Tokyo Video Game Tycoon

  Chapter 257 Atari Collapse

The   Atari crash is definitely the biggest event in the history of the video game industry.

  Atari was a game company in the original world, a game company originally founded in the arcade field.

   A few young people created a pool game called pong on a whim at that time. The gameplay is to use a platform to continuously catch a small ball, then hit the square above the screen, and finally destroy all the above squares.

   After a few young people made this game, they made it into a simple arcade and put it in a nearby bar.

   As a result, this game is particularly popular, and the boxes for storing coins are eventually filled with bugs, but it still cannot stop the enthusiasm of players.

   Since then, video games have flourished.

  Before this, it could only be called the wild age of games. After these young people developed pong, it could be called the Bronze Age of game history.

   Then the company started out logically, grew rapidly, and finally became a giant in the video game space.

  At that time, Nintendo was the younger brother in front of Atari.

   However, Atari made a lot of bad decisions after the inflation.

   One of the most deadly is that it does not restrict the creation of game content, resulting in countless junk games in its game consoles.

   At the same time, these junk games are still very cheap, the average price is only about five dollars, and the developers are often one or two people, and it only takes a week and a half to make them, which is very fast.

   Those who bought games didn’t know enough about video games at first. They really didn’t know whether the game was good or bad. In this state, the only thing they could measure was the price.

   A high-quality game was often sold for around thirty dollars at that time.

   But a bad game costs five dollars or less.

   In this way, if the purchaser does not know enough, they will subconsciously choose the cheaper one.

   It's all video games, isn't it great that I can buy five or six for the same price?

   This was the unanimous thought of consumers at that time.

   At that time, no one took the initiative to guide them what was fun and what was garbage.

   They will only see the cheap ones to buy.

   Then they bought it home, played the game, found it was a pile of rubbish, and then naturally thought video games were rubbish, there was no fun in it, and I was just wasting my time playing this stuff.

   This is bad money driving out good money.

  The large amount of content will hold these consumers to death, giving them no chance to experience higher-quality games.

   Then, it was Atari's last fatal blow, the release of ET, which made Atari almost fall in half.

  Consumers will vote with their feet. When there are only a bunch of junk games on the market, they can no longer take a look at those games that may be better.

   As a result, the game industry in the United States fell into a cold winter for two whole years, until the advent of the fierce Nintendo, which saved the entire industry.

  Without Nintendo, the U.S. video game market would have to slump for at least another decade. This is not a casual statement.

   Zhu Yuxing did not expect that he was developing so rapidly, and he has tried his best to control the development trend of this kind of thing, but the industry seems to inevitably go this way.

   It seems that this is some kind of general trend, a force majeure.

   But the good news is that the video game market is not without any resistance now.

   Now the brand of Youxing Electronic Entertainment is the representative of high-quality games.

Coupled with Zhuyouxing's restrictions on the content of its own game consoles, junk games will not appear on their own game consoles. As long as you buy our game consoles, you will never feel that they are garbage. At most, you don't like this category. That's it, but you can't deny that game.

   Zhu Yuxing looked at the newly passed information, and the more he looked at it, the more his heart sank.

  The price of a game console is generally less than $150, and the price of a game is generally less than $10, which also includes the cost of the game cartridge itself.

   What kind of game can you do? You almost don't need to play it anymore.

   This is bad, really bad!

  …

  United States, New York, a newly established small game company, several young people clapped each other excitedly.

   "Aha, our game just sold 30,000 copies! Our profit is only $200,000, which is a huge profit."

Another young man was gulping down a bottle of beer he had just opened, then wiped his mouth and said excitedly, "We have only made this game for half a month, doesn't it mean that every time we make this game? The personal output value is 200,000 in half a month? Is there a more exciting job than this?"

"No!"

   Several young people shouted in unison.

   They are full of emotions and have boundless pride in their hearts, feeling that they have found a career that they will devote their whole life to in the future.

   This money is made so fast!

   "Let's go, today I invite you to take you to a strip club!"

   "Long live the boss!"

   "Long Live Video Games!"

   "Let's go crazy!"

  In many parts of the United States, many such small game studios have sprung up.

   They are usually just two or three young people who dropped out of college or high school. They are full of ruffians, and they devote themselves to game development with a small amount of programming knowledge they have mastered.

   Game development is actually not that difficult, but it is a little difficult to get started at the beginning, but as long as you know programming knowledge and some simple painting skills, you can make a simple game.

   In particular, all kinds of popular games are already in front of them. They only need to remove the program and modify it a little, and then they can magically change it into their own game and sell it.

   These games are generally very poor and have not been tested in any way.

  Some even just bought it, the game machine will freeze because the cassette is inserted, and finally the game machine cannot be used.

  Consumers are of course unhappy, they will go to the department store and ask for repairs or returns.

   And the department store will naturally go to the game console developer to discuss it. As for the game console developer, they don't care much.

  Because there are only a few people who actually return products because of this kind of thing, most people in the United States are too lazy to do this kind of thing. They just eat a dead fly and swear that they will never buy junk like video games again.

   Most of those game console developers are also immersed in the short-term skyrocketing sales performance, and they don't care about the future of the game industry at all.

   (end of this chapter)