Free Web NovelChapter 224: Chapter 196: Home Game Console and Flagship Title
The new game console concept was a success.
The goblins took less than a month to crank out a prototype for the new modular home game console.
It was officially named the Zog Home Game Console, but due to its color scheme of a red Magic Crystal Stone and white casing, it was also nicknamed the Red and White Machine.
The development process itself didn’t present many technical hurdles. The only tricky part was separating the storage and control components from the Magic-casting components.
The casting components would be sold separately, serving as this world’s equivalent of game cartridges or discs.
However, the correct term here would be "game ring," as it was a metal ring with an inner diameter of 30 centimeters, an outer diameter of 36 centimeters, and a thickness of 10 centimeters.
A Magic Array was inscribed inside, designed to cast the game’s Magic. It was dedicated to a single game and would only run when connected to the main console.
In truth, the goblins solved this so-called "technical hurdle" after pulling just three all-nighters.
The rest of the time was mainly spent figuring out how to cut costs, as Magic Materials were still a bit too expensive for mass consumption.
A whole crowd of Engineers gathered, trying to find ways to make the product cheaper.
First, they removed the ability to generate Illusions, making it so the console could only display on a Magic Vision Device. Then, they removed the audio and drastically compressed the image quality.
As for the frame rate, it was capped at 30, and not a single one more. As long as people had never experienced 60 frames per second, they would easily accept 30.
The goblin Engineers had originally wanted to compress it down to 10 frames, but Zog stopped them. Any lower and it would be painful for him to watch.
The home game console was positioned to bring gaming entertainment into every household.
It wasn’t meant to be a toy just for the rich, Mages, or something you could only play at an arcade.
Furthermore, a price point affordable to the general public would effectively reduce the market for pirated games.
For most consumers, as long as the value for money was good, they were happy to support legitimate copies.
Zog wasn’t worried about piracy. First off, due to the materials involved, bootlegs couldn’t be much cheaper anyway.
Second, many game companies are plagued by piracy because of inadequate legal oversight and the difficulty of fighting international lawsuits, making it impossible to directly make pirates pay the price.
Things were much more convenient for Zog. He didn’t have to file lawsuits; he could just fight them directly.
In the end, the hardware was simplified to the bare minimum. By comparison, a Switch would be considered a high-end console.
But even with all that, they calculated that a single game would still need to sell for at least 40 Copper Coins to be profitable.
The standard edition console would cost two Silver Coins, which was close to the production cost and offered almost no profit. Zog planned to use the console to open up the market and then make money by selling games.
Of course, there would also be deluxe, professional, enhanced, supreme, and custom editions of the console.
The profit margins on these were sky-high, specifically designed to fleece the rich.
While an average person could save up to buy the main 2-Silver-Coin standard console, a 40-Copper-Coin game was still too expensive.
Forty Copper Coins could buy about five and a half pounds of ribs or two pounds of pork. Here, bone-in meat was much cheaper, considered a treat for the poor. Bone-in pork, in particular, was looked down upon by most.
The price had actually risen somewhat in the past two years, thanks to Zog. His methods had successfully elevated the status of bone-in meats and offal in the culinary world.
A strange trend was now spreading outward from the Zog Group. It was a trend that baffled many locals, who couldn’t understand the preference for gnawing on chicken necks and feet over eating breast meat.
Before, 40 Copper Coins could buy at least eleven pounds of ribs.
Yet, the average annual income for a commoner family in Twin Tower City was only about 70 Silver Coins, and this was in a major commercial city.
The father worked in a Factory, the mother stayed home to care for the children while taking on odd jobs, and two or three of the kids worked as child laborers. Perhaps the smartest among them might get a chance to go to school.
This was the most common family structure for commoners nowadays.
For a family like this, when choosing between a game that offered only a dozen or so hours of fun and several pounds of ribs, they would always lean toward the latter.
Since there was no more room to cut hardware costs, Zog had to get creative with his sales model.
In the end, the solution he proposed was to create an official secondhand buyback channel.
Players could sell their finished games back to an official recycling station and get seventy percent of the purchase price back.
This was because the material used for the game rings had excellent Magic-rewriting properties, meaning the inscribed Magic Array could be erased and a new one written over it.
The cost of this process was extremely low.
Besides, secondhand trading was inevitable.
Many major game companies on Earth had tried to push for legislation to ban the trading of used discs, but all had failed.
In the eyes of these major companies, every used disc sold felt like having a piece of their own flesh carved off.
But no matter how displeased they were, the secondhand game market was perfectly legal and reasonable.
That being the case, Zog figured he might as well take over the secondhand market himself, which would also make his games affordable for everyone.
Compared to a few pounds of ribs, a dozen or so hours of happiness was now a very competitive alternative.
Ren 82 connected the prototype to a Magic Vision Device.
The prototype was a circular base with a vertically embedded Magic Crystal Stone in the center.
The game’s Magic, transmitted from a non-corporeal plane, would be temporarily stored here.
This meant that after buying a new game, you couldn’t play it immediately; you still had to wait for it to download.
A single Magic Crystal Stone could store several games at once.
To help players understand the storage capacity, Zog specially introduced a new system of units.
Zhao, jing, tai, and a long list of others that followed.
The system was base-1000. Since Magic wasn’t binary, there was no need to use a base-1024 system.
The size of one zhao was standardized based on the game "Jump Jump," in commemoration of the first game Zog ever made.
However, to make it sound more professional, the formal definition of one zhao was the change in Magic Power value produced by a basic Fire Element particle fluctuating 0.105 x 10^23 times in a magic-free environment.
