Tokyo: Being coveted by my wife, I just want to play games

Chapter 439 Snowball!
Compared to the original version, Hearthstone by Fuyukawa Che can be said to be a super enhanced Plus. Not only does it have a lot more high-quality decks than the original, but Fuyukawa Che has also made stronger personalized treatments between different professions, and even different talent play styles of the same profession.

Yes, different talents for the same profession!
"Hearthstone" can be regarded as a derivative work of the World of Warcraft IP, but to be honest, due to the limitations of the production team's capabilities, "Hearthstone" did not inherit many interesting elements of Warcraft, and one of them is talent.

The talent gameplay of "World of Warcraft" is one of its iconic gameplays.

The same profession, different talents, the gaming experience is often very different.

Of course, the original Hearthstone also intends to develop in this direction.

Basically, in the early stages of each new version, each profession actually has more than two sets of card decks to play with. From this point of view, it can be clearly seen that the production team of "Hearthstone" wants to create diversity, but there is no way. Generally, after the early stages of the version, there are only a few super-model card decks left in the game.

Nothing can be done.

To quote a line from "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" - "It is the nature of apes to seek out the thickest trees to build their homes."

If I have to describe this point, it is a bit like a Japanese light novel.

In recent years, the types of Japanese light novels have become more and more single, and homogeneity has become more and more serious, no longer as diverse as in the 1980s and 1990s. But this does not mean that Japanese light novel authors have no talent, but after looking at market data, they found that certain themes do have a larger audience, and a market with a larger audience also means a market that is easier to make money.

Most of the light novel authors who are not that talented and just want to make a living in this industry will write about popular and best-selling topics in the current market in order to support their families.

"It is the nature of apes to find the thickest trees to settle down." This behavioral logic is also applicable in Hearthstone.

It’s not that Hearthstone lacks diversity, but because of the imbalance between numbers and deck strength, all players can only choose a few powerful decks in the most competitive middle and high ranks of the ladder.

Secondly, the card environment of Hearthstone is solidified, not only because of the imbalance between the value and the strength of the card deck, but also because... This is actually something that the production team of Hearthstone expected, and it is even possible that it was intentional by the production team!
Yes, it was intentional.

It sounds incredible, but it makes sense logically.

The reason is simple. Hearthstone was one of Blizzard's pillars in its previous life, and Blizzard must have hoped that Hearthstone would have a longer lifespan. However, human creativity is not endless.

Maybe Hearthstone has already designed ten decks with novel and interesting gameplay and balanced numbers in version A. But if these ten decks are all used in version A, what will be used in the next version B?
This is not something that is impossible to happen.

In fact, there are many such examples in life.

The most typical one is NVIDIA graphics card.

Players who know a little bit about NVIDIA graphics cards should know that the performance improvement of each generation of NVIDIA graphics cards is almost exactly the same. That is why NVIDIA is often complained by players as "exquisite knife skills".

而且每一代的80型号显卡，必然都是能满足当时市场的准最高需求。比如当年2K显示器还是主流之时，3080就能以2K最高画质运行绝大多数优化正常的游戏，并且数据在60帧左右徘徊；而随着4K显示器渐渐普及，4080又能满足4K最高画质60帧。

And what does this mean?
This means that NVIDIA is not incapable of making more powerful graphics cards, but they will only make products that meet market demand based on current market demand! Why does NVIDIA do this?
On the one hand, Nvidia has no reason to launch a graphics card with too strong performance in the early stage. To put it bluntly, if the 1080 can run 4K games, no one will buy the 4080! If a 1080 can do "fighting for ten years", then Nvidia's gaming graphics card department will be completely sluggish.

As for the other reason, it is actually similar to Hearthstone. However, this time it is not the performance of the graphics card, but the driver adapted to the graphics card.

Many people think that Nvidia is great because they are good at making chips, but...
If you get to know NVIDIA more deeply, you will understand that NVIDIA can completely suppress AMD. Chip technology is only one aspect. The other is because of their CUDA system that can amplify computing power when used with NVIDIA graphics cards.

The same goes for gaming.

The performance of AMD's graphics cards of the same model in running data is actually similar to that of NVIDIA. Even when NVIDIA's 4080 graphics card runs 4A masterpieces with the highest image quality and ray tracing at 3K resolution, many of them cannot maintain a stable 60 frames, and basically hover around 60 frames. The same is true for AMD's graphics cards of the same level, but NVIDIA has Popeye 3 (DLSS3).

With DLSS3 enabled, the frame rate can be directly increased from an unstable frames to around frames. And this is the key to the matter.

Why did NVIDIA launch Popeye 40 when the 3 series graphics cards were released?

Did they just develop AI-driven graphics technology like Popeye 3?

No, they have already developed this technology.

The reason why NVIDIA launched Popeye 40 when the 3 series graphics cards were released is essentially because in the era of 30 series graphics cards, most monitors were still 2K, and the 3060 graphics card can actually meet the basic needs of 2K monitors. Therefore, they had no reason to launch this technology in the era of 30 series graphics cards.

The only result of launching Popeye 30, a system that can improve frame rates in the era of 3-series graphics cards, is to reduce players' desire to buy 40-series graphics cards and force NVIDIA to invest more funds in the research and development of more advanced graphics optimization technologies.

Roll yourself up?
Apart from the 996 work schedule forced by life, who would take the initiative to do this?

The same goes for Hearthstone. In its most popular period, there were only two or three classic decks.

Since sales and popularity indicate that players can accept this gaming environment, even if the Hearthstone team wants to make the game more interesting, Blizzard's management and shareholders will still limit the release of decks. They must want to make the game last longer, because Hearthstone was already one of their pillar industries at that time, and risks were the most important thing to avoid, but Dongchuan Che was different.

There are too many games in his head.

If he were presented with the two options of "each version is relatively less interesting, but can keep Hearthstone alive for more than ten years" and "each version is rich and colorful, but may shorten the life of Hearthstone", he would most likely choose the latter.

This is indeed the case.

Apart from other things, for the release of Hearthstone, he made three decks for the Rogue class alone, which have strong stats and interesting gameplay. One of them is the [Explosive Rogue] that is "hated" by many Hearthstone players.

The so-called "explosive thief" is based on the gameplay setting of Hearthstone Legend. The player can hold a maximum of 10 cards in each round. After having 10 cards in hand, if you continue to draw cards, the drawn cards will be burned directly, and when all the cards in the deck are drawn, the player will lose health every round.

This gameplay is actually quite suitable for the characteristics of the thief profession, which is insidious and cunning, and is very suitable for live broadcast effects.

As the number of people and comments in Xiaoshan Futaba's live broadcast room began to soar, Dongchuan Che's eyes became more and more smiling. At the same time, he bent down to take the tablet from the table and opened the company's special internal [Third Eye APP].

The function of this [Third Eye APP] is very simple. It mainly monitors the three major sections including [the live broadcast section of the Banana short video platform under Shanhe Group, the largest short video platform in China], [the live broadcast section of the GOGO game platform under Shengguang Society] and [the live broadcast section of Peach Blossom under Ghani Group, one of the top three video websites in the United States].

Whether it is Banana Short Video, GOGO Game Platform, or Gani's Peach Live Streaming section, they are all super platforms that can squeeze into the top three in local national traffic.

Read more latest popular novels at 6.9*shuba!

Of course, this APP is also shared by the three companies. After all, it does not involve anything too confidential. It is just exchanging information and doing market analysis through the traffic and popularity data of the three websites. But this is just [just] in Dongchuan Che's eyes. In fact, because the three companies mostly use the company's intranet when working, there is no APP on the entire network with more accurate data than this.

Dongchuan Che also frequently uses this APP, and soon he scrolled to the column of anchor popularity.

To be honest, the overlap between the audience of stand-alone games and the audience of live broadcast users is not that great, but the overlap between the audience of online games and the audience of live broadcast users is very large. Moreover, many online game anchors are omnivorous, and their audiences also have some omnivorous attributes.

To give a simple example, there was a period of time when the killing of geese and ducks was very famous in the country.

This game is indeed of good quality, but it became popular so quickly mainly because many anchors were playing this game at that time, which brought up the popularity of the game. Later, as many live broadcast platforms banned anchors from playing this game, the popularity of Goose Duck Kill quickly dropped.

This is the role of online anchors.

In fact, the role of online anchors in games is somewhat similar to those students in elementary school who were the first to walk into the campus with Pokémon cards and teach others how to play by taking pictures of the cards.

They don't need to actively promote Pokémon cards like advertisers, but as long as they can get a few friends to lie on the ground and take pictures of the cards together, other children will spontaneously feel curious and run over to take a look.

If Pokémon cards were available at fifty cents a pack at this time, which most children could afford, and the card-snapping game was fun and easy to play, then this way of playing would quickly become popular in schools.

This is the same principle that applies to primary school students when they play cards, and it actually applies to online games as well.

Many players won't really care if you advertise something like "Hearthstone is really fun", but if a group of streamers are playing the game enthusiastically, players will be more likely to be curious. To determine whether players are curious, you only need to compare the comments and popularity of the streamers when they are broadcasting Hearthstone with those of other games before, and you will have a preliminary idea.

As Dong Chuan Che opened the data APP and looked at the data charts of each anchor, there was more smile in his eyes.

There is no other reason, the popularity has skyrocketed!

Hearthstone was launched at 10am this morning. Normally, not many people watch the live broadcast at this time. The same is true for the data charts of the anchors. From 10am to 11am, their traffic is relatively flat. But as the discussion of Hearthstone heats up, as time goes to 12pm lunch time, the popularity of the major anchors monitored by the APP soars!

Soaring suddenly!

A sea of ​​red!
Normally, the popularity of most anchors who start broadcasting at this time is usually white, and only some top anchors can be red. But now, almost all anchors who are broadcasting "Hearthstone" have extremely high popularity!
Scrolling down the app, Dong Chuan Che even saw several small anchors whose popularity was only a few thousand a few days ago, but now their popularity has exceeded ten thousand! As for the top anchors, many of them are much more popular than the peak value at eight or nine o'clock in the evening!
There is no doubt that this is all the popularity brought by Hearthstone! And this is not the most important thing. The most important thing is that by comparing the popularity data chart of the Hearthstone game itself and then comparing it with the popularity data of the anchor, Dongchuan Che can clearly find that there is a time difference in the rising trend of these two data!

From 10 to 11 in the morning, the popularity of Hearthstone was soaring, but the popularity of those anchors was rising slowly, and only when the popularity of Hearthstone rose to a large level would the popularity of these anchors rise a little bit. But two hours after the game was launched, as public opinion fermented, things turned around!

The popularity of Hearthstone's live streamers began to soar, and the popularity rose earlier than the game! The situation has become that every time the live streamer's live broadcast popularity rises a big step, the popularity of Hearthstone will also rise a big step!

The host’s popularity is starting to feed back into the game!

After all, Hearthstone was launched in the morning, and you need to buy a monthly card to play the game. Therefore, although the popularity of the game is very high under Dongchuan Che's strong promotion, most players, except for die-hard fans, are not in a hurry to buy it. They are either waiting and watching, or waiting to go home in the evening. At this time, the game anchors become the best game salesmen!
It's the same principle. Electronic games are essentially not much different from the marbles and cards we played as children.

If others don't play, few people will take the initiative to buy marbles, because their interest is not aroused. But if everyone around you is playing marbles and cards, once such an atmosphere is formed, it will continue to snowball, and there will be a steady stream of new people who will choose to try to join in because they see others playing interesting games!
And now, Hearthstone has begun to show such signs!
(End of this chapter)