Extraordinary Genius

Tencent’s Pony Ma sat opposite Feng Yu in the latter’s Shanghai Office. Pony Ma is someone Feng Yu respected in his previous life.

“I had come over to do some paperwork and drop by to take a look.” Pony Ma smiles.

“Paperwork? Are there any problems with the company?” Feng Yu frowned as Zhong Qingxian had not told him anything.

“No,... we had just added a new service. Tencent will be entering the gaming industry.”

“You are going to start QQ games?!” Feng Yu asked excitedly. But did QQ games appear so early?

“How do you know I am going to name this service QQ games? Oh, you must have guessed it from QQ. That’s right. It’s QQ games.” Feng Yu did not even need to explain himself as Pony Ma came up with an answer.

“What do your QQ games include?” Feng Yu asked curiously. It would be great if the games he likes are available now.

In Feng Yu’s previous life, QQ games are extremely popular. Every QQ account is also a QQ games account, and there are more than 200 million active players. The most number of online players playing concurrently is more than 8 million.

“Currently, we only have two types of games. One type is chess and card game, and the other is a type of electronic pet rearing game. The chess and card games include poker cards, mahjong, Chinese chess, Chinese checkers, and Land Battle Chess. There are many ways to play poker cards and mahjong games, and the electronic pet game is a virtual pet rearing game. Players can rear an electronic pet and play simple games with the pet. Its target audience is the female players.”

Feng Yu is not interested in QQ pets but loves card games. He played long hours in his previous life, especially Dou di zhu. Dou di zhu is China’s most popular game, and the craze even spreads overseas.

“Not bad. What is the future plan for this? I can tell there will be new games coming out from your tone.”

“Of course. We will be introducing recreational games. These are single-player games converted to online games. For example, Connect it, Tetris, Spot the differences, etc.”

In Feng Yu’s previous life, he had played Spot the differences on QQ games. But it was later turned into pictures of pretty girls to attract players. Of course, the pictures are fully clothed women.

“Good idea. These classic games are boring when played alone, and it will be more fun if players can challenge each other. But can your server cope with the sudden stress? Do you all have enough engineers to handle it, and have you tested all the games?”

“We intend to introduce a QQ games lobby, which is our gaming platform. In this lobby, players can choose the games they want to play and enter that room. Their accounts and passwords will be the same as their QQ accounts, and we used a simple mirroring technique for this. We have also recruited more engineers and should be sufficient to handle the additional workload. Of course, if Sina, Lenovo Kingsoft, etc., are willing to lend us some of their engineers, it will be great.”

“We have basically tested all the games internally and will be launching the Beta testing now. These games will be available for free.”

Feng Yu rolled his eyes. You want Lenovo Kingsoft, Sina, etc., to lend you their engineers? Dream on. But he doesn’t mind lending some of his Wind and Rain Games’ engineers to him as they have plans to develop card and chess type of games.

But Feng Yu also have some worries. The games had only gone through internal testing, and there should be many undiscovered bugs. If anyone developed external plug-ins to exploit these bugs, it would have a devastating impact on QQ games.

“You mean there will be plans to charge fees for QQ games in the future? If that’s the case, you must be wary of external plug-ins. If external plug-ins appeared in the market for free, it would affect QQ games.”

For example, Dou di zhu’s members will be given 50,000 points every day. But if someone can use an external plug-in to get 5 million points, who will buy the membership?

Players with membership might lose their points, but others can just get free points to level up. This will cause the game to be imbalanced and collapse.

“We have thought about this, but if we don’t go into public testing, we will not discover the bugs. We will put lots of resources into this area, especially after we introduce Q coins. Q coin is a type of virtual currency used to buy products on our QQ platform. This will also increase our income, and we know we will suffer heavy losses if someone can generate Q coins illegally.”

Q coins are already available? This is the most important virtual currency in Feng Yu’s previous life, and he did not expect it to appear so early. The biggest advantage of Q coins is to raise funds quickly.

Many people will buy Q coins but will not use everything at once. If someone wants to spend 5 RMB on Q coins, he might buy 10 RMB for the discount and save the additional 5 RMB worth of Q coins. To Tencent, they had sold 10 RMB worth of product.

Tencent will use other methods to entice the user to spend the 5 RMB worth of Q coins he saved. For example, if you see a product selling for 10 Q coins is selling for 8 Q coins now, the user will top up to get it. Tencent will profit from it again.

Tencent Group is one of the top companies that made full use of topping up services. They provided lots of free products to the users and let the users feel the gap between them and those paid members to stimulate them to spend.

Of course, the users can choose not to spend money, and Tencent can still profit from them. For example, Tencent can show their users’ volume to the advertisers and charge them higher fees.

Many people had been discussing the best advertising method in Feng Yu’s previous life. It was later agreed that QQ’s pop-up advertisement is the best. The number of QQ users online concurrently had exceeded 400 million, and there are more than 1 billion registered accounts.

Tencent can become one of the top internet technology companies in the world because of its user volume.

“Are there many people buying Q coins now?” Feng Yu asked curiously.

“Not a lot, but it is increasing. I believe the number of paid users will exceed one million within a year.”

One million paid user is too low compared to the resources Tencent poured into it.

“Have you thought about introducing other products to stimulate Q coin’s sales?”

“Yes. I have thought about adding a blogging feature, but this blog will be different from Sina and the other companies.”

Feng Yu raised his brows. Could it be Q Zone?