If anyone in this world can care more about the rise and fall of his business than the owner himself, it must be his competitor.

While Gu Ao closely monitors the launch progress of Tiankun Ps game console, Nintendo's Yamauchi is more concerned than him, far away in Kyoto, far away from the ocean.

Hiroshi Yamauchi was just 60 years old last year, so now he is facing a new wave of competition. His mentality is quite different from when he first entered the home computer market five years ago, and he is more open-minded.

Five years ago, Hiroshi Yamauchi was only 56 years old. He was still quite radical at the time. When he saw his opponent launch something, he immediately started a benchmark competitor to grab the business. Five years later, he became more at the pre-set pace when he looked at the problem. It was not so easy to get angry, and he would not see his opponent having new things and he had to compete immediately.

This old man has been in charge of Nintendo for almost 40 years, and if history has not changed, he can continue to be in charge for 13 years and not retire until the beginning of the 21st century. It can be said that he has spent his whole life on Nintendo's career, from the age of 24 to the age of 76.

Historically, Sega Company defeated Nintendo's FC in the 8-bit computer era, so it was eager to launch the 16-bit game console md in 1988.

Nintendo also realized that upgrading the game console is definitely necessary, just like the 8-bit computer that replaced the Atari 2600, which was a natural history.

However, since the FC era, Nintendo used CPUs that were relatively low-end and cheap, and the chips of the Rioh6502 series were not expressive enough around 1988.

If the next generation of consoles is launched rashly at this time, there will inevitably be problems such as changing the CPU, affecting the inheritance of the full set of hair opening instructions, and it will also lead to Nintendo's usual low-end price war route being unsustainable, and the entire machine will definitely increase its price.

After all, it is certainly reasonable that Gu Ao and Sega in history have radically chosen the latest 10mhz CPU of the Motorola 68000 series to develop game consoles at this critical moment in 1988.

Tiankun and Sega from the original time and space are at the high price of CPUs. The picture shows that at this time node, no other cost-effective CPUs can be found, which can achieve this effect.

This is not to say that Motorola is better than Intel or other CPU manufacturers, but in that era, because the frequency of new products was launched was low, it was normal for a time to get a competitive advantage of one or two years. Until 586, Intel only launched a new CPU every three years, rather than a new model every year like the later era of PC explosions.

This means that in the past three years, if other CPU manufacturers use the latest technology and design to insert one, they are likely to be better than Intel.

After seeing Sega's MD game consoles sell well, Nintendo in history still launched the 16-bit SFC that replaced FC in 1990 due to technical inheritance, and lost a considerable portion of the share advantage left by the previous generation in competition.

The inheritance of technical routes and instruction sets forces game manufacturers to move away from the first generation, and it is impossible for the second generation to switch tracks at will. At this time, they can only play their own games.

Therefore, in this life, seeing Tiankun’s ps1 game console debut, Yamauchi Hiroshi also adopted a cold-eyed and observing mode.

He did not choose to force the R&D team to take out the SFC immediately, but in fact, this thing has not even been completed. Even if he forced it, it would take a year to get it out immediately this year. At most, it would be a year or two earlier than the same period in the original time and space history.

Nintendo’s response strategy is to continue to explore the possibility of reducing costs at the business level and use the lagging 8-bit computer to fight a price war.

At the same time, without changing the overall architecture of 8 bits, slightly correct the circuit, such as adding an independent sound processing chip to the motherboard.

Or discover more efficient preprocessing on the game cartridge,

Develop more efficient battery recording cartridges to cope with archived strategy games, war chess rpg games that have sprung up like mushrooms in the past two years.

After all, even if it is a red and white machine of the same FC, the game launched in the early 1990s was much better than that of around 1985. The advantage of cassette game consoles is its strong scalability.

It is not like a magnetic chip or optical disc game console, and all data processing depends on the machine. Some audio and even refresh processing of the cassette machine can be completed in the extra chip in the cassette. It is a bit similar to the plug-in "independent sound card" or something.

Of course, the disadvantage of doing this is also obvious, that is, the production cost of game cartridges will be very high. If you can obtain additional processing and computing power by upgrading the machine, then just add an additional sound card chip to the machine. If you do not upgrade the machine and complete it by using the card tape, it at least means that each game cartridge that requires this performance must be installed independently of such sound card chips.

All primary school students can figure this out. If you just run one or two new era high-effect games on an old machine, the general ledger is still cost-effective.

Once you are a hardcore and fever player and want to experience the ten latest games with eight latest display and sound effects, the total cost of the old machine with new cassettes will definitely be a scam.

Finally, I figured out the general account and found that I saved 100 yuan to buy a game console, but each game cost an extra fifty. The total money of buying a game is many times more expensive than buying a game console.

...

After Yamauchi Hiroshi was ready for the price war and soft upgrade competition, on July 1, his subordinates finally learned about the pricing of Tiankun Ps1 from regular channels and reported it to him as soon as possible.

When I was about to get off work that night, Masayuki Uemura, who had been transferred to Nintendo's marketing department, handed a detailed fax to Yuki Yamauchi's desk:

"President, this is the retail guide price of Tiankun's PS game console. The whole machine does not include peripherals such as keyboards, vibrating handles, etc., which is $298. If you want a full set of peripherals, depending on the level of the peripherals, there are two pricing levels of $368 and $398. Among them, the most advanced luxury version also comes with additional member value-added services."

"$298? Gu Ao really dares to increase the price." Yamauchi was also a little emotional when he looked at the price. "I promoted the learning machine two years ago, and it was a little upgrade and supported archive games, which increased by $50. Now it has been a big change, and it has increased by $100 more than the learning machine."

Historically, Sega's md game console was not so high, about 30,000 yen. Considering that the exchange rate of the yen to the US dollar in 1988 was already close to the highest point after the Plaza Accord, and 1 dollar was only more than 120 yen, so the US version of Sega Md is only priced at US$250.

In 1990, when the Nintendo SFC was released, the official price was 25,000 yen, equivalent to US$210 to US$220. Sega's md also immediately reduced its price to US$24,000 after two years of relatively profitable sales period to deal with Nintendo's competition.

After 1992, as the hardware cost decreased, the components of CPU became cheaper, and Sega MD was reduced to 21,000 yen, a discount of 180 US dollars or 1,500 RMB. In the future, the official retail price never dropped again.

However, because Sega MD's pirated machines later became rampant, many of the so-called Sega machines bought in China were from pirated manufacturers, with pirated goods up to 1,200 yuan and 800 yuan in the later period.

(800 yuan is basically after 1995. Foreign countries even had Sony Ps game consoles, which dropped to such a low. At that time, Motorola's 68000 series had been discontinued, and Motorola's CPU business was also delayed by the "Iridium Plan". The counterfeit factories all collected second-hand materials CPUs and backlogs of processing inventory to produce, so the cost was so low.)

But no matter how it is reduced, after all, this is from Motorola 68000 platform, and the basic cost is there, not comparable to the bargaining products on the 6502 route. No matter how you steal the board, the new phone is still maintained for 800 yuan per person, not so bad as the Little Bull.

Now the first generation of Tiankun’s PS is at least 20% higher than the price of Sega MD in the same period in history.

In fact, Gu Ao's profit margin will only be higher than Sega in the same period of history. Because all his production links are completed in China, this is much more comfortable than those Japanese companies that have remained in Japan and have endured the surge in costs after the appreciation of the yen.

In Gu Ao's early PPS, except for the CPU, which is the same as the Sega MD in history, the other peripheral designs are better. The audio processing chips and special picture refresh scanning auxiliary chips are much more solid than Sega MD. When users play, they basically won't see other arcade games being transplanted to the TV, and the pictures are all flashing and hurting their eyes due to insufficient refresh rate.

In general, according to the users' requirements for the picture in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tiankunps' performance can be described as silky. The extra dozens of dollars of hardware cost are all spent on this blade.

"President, then what adjustments do we need to make now?" Masaino Uemura saw Hiroshi Yamauchi pondering for a long time, but just sighed and didn't have any instructions, so he couldn't help but feel a little worried.

Yamauchi Hiroshi raised his hand: "Don't worry, wait and see, I don't believe that American consumers will support this. A game console, $300, or even a better peripheral device, is close to $400, and there are people who support it? In just a few years, Americans' consumption level is so high? Are you willing to spend money on game consoles so much?

We can buy two or three old-fashioned FCs for this little money. For our machine, as long as we spend 10 yuan or 20 yuan on each cardboard, we can also play turn-based strategies and war chess games? It’s just that the picture is a little worse and the sound effect is a little worse, and the game mechanism can still keep up."

"But, in the field of action games, the graphics and sound effects are almost all. It's useless for us to keep up with the game mechanism." Masayuki Uemura wanted to persuade him, but he still held back.

Anyway, it’s not bad for the past two months. Let’s take a look at Tiankun’s performance.
Chapter completed!