Dragon, choose cultural victory to make money

Chapter 197 Home Game Consoles and Escort Masterpieces
The new console idea was a success.

It took the goblins less than a month to create a prototype of a new split-type home game console.

Officially named the Drogo Family Game Console, it can also be referred to as the Famicom because of the red magic crystal and white shell color scheme.

There are not many technical difficulties in the research and development process itself. The only troublesome part is to separate the storage and operation part from the spell content release part.

Release some of them for individual sale, which are the game cartridges or discs in this world.

However, the accurate name here should be game ring, because its shape is a metal ring with an inner diameter of 30 cm, an outer diameter of 36 cm and a thickness of 10 cm.

There is a magic circle engraved inside to release the game spells. It is dedicated to the game and will only run after being connected to the game console.

In fact, the goblins solved this so-called R&D difficulty in just three days and nights.

The rest of the time was mainly spent on researching how to lower the cost of this thing. After all, magic materials are still a bit expensive for mass consumption.

A large group of engineers got together to find ways to make the product cheaper.

First, the function of generating illusions was removed, so that only the magic video machine could be connected for display. Then the audio was also removed, and the image quality was severely compressed.

As for the frame rate, 30 frames is the maximum and don’t even think about going higher. As long as you haven’t seen 60 frames, it’s easy for everyone to accept 30 frames.

The goblin engineer originally wanted to compress it to 10 frames, but was stopped by Drogo. He would feel uncomfortable if it was lower.

The purpose of home game consoles is to make gaming entertainment accessible to every household.

Not the toys that the rich, the mages, and the people can only play with in game stores.

And pricing that the general public can afford can effectively reduce the audience for pirated games.

For most consumers, as long as the price-performance ratio is good, they are still happy to support genuine products.

Drogo was not worried about piracy. First of all, due to the materials, pirated products were not much cheaper.

Secondly, many game companies are troubled by piracy because of imperfect legal supervision and the difficulty of cross-border lawsuits, which makes it impossible to directly make pirated producers pay the price.

It's much easier for Drogo, he doesn't have to go to court, he can just file a lawsuit directly.

In the end, the hardware part was simplified to the point where nothing could be deleted, and the Switch is considered a high-end console in comparison.

But after calculation, a game still needs to be sold for at least 40 copper coins to make a profit.

The regular version of the game console costs two silver coins, which is close to the cost price and leaves almost no profit. Drogo plans to open up the market with the game console and then make money by selling games.

Of course, the game console also has deluxe edition, professional edition, enhanced edition, supreme edition, and customized edition.

The profit here is extremely high, and the focus is on targeting rich people.

The 2-silver ordinary game console that is mainly promoted can be bought by most people if they save up enough money, but a game that costs 40 copper coins is still too expensive.

40 copper coins are enough to buy 5 kilograms of ribs, or 2 kilograms of pork. Meat with bones is much cheaper here, which is a treat for the poor. Pork with bones is at the bottom of the contempt chain.

Some of the price increases in the past two years were caused by Zhuo Ge. His approach has successfully improved the status of bone-in meat and offal in the catering industry.

A strange trend that seems inexplicable to many locals, where people would rather gnaw on chicken necks and chicken feet than eat chicken breasts, is spreading outward from the Drogo Group.

In the past, 40 copper coins could buy at least 10 kilograms of pork ribs.

The annual income of a civilian family in Shuangta City is only about 70 silver coins, and this is a large commercial city.

The father works in the factory, the mother takes care of the children at home and occasionally does odd jobs, two or three children work as child laborers, and the smartest one among them may have the opportunity to go to school.

This is the most common civilian family structure today.

For a family like this, between a game that can only be played for a dozen hours and several kilograms of pork ribs, they would prefer the latter.

Since there was no room for price reduction on the hardware, Zhuo Ge had to find a way to sell it.

In the end, the solution he proposed was to create an official second-hand recycling channel.

If you sell the finished games to the official recycling station, you can get 70% of the sale price back.

Because the material used in the game ring has excellent spell copying properties, that is, the magic circle engraved on it can be cleared and rewritten with a new one.

This process is extremely low cost.

Second-hand transactions are inevitable.

Many major game companies on the planet have tried to promote legislation to ban second-hand disk transactions, but all have ended in failure.

Every time a second-hand disk is sold, it is like a piece of flesh being cut off from the big manufacturers.

But no matter how dissatisfied they are, second-hand game transactions are a reasonable and legal thing.

In this case, Drogo thought it would be better to make the second-hand market his own so that everyone can afford to play the game.

Compared with three or two pounds of spare ribs, more than ten hours of happiness is still very competitive.

Ren 82 connected the prototype to the magic viewer.

The prototype is a circular base with a vertical magic crystal in the middle.

Game spells transmitted from the non-material plane will be temporarily stored here.

Therefore, you cannot play a new game immediately after buying it, you still have to wait for it to be downloaded.

Several games can be stored in one magic crystal at the same time.

In order to let players understand the capacity, Drogo also specially introduced a new set of units.

Zhao, Jing, Tai, and a long list of others.

The carry is 1000, but magic is not binary, so there is no need to use a carry of 1024.

The size of 1 megabyte is based on a jump to commemorate the first game made by Drogo.

However, in order to sound more professional, the written definition of 1 trillion is the magic change bonus generated by the basic fire element particles fluctuating 0.105*10^23 times in a magic-free environment.

Obviously, the target was drawn after shooting the arrow first.

Ren 82 started the Famicom, and a dragon head silhouette appeared on the magic screen.

With a brief and pleasant startup sound, the magic crystal floated up, and the game ring also rotated around it.

It looks like an art piece.

If someone asks what's the use of it floating?
If anything, it can improve cooling by a few single-digit percentages, although the console never overheats.

The main function is to make the buyer feel that the money is well spent and it is indeed high-end.

Most people are also obsessed with appearance when buying things.

So this floating magic crystal is roughly equivalent to the fancy light strip in the computer case.

The appearance of the game console was designed by a less successful cartoonist. Drogo strongly encouraged those people who had plunged into the comics field but could not draw anything to their credit to change careers.

This is a successful case, which creates a new career direction for art students: product design.

All the previous machines, magic devices and the like, did not consider the appearance, the main focus was on being usable.

We cannot say that people who do research all day have no aesthetic sense. Aesthetics is subjective, but the subjective aesthetics of most of them is indeed difficult to be recognized by the public.

After the boot screen ends, the main interface of the game appears directly.

You play whichever game you want to play, so there is no entry point to the game.

On the screen of the magic camera, there is a large red and blue title, "Ice and Fire Man in the Forest".

There is also "Press any key to continue".

"How do I use this thing?" asked Elsa, who came to experience the game console.

The development team unanimously agreed that if Elsa can play the game console, it means that almost everyone can play it.

"Just press a button," Drogo replied.

"I've never used such a device. What is it called?" Aisha said.

This thing looks different from the control devices you see in game stores.

Those are all placed on a flat surface, but this one is held with only two hands, and it feels like the thumbs will be very busy.

"Game controller, don't worry, there will be a tutorial to teach you how to operate it after entering the game." "Controller? What a strange name."

Elsa tried to press a button at random, and then the handle made a sound of mechanical structure operating.

She was so scared that she almost threw the controller away, worried that it would suddenly explode or something.

"Don't panic, the handle is adapting to your hand shape." said Drogo.

This handle is the ultimate dwarven black technology.

Except for the layout and main functional requirements which were proposed by Drogo, the rest were all the result of the dwarves' independent thinking.

In order to make one handle usable by all races and to match the widely varying palm sizes and knuckle lengths, the dwarves created this adaptively adjustable handle.

Not only the size, but also the position of each key can be moved within a certain range to ensure that players can play as comfortably as possible.

What’s even more amazing is that this controller is wireless, and one game console can be connected to up to eight controllers at the same time.

There's even a somatosensory function.

None of Drogo's games have motion sensing functions, and software development has not caught up with hardware progress.

Under such complex circumstances, we can still achieve mass production on the assembly line.

And all these magical functions were performed without Drogo spending a single copper coin.

He is just offering a bounty at Forge, and the dwarf who can make the best controller can get all the new skins for the next season of Auto Chess.

Then the dwarves rolled out this magical handle.

By the way, it was not made by Barnforge. Due to his preference for Auto Chess, the functions of the handle he designed were all for playing chess. Unfortunately, he was not selected.

I can only say that I haven’t played enough games.

However, it is understandable that an old man like Barn, who can't even search for the cards when playing chess, can only play strategy games, let alone games that require operations.

It is no exaggeration to say that his level of jumping music and fighting games is on par with Elsa.

"What kind of game is this? And this is clearly Fire Man and Water Man, why are you calling it Ice and Fire Man?"

Elsa controlled her blue man to run around.

"A puzzle game. Don't you think Fire and Ice Man sounds more exciting?"

Drogo took up the controller as well.

"The rules are very simple. Just send these two people into the small door at the top to pass the level."

"Ha, that's easy." Elsa took the lead.

A few minutes later.

"Don't rush, you can't step on the lava!"

"Did I press jump? The controller must be not working properly!"

"Hold on, don't move, wait for the board to rise up."

"I can't jump over this?"

"You first... forget it, give me the handle."

With the "cooperation" of one man and one dragon, they passed three levels in a row.

"Ha, I'm invincible. There is actually a game that I can complete so quickly." Seeing that she was unable to enter a new level, Elsa said proudly.

"You're not going to complete the game at all. These are just three trial levels." Drogo directly shattered her fantasy.

"This is one of the alternative games for the first release of the Famicom. We have made trial versions of several of the alternatives so you can experience them and choose the one you like best for reference."

Escort masterpieces, that is, the first exclusive games released, are the source of a game console's core competitiveness.

Although the Famicom does not need to compete with external high-quality products, it does have to compete with its own arcade-style game consoles.

There is no need to determine a winner in the competition between the two. It is better to make enough differences so that rich people will buy both.

The advantages of arcade machines are very prominent, with pure phantom display, high picture resolution, and no frame rate limit.

The Famicom does not meet these conditions.

Because rich people would also buy arcade machines at home, the advantages of playing the Famicom at home were not obvious.

And for those people, cheapness is even considered a "disadvantage", so they can only find a way to get exclusive games.

That is, exclusive parties, cooperation, and fun-oriented games to solve the pain points raised by Stephen.

Several cooperative games have been prepared for this purpose.

The best case scenario, of course, is to play all the cards at the same time as the Famicom is released.

However, because there are too many projects being developed at the same time recently and there is a serious shortage of human resources, we had to make a few trial levels for each one first, and then pick the one that everyone likes best to make the full version and release it first on the Famicom.

The choice of the task you like cannot be made by the developer, only the player can choose.

For game developers, their gaming preferences will always become somewhat eccentric as their years of work increase, and they will not be aware of many problems, especially for the games they make.

It's a bit like being in this mountain.

For this purpose, we found a lot of players of different levels to try out the game. Elsa is one of the weakest among the casual players.

"So what do you think of the Forest Ice and Fire Man?"

"It's okay, but haven't many wizards made puzzle games? I don't think it will be particularly popular." Elsa answered after thinking for a while.

It's not a good game, but what you said makes sense.

Drogo really likes the Ice and Fire Man, maybe because of the childhood filter, but he spent his childhood playing independently, using his left hand to wasd and his right hand to move up and down and left and right.

Humph, as long as you are good at playing, you don’t need others to play with you. It’s also fun to play by yourself. I don’t envy those people at all...

"Come on, let's try the second one." Drogo took down the Ice and Fire Man and put on the new game.

"Overcooked? This is a cooking game?" Elsa said with a hint of disdain after seeing the title. "I have been cooking at home since I was 6 years old. How can cooking be difficult for me?"

Drogo smiled but said nothing.

The game Overcooked looks very casual. You need to cooperate with each other to process ingredients and make dishes according to orders.

However, as the number of orders increases, the styles become more complex, and time is quite tight, unless you are an expert, you will inevitably fall into a mess.

The more anxious you are, the more mistakes you make. The more mistakes you make, the more anxious you become, entering a vicious cycle.

"Why are you running with a plate?"

"Get out of the way, the pot is going to catch fire!"

"You dumped the soup in the trash!"

“Get out of my way!”

"The tomatoes are on the ground!"

"It was obviously you who didn't catch it!"

Although it was very noisy, it finally passed. But I'm glad I got one star.

Elsa gnashed her teeth and said, "If I can beat you, I will definitely blow up your dragon head!"

"But I can really deduct your salary and attack your boss, and you will lose your money."

"No, how did I attack you?"

"Verbal attacks are also attacks."

"Ah——" Aisha was furious. "I won't try it anymore! Whoever wants to play your unlucky game can play it!"

"Don't worry, there's one last one. It's definitely the happiest and most party-like one, but we're still missing a few players. Where's Doudou? I've made an appointment with him."

(End of this chapter)