Millet handles, the big possibility of gadgets

The popularity of smart phones has made many devices become tears of the times. Walkman and portable game consoles are two typical cases. In 2014, two major mobile application markets, the App Store and Google Play, generated more than $22 billion in revenue, of which more than 80% came from mobile games. Mobile games have become a huge gold mine in the era of smart phones, attracting countless developers and companies to come to gold. With the rapid increase in the performance of smart phones, mobile games have become more and more well-known and have more and more gameplay. Soon, the performance of the flagship mobile phone will exceed the previous generation of game consoles, and there will be more room for mobile game development.

What is embarrassing is that although the current mainstream mobile phones are far better than PSV, such as performance, screen size, and portability, mobile phones have always lacked large-scale, hardcore games that are very common on game consoles. Complex games, long shooting time, RPGs, adventure puzzles, and racing games are rare on mobile phones. Until 2014, the gameplay of many popular mobile games was not even comparable to classic old works from the end of the last century. Many game players have also ridiculed that mobile gamers can only play some puzzle games, and they simply cannot realize the true charm of video games. It must be said that although the mobile phone performance has been so powerful and the scale of the mobile game market has reached the level of 10 billion US dollars, the mobile phone still cannot completely replace the professional portable game console.

The biggest reason for this is that mobile phones lack a suitable and unified game controller. Any game machine comes with a dedicated handle, while the PC has a standard keyboard and mouse as input means. Smartphones have so far only adopted a multi-touch screen as the mainstream input method. This type of input method is more efficient and more effective in playing games, especially in shooting, racing, and action-advanced hardcore games. Than simply the difference between hell and heaven. Under the limitation of input methods, the mainstream game types on game machines are difficult to transplant to mobile phones on the premise of guaranteeing experience, resulting in the status of large-scale and hardcore games being scarce on this platform. However, as more and more game time and money are spent on the mobile phone, the mainstream small-sized, low-complexity, partial-minded and casual games are more and more difficult to meet the needs of users. Users are increasingly tired of scratching the screen without touch, and the demand for dedicated control equipment has become very urgent.

However, mobile phones do not have to have a handle to play the game. If different handle designs and key positions are too different, it is difficult for developers to adapt to all the controllers; if there are too few users to purchase the handles, the developer has no incentive to develop complex and costly large-scale games for a small number of users. It's best to have a universal, high-quality control handle for your phone, while the handle is cheap enough to get enough sales. Obviously, this is not a problem that can be solved by one or two mobile phone accessories manufacturers. It is only the mobile phone manufacturers themselves that are pushing this matter. And only mobile phone manufacturers with high enough market share have the ability to sell enough controllers and attract developers to adapt the game for such handles.

Xiaomi exactly meets the above conditions: The output is large enough to make a product with good quality and low price, and it has a good relationship with the developer. The product line of Xiaomi's mobile phone is not complicated, and it is difficult to design a universal handle. Xiaomi has its own app store and it's easy to promote games that are optimized for handles. Millet also has a good box, connected with the handle and even can be used as a small game console, incidentally occupying the next living room market. It can be said that Xiaomi is a mobile phone game control accessory that is both good-for-money and good-natured. It is very easy to succeed.

Selling a handle is certainly not profitable. In order to speed up the popularization, it is also necessary to lose out on sales. However, the potential benefits of the popularity of a standard controller to millet are immeasurable: On the one hand, the emergence of the handle can greatly speed up the evolution of the mobile game market, spawn a large number of hardcore game works; on the other hand, the user has a convenient There will naturally be more spending on mobile games after the controller and more quality games. When Xiaomi’s mobile phone becomes a qualified portable game machine and a millet box can also serve as a good living room game machine, Xiaomi can easily obtain huge profits from the mobile game market. Apple's score from the mobile game market last year was nearly 4 billion U.S. dollars, and it is expected to double in the next two years - and these divisions even exceed the profitability of the most expensive iPhone. For Xiaomi, who maintains a low-margin strategy on hardware, it is invaluable to have such a market that can easily make money.

The just-released millet handle may just be a temptation. In the future, millet will inevitably introduce game controller products that are suitable for a variety of mobile phones and TV boxes and are designed with a lower price. Millet's strategy of "low-cost machines occupying the market and making money from software services" is also likely to take the first step toward "making money" from the mobile game market. The seemingly simple handle may be one of the most important pieces in the future of Xiaomi.