Game Development Giant

Jester happily agreed to Bill Gates' request. It was a great idea to bundle American Cube with win3.0. In fact, this is the biggest reason why Minesweeper will be well-known in later generations. The reason is, of course, that the game Minesweeper is an excellent game, and that the win system later swept across the PC operating system industry.

After finishing the conversation, Bill Gates said goodbye. After all, the main reason why he came to this Mars Entertainment Carnival was to participate in this grand gathering of the gaming industry.

It can be said that this is the first global gathering attended entirely by video game players. Although many game companies also attached great importance to the previous CES show, CES is mainly a consumer electronics show, mainly Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Motorcycles, Philips This is the home of leading companies in consumer electronics.

And game companies can only be regarded as an embellishment. At most, Mars Entertainment has been very popular in the consumer electronics market in recent years. This embellishment of green leaves is more conspicuous. In the eyes of the real electrical appliance giants, Video games really can't move them.

What if you host one yourself?

..m??After seeing off Bill Gates and Bill Gates, Jester suddenly thought of this question. As far as he knew, there was no formal worldwide game specifically for game manufacturers or game players. There are very few exhibitions prepared, even if they are informal. This is why e3 has finally become the world's recognized first game exhibition, because game manufacturers always choose this place to break their major news at the e3 exhibition.

On the other hand, this is not the case at tgs in Tokyo.

It can be said that they are completely opposite to e3. E3 values ​​manufacturers while tgs is loyal to players. Rather than saying that tgs is a news conference for game manufacturers, it is better to say that this is a real player event. In terms of player experience and emphasis on players, tgs far surpasses e3. Even in the early days of tgs, relying on the strength of Japanese manufacturers, tgs was still the world's number one game exhibition after e3.

But it is a pity that TGS was organized by cesa. This was when Sony had just entered the gaming industry in order to compete with Nintendo. A large group of companies, almost all of which were owned by Nintendo's royalties, were brought together to form this cesa, and then it was higher than this tgs, which is the Tokyo Electronic Game Show. For a proud person like Hiroshi Yamauchi. This was simply a shame and a big insult, so after Nintendo used very fierce words to criticize TGS, it said that we would not participate in such a low-end game show, and Nintendo immediately organized its own autumn conference. This should be the world's first large-scale game exhibition organized by a game company. Blizzard's Carnival can only be regarded as a successor.

Of course, it’s not like Nintendo has never participated in the TGS exhibition. In 2001, Nintendo was almost completely defeated in the home game console market. At that time, Minoru Arakawa, the president of Nintendo of America, even proposed to Hiroshi Yamauchi a piece of news that later players found shocking, that is, to transfer Nintendo's game department. Sold to Microsoft.

Minoru Arakawa is the son-in-law of Hiroshi Yamauchi. He is a very outstanding businessman and a very talented businessman. Even before this, he has always been Hiroshi Yamauchi's most optimistic successor to Nintendo. However, as a person who wants to take over a genetic company, For someone in a company where video games are in the blood, his biggest shortcoming is precisely that he doesn't have enough love for the video game industry.

Then, it was Hiroshi Yamauchi who mercilessly eliminated Minoru Arakawa from Nintendo, which led to the rise of Satoru Iwata and Reggie the Gorilla.

However, at that time, because the situation faced by Nintendo was almost a dead end, in order not to end up like Sega and completely withdraw from the home console market, there was really no other way. In order to promote GBA, Nintendo reluctantly participated. A tgs game exhibition, their main purpose of participating in this game is not to promote their games, but to promote gba.

Thanks to GBA, Nintendo got through the most difficult years when they had almost no hope for the future. Then the Wii exploded, almost tying up the console war between PS3 and XBX360 in that era. The beating made me pee.

Jester remembers clearly that in the first two years of the war between the three major consoles, the combined sales of PS3 and XBX were not as high as the sales of Wii.

At that time, another most important reason why tgs was even more popular than e3 was that European and American manufacturers were too unscrupulous. These manufacturers were similar to domestic manufacturers later. They flocked to participate in any exhibition and did not care about it at all. Consider whether there is a market for your own games in the region where this exhibition is located.

And those less famous Japanese manufacturers are much smarter. For example, at the e3 exhibition, they have no hope at all. First, because there are so many large game companies participating, almost only those in the world can be ranked. Game companies will participate in this annual event for the entire gaming industry. Secondly, such European and American game shows, including Gamescom, use the aesthetic preferences of European and American players as their main selling point, while Japan’s Manufacturers naturally have their own theories and styles for making games.

Their style, which has been accumulated by Nintendo and Sega for 20 years, is very different from the style of American manufacturers.

As for CJ after the new century, there is really no need to mention it, because this exhibition, which is known as the largest game exhibition in the world, is more like a party where people sell things with clearly marked prices. Every time CJ opens, , basically the news from the media is not at all about this CJ. What important games will be announced, what important games will be released for trial play, and what game companies will announce a big news.

Basically, all the headlines in the game media at that time were about who had the biggest thing, who had the highest price, and the inevitable battle of war.

Jester recalled the three largest game exhibitions in terms of exhibitors and the number of participants in later generations. He also had a map in his mind. If he wanted to plan a world-wide game exhibition, then he had two ideas: Plan-cj’s example basically doesn’t need to be considered.

One is e3, a game show that values ​​the industry, and the other is tgs, a game show that values ​​players.

There are specialties in the art industry, and if you want to have both, you will be able to do nothing but the best. Then later, when various game exhibitions come and go, the game exhibition you organize will lack the necessary competitiveness.

After thinking about it for a long time, Jester felt that both game show models had something to learn from. However, after thinking about it, Jester still chose e3, a game show with participating game manufacturers as the core. Model, it’s not that Jester thought about the advantages of this kind of game exhibition compared to the one at TGS, but it was purely the game exhibition model of e3. In Jester’s world, it was the world’s number one game exhibition.

Of course, there are still a lot of things to do to create a game show at the level of e3 or tgs. For example, before Sony launches tgs, it will initiate the establishment of associations such as cesa to host it. With this The association will win over a large number of second- and third-rate game companies and let them participate.

This is a trend. Don’t underestimate these small game companies that are still first- and second-rate. Game development is like this. Maybe a good game can turn it around. The best example is Jester The Square in my memory.

At that time, everything was at the end of its rope, and it was only through a game of Final Fantasy that it came back to life.

Another very important reason is about the game rating system.

There is no grading system for game developers now, but Jester knows that this thing will definitely exist in the future, because with the development of electronic games, there will be more and more games with no lower limit and no bottom line. , for example now, there are many people attacking video games in various media.

For example, dnd has received attacks from an organization called the American Moms Association before.

In Jester’s memory, the world’s first game rating system was born in Japan. There are many reasons for this. One of them is that the real world urgently needs a game rating system. Second, the reason why this classification system was not first born in the United States, but in Japan, is that Japan has formed the Arcade Entertainment Association since the 1960s and 1970s.

Only the Arcade Entertainment Association, which has such universal validity, has the ability to get everyone's formula and issue such rules before the official reaction.

And now Jester is indeed aiming to establish such an organization in the United States.