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The influence of Internet bar culture lies not only in the coverage area in the physical space, but also in the spiritual space, soothing the youth with nowhere to be placed.

I wrote a story about the development of Internet cafes before, but in some recent thinking, I found that I still underestimated the impact of Internet cafes on many things.

The reason for underestimation is that if we look at Internet cafes as a whole, it will be a super chain that far exceeds McCann, Snow and Ice City, Shaxian snacks and a large number of fast-food restaurants in terms of number and coverage.

Such a store, especially with teenagers as its main customers, is precisely because we are so familiar that we often ignore that it actually plays a very important role in the causes of many phenomena. So in this issue, I will talk in detail about the culture of Internet cafes and what far-reaching effects it has caused.

01 to explain my opinion, we have to start with a phenomenal film.

The release of Fast and Furious 7 in 2015 created a box office myth, especially at the domestic box office. If you still remember, you will remember that at that time, "Speed 7" was simply a record shredder. Starting from the box office of 400 million yuan on the first day, it broke a number of box office records in the mainland in a row, becoming the first film in domestic film history that grossed more than 2 billion yuan at the box office. And it took only 15 days.

The previous record holder, Transformers 4, which has amassed a large audience in China, took a month to reach nearly $2 billion at the box office. According to a rough estimate, "Quick shock 7" broke more than 30 records, large and small.

Such a box office miracle aroused a lot of discussion at that time, analyzing why the box office of "Fast 7" was so high.

Most of the reasons can be summed up for two reasons: the first was that the number of screens in China was growing rapidly at that time, and the second was the impact of Paul Walker's unexpected death.

These reasons are well known, and of course they are very important. But what I want to say is that these reasons can explain why the box office is so high, but it is difficult to explain why it is so high.

In terms of the series, the Fast Wave series was released in the mainland from the beginning of the fourth film, with a cumulative box office of only 700 million. In terms of popularity and audience base, it is obvious that the "Transformers" series is not the same order of magnitude as the Transformers series. And if it's all because of Paul Walker, I don't think it's right.

I have two reasons: first, Paul Walker was not very famous before he died. In fact, he is not an A-list star in Hollywood. Second, the exaggeration of "Fast 7" at the mainland box office at that time was even higher than Paul Walker's native North American market.

I would like to stress again that it is not that these reasons are unimportant, but that it is difficult to explain why the box office is unreasonably high.

So, I think the thrill series has actually had a larger audience than expected. Even though the series was only released in the mainland from the beginning of the fourth film, in fact, there are not a small number of viewers who have seen the series before. It is on this basis that many factors are mixed together, which finally detonated the phenomenal box office.

This is not difficult to understand, just as we seldom saw Hong Kong films in cinemas when we were young, which did not prevent most of us from becoming fans of Stephen Chow through pirated CDs, so that in the past there has always been the saying that "I owe Sing Yeh a movie ticket". And the film directed by Stephen Chow has indeed made amazing achievements in the mainland.

However, the viewing channels of the fast series are still somewhat different from those of Hong Kong films, and its larger audience may come from Internet cafes. Therefore, I also call this kind of movie the Internet bar movie.

02 here, I would like to introduce a little bit about the way of watching movies more than ten years ago.

As we all know, around 2000, we mostly rely on renting DVDs to see movies. The price of my family is about 10 yuan deposit and 1 yuan rent.

After the gradual decline of DVD, because all computers at that time had optical drives, computers began to become one of the mainstream viewing equipment. With the popularity of broadband, it is possible to watch movies on the Internet.

In order to watch a movie on the Internet, we can say that we are doing everything we can. In addition to slow downloading, if you run broadband, the merchant will even send an online movie website.

But regardless of the way, there were at least two problems at that time: the first is that many people still do not have computers at home. Second, even if there is a computer, the Internet speed is surprisingly slow, the download is also very slow, and the buffer is also very slow.

So at this time, the Internet bar has become an excellent place to watch movies.

What are the advantages of watching movies in Internet cafes? After solving the problem of not having a computer, the Internet speed is generally faster than at home. More importantly, most Internet cafes will download good movies in the computer in advance, or even classify them in detail, so that they don't have to consider the problem of stutter at all.

In the United States, there is a kind of film called video film. A videotape will be released some time after the film is released in theaters, so in addition to the box office, you can also charge a fee for selling DVDs. The famous Warner has the nickname of "selling disc Hua". Some of these small-budget movies are even released in the form of discs, bypassing the cinema line.

This has also created a disc rental market, the most famous of which is PepsiCo. Netflix started its business by mailing and renting DVD, until it ate up the market of PepsiCo through online and membership models, and eventually became a streaming giant. By the way, Netflix also made a play called Life Pepsi, which tells the story of the last PepsiCo store, which can be said to be very heartbreaking.

It is obvious that there are some differences in genre preferences between videotape movies and cinema movies, because the audience is different. Anyone who watches American TV series and movies should know that the common plot of a single dog or frustrated middle-aged man is renting a disc at night, opening a few cans of beer, and watching movies lonely in his apartment with junk food.

In our country, the stage of videotape film is relatively short, but it is relatively close to this type. I think it is actually Internet bar movies.

There is a need that I think is similar. Watching movies is mainly to pass the time. You know, although there were a large number of people watching movies in Internet cafes at that time, most people did not go to Internet cafes for the sake of watching movies.

In fact, most people go to Internet cafes to play games. And at that time to kimchi online games-based Internet bar games, a major feature is the need for a large number of brush strange, so players often choose to hang up.

What will you do when you hang up and get bored? The answer is: go to the movies. Especially in the night, between playing games, leisure to boring, watching movies is the best pastime.

So the portraits of moviegoers are also very typical. According to recent industry reports, 70% of Internet bar users are between 18 and 30 years old, 90% are men, and 65% of them are unmarried. When people watch movies in Internet cafes, they generally prefer action movies, suspense films and comedies. The best is the type that makes people so bloodshot that they don't doze off.

And the fast series, as it happens, is one of the best, in line with almost all the elements of the Internet bar movie.

At the same time, as a series of films, Quick has a huge advantage. That is, when the network administrator downloads movies for Internet cafes, the larger the film library, the better. In this respect, the series is very dominant, and it is 357 at a time.

If you put a noun for the Internet cafe movies at that time, I believe that the fast series, which had not yet been officially released in the mainland at that time, must be among the best.

According to this speculation, in fact, in addition to the fast series, the Night Legend series, the biochemical crisis series, and works such as Van Helsing are all representatives of Internet bar movies. At the same time, these films are also the common copy backgrounds of Infinite flow novels.

So when "Fast 7" hit the box office, many shocked critics wondered where these audiences came from, and how so many people had seen the series, they must have omitted the special cultural phenomenon of "Internet cafe movies".

In more than 2000, when many people do not have a computer at home, the network is underdeveloped, there are few screens or even there are no cinemas at all in many places, Internet cafes are a film channel that covers the whole country.

03 when we regard the Internet bar as a channel, we will find that the number of people and the coverage area it can reach is quite terrible.

According to a report in 2005, there were 113000 registered Internet cafes in China at that time, with an average daily flow of 4000 million Internet cafes.

How terrible is this number? We can see everywhere, open all over the country, firmly sitting in the number of stores in the top number of Shaxian snacks, so far only 88000.

At its peak, the number of registered Internet cafes was about 140,000 to 50,000, but I think this number may have been seriously overcalculated, and it is difficult to count the number of unregistered wild Internet cafes.

I have mentioned in the past "25 years of rise and fall of Internet cafes in China" that after the popularity of "Legend" in 2001, how to pay and how to sell cards online has become a problem. At that time, Shanda relied on a strong push team to solve this problem directly in the Internet bar sales card.

At that time, I mentioned that the core of Internet cafes is always games, and a dominant game can drive the entire Internet bar industry, including "Legend", "Dream Journey to the West", "World of Warcraft", "League of Legends" and so on. But because on PC, no game can take over "League of Legends" in influence and coverage, the lack of national-level games has also become an Achilles' heel in Internet cafes.

But if we think the other way around, while games restrict Internet cafes, in fact, Internet cafes are also affecting the trend of China's game industry.

Obviously, games are an industry that is highly related to hardware media. When communicating with friends in the game industry, we can't help but mention the old questions, such as why there is a lack of handheld phones in China, the mainframe market, and why there are no 3A games, and so on.

I think if you take the Internet bar into account, you will get a very interesting perspective.

One of the obvious reasons for our lack of handset and mainframe market is the lack of foundation since we were young. To put it bluntly, in the past, it was so poor that the average family could not afford a handset or mainframe at all. When I was a child, my classmates who could afford to play with GBA could be regarded as children of a rich family.

Not being able to afford it here is actually a relative concept. It does not mean that we cannot afford game consoles at all, but that the consumption of game consoles has never been considered by parents, or it is an option with a very low budget.

I'm sure most people have the same experience as me. When domestic children buy entertainment products, they often ask their parents to buy them in the name of learning.

For example, to buy a bully for typing is actually for playing games. In order to practice listening, I bought a repeater, actually, to listen to music. To buy Wenqu stars in order to learn English is actually to play games and read novels. Buying a computer and installing broadband are also reasons for learning.

So in the past entertainment products in the sales strategy must be a layer of learning skin, what is accurate insight into the actual needs of users at the same time, but also grasp the needs of the actual paying crowd, this is!

This kind of demand has caused a phenomenon, generally speaking, the configuration of computers and broadband will not be too high, because the entertainment premium is extravagant consumption in addition to the demand for parents. Ordinary configuration allows children to access the Internet, they can chat, fight a landlord, grab a parking space, more than enough.

So even if there is a computer at home, one is not allowed in time, and the other is that there is a deficiency in the configuration, resulting in children finally choosing to go to places like Internet cafes to play games.

Therefore, the games suitable for Internet cafes are the ones that can spread most widely. The summary of a report on Internet cafes by Youfan Research is very exquisite: first of all, such games had better be PC online games, with high online duration, social attributes, and slightly higher requirements for hardware and Internet speed, but not too high.

In other words, stand-alone games naturally have the attribute of anti-Internet cafes. Regardless of the price, we are all pirated, and the hardware of the Internet bar is enough to run 3A, but as a temporary place to surf the Internet, not being able to archive is the biggest problem.

We all know that the system of Internet cafes will install restore genie, and if you turn it on again, you will empty all data.

In addition, the Internet bar is actually a social place, and many people go to the Internet bar together to play. Therefore, can let many people play together, partial to the anti-class games, is naturally suitable for Internet cafes.

This is even reflected in console games. In the past, there were many small mainframe bars, many of which were operated by Internet cafes. Even if you go to these hosts, customers are more likely to choose fights like "King of Boxing" or sports like "FIFA" rather than RPG like "final Fantasy 7".

It can be said that the so-called mainframe is actually a continuation of the arcade hall. Even the earliest Internet bar, at first, is an upgraded version of the arcade hall, initially opened in the arcade hall, called "black bar".

After that, the popularity of smartphones has even surpassed that of Internet cafes, and it is not surprising that mobile games put an end to everything.

Therefore, the high coverage of Internet cafes can be said to greatly stimulate the development of games consistent with each other. The greatest benefit is naturally e-sports, which almost perfectly meets all the needs of Internet cafes.

According to this idea, the situation in South Korea, another big country of e-sports, must be similar. In fact, South Korea is also a country with an unusually developed culture of Internet cafes, the number of Internet cafes reached more than 20,000 in 2001, and the first popular Internet games in Internet cafes in China are basically from South Korea.

In a South Korean drama "Gentleman's character" more than a decade ago, Zhang Dongjian, who is nearly 40 years old, went to Internet cafes to play games with the brothers to pursue the plot of his boyhood. This plot was once imitated by many domestic dramas.

04 so, when we re-examine the Internet bar, what kind of existence is it?

Starbucks attributes its success to the "third space", which is a social space for us to feel relaxed, happy and soothing besides life and work.

In my opinion, Internet cafes are actually the third space in China. In fact, according to this definition, on the attribute of the third space, Internet cafes can hang Starbucks and fight.

In fact, Internet cafes are also non-staple food shops. The extremely high coverage rate makes it very convenient for Internet cafes to sell snacks and drinks. Coupled with the Internet, especially the night people have a rigid demand for food and drink, Internet cafes are definitely an important sales channel for instant noodles and Iced Black Tea.

Now Iced Black Tea can't sell. I think it has a close relationship with the decline of Internet cafes and passenger flow. After all, if the skin doesn't exist, the hair won't be attached, right?

Internet cafes even have the property of a hotel. As most Internet cafes are open 24 hours a day, it has become a place for many people to stay. After all, compared with small hotels, Internet cafes have too many advantages. It is not only cheaper, but also can play games on the Internet, especially safer than the small hotels near the railway station.

In the past, if you wanted to catch the train the next morning and the railway station was far away, it was often an excellent choice to go to the Internet bar near the railway station the night before.

When it comes to the third space, what grade of Starbucks can you compare with my Internet bar?

In retrospect, when the Internet bar industry is declining and new industries such as Internet cafes and e-sports hotels appear, why can't they all return to the glory of the past?

On the one hand, of course, it is because every family has a computer and everyone has a mobile phone. On the other hand, e-sports Hotel is not an upgraded version or substitute for Internet cafes at all, it is purely another industry.

When this industry acquires only one of the attributes of Internet cafes, and upgrades this attribute, the customer group it faces is bound to be more refined.

When it is not like Internet cafes, it can drive all over the north and south of China, the fallen street of every university, within a radius of 50 meters of every railway station and long-distance bus station, it can make all strata of society, groups of different ages, a school does not care to study well, poor families, rich or ordinary or poor students hook up their shoulders and collectively climb over the wall, and shout "network management, get on the computer" together, it also loses the magic of the Internet bar.

So, how should we define Internet cafes?

It is a game room, a cinema, a snack bar, a small hotel, and a place where we can escape stress for a while outside our families and schools. The influence of Internet bar culture lies not only in the coverage area in the physical space, but also in the spiritual space, soothing the youth with nowhere to be placed.

Many years later, I had nothing to do and walked into the Internet bar alone, turned on the phone, registered, and ordered my favorite snacks and drinks. I want to cover the night, want to have a good war.

I no longer have to worry about being taken away by a teacher who suddenly inspects. I will be afraid that I don't know how to explain it to my parents, but in the face of the big 32-inch 144HZ curved screen, I don't know which software to click on.

Looking back, the speed of the Internet bar is fast, the hardware is good, and the environment is advanced.

It's just that my youth is no longer restless.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: IC Lab (ID:InsightPlusClub)

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