Tokyo Video Game Tycoon.

Even if YOO were to fall completely, it would still be a giant to the average person, except that YOO is now just a dying giant.

The various sectors previously controlled by YOO were quickly redistributed, with most of them returning to the hands of conglomerates.

YOO still has some value. The remaining management team managed to maintain their core business, namely the internet portal, while other areas had to be abandoned because they were too expensive.

Without any capital investment, YOO simply cannot afford such a large investment.

As a partner of YOO, Surui Electronics inevitably felt a sense of shared sorrow.

However, they quickly accepted most of YOO's game development team, even with tears in their eyes.

In particular, the team that previously developed shooting games and FIFA football games was fully absorbed into Surui Electronics.

These rootless duckweeds, having lost their support, naturally had no other choice. Joining Surui Electronics was probably the best outcome for them.

Surui Electronics was also very generous to those unlucky game groups that didn't join, promising to provide some financial support and better revenue-sharing agreements to develop exclusive games for Surui Electronics. Of course, the financial support was limited, at most a million US dollars. This amount of money was only enough for a team of twenty or thirty people to develop a game with slightly better graphics. Surui Electronics couldn't do anything about it. If they couldn't prove their strength, they could only be ruthlessly abandoned.

Finally, some more resolute groups decided to make a painful but necessary break free from all control, deciding to emulate that mysterious game development genius—the one who created Stardew Valley and Loopwind Heroes—whose name is 'Nintendo, the fucking world ruler'?

One person can develop two such excellent games. With their years of game development experience, even without the ability to develop ingenious games, they can still make a living by developing some relatively good games.

Battle.net, now a popular platform for independent game releases, naturally welcomes such projects. They welcome any individual or group aspiring to develop excellent games. As long as they submit their work to Battle.net, they can use Unreal Engine freely. Of course, once they reach a certain revenue threshold, they will receive a share of the sales. This is already the best possible outcome for these teams that have become rootless and adrift.

In addition to these individuals, another group was absorbed by Brown Entertainment, which focuses on game development.

Hack Brown has always been an ambitious person. Compared to Oobi Amane, he is more calm and conservative. His company has always been steady and pragmatic. Joining such a company is a good choice.

Finally, about a dozen more people joined the Morgan Group. These people were quietly recruited by the Morgan Group without alerting anyone. They also signed confidentiality agreements, and everything was kept very secret. However, this news was not kept from their partner, Youxing Electronic Entertainment. The Morgan Group also seemed to be interested in trying to develop some games, as they were very interested in the user base that games could bring.

And so, a gaming giant that had only recently risen to prominence collapsed, leaving behind a legacy that became nourishment for Suri Electronics, Brown Entertainment, Morgan Group, and Youxing Electronic Entertainment.

The video game industry seems to have been divided into four parts under such circumstances.

The arms race in gaming seems to have temporarily come to an end, with several companies entering a digestion phase.

What the other companies are doing is currently unknown, but Yuxing Electronic Entertainment has already begun a new round of intensive preparations.

The GS1 home console has been on the market for about six or seven years, and its sales have now reached 1 million units.

This is basically the limit for a home console.

Game consoles like the FC were outliers, so this one shouldn't be included.

As the GS1 gets older, its performance has gradually become unable to keep up with the capabilities of game development, and there are many areas where some compromises need to be made to improve the GS1's performance.

However, the price of the GS1 is not as expensive as it used to be; now you can buy a GS1 game console for just $99.

The value of game consoles has essentially reached saturation.

According to statistics, the ratio of players buying games to buying game consoles has remained at 7:1, which is quite good.

In total, since its release, the GS1 has brought the company approximately five billion US dollars in profit, including game sales.

Recently, gamers have started to crave games with better graphics, and they are gradually no longer satisfied with the GS1's performance.

Thinking about it, that makes sense. The GS1's performance was roughly the same as the PS2's, and the fact that it has lasted this long in the world is thanks to the fact that the video game industry in this world was practically nonexistent at the beginning.

If better game consoles aren't developed soon, gamers will likely switch to other game developers. Gamers are a very demanding group; they can easily switch sides because of a single game. It's rumored that some emerging companies have ambitions to develop higher-performance game consoles, but the sudden dot-com bubble has caused problems with their funding, affecting their development plans to varying degrees.

This is a great opportunity, and it's absolutely necessary to take advantage of this opportunity to develop a better gaming console.

The engineering development department has been working hard on research and development and preparation recently. In fact, the development work officially started about a year ago, and Hayazawa Airi has stayed up all night several times because of it.

"The bamboo tour is finished! Look at my results."

Inside the new Game Star Building, the engineering development department occupies five floors, making it larger than any single game development department.

The products produced here are the most confidential products of Yusei Electronics Entertainment, and it is also the department that Yusei values ​​most.

Airi Hayazawa serves as the engineering director of the engineering development department and is also the backbone of the development team.

Only Hayazawa Airi can faithfully carry out all the tasks assigned by Takeyusei, and she is extremely efficient.

In front of Zhu Youxing was a brand-new prototype game console without its outer shell.

This is a host machine that uses the world's most mainstream processor and many new hardware technologies.

Its performance is roughly between that of the PS3 and PS4.

It can't meet 4K quality requirements, but it's already very stable at 1080P quality.

Zhu Youxing picked up the controller and clicked to enter a built-in test game on the game console.

This is a demo version of the game. The content is roughly about a person walking around the city, attacking passers-by at will on the streets, and also stealing cars to drive around freely.

However, since it was just an initial trial, many aspects were quite imperfect. Bamboo Star would either suddenly fly into the sky while driving normally, or the character would be stretched out like a rubber man, with the character's head already outside the map boundary while the character's feet remained in the original position. It could be said that there were bugs everywhere.

However, this game can also effectively showcase the performance of current game consoles.

The new game console can accommodate more polygons, making game characters look more rounded and bringing the realism of the game to a whole new level. For the world, this can be called a new generation of game graphics.

Zhu Youxing was very satisfied with this.

Chapter 588 Ambitions for the Future

588

When game consoles reached the performance levels of the PS3 and XBOX360, players gradually began to pay more attention to image resolution and frame rate.

30 frames per second, 60 frames per second, and 1080P and 4K resolution have become the most intuitive data information that many new-era gamers often discuss.

Later, apart from Nintendo working on its own, both Microsoft and Sony tried their best to improve their performance in this area in order to develop the best-looking games to attract players to buy them.

Therefore, when Bamboo Star planned to develop a new game console, it set higher requirements.

Previously, the requirement was simply to meet the performance standards of current game consoles. However, their own game consoles have made additional expansions in other gameplay aspects, such as the use of motion-sensing games, controller vibration, and gyroscopes, allowing players to experience more novel gameplay.

However, this time, Zhuyouxing is preparing to make a leap forward in the game's graphics performance.

To date, Yuxing Electronic Entertainment's global development team has exceeded 5,000 people, not including outsourcing, engine development teams, and professional CG special effects production teams.

Based on its size, Zhuyouxing believes that Youxing Electronic Entertainment has the foundation to develop its own ultra-large-scale AAA game.

The buggy game currently running on this first engineering prototype is one of the prototypes of the Bamboo Star Future Project game.

This game can be said to have left a deep and colorful mark on my previous life's world. It is an absolutely top-tier game that cannot be ignored. In the market, this game is generally known as Grand Theft Auto, or GTA for short.

This game series can be considered a benchmark for open-world games. Developing such a game is not only a testament to the team's strength, but also a feast for the players. Zhuyouxing has wanted to make this game for a long time.

In fact, the Grand Theft Auto series didn't need many developers at the beginning. Yusei Take could have started from scratch, developing the first Vice City, and gradually accumulating popularity and experience.

However, now that his team is so large, Zhu Youxing feels that developing those outdated works would be a waste of resources. If he's going to do it, he wants to do the best.

It should start with GTA3, which completely established the reputation of the series. Before that, Grand Theft Auto was more like a game with a high degree of freedom but lacking the soul of a storyline, which was a way to vent and relax. When GTA was released, it caused dissatisfaction among some people in society, who believed that the game would affect children's minds and make them imitate the things in the game. In short, it would teach children bad things.

However, in reality, Takeyusei, who has been playing Vice City since childhood, has never stolen a car or committed any acts of vandalism or robbery in the street. Games are just games after all. In fact, most people have their own judgment, so how could video games easily affect their code of conduct?

In the GTA3 series, the two DLCs that are considered masterpieces of the century are the stage when it truly ascended to the altar. These two DLCs are Vice City and San Andreas, which are the most familiar to Yuuki Bamboo.

Yusei Takeshi not only intends to bring Vice City and San Andreas back to the world, but he also hopes to add more to the graphics, gameplay, and content on top of the original, making these two DLCs even more masterpieces.

This can be considered as making up for the regrets I had when I grew up.

He recalled that when he revisited Vice City and San Andreas from his childhood, he thought countless times about one thing: how wonderful it would be if the game's graphics were better and the character animations were on par with GTA5.

But this is just a random thought; the developers are unlikely to actually do it according to their own ideas.

But in this world, he has the opportunity to do so.

Zhu Youxing didn't want to give up this opportunity easily; he wanted to try and seize it.

Of course, it's too early to talk about these things now. We haven't even finished developing game consoles that can meet the requirements for game graphics performance and more gameplay content.

The current engineering prototype still has many shortcomings and needs continuous adjustments, which will take at least six months, so there's no rushing it.

The CPU processors and GPUs for this game console were supplied by designated manufacturers.

This manufacturer initially volunteered to have more opportunities to cooperate with Youxing Electronics Entertainment, and they were willing to contribute their most professional chip designers to customize a dedicated processor for Youxing Electronics Entertainment. Zhu Youxing took a look and found that this company had many similarities with AMD in his previous life. There was absolutely no problem with its chip development capabilities. Moreover, the design of the chip itself was very much in line with Zhu Youxing's vision. It was easy to develop games and had versatility. Even if the game consoles were upgraded to the next generation in the future, the old games could still be seamlessly connected to the new game consoles.

Just then, Yusei also planned to raise the secrecy level of its game console development to another level. Although it certainly wouldn't stop its well-informed rivals from seeing through its secrets, it would at least keep them guessing about Yusei Electronic Entertainment's development plans for a short period of time.

That's enough.

The remaining task is to expand the US game development team, so that in addition to developing more shooting, racing, and sports games, they can have at least a thousand people working with them to develop the GTA series for this world.

Besides, there are still some games waiting to be released for the GS1. We can't neglect these games because we're planning to develop a new game console. As gamers, Zhuyouxing doesn't want the quality of the games to suffer due to reasons other than game development.

Therefore, the development team continued with the game development as planned.

Following the development schedule, the next release will be the Resident Evil game that Bamboo Planet had planned from the beginning.

This is the first time that Yuxing Electronic Entertainment has attempted to create a horror game.

Before this, some small companies had tried to develop horror games in a different way, but most of them failed to get the hang of it. They would only use the sudden scare method similar to that in movies and TV shows to scare players, but it was difficult to combine it with the gameplay itself.

Even so, these kinds of horror games have been welcomed by players within their small circles.

It's not that these few players have any weird quirks or like being startled; it's just that they're exploiting human instincts and a bit of psychology.

Fear is a basic human emotional response. When faced with unknown and dangerous situations, people inevitably feel a great sense of oppression, which should be a negative thing. However, when fear is presented in a sudden fright or other scary way, people will get a great sense of pleasure from it.

Horror movies have maintained their own unique market for this very reason, and the same goes for video games.

Chapter 589 Horror Game

In Zhu Youxing's opinion, the sudden scare mode is still too simple. The game can have a better way of presenting it. Resident Evil is one of the benchmarks in this regard. At least the first four installments were considered the benchmark for horror and thriller games.

For example, the tension players experience when being chased by powerful and terrifying creatures far exceeds that of movies.

Once the trouble of the chase is resolved, the exhilarating feeling can reach its peak in an instant, making it irresistible.

And so it goes, repeating itself endlessly, constantly stimulating the player's senses.

In fact, besides stimulating the players' nerves, what Zhuyouxing didn't expect was that making a horror game would also stimulate the developers' nerves.

Initially, Hideaki Uchiyama's Ninth Development Group was somewhat reluctant to develop Resident Evil.

Especially Hideaki Uchiyama, who always felt that the horror and thriller genre was really not interesting. It was just about scaring you, with a ghost face suddenly popping up in front of you. It had been overused in movies.

However, there are also some horror movies in this world, such as Silent Hill and Ju-on, which suppress emotions to the extreme and then suddenly explode, but in Hideaki Uchiyama's opinion, they can only be considered average or good.

Compared to horror-themed cultural works, he still prefers those with cool and explosive visual effects.

If Zhu Youxing were to develop a cool action game right now, he would be extremely enthusiastic.