand why VCs are unwilling to enter the Que.　　You can say that the Yellow brothers in the game industry to achieve such a pioneering achievement is luck, but recall that they do "Guitar Hero" before the sale of five years of dance carpet-related products, the accumulation of this market is not deep. Huang Zhongkai said a point that I think is right, that the industry has never had a free lunch. You see Blizzard's "World of Warcraft" Who and the game, but also to think of "World of Warcraft" before the blizzard team spent more than 10 years to do three quality of "Warcraft". Similarly, "Grand Theft Auto" is only 3 generation, "Call of Duty" is the fourth generation. All these teams, who have been unusually stable for more than five years, have an industry-free understanding of a market that is blockbuster. (Digging the shell net)