Li Ming is a veteran game player, in his game experience, Microsoft's Xbox One, Sony PS4 Pro is his most often played Game console Lately, seeing friends playing "Super Mario Odyssey", he was tempted to buy another Nintendo Switch. In Lee 's opinion, holding the handle on the couch in the living room is the game. Open the way correctly.
Tens of thousands of players like Li Ming, this group propped up a huge living room game market.According to the latest report of market research firm Newzoo, in 2017 the global hosting game market share of 33.3 billion US dollars, accounting for the overall game market share 29%.
If the mobile game market is fiercely competitive and the amount of game of days is in a hurry, then the host game market consisting of the three major platforms of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will show the opposite stability: the game hardware with fixed frequency can basically be expected Of the big game release rhythm.Li Ming view, this stability while bringing a smooth gaming experience, which is his choice to play mainly in the living room, one of the important reasons, 'I do not like to toss'.
Another reason is that he could not bring hundreds of games in his bedroom computer to 'living' in the living room - connecting the heavy desktop computer to the TV and then using the mouse to open the altar to the sofa This complex set of procedures makes it very difficult for 'living room computer entertainment' have a good impression.
In fact, the "living in the living room to play computer games," this demand for a long time.Computer hardware update cycle is shorter, which means faster new technical support and better picture effect, for the pursuit of the game experience, a player supports 4K Resolution, full-height effects of high-end computer software to bring the game feel much more shocking, and launched about 2013 mainstream game console, the screen performance has been unsatisfactory.
In response to demand, some PC manufacturers, platform parties and game giants have deployed related products such as Valve, the game platform's Steam owner, and Steambox, a joint hardware company, to play Steam games in the main parlor. Valve also targeted the launch of a large screen Steambox is essentially a computer connected to a TV and playing games in the living room.
The other party of 'rivers and lakes', then take the wireless transmission program, plug in the wings of computer games, fly to the living room.
In December 2017, NVIDIA announced that it will officially launch the SHIELD TV entertainment equipment to China. This is the first time for NVIDIA to launch consumer-grade products in China for the living room games in addition to the video cards.
SHIELD started as a two-generation Android-based home console launched by NVIDIA in May 2015. In this mini-box, you can play and watch games, so it looks like a Taiwan ordinary Android game console and not much difference.
However, Zhang Jianzhong, global vice president of NVIDIA and general manager of NVIDIA China, believes that SHIELD is not as simple as an Android game console, and its introduction means that the border of computer games is expanding to the living room because of NVIDIA more powerful graphics business, as long as the Internet, players playing games on TV can also get a computer-like smooth experience.
In fact, this was the mainstream direction that the industry saw as two or three years ago to pry Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo to monopolize and cut into the living room games and entertainment, and such game machines usually Was named "micro-host." In the past two years, micro-hosts took turns on stage, attracting people's attention.After the most rapid development of mobile hardware era, the OUYA as the representative of the mainframe seems to show a The traditional host trend has been to the future.
In China, the most famous is known as' the first domestic Internet home entertainment consoles' ax games, Blue Harbor's ax technology company in May 2016 was first released. Unfortunately, these consoles was eventually reduced to 'test Wrong product '.
'Andrews has the world's largest developer, this means that the production of high-quality content possible for the platform, or to choose a big stage to do something.' Zhang Jianzhong said Andrews maturity, stability, scalability big, manufacturers transplantation low threshold. Prior to this, NVIDIA has Andrews hand-held gaming device , Tablets and Android driverless embedded software development experience in the PC platform handy NVIDIA, aiming at the living room, they naturally choose a similar degree of open Android.
"NVIDIA has a very solid hardware technology foundation compared to other Android room devices." One game industry veteran told press interviewers that NVIDIA has a nearly 10-year history of development on hand-held device chips and SHIELD Tegra X1 chip, has been used in Nintendo Switch host, Google Pixel C Tablet PC's own high-performance processor, SHIELD game to win the hardware requirements of the guarantee.
From 2016 to announce the introduction of SHIELD, and then to the official sale, what happened in the middle? Why so long? Zhang Jianzhong told interviews with news reporters, despite the SHIELD hardware sold in China with the overseas version of consistency, but in the software ecosystem And the subscription function has been completely changed, 'the software is basically rewritten'.
How to make SHIELD realize local operation is the problem NVIDIA China team tried to solve in the past year.Overseas version based on Google Android ecosystem, after the introduction of domestic, the corresponding need to select the relevant partners for content replacement.
Choosing a partner is not an easy task. "Partners can not choose a lot, choose only one, find the most suitable one, and ensure that both parties are willing to invest." Zhang Jianzhong said: "This is a long-term Together, and like-minded things, we spend a lot of time doing this in China. '
Finally, on the App Store content offer, NVIDIA chose IKeYi and embarked on its Baidu DuerOS artificial intelligence voice control system.
For a game device, the content is the most difficult to finalize the resources.Microsoft, Sony after three years of long construction, before they each on the Xbox One and PS4 gradually build a large number of games with a content library, Nintendo freshman Switch the same , Commentators believe that, for the living room, players are more willing to see is 'not going to the host game'.
Outside of China, NVIDIA has selected a variety of ways to expand its content, and based on Android's Google Play Store, players can choose from a wide range of video entertainment and gaming applications that support the TV environment, and NVIDIA's own game team also releases exclusive SHIELD games to differentiate , Such as "half-life" "portal" "alloy equipment" and so on.
It is noteworthy that, SHIELD sold in China chose Nintendo as the content of the party.On the day of sale, SHIELD support "The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess", "New Super Mario Bros. Wii", "Fist Fight! "Three classic games," Super Mario Galaxy "," Galaxy Warrior "will also be followed by landing SHIELD.According to Nvidia and Nintendo signed an agreement, Nvidia will select popular games on Wii and Nintendo Gamecube, NVIDIA HD quality To reproduce.
The porting of these games was done by NVIDIA's LightSpeed studio, which is also the creator of SHIELD's Half-Life 2, Resident Evil 5 and Doom 3.
It's not easy to persuade Nintendo to license the game to third parties, and since Nintendo has been very cautious about entering China, IP has been relatively conservative and even more cautious than Sony and Microsoft. According to Nvidia, Chinese market, 'can not find the way.'
'With Switch, we had established a good relationship with Nintendo and that is why we have had the opportunity to do more things, such as the Chinese market.' "Zhang Jianzhong believes this partnership will help Nintendo play a 'Pathfinder' The role of China's Nintendo do not know how to enter the current China can not see the success of the game console case, it is hard to say PS4 and Xbox One in China is very successful that Nintendo there is no need to Switch It seems that the ratio of input to output is not necessarily reasonable.
'It (Nintendo) is very good, and we have so many GeForce users in China, is it possible for us to do something for them? This is also Jensen (Nyan Jen Hsun) and Nintendo they talk about cooperation, we help them to content Introduced to SHIELD above. '
This coincided with the analysis of the outside world, ACE Economic Research analyst Yasuda Hideki believes that Nintendo SHIELD provide games 'help to enhance (Nintendo Games) awareness in China'.
For overseas players with sufficient network bandwidth, NVIDIA launched the Gefore Now cloud gaming service, which is designed to experience the PC or console platforms at least 10 Mbit / s, such as Wizards, Batman, "Street Fighter" and others, Gefore Now uses a membership model and a game purchase mode overseas, but because of broadband delays and price reasons, NVIDIA is currently struggling to provide stable service in China. If broadband delay is not good, users will not be able to Game, and if the player can not afford the cost, it might as well direct buy video card. '
Selling hardware and then making money through game software is the operating strategy for most gaming console platforms, making it a top priority to select content for the platform, but from a third-party gaming vendor's perspective, porting games to Android hosts is one Pieces do not thankless thing, so Android game hard to get large game companies enough support.
Therefore, NVIDIA is more valued by making SHIELD's GameStream function more convenient for players to play computer games in the living room.Therefore, how to make sure that the game screen transmitted to the TV after pressing the game button quickly and instantly responds to become a Guarantee the most important game experience the difficulties.
Computer runs the game, the graphics card through the calculation to produce a frame, transmitted to the buffer zone, through the display.If you want to wirelessly stream to the TV, the central processing unit (CPU) receives the command, the first data transfer to the memory, Memory and then send the data through the Wifi wireless network, the receiver receives the receiver data through the graphics processor (GPU) for a moment after processing, the formation of the image information can be played by the television.
'The process is very complicated. If every step of the process needs to be done step by step, the speed will be very slow and there will be some delay. The key lies in the optimization among them.' "Zhang Jianzhong explained that" how to make GPU-calculated data faster Method, sent to the SHIELD through the network to go, this is our research and development focus because the GPU is our own, decoding the code by our chip to complete, so we can use their own methods to do a lot of optimization at the bottom of the work, which is Third party is hard to do.
'We hope that through various efforts, we will be able to reduce the delay to the display with the computer so that users can enjoy a better life,' said Zhang Jianzhong.
Obviously, SHIELD is targeted at GeForce card users who have a need for parlor games, and there's a subtext to abandon the console that symbolizes the living room amusement center, where a small 'box' will allow more people to play on TV Quality computer games.
'So logical to make SHIELD a geForce ace partner, you will find, through the stream, SHIELD game experience has become the best of all the game console experience.' Service for GeForce video card users, so SHIELD formed a unique competitive barrier, emphasizing this difference, rather than the common Android game ideas, SHIELD formed a number of specific needs.
Zhang Jianzhong said that China is the world's largest market for GeForce with a large number of GeForce players who formed SHIELD's potential users' demand. "In contrast, Chinese players, for now, have not formed a culture of buying console games. In contrast, PC gamers, on the order of hundred million GeForce, are a hundredfold difference from millions of console players and we offer a better way to play PC games. "
Currently, there are about 30 games in SHIELD's Ai Qi Yi application store, including games such as Legend of Paladin 5, Light and Shadow, UFO: Unknown Enemy, Zhang Jianzhong mentioned that for the future planning of game content, NVIDIA has set a good road map, 'I believe will not disappoint players.'
'In fact, SHIELD this product itself, we do not rely on it for profit.Of course, we hope that future game content and application content to help us make a profit, but in fact, in the short term do not rely on content.'Zhang Jianzhong said, I hope we GeForce users because SHIELD more like GeForce, GeForce every user has the opportunity to buy a SHIELD, as its gold partner, the game experience will be better if the GeForce user experience improved, he It is possible to buy more high-end GeForce graphics card, so my business will do more.
'So, my business model should be linked together, not just providing an end-to-end game solution that gives our players a better gaming experience on the GeForce platform, and they can base their GeForce-based desktops and Laptop, and then buy SHIELD, this is an ecology. '
For SHIELD, NVIDIA has a long-term plan to do this. "This product will continue. This is our long-term strategy. We also hope SHIELD can become a trump card for every GeForce player," concludes Zhang Jianzhong.