Why is it so difficult to produce an Android box as a game console for 60 million yuan?

With the launch of Axe Technology's "Tomahawk F1", news about Axe has been all over the major media. After more than a year of development, Axe has only produced an enhanced version of the game box, which is inevitably disappointing.

This has caused many people to wonder why Axe, which has a startup capital of 60 million US dollars, cannot build a console that belongs to the Chinese with so much money.

How difficult is it to develop a game console?

Nintendo's FC pioneered the era of home consoles. As the industry's standard setter, Nintendo has achieved great success and a monopoly in the industry after a large amount of R&D investment without any competitors, and its profits are naturally huge. It has become the industry leader! Needless to say.

SONY also wanted to enter the console market and cooperated with Nintendo, but later Nintendo unilaterally tore up the contract because of the game carrier. After breaking up with Nintendo, Ken Kutaragi founded Sony Electronics Entertainment in 1993. With the experience he had gained from his cooperation with Nintendo and the unremitting efforts of the entire team, he developed SONY's first generation game console PlayStation and entered the market.

After that, SONY invested more energy and financial resources to continue developing subsequent consoles, starting with PS2. SONY developed a CPU with 128-bit processor technology that was ahead of the market. In 2001, it worked with IBM to develop the CPU "Cell" for PS3, which took five years. The "Cell" supercomputer standard has a computing power of one trillion floating-point operations per second. The latest PS4 has GDDR5 shared memory technology, using 16 512MB GDDR5 chips to form 8GB CPU/GPU shared memory. It not only improves performance, but also saves resources. Each generation of SONY consoles has its own core technology. This is not only a matter of resource consumption, but also requires excellent technology and strong capital.

Let's talk about Microsoft's success. In addition to Bill Gates' personal promotion, it mainly relied on a model similar to dumping, selling each console at a loss of $125. This move caused Microsoft to lose $1 billion in the short term, and only then could it occupy a part of the market share. Microsoft's second-generation console Xbox 360 (360 for short), Microsoft customized a specific chip for the 360 ​​console. Then there is 360's somatosensory Kinect, which was a camera motion capture technology for military technology at the time. Microsoft redefined somatosensory games through this technology, which made 360 ​​an unprecedented success. However, this technology cost Microsoft $200 million, and 360's investment was far more than that. Microsoft's research and development and design costs for the handle alone were as high as $100 million.

This is enough to prove how large the investment in developing a console is. It must have been done with such strong financial support.

Is hardware alone enough?

Hardware alone is definitely not enough. The console must be guaranteed to have a large number of high-quality follow-up game software to attract players. After all, a console without games will only be covered in dust when you buy it home.

In terms of games, developers are not willing to put all their eggs in one platform, and are more willing to try to release games on multiple platforms to increase game exposure and achieve better sales. Nowadays, there are very few exclusive games. Therefore, Sony and Microsoft both have first-party game development teams to support them, to ensure that the consoles have enough high-quality games to attract players.

A successful console not only needs powerful hardware and fun games, but also the operating system. If a console has perfect hardware and fun games, but its operating system is ugly, slow to respond, or even crashes frequently, you will lose the mood to play games. For example: "The first Android console Oyua was very popular two years ago. Although it had more than 1,000 games and good hardware configuration, it failed miserably because of the poor user experience, frequent system errors, and poor control."

Nintendo's latest generation console, Wii U, is criticized by players for its slow switching between systems and games, which affects the gaming experience.

Is the domestic environment more suitable for making game consoles?

Looking at the current domestic market, although the game console industry is optimistic, practitioners have long lost the enthusiasm for stand-alone game production. Because the industry environment is too impetuous, most people adhere to the concept of making quick money. With the rise of the mobile game market, the chaos in the industry has been exacerbated. They all want to quickly occupy the market through Android game boxes and make money. This model cannot effectively accumulate experience and is also very unfavorable to the development of the domestic game industry.

When talking about the domestic environment, we should talk about the recently popular Axe Technology. Although the 60 million US dollars invested by Axe Technology is already the largest investment in the domestic game console industry, the investment is far less than that of overseas console manufacturers. Although almost all of the 60 million US dollars were used to sign games, it is definitely impossible to sign exclusive masterpieces. I don’t have the ability to make 3A-level exclusive games myself, even if I go the route of mobile games or game porting, there is little hope. The console market is too difficult!

Looking at the domestic environment, although many bigwigs are optimistic about the console market, who knows that "Baidu's TV game department was established and disbanded three times, Alibaba's 400 million investment in TV games went down the drain, Xiaomi's TV game team transformed into mobile games, and who still remembers Qihoo 360's Big Chief console." Even these Internet bigwigs have failed to do it. Doesn't it prove that consoles are difficult to make? If domestic console manufacturers still have the idea of ​​small investment, short cycle, and high returns, they should not wade into this muddy water.

It is indeed unsatisfactory that Axe Technology only produced a game box with 60 million US dollars. But for the console industry, 60 million US dollars of investment is just a drop in the bucket. Axe’s fault is not that there is not enough money, but that it underestimated the game console industry and boasted too early. Judging from the press conference, the Tomahawk F1 is not on the same level as the PS4 or XBOX ONE, let alone comparable.

If domestic manufacturers want to enter the game console industry, which has a complete closed loop, they must have strong hardware and software to gain a foothold. The idea that they can squeeze into the market by putting together a few games and a console is completely unacceptable.

Finally, I can only say that the current environment in China is indeed not suitable for the survival of game consoles!

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.