Chapter 464 462. Is this appropriate?

In less than an hour after dota was launched, it accumulated more than 200,000 users.

In the following days, dota's users' growth rate was still very fast. In addition to the most core users, many new players were pouring in.

In less than a week, dota downloads have exceeded 2 million.

At the same time, the number of online users has exceeded 200,000.

This has exceeded Meng Xiao's expectations, but it is far from enough for Cao Yang.

Because the number of lol players in previous lives was calculated in 100 million.

Light competition, especially this type of moba-type battle game, has very high requirements for the number of players, because you have to ensure the good experience of players, as well as the matching interval and quality. When the number of players is too small, the matching time will only exceed 30 seconds, causing discomfort.

Fortunately, the number of users has reached the basic requirements, and Cao Yang has no concerns in this regard.

The only concern is-

It is only the first step to gain a large number of users. It is probably still a while before you can really make money.

Because Dota is taking the route of selling skins, players' willingness to pay and payment depth are not very high. Only when the base is large enough can they really make money by selling skins.

...

Dota games quickly swept the world and became the hottest game in spring 2009.

Dota itself has its own extraordinary charm, condensing the long-term confrontation of mmo in a game, each player can find his own positioning and exclusive heroes in it. At the same time, hero operation is simpler than traditional e-sports games like war3, and it will not cause dizziness like shooting games. It can also meet the personalized and diversified needs of players. Therefore, as long as the players can settle down, they will easily be attracted by this game.

In addition, Bomi Company is not only China's largest game manufacturer, but also the best game publisher in the world. Through its own channels and advertisements, it can instantly promote and promote dota games to the maximum extent, allowing more people to understand this game.

Bomi's promotion comes faster and better than before Dota's own reputation and spontaneous promotions from players, so it can easily gain a large number of users.

Dota itself has a certain user base, for example, there are more than 600,000 old Dota players around the world.

This part of people can guarantee a base of dota.

So the users of Bomi's new dota grew very fast in the past few days, because of this part of the core players of dota.

However, for them, the biggest threshold for playing the new dota is [not adaptable]. The game's UI, game graphics and hero image have changed. Overall, it is more refined and high-end, but it also brings certain cognitive difficulties. Fortunately, Boss Cao has done a good job in this regard. Boss Cao had expected this situation from the beginning, so he asked the artists to optimize as much as possible on the basis of maintaining the original hero characteristics.

With the view of World of Warcraft and the sense of characteristics, it is easy to recognize this hero at first glance.

Players will get familiar with each other after playing it a few times.

So although there are a small number of players on the forum that they are not used to it, it is better to play the original old dota, but as time goes by, more and more players still choose to enter the new dota.

The user pool of old dota is decreasing, and in the end everyone happily accepted the new dota.

When you accept the new dota, you will feel like [Damn, this is so amazing].

"I found that as long as you accept this setting, you will open the door to a new world. The dota made by Bomi himself is really fun." After trying out Bomi's new dota, a dota player couldn't help but post on the Internet and sighed.

"Yes, and have you noticed that Bomi official also designed a set of old dota hero skins for us very considerately, which can be collected as long as they are online. If you think these heroes are not familiar with, it doesn't matter. You can use these old versions of skins, which will bring you back to the familiar dota environment.

But when you see that other people's heroes are so crazy and cool, don't you feel that there is a hint of jealousy?

Hahaha, after using the classic skin for a day, I began to decisively abandon the hero skin of the old dota and turned to embrace the new hero image.

Look at this white tiger, isn't it bigger than the original one?

Isn’t this Wind Walker’s arrow more silky and cooler than before?”

"Damn, I even have classic skins of Dota. I can only say that the official thought is really thoughtful."

"Huh? What is the skin?" Someone soon captured the key information.

"This is the skin.

Shadow Demon·Shadow Lord.jpg

Have you seen it? This is a skin specially created by the official for the hero Shadow Demon. You can still tell it is Shadow Demon, right? But it suddenly became much taller, right?

And there are specific new special effects in the game."

"Actually, the so-called skin is the same hero, but there are many different images to choose from, but some of them are not available now. I see the official explanation that there is a probability of obtaining it when doing activities in the future, and some skins can be obtained through purchase."

"Damn it, it's amazing. Bomi really has a clear understanding of the players' thoughts. He even thought of these details. I feel the urge to want to see this Shadow Demon's skin."

"Huh? Didn't you say it's free forever?" Someone discovered the blind spot.

"It's free. If you don't want to spend money to buy skins, you can play this game completely for free, because the heroes are given to you for free and will not have any impact on the game. These skins are decorative.

At first I thought I couldn't play this hero without skin, but then I carefully studied it and found it was okay."

"Oh, that's good, scared me."

"This method of making money is already very conscientious. Not buying skins does not affect playing games at all. After all, Bomi is also a commercial company, and it is impossible to use Ai to generate electricity completely.

Skin is just like shopping and buying clothes. If you like a certain hero's skin, just go and buy it directly. Others won't force you, it's entirely up to your own preferences."

"Well, this method is quite acceptable."

...

Bomi's new Dota actually makes profits by selling skins, and there is no RPG content other than that. The game is very streamlined and is completely for light competition. This is something that no peers expected.

"Damn, I thought Bomi would make some fun, but I didn't expect that the end of the game was selling avatar?"

"Although it's also avatar, it's officially called skin."

“Will anyone really pay for this kind of decorative stuff?”

"It is definitely better to sell attributes directly at the payment rate. It depends on how many players there are in the end. Only when the base is large enough can you make a profit. Otherwise, I think Bomi's company consumes tens of millions of bandwidth and server costs per year for the dota game alone. I don't know if they can make a profit."

In fact, at this time, no matter which game player is, he will not think that dota game users can exceed tens of millions, because it still has a certain threshold, but he will not underestimate this game.

According to their idea, the number of players in the last dota can be maintained at about 3 million to 4 million.

This number is already a very high number of online game players, but this number may not be enough for the way of making money by charging for skins.

But Cao Yang himself knew that moba games are the future king of online games, and millions are just a trivial number. His goal is to increase the number of dota players to 100 million in five years.

...

For a long time in the future, it will be a period of rapid growth for Dota or Moba games.

So what Cao Yang has to do is very simple, which is to let the dota team continuously optimize the content, and at the same time carry out long-term publicity to organize the content of the competition.

In addition to the old marketing methods, this time Bomi adopted a new marketing plan with an opinion leader-led model.

In other words, let some more authoritative professional players or powerful dota anchors broadcast live on site A or publish related videos. Under the leadership of these opinion leaders, many people have inexplicably followed the trend and entered the dota trap, and they are the kind that they can no longer extricate themselves once they enter.

Dota games also have their own flaws, such as the threshold for getting started is very high, which is not friendly enough for novices. If many novices have not played dota or combat games, they are easily killed and withdrawn from the game in the early stage.

So this time, Bomi Company has carried out a lot of newbie protection and optimization for Dota, and the most obvious one is the rank design-

When players have rank points, many old Dota players can easily score points because of their experience in dota game, thus leaving the lowest level of novice. After the newcomer enters dota, the players they match in the early stage will be similar to their own level and will not be killed or repelled.

The reason why competitive games are fun is that you can match opponents and teammates who are equally matched every time.

It would be meaningless if you keep winning or losing.

In order to make it easier for novices to get started and adapt, Bomi has also specially developed many novices levels and tasks this time.

Moreover, when the players' level is low, the official will also let the robots bring warmth.

For example, if you have a low level and you have lost several times in a row, the opponent you may match next time is a robot.

The robot will take the initiative to deliver the head to the door, and will also pretend to be a [missing] at the right time to allow you to escape at the extreme.

This is the benefit of Cao Yang's vigorous development of AI.

After all, the competition between players is a zero-sum game, which means that as many players win, the players lose.

The experience of losing is not necessarily completely negative, but the experience of losing is definitely completely negative.

So when a robot is added for matching, the players' winning rate will increase, and this is no longer a zero-sum game process, because your opponent may be a robot, and you will be able to win when facing a robot.

When AI is smart enough, players may not be able to discover this.

Especially now it is 2009, and many game manufacturers have not yet understood this truth, so the new Dota of Bomi Company is very friendly to players, and the players' reputation is also very popular.

...

Thinking of game AI, Cao Yang suddenly remembered Liu Guangran and the others.

It has been almost two years since the establishment of the Bomi Research Department. Although the research related to artificial intelligence and cloud computing that Liu Guangran’s team is conducting cannot produce results overnight, and it even takes a lot of time to make a little progress, Cao Yang is still very concerned about the progress of the project.

So on the afternoon of that day, on the way to the Qingda Mining Miss, he went to the nearby Bomi Technology Research Institute to see Liu Guangran, and asked him for dinner and chatting.

After Dota was launched, the results were good, so Cao Yang seemed particularly happy today.

The research institute is now a rented office building with a total of 14 floors. Bomi Company rented 4 to 14 floors for development.

The bottom 1 to 4th floors are some merchant storefronts, such as Lanzhou Ramen, McDonald's...

A few more layers are the computer room used by Bomi to stack servers. Here, the best servers in the world are used, and Liu Guangran and others are provided for research through server stacking.

For example, cloud computing allows multiple servers with super computing power to operate simultaneously to achieve super fast computing effects.

Bomi Company has invested hundreds of millions of millions of these equipment alone.

There are similar computer rooms in Tsinghua University and other universities, and these are research projects that have been collaborated with Bomi Company.
To be continued...