Rebirth of the Internet: Starting from Games

Chapter 240 Madness

After signing a series of agreements with Blizzard, the first initial payment has been made.

代理费300万、版税金每年一付一期1000万、服务器初期先预定了100组定金2000万，暴雪承诺服务器3个月内会陆续交付。

This is 3300 million, in US dollars, totaling 2.7 million yuan.

This does not include subsequent server costs, marketing and publicity costs, and a considerable sales share.

Putting aside whether it makes money or not, "World of Warcraft", at least for now, has become Century Interactive Entertainment's biggest gold-swallowing beast.

The finance side has actually calculated that when the number of people online reaches 100 million, Century Interactive Entertainment's profit will be close to 50%. The more people online, the higher the proportion of Century Interactive Entertainment's revenue will be.

On the contrary, it is less than 100 million, and the majority of the income is with Blizzard, because as a provider of production materials, except for the cost of developing games and basic labor costs, other aspects are almost zero costs.

Chen Hao remembered that Chen Tianqiao only spent 30 US dollars to represent Legend, and divided it into more than a dozen points for the game manufacturers. It was simply a bargain price. Otherwise, the Korean side jumped in and became jealous, and Shanda made a lot of money. He ran away. Of course, the legendary renewal agency fee later increased from US$30 to US$400 million per year.

However, Chen Hao can still afford these necessary investments. After the money-making version was updated on March 3, the overall game revenue in March directly broke the record, reaching 1 million.

The current expenditures mainly include several aspects:

The company's new location cost 2 million yuan to purchase land and 3 million yuan has been invested in building the building. It is expected that another 2 million yuan will be needed to complete the project.

World of Warcraft can directly kill 2.7 million people right now, and this is still just the early days.This does not include the purchase cost of a large number of servers for announcement and public testing, which is expected to be more than 5 million.

Of course, you can't favor one over the other. Having an adopted son and a biological son in the world of martial arts requires more love. Currently, [-] million has been invested in research and development including game engines and motion capture studios, and Chen Hao deliberately reserved another [-] million.

Compared with the gold-eating beasts above, the group's labor costs of tens of millions per month are simply not on the table.

But fortunately, nearly half of the income from the online game market is currently in his own pocket, and his cash flow can still be sustained.

Chen Hao called Lin Xiaoran and told him about the recent situation. He might be very busy in the past two months.

After finishing this, he could finally move into Tianji Studio.

In his last life, he experienced World of Warcraft as a player. This time, he experienced it as a participant, so Chen Hao was eager to get started.

The current scale of Tianji Studio was previously planned to be 300 people, but now it is less than 200 people, so Chen Hao asked the human resources department to increase recruitment efforts from major universities and society to recruit new people.

The first point of recruitment is players who purely love Blizzard games. To this end, Chen Hao also spent a day making a set of written test questions for Blizzard games.

For example, which Blizzard games have you played and how long have you played them? Talk about your gaming experience on the Blizzard games you have come across, how much you know about World of Warcraft, etc.

Only if you pass this set of interview questions can you enter the next interview session.

Blizzard is still very efficient and sent the game package quickly.

As a result, they were dumbfounded as soon as they got the game installation package. The game was all in English, including the plot, skill descriptions, and dubbing.

A lot of localization work needs to be done. I roughly estimated the workload. The overall English word count is 150 million, while the Chinese version has nearly 400 million words.

Obviously this is a huge and lengthy job.

Of course, these difficulties did not dissipate everyone's enthusiasm, but instead aroused their fighting spirit, and they were done.

The technical team carried out installation, deployment and debugging, and Chen Hao followed along and was busy working in his profession and enjoyed it.

There are nearly ten people in the translation team, and they start to translate. They are divided into categories first, such as plot, popular science, characters, skills, dubbing, etc. The translation related to dubbing is given priority because there is a priority here.

The dubbing team began to overturn all the original English dubbing of World of Warcraft and re-dubbed it according to the translated Chinese.

<divclass="contentadv">Especially the selection of the dubbing team. In order to allow Chinese server players to experience dubbing that fits the fantasy cultural atmosphere created by the game, Chen Hao specially invited very professional dubbing personnel, such as Mr. Ni Kang, who has 30 years of dubbing experience, serves as the dubbing director.

Especially when we were looking for voice actors for characters such as Ragnaros, Nefarian, and Valastraz, we invited voice actor Gong Geer from Mongolia. The latter heard that he could voice actors for "World of Warcraft" and sat down that night. An overnight train trip to the capital.

Perhaps due to the fatigue of the journey, he felt completely incapable of dubbing the next morning, so Ni Kang discussed with the project team to treat him to a box lunch and then use someone else to try.Unexpectedly, after eating the box lunch, the Mongolian immediately became energetic and quickly mixed all the sentences that needed to be mixed, without even adjusting them.

Chen Hao listened to the dubbing effect on the spot and nodded repeatedly, yes, this is it.

While the localization work of World of Warcraft was in full swing, Century Interactive Entertainment and Blizzard also had some minor frictions.

In the Chinese translation process, one of the tasks of the localization team is to interface with the QA team at Blizzard headquarters, and the QA department is responsible for supervising the translation quality.

Due to the cultural differences and concepts between China and the West, there may even be some conflicts between the two parties.

For example, the famous Ironforge murloc Ba'erba was originally named "Murky" in English. The translation team of Tianji Studio translated it into the name of the murloc monster in "Journey to the West". The United States believed that its transliteration should be Moqi.

For example, the food cooked by mutated fish is named "Delicious Wind Snake" here, but Blizzard believes that the correct name should be "Delicious Mutated Fish".

Many similar situations like this.

Chen Hao thinks from the perspective of a domestic player. In a Western fantasy world, if he suddenly discovers a little fishman named Benboerba, he will definitely smile knowingly. Westerners cannot understand this kind of feeling that can only be imagined but cannot be expressed in words. .

So as a player, he firmly supports the opinions of his team, and at the same time, as a boss, he has enough privileges to call Mike Mohan directly, communicate with him for a few words, and it's done!

Follow localized naming.

Due to tight time and heavy tasks, Chen Hao moved back and forth among various groups, observing progress, making decisions, occasionally serving as a firefighter, and even conducted final interviews for individual high-level talents who were about to enter Tianji Studio.

I was so busy that my feet hit the back of my head. Fortunately, I slept directly in my office.

Other members of Tianji Studio have learned from the past and their boss is taking the lead in the charge. They cannot be timid and follow suit. If they can sleep in the company, they sleep in the company. If they can't, they sleep in the hotel next door.

After waking up and washing up, I go to the cafeteria to take a bite and start working. When my stomach starts to growl, I go to the cafeteria to eat. I fill my stomach and come back to continue working. It’s late at night and the work has come to an end. I feel a little tired and fall asleep. The cycle repeats itself.

Some employees even fell asleep on the company floor before climbing back to their bunks.

The people at Tianji Studio no longer have the concept of commuting and weekend breaks. In addition to making money, they are all players who love games and World of Warcraft.

It is precisely because of their love for games that they do not feel hard work and even enjoy this pure work.

Chen Hao saw that the mental state of these guys was a bit crazy. If the springs were too tight, there would be problems, otherwise they would run out of energy and die suddenly, which would be really exhausting.

He relaxed his attitude and quickly ordered them to take a day off, joking that the company's overtime pay was not enough, but even so, he found that some people still secretly came to the company to work overtime.

Blockage is worse than sparseness, so Chen Hao thought of a good way. In his rare free time after work, he took the lead in organizing a group of fanatics from Tianji Studio to play "StarCraft" and "StarCraft" together in groups. "Diablo" and "Warcraft 3" were even played together on the test server of "World of Warcraft" that had been built. After downloading the dungeon, the Wailing Cave, Shadowfang Castle, and Scarlet Monastery all left traces of their hard work.

Under Chen Hao's organization, internal competitions for these games are held regularly. The boss personally pays for the prizes and solicits the opinions of his comrades, ranging from laptops, massage chairs, and computer accessories to keyboards, mice, computer bags, and recliners.

The people at Tianji Studio discovered that the boss was not only a fanatic about his work, but also a very good game player, and even won first place in the StarCraft competition.

We are crazy together when we win, and we bear it together when we lose. How lucky we are to have such a leader!