The richest man starts with a blind box

Chapter 258 National Finals

Thomas himself did not expect the influence of this post. In less than a day, this post spread from the Warcraft III Chinese server forum with only a few thousand people to various Warcraft III forums in the United States.

Then all the American players felt deeply shocked. After the shock, there was a deep shame. My majestic beacon of freedom, the birthplace of computer games, is also the birthplace of e-sports. When holding an e-sports competition, It doesn't even have the style of the Chinese.

Then, many players began to leave messages and letters on the official website and forums of World of Warcraft, asking Blizzard to also hold an e-sports competition with a scale not inferior to that of the Chinese, so that those poor Chinese can know which is the real e-sports competition. King of Kings.

Under normal circumstances, game companies will only talk to appease, but will not really pay attention to these requests, because hosting an e-sports competition does not make money, but only loses money.

But it's different when it comes to Blizzard, because it has the full support of the president of Blizzard.

Alan Adhan himself is a veteran e-sports fan, and he has long been looking forward to holding such a large-scale e-sports competition in the United States.

It's just that although he is the president of Blizzard, he doesn't have an absolute controlling stake in the company. Holding such an expensive game requires the approval of the company's board of directors. Alan Adham mentioned it once or twice before, but directly It was rejected by all the directors, because in the directors' opinion, such a competition is small-scale, or it is enough for the players to organize it spontaneously, and it is a complete waste of money to hold it by themselves.

And this time, the player's spontaneous request became Alan Adhan's best excuse. At the same time, he took out the data, saying that according to the data given to him by the Chinese, before the official opening of the game, Warcraft 3 was in the entire game. The total number of players who play Warcraft 3 in China is about 200 million.

But when all the city championships are over, with the help of the huge storm caused by the city championships, Warcraft 3 has more than 3 million registered players in China, which is ten times more than the number of players in the United States. So far, the total sales volume of Warcraft 000 in the United States is only 3 million copies.

Although these 200 million copies are already the sales data ceiling of the US computer game industry.

Of course, considering that the number of registered players in China is not equal to the actual number of players, and one paying user is worth at least 20 free users, so is it true that in which country Warcraft III actually created greater economic benefits? Not clear, but this does not prevent Alan Adham from using these data to convince his board of directors,

In the words of Alan Adham, if they hold a national e-sports competition, they can at least attract another 50 paying players, and these 50 paying players can bring in 6 million US dollars Direct economic benefits, and holding a national e-sports competition only requires an investment of several million dollars.

So Blizzard's board of directors was persuaded, and soon under the organization of Alan Adhan, the Warcraft III National Championship in the United States will also be held from 2003.

And all regions of the world have more or less been led by this trend, and various e-sports competitions have sprung up like mushrooms after rain.

Soon, the WCG held in December directly announced that Warcraft 12 will be included in the official competition, which further promoted the development momentum of the entire Warcraft 3 e-sports.

This growth rate is at least 10 times faster than in history... No, even if you say it is 100 times faster, there is no problem, because in the previous life, Blizzard was belatedly aware of the e-sports competition.

Until 2010, Blizzard did not take the initiative to hold any e-sports events, whether it is StarCraft or Warcraft, it is the same, and if there is no official leader, it is difficult for any game to start its e-sports journey, except StarCraft is an outlier.

Warcraft 3 in history has almost no sense of existence once it leaves the only stage of WCG, so it can be said without exaggeration that the intensity of e-sports in this world of Warcraft 3 has surpassed that of the previous life 100 times, because Warcraft 3 in the previous life was in 2002, even WCG did not join, and there were almost no e-sports competitions to speak of.

On November 2002, 11, the biggest climax of the entire Warcraft 15 e-sports competition in China came, and that was the long-planned Warcraft National Finals, which was also held in Shanghai.

And this time the venue of the competition is set at the largest stadium in Shanghai, Hongkou Stadium.

However, the name of this stadium is not commonly used. The name he really uses is the 8-person stadium, which means that the stadium can accommodate up to 8 people watching the game at the same time.

Since the name is 80,000 people gymnasium, the price is also extremely expensive. The cost of renting it alone for one day is as high as 100 million yuan, and the national finals will be held for three days. Although the price can be discounted, it still costs 200 million yuan .

Spending 200 million yuan to rent a venue for the competition was something that many large enterprises could not have imagined in 2002, but Jiangnan did not hesitate to spend money on the matter.

But Jiangnan seems to have no loss at all, because the national finals lasted for three days, and a total of 24 tickets have been sold out. Even the cheapest price of 100 yuan per ticket can sell 2400 million. The box office came out.

But in fact, Jiangnan lost again, because all the 24 tickets were given away. The national finals of this Warcraft Tournament had already started various publicity preparations as early as May. Hot, tell everyone, these tickets will all be given away.

Then, in July, the rules for gifting tickets were announced.

First of all, all players who are ranked at the Celestial level can get a ticket to the VIP area for free.

All Earth Immortal level players can get a free admission ticket to the general area, so 600 tickets have been sent out, and the final settlement period is October 10.It is worth mentioning that these 30 tickets are pass tickets, that is, tickets that can be used to enter the finals for three days, and are the most precious tickets.

As a result, before the entire October, the heads of Warcraft 10 players will be broken. In order to obtain a level above the level of the earth fairy, the dog brains of those master players are about to be blown out.

However, players at the Celestial level soon discovered that it was meaningless to play like this, because since they can stabilize at the position of Celestial Immortals at level 100 in the country, they can go to professional competitions and directly become contestants. Isn’t it good to play on the stage? ?
After that, it is the way for ordinary players to obtain it. It is very simple, it is a lottery.

According to the rules, Jiangnan will give out a total of 6 tickets, and within a period of 100 days, 600 tickets will be drawn every day.

Each player only needs to play 5 matches every day, whether it is qualifying match or matching match, even PVE match, to be eligible for a lucky draw and get a digital code in order.

Then at 2:12 noon on the second day, the Shanghai Notary Office will draw a lottery and draw 600 lucky players.

The above is the way to give away a total of 61800 tickets, so how did you get the remaining 18 tickets?

Simple, send it together with the blind box.

After the resumption of sales of the Warcraft Three Blind Boxes, all blind boxes will randomly come with an admission ticket. According to the official probability, this probability is about 1%.

In other words, there are nearly 1800 game tickets placed in 18 million blind boxes.

Huang He thought that these 1800 million blind boxes could be sold for about three months no matter what.As a result, in less than 30 days, all 1800 million blind boxes were sold out, that is, 10 million sales were sold in 1.8 days, which once again shocked the jaws of all business people.

Tsk tsk, the seemingly free tickets were actually sold for 1.8 million. This is definitely an epic classic case.

So much so that a wolfish economist declared that the most profitable industry in China is not real estate, but blind boxes.

However, many of the tickets eventually fell into the hands of the scalpers. As a result, a free ticket for the general area was hyped to about 300 yuan in the hands of the scalpers.

Tickets for the VIP area have been hyped to more than 2000 yuan.

This was 2002 yuan in 2000. You know, the VIP area of ​​Jay Chou's concert at that time was only 680 yuan.

It has to be said that scalpers are eternal gods.

So when the National Finals of Warcraft III was held in the 11-person stadium on November 15th, the entire stadium was full of seats. 8 players filled the entire stadium, and a large number of players were Come from all over the country by various means of transportation.

In recent days, Thomas, who has made a lot of money by selling redemption codes, stood excitedly on the VIP seat. He spent 2000 US dollars to buy tickets for three consecutive days, but this is for him now. , is already small money.

This time, Thomas took out his camera, took a video of the scene, and uploaded it to the forum.

Of course, in 2002, an ordinary forum could not bear the data of the video, but Thomas made a moving picture, which can be uploaded in front of it.

Then the players in the United States broke their defenses again. This animation became the direct reason for many players to petition the official, and it also became an important proof that Alan Adhan asked the board of directors to hold the game.

"Look, China can gather 8 people to watch the game, why can't the United States?"

[PS: After finishing this chapter, I realized that the data was written too much. In 2002, 8 e-sports tickets should not be sold out. After all, this is not the world finals of S7.The actual data is probably about 2 people. There is no problem, but I will not change it. It is a novel anyway, so let’s have a good time. Everyone should have no objections! 】

(End of this chapter)