Hollywood Hunter

As Hollywood's most high-profile rising star, Daenerys Entertainment's attempt to enter the field of video games has been the focus of attention of many media from the beginning. Forbes magazine's September 400 US rich list's note on Simon's personal assets , Blizzard Studio was also specifically listed.

Blizzard Studio's water test project "Ninja Turtles" has been rapidly popular since its birth in 1984. After the game was announced in February this year, it was also rated as one of the most anticipated video games this year by some magazines.

However, Blizzard Studios developed the ARPG (Action Role Playing) version of the "Ninja Turtles" game for 8 months, far exceeding the average video game development cycle of 3 to 5 months in this era.

When the outside world had almost forgotten this matter, Nancy finally officially launched the promotion of the "Ninja Turtles" video game in October.

Because of the many miracles created in recent years, the projects produced by Daenerys Entertainment almost naturally carry a halo attribute that can attract the attention of the media and the public, which has created a great deal for the release of the game "Ninja Turtles" convenient.

With a lot of spontaneous follow-up reports in the media, the game "Ninja Turtles" created an effect that other game companies did not necessarily achieve $5 million just by relying on a comprehensive advertising budget of $1 million.

As of November 3, the "Ninja Turtles" game is almost universally known in the game circles of the two major video game markets in Japan and the United States.

"The New York Times" evaluated "Ninja Turtles" before Blizzard Studios as "Atari's "Alien ET"".

The poor quality of "Alien ET" triggered the famous "Atari crash", but still sold 1.5 million boxes of the best-selling level that year, which relied on the global sales of the "Alien ET" movie. Strong popularity.

As for "Ninja Turtles", the "New York Times" concluded that this game relies on the attention brought by Daenerys Entertainment's own reputation, and there is almost no possibility of failure in business, and the result is only a matter of making more money.However, if "Ninja Turtles" can not be recognized by players, and even encounters bad reviews like "Alien ET", after this game, Daenerys Entertainment will be very difficult to gain a foothold in the field of video games.

Simon and Nancy actually understand the truth of the New York Times. Otherwise, Blizzard Studios’ first game will not be so refined that it takes eight months to grind harshly.

In the attention of all parties, the ARPG version of the "Ninja Turtles" game was launched in the United States and Japan on November 3rd.

The first batch of 100,000 cassettes is priced at US$60 in the United States and 7,000 yen in Japan.In order to achieve the maximum momentum effect, after Simon contacted through the twists and turns of the Australian relationship, the "Ninja Turtle" game also landed on the cover of Nintendo's official game magazine "Nintendo Power".

In the next few days, as the media discussed the Simon Westero Boeing 767 private car, game reviews of "Ninja Turtles" also came out.

"Nintendo Power" directly gave "Ninja Turtles" a good score of 8 points in the 10-point scale, which of course has the public relations effect of Daenerys Entertainment, but Nintendo's official affirmation of this game is no doubt. Be suspicious.

The scores given by other professional game magazines are basically excellent.

Of course, criticism must be indispensable.

The Japanese game magazine "Fami Pass" accused "Ninja Turtles" of imitating Nintendo's "Said Legend 2" and Kreme's "Moonwind Demon" in many details.

"Said Legend 2" and "Moonwind Biography" are both horizontal ARPG games produced in previous years. The first "Ninja Turtles" is also a horizontal ARPG.

In fact, after writing a rough game plan based on the Kelome version in memory, Simon did let the game design team try out several famous horizontal ARPG games such as "The Legend of Cedar 2" and "Moonwind Biography".

Even if Blizzard's team wanted to copy directly, Nancy, who had been staring at the project, could not allow it.In addition, the horizontal version of the game has been flooded in recent years. The phenomenal games of "Contra" and "Super Marie" are also horizontal versions. The accusation of "Fami Pass" has nothing to do.

Statistics of game sales data are not as timely as the movie box office, especially in the case of simultaneous listings in the US and Japan.

However, during the week of November 3 to November 9, the original batch of 100,000 game cassettes was quickly sold out, and Daenerys Entertainment urgently added an order for 200,000 cassettes to Nintendo.

On November 13, the first week of sales of "Ninja Turtles" was officially released. The total sales of the two major markets in North America and Japan were 263,000 boxes, with sales of up to 15.7 million US dollars.

Compared with the movie box office, the sales curve of video games is more like a music record, with a strong vitality.

"Ninja Turtles" sold 263,000 boxes in the first week. Although it failed to break the sales record of 500,000 boxes in the first Thursday of many games in the industry, it also shocked a large number of people.Because the games in the forefront of sales records are basically the second generation and third generation sequels, "Ninja Turtles" is the first generation.

In the first week of 263,000 boxes, considering the excellent quality and reputation of this game, there will be no problem with the total sales reaching 4-5 million in the next year.It is estimated that the total sales of 5 million boxes of games, although not reaching the ten million level of the Super Mario series, is definitely already in the ranks of phenomena.

Game sales actually means market recognition. Daenerys Entertainment immediately invested in the second wave of large-scale publicity, and the attention was further increased. Inevitably, the sales of the game "Ninja Turtles" were inevitably driven again.

The best-selling phenomenal video games usually have a long life cycle.

Therefore, only the success of the game "Ninja Turtles", through the development of the next sequel, Blizzard Studio can be eaten for at least five years, which undoubtedly means that Daenerys Entertainment is in the field of video games Stand firm.

Daenerys Entertainment Headquarters.

The time is Wednesday, November 15.

Conference room.

The success of the "Ninja Turtles" game, Nancy began to calculate Blizzard Studios' next expansion plan.

"Game cartridges priced at US$60 have a gross profit of up to 50% compared to several Capcom manufacturers who can produce their own cassettes and have a premium discount. Our studio's gross profit margin is only 30%. However, this is only the case In the "Ninja Turtles" game, the sales of 263,000 boxes in the first week have allowed us to recover all the investment of Blizzard Studios in the past six months and achieved a net profit of 2 million US dollars. The next year, the game’s expected net The profit scale will reach 100 million US dollars. My next plan is to expand into the PC gaming field. It is too slow from scratch. Now that I have some knowledge of the gaming industry, I hope to expand directly through acquisitions."

Simon has not spoken yet, and Amy, who has done a lot of work recently, asks: "Nintendo's exclusiveness is very strong, Nancy, how do you solve this problem?"

Nintendo can now almost be said to unify the console game market. The market share of red and white machines in Japan and the United States is more than 90%. This company is therefore in the strongest period, even if it is the closest to it. The six major manufacturers also said that they would be blocked, let alone second- and third-tier game production companies.

Nancy apparently considered this issue as well, saying: "We can keep the PC gaming department separate and not intersect with Blizzard Studios. Moreover, we will not cooperate with Nintendo competitors such as Sega and Atari to acquire After the PC game manufacturer, you can also choose some excellent PC games to transplant to the Nintendo host platform, so that the hostility of Nintendo can be eliminated to the greatest extent."

Amy obviously didn't think so, and turned to look at Simon.

"Ninja Turtles" sales performance is so good, she does not feel the need to expand to PC games.The scale of the PC game market in this era is still far from comparable to console games. If Blizzard Studios are targeted because of the expansion of the PC field to Nintendo, it will outweigh the gains.

Simon also doesn't think that the bossy Nintendo will let Daenerys entertain'three hearts and two minds'. However, he also doesn't plan to bind Blizzard Studios to Nintendo, a big ship that has gone from bad to bad, so he asked: "You see Is it a suitable target?"

Nancy nodded and handed over two pieces of information to Simon and Amy, respectively: "ElectronicArts (ElectronicArts), a San Francisco-based video game manufacturer, was founded in 1982 and initially developed games for Atari consoles. After Atari fell behind, EA began to focus on PC game development, and has accumulated a number of very popular sports game brands over the years."

Simon looked at the information in his hands and had to admire the vision of his little child executive again.

EA.

Despite the notoriety of the "Studio Terminator", EA is undoubtedly one of the largest game production publishers in Simon's memory, and the market value at the peak was once close to US$50 billion.

Nancy noticed the weirdness of Simon’s expression, but just continued: "EA just launched an IPO a month ago, and then encountered a stock market crash on October 13, this company's current market value is only 170 million US dollar, 13 times price-earnings ratio. If we issue a goodwill invitation and get a response, $300 million should be able to win. EA's performance has been very good in recent years, and it is very reasonable to buy at a price-earnings ratio of 25 times or less. ."

Simon asked: "What if the invitation to buy in good faith fails to respond, or suddenly other competitors appear?"

Nancy said: "In this case, our chips can be raised by another 50 million US dollars."

"That's it, give you a $350 million budget and take this company," Simon looked at Amy without looking back. "You can discuss this matter yourself, and you can find Jim to cooperate with me. Jenny and I weekend I will go to Europe, and I will let go of the company as much as possible for a long time. Don’t let me down."

Both Amy and Nancy already knew about Simon’s plan, and they almost agreed that their boss could not ignore the company’s affairs for a long time.

Nature is hard to move.

Therefore, there is no objection to Simon's plan to'take a long vacation'.

At the end of the meeting, Amy and Nancy were busy on their own, and Simon also rushed to participate in the audition for the leading actor in The Ten Days of Danger.

The original "Dangerous Ten Days" heroes are James Kane and Casey Bates. Casey Bates also won the Academy Award for Best Actress for this role.

However, Simon did not intend to use the original team this time.

Simon watched the original film, and Kathy Bates' performance was really good, but Simon thinks that the reason why the other party can get the film is still more exposed to the role and public relations.

Oscar's favor of various mental illnesses is well known.

Oscar was once ridiculed as a mental hospital because of too many mental patients, homicides, mania, etc. "patients" won the small gold.

At the same time, Casey Bates is still an artist under the CAA. Without Simon's appearance, CAA is definitely the most powerful talent agency in Hollywood in recent years. From the beginning of this year, under the sniper of Daenerys Entertainment, CAA has remained as Das. It can be seen that Ting Hoffman won the second little gold man.

However, compared to the original sickness and mania that Annecy played by the original Kathy Bates simply made the audience nervous, Simon also hopes that the new heroine will allow the audience to generate some strong dangers of taking over the role of an abused writer. sense.

Obviously, this needs to consider the face value.

Comprehensive appearance, acting skills and some unavoidable human considerations, Simon finally selected Susan Sarandon.

Susan Sarandon is 43 years old this year, about the same age as Casey Bates, and also in line with the rough setting of Stephen King's original heroine.

Moreover, Susan Sarandon has already won the first Oscar nomination for Best Actress in 1981, and his acting skills are beyond doubt.

Although she was over forty years old, Susan Sarandon was very well maintained. In the "East Town Witch" two years ago, the actress's style was not lost to Michelle Pfeiffer and Cher. Last year, he also co-starred with Kevin Costner in a box office sports movie "Millions of Golden Arms".Susan Sarandon is ten years older than Costner, but the two of them appear to be very well matched in the film, without any sense of age difference.

Speaking of which, Simon was very impressed with Susan Sarandon's "The Legend of Yanwa".

Most people only think that Brooke Shields is the core of "The Legend of Yanwa", but Simon doesn't feel a little about the flat body of Brooke Shields in the film, but instead plays Su, who plays the mother of Brooke Shields. The scene when Shan Sarandon was lying on the side of the sofa naked and photographed was like a beautiful classic oil painting, which was endlessly memorable.

Receiving Simon's invitation, Susan Sarandon was hesitant about playing a maniac extreme fan, but after considering it, he quickly agreed to appear.The actress clearly can see the breakthrough that this character may bring to her.

As for the actor, Simon's requirements for this role are not high, so it is inevitable that many human offenses will be ushered in.