Gu Ao closed the door and conspired with his subordinates for a long time, which made CNN female reporter Isabella feel itchy and wanted to rush in to listen to the other party's discussion several times.

Unfortunately, the situation does not allow it, and she has no right to infringe on the other party's business secrets.

I was chatting with other students from the Wallace Diplomacy Academy outside, selling some small gains, and after two hours, the door of the meeting room finally opened, and a group of people came out in a convincing but silent voice.

Isabella hurriedly blocked and asked: "Mr. Schulhof, is there anything you can disclose? How will your company take advantage of Atari's collapse? Is Atari's collapse within Mr. Gu's expectations?"

Shurhof was quite excited and answered appropriately: "I'm sorry, I can only say that any attitude the boss had made public before was sincere. He and I believed that Atari was unsustainable, but no one was a god, and no one could specify which year or month it would take."

Isabella showed a sly look: "Then do you have evidence to prove that your company is also 'unprepared' for Atari's collapse? It is easy if you try to spread public opinion that is unfavorable to Atari in the market. The episode on the scene of Larikin..."

Schulkhof flatly denied that possibility: "We were really caught off guard! At the internal meeting just now, the boss denied our plan to speed up R&D and launch our own home game consoles in the window period after Atari collapse. He asked that they would rather not seize the blank market than give consumers a better experience!

After temporarily making the decision to absorb a part of the faithful and reliable Atari technical team, he asked to "increase the amount without accelerating" and make a review and major changes to the product to offset consumers' distrust of the industry. He is a real great man and hopes to rebuild the industry order behind Atari! Even if he loses the window period and loses the opportunity to occupy the market, he will give other peers time to respond and catch up!"

Schulkhov's words were so magnificent that Isabella felt incredible.

Are there such conscientious businessmen in the world?

"Can I interview Mr. Gu himself on this issue?" she confirmed.

Schulchoff's wrist is very smooth: "The boss is inside. If you want to ask, go find him. Considering that you are a TV station, we can also provide video materials. It is just edited by us. It definitely reflects the real meeting discussion process just now. It is just that the part of the discussion on the technology research and development plan involving trade secrets has been cut off. I hope you understand."

Isabella breathed a sigh of relief. The other party was willing to provide video materials, and it would be much more convenient for them to do news interview programs. As for cutting off the technical confidential part, it was completely necessary.

Isabella walked into the secret room of the meeting openly.

"Hello, Mr. Gu, it's convenient for you to interview now."

"You're welcome, please sit down." Gu Ao pointed to the sofa next to him.

There is no standard meeting room in the club, and the rooms are furnished with sofas and coffee tables, rather than desks and chairs.

Isabella sat down, deliberately pulled her skirt up a little, and asked a question from a pretty good angle to the camera.

"Gu, I just heard from President Shulhoff that your company had already carried out research and development of home machines before Atari collapsed and had considerable results. But you temporarily decided not to accelerate the listing of this incident. Instead, you hope to learn from Atari's lessons and polish the products better? Can you explain it?"

Gu Ao looked calm: "Of course, except for technical details, I can say it. My consideration is this: I have long thought Atari could not do this, but I really didn't expect them to be so fast and thorough. Did I think all this will happen in the middle of this year? Our original development plan was also done according to this estimate."

Isabella thought for two seconds: "It was just three or four months earlier than you expected, and that was a very accurate prophecy. You are really a business genius. Can you talk about what you didn't expect in advance, and what Atari just taught you?"

Gu Ao: "I think Atari is defeated faster than I imagined. The key factor is that the current price of game cartridges is too high relative to the price of game consoles. This is too high, but as games become more and more popular and the quality is getting lower and lower, consumers lose the patience to bet on whether the game is fun and choose not to buy anything.

Atari’s gaming console was sold for less than $200 when it was first launched. That was the market in 1977. I think it was not very profitable. Now more than five years have passed, and the price has been reduced to less than $150, and some unsold dealers are even lower. It is also the reason why you should know Moore’s Law as a reporter interviewing the technology industry, right?”

Isabella nodded: "Of course, the main frequency performance of the chip processor will double every 18 months, and the old specifications will become cheaper. Atari's gaming console has not been upgraded in the past five years, so it is also necessary to gradually reduce the price of the machine."

Gu Ao continued to say: "Yes, but you should also see that Atari is currently selling the "ET Alien" that caused the collapse of the market, and the price is also $40. It costs about the money to buy 3 to 4 game cartridges, and you can buy a game console.

I think this proportion is too high, which leads to the high cost of trial and error, so it is unwilling to try and error, which further intensifies the conflict between the two sides. You should have heard of a joke before Atari finished a joke at an internal meeting of their executives saying, "Even if we produce a brick bag and sell it to consumers in a cassette shell, consumers will not be able to return the goods."

Now, if the American people do not want the American game console industry to fall into depravity and do not want to be occupied by Japanese manufacturers in the future, then the only way is to find a way to rebuild the foundation of mutual trust. Therefore, our Tiankun Entertainment has overturned the design that has been developed for nearly half a year and made major changes."

Gu Ao said, taking out a prototype and placing it in front of Isabella, so that the camera can take pictures.

This is something that looks similar to the later Nintendo FC, but it does not have a shell yet, and the circuit board is very rough and soldered by hand. Many boards are connected with wires.

At first glance, it is a semi-finished test machine in the R&D stage.

Isabella was a little curious and confused. She was born in a liberal arts student, so how could she understand the circuit board?

"You show it to me, but I can't understand it."

"It doesn't matter if you don't understand it. I'll explain this slot to you. It's a slot for the game cassette, which is similar to the memory slot of a personal computer. Although the interface of the Atari 2600 game console is different from this one, the type is similar."

Gu Ao pointed to the circuit board and explained.

If you use the analogy of later generations, it is equivalent to the difference between dd memory and dd or dd interface. In the advanced areas, there are no medicines when changing the soup.

"I understand, then?" Isabella confirmed and continued to ask.

Gu Ao: "Then, we realized that as long as we adopt this cassette format, the production cost ratio of cassettes and game consoles will not be significantly changed. The cost of a game cassette in the future will be at least 20% of the game console, which is not conducive to consumers' trial and error.

Therefore, today I temporarily decided to retain the design of other parts of the game console, but remove the existing cassette interface and we designed a game cassette with a brand new storage medium, which greatly reduces the cost of the cassette.

Of course, this may lead to some audio processing chips originally designed on the cassette motherboard, and even other unpopular data preprocessing chips, which need to be transplanted from the cassette to the body. In the future, the cost of our Tiankun Entertainment's game console will also increase, and market sales and acceptance will decline.

But we think it's all worth it, because the hardware cost of each card will be cheaper in the future. Players no longer need to pay for redundant hardware electronic garbage. They just need to pay for the software development team they support!"

Isabella felt it was not intuitive, but she still understood the concept. She thought about it and asked a little offensively: "Then... can you give a rough number description? I don't quite understand what you mean by 'This design will make gaming consoles expensive and cassettes cheaper'. It's probably what concept it is. If this involves trade secrets, you can not answer."

Gu Ao: "It doesn't matter. Although it is a commercial secret, I am still willing to answer that I can tell you that according to our current design, this game console may cost more than $120 in the end when sold to consumers. After we improve it, the machine will increase at least $150.

However, in the future, the price of each game cartridge can be reduced from the current $40 to $30, or even lower, and more than $20 is possible. In other words, the price of a machine becoming more expensive, as long as consumers buy more than 3 game cartridges in the future, they can make money back from the difference in the price of the cartridge becoming cheaper. The more they buy the cartridge, the more they earn.

In this way, upstream software developers can make more money, make more independent game companies have lower access thresholds, and share the benefits of Tiankun Entertainment game consoles after the hot sale. We have always been committed to establishing benign industry credibility, rather than selling machines at a low price and using cassettes to get rid of money."

Isabella thoughtfully calculated: "So, do you think the improved plan can reduce the price of the game cartridge by 30%. Can you reveal the specific plan?"

"Of course this doesn't work, it's the R&D technology secret."

"I'm sorry, I asked extra questions." The female reporter was very embarrassed.

"The rest of the parts, as long as I'm willing to tell you today, can report them as you want."

"I understand, thank you for your cooperation. You are such a socially responsible entrepreneur."

"You're welcome. If possible, try to promote President Schulhof as much as possible, and don't promote me more for the time being."
Chapter completed!