Game Development Giant

In the end, Jester made his own compromise with Microsoft.

He agreed to one billion dollars, plus the ownership of Windows in his hand, in exchange for 12% of Microsoft's shares.

In addition, in the past few years, Jester secretly acquired 4% of Microsoft's liquid shares.

Now, Jester already owns 16% of Microsoft's shares, which is about the same as Paul Allen. Even compared to Bill Gates, Microsoft's largest shareholder, it is not too far behind.

You must know that even Bill Gates' current shareholding in Microsoft is only in his early twenties. After Windows was launched, his shareholding did not even remain above 20%. Although the specific amount is, Jess He didn't know exactly, but he remembered an article he had read, which mentioned that Bill Gates' shareholding for a period of time was only 19%.

According to the time calculation, it can also be calculated that they are close to each other.

Microsoft is a listed company, so such a large-scale share acquisition naturally needs to be announced, and the buyer is also very familiar to them, the American young entrepreneurial leader, Jester Lee.

Even because of this time, Microsoft's shares rose for a few days.

The final increase was actually 10%.

time flies.

One year passed in a blink of an eye, and just as Jester expected, Windows was a huge success as soon as it was released.

Microsoft's stock is still rising. People recalled that Jester spent a huge amount of money to buy a large number of Microsoft shares, and they all praised Jester's good vision. But in fact, few Some people know that if Jester had not controlled part of the Windows operating system, Microsoft's board of directors would never have made such a large deal with Jester when Windows was about to be launched.

Now that I see Microsoft's stock price, I really feel like crying.

And other products that compete with windows93. For example, Apple's long-lasting Macintosh computer over the years has been completely melted away like snow hitting the sun.

Jester was even included in an interview.

He took the initiative to talk about the strategy that Mars Entertainment will adopt on PC.

Although there were expectations, when Jester said that future Mars Entertainment games would no longer support PC operating systems other than Windows, it was almost a disaster for the sales of Apple Macintosh computers.

You know, among the many users of Apple, the proportion of gamers is very high. Almost more than 80% of today's American game developers, their first games are PC games, and their gaming computers are either Apple 1 or Apple 2.

In fact, the biggest reason why Bill Gates agreed to Jester buying shares from Microsoft was that he felt that Jester had no control over Microsoft**. So he is safer, and rather than letting the shares be in the hands of other people, it is better to have these shares in the hands of someone he is familiar with. In this way, he can also get better support from the other party.

In fact, Jester is indeed very supportive of Bill Gates' various decisions.

Plus Bill Gates, Paul Allen. In addition, Jester's shares already exceed 50% of Microsoft's shares, basically. As long as these three people reach an agreement, then there is no proposal that cannot be passed.

And as long as there are no three people’s consent, no matter what the proposal is, it will not be passed within the company.

However, Microsoft is still relatively harmonious, because it is still in Microsoft's expansion period, and no matter how big the internal conflicts are, they can be temporarily suppressed.

In fact, this is the reason why Jester is unwilling to manage Microsoft in depth. He comes from a later generation, and he has a deep understanding of how fierce the internal struggle will be at Microsoft in the future. Many people say that Sony's internal fighting will be related to Disagreement is world-famous, but in fact, in this regard, Microsoft is not inferior.

Just like in history.

The game that Bill Gates had previously entrusted to showcase Windows 93 to the world, Jester still handed it over to John Carmack's team.

What Carmack likes most is this kind of challenging task that others can't complete.

For all boring and repetitive work, he lost interest in this kind of work after only doing it once. This is why John Carmack did not continue to produce Quake after the third game. .

Because he feels that his engine development technology has entered a bottleneck period. Under this situation, if he continues to develop Quake, the engine used will still be the one he used when developing the third game. Such a game , for others, it may be very exciting. After all, just the words Quake now represent the highest-selling series on PC!

But when he heard Jester saying that he wanted to develop games on a brand new system.

John Carmack immediately threw himself into the new work, and three days later, he came up with a new 3D engine design idea that made him extremely excited.

Now more than a year has passed, Quake 4, a brand-new FPS game developed with Carmack's new engine, has officially appeared at the E3 exhibition in June this year, and has become a This time the absolute core of e3.

As for the ‘era’ plan.

Although many people are still talking about the 'Era' project, except for the video released at E3 at that time, Mars Entertainment has not revealed a single bit about this project in the past few years. According to the information, many people even believe that this project has been cancelled.

But it is a pity that although there is no information about this project at some game shows.

But whenever a reporter asks insiders at Mars Entertainment whether the 'Era' project is still there, these people will answer in unison that the game is still under development.

But other than that, they won't reveal any other information.

Although these people don’t know much more about the ‘Times’ than the reporters who asked the questions.

The graphics of Quake 4, processed by the new Windows 93 and Carmack's latest engine, can almost be said to have reached the current extreme. Many people have even decided to develop this type of game after seeing the popularity of FPS games. Gamers are extremely pessimistic and disappointed.

Because they found that it was impossible for them to produce a game on the same level as Quake 4, or even Quake 3. (To be continued...)