Losing Money to Be a Tycoon

April 1st, April Fool’s Day…

Game Designer was officially up for sale. It was set at twenty-eight yuan!

Now that Tengda had made a name for itself and even recruited several video UP Masters to publicize its new game, it was impossible for it to publish the new game without gamers realizing it.

Pei Qian struggled with pricing for a long time.

He could not set too low a price because of lessons he learned from Ghost General. He could not set too high a price either because of another set of lessons he learned from Ocean Stronghold.

What should he do, then?!

He was caught in a fix.

Pei Qian pondered over it for a long time, before deciding to price the game slightly lower than average.

This was because the special characteristic of Game Designer was that gamers could achieve “Cloud Clearance”¹!

As long as content creators recorded themselves playing this game, the Cloud Players¹ would fully experience the game on these video websites. Then, they would not have such a great urge to buy the game.

In other words, the main group of people who would buy the games would be hardcore gamers.

These would be people like video UP Masters, anchorwomen, and gamers who were passionate for domestically-produced standalone games. This group of people would not be price-sensitive. Whether a game was priced at thirty yuan or ninety yuan would make no real difference to them. If they wanted to play it, they would buy it.

As for people like Cloud Players who were used to getting the gaming experience for free—no matter how low the price was, it would not be lower than zero yuan.

Thus, after taking everything into consideration, pricing the game at twenty-eight yuan was best. That was the lowest price the System would allow Pei Qian to set.

Given that the target audience was more or less set, the low price would ensure that Pei Qian earned less!

This price caused some people in the company to worry. They were afraid that they would not be able to recover their capital. However, after Pei Qian shot down all of their suggestions, he finalized the price.

Pei Qian hoped that this game’s descriptors would be: huge investment, cool backgrounds, vastly popular, and dismal sales!

Until now, Game Designer’s main investment was in its art resources. They poured more than two million yuan in the art resources. Together with all the other expenses, they spent a total of about three million yuan on creating the game.

Ruan Guangjian gave them discounts, but he was only in charge of the animation design. Tengda still had to pay other people to create the actual animations, backgrounds, and models.

After adding in all the other expenses for the game, they had to sell more than three hundred thousand copies of it before they would be able to profit!

Pei Qian was quite confident that they would not be able to reach that volume of sales.

He could accept the fact that a small group of people among the gamers were masochists. However, there could not possibly be three hundred thousand masochists among them, right?

…

At the same time that the game was published, Qiao Liang uploaded his video.

After he finished, Qiao Liang immediately logged off the Potato Web platform. He switched off notifications on his fans’ chatting platforms and set his cell phone to silent mode. In a single breath, he had gone into isolation mode!

At once, he sent the link to the video to Lu Mingliang. A while later, they sent the money over. Now that the money was in his account, Qiao Liang heaved a long sigh of relief.

Perfect!

He was now in full ostrich-mode. He did not care that chaos was going to follow. Since the money was in his account, he could play for two months before paying attention to any of this! Even if he got scolded upside down, everything will blow over in two months. He would act as if nothing had happened. Teacher Qiao was still a good man.

…

Not long after Qiao Liang posted his video, his fans received a notification recommending it. In just ten minutes, the fans’ moods were vastly overturned. They were very hurt!

At first, when they saw that Teacher Qiao had just uploaded a new video, they were overjoyed. When they saw that it was posted under New Recommended Games of the Month, their excitement halved. That was because they knew that this was the segment he used for sponsored partnerships; the videos there were not very interesting. A portion of the fans felt bored so they clicked the notification to watch the video.

Then, their three points-of-views [3. This is a Chinese, online slang representing one’s values, life philosophy, and worldview.] were shredded to bits! The entire video contained only recordings of a certain game. The game looked very beautiful; there was nothing worth criticizing.

However, the voice-over and contents of the narration could only be described with four words: intolerable to the ears!

“My dear daddies, greetings. I’m the same old Godfather of Games you guys know me as—Teacher Qiao. Before I begin this video, would you—dear daddies—please allow me to calm myself down? Slurp, slurp, slurp… ah…

“Everyone, the game that you are looking at now… do you see its creator? Tengda! Tengda Games has published a new game. Now, I want to start by showing all of you the images from this game…

“Sorry, everyone, I’m a little incoherent. Uh-oh, ladies and gentlemen, the very first time¹…

“I haven’t felt this way in a couple of years. I’ve waited for this game for so long. At 3:11 AM, Tengda Games’ research and development team sent these video materials to me online. Its name is Game Designer. G-A-M-E, game, game designer!

“Awesome!”

…

Many fans of Teacher Qiao were stunned. Their mouths were stuck in an ‘O’ shape until they finished the video. The video was not long; it lasted ten minutes at most. However, the style of the video was very different from the rest of Teacher Qiao’s videos. It looked like it was made by a completely different person!

In the past, although the videos under the New Recommended Games of the Month were all done for sponsors, Teacher Qiao still put in effort for them. He did an introduction that matched the style of each game. He spoke coherently and smoothly in the videos. He did these videos for sponsors so he emphasized the games’ good points and skimmed through their bad points. However, the videos were still full of content and interesting.

What the hell was this video all about?

Strangely, he was using English words mixed with Mandarin. He was even using a tone that disgusted the viewers. He was praising this game to no end, and not mentioning a single bad point about it. What’s more, he was saying useless things. It was almost as if he could not find anything good to say about the game in reality.

The most important thing was that even after watching the entire video, they could not find anything of value. Everything was pointless. It was a pure waste of time! Apart from disgusting people to the core, this video served no purpose.

After watching the video, many fans could not accept the cruel reality.

“Teacher Qiao, if you were kidnapped, blink! Oh, you’re not showing your face. That’s alright.”

“What is this? It’s fine if you’re being sarcastic, but how awful can this be?!”

“Turn away, turn away!”

“Suck-ups deserve to die!”

“I shouldn’t have clicked this video after seeing that it was posted under New Recommended Games of the Month.”

“What’s the meaning of this? Is this an April Fool’s joke? En, it’s April 1st. I guess that’s it!”

“I cannot tell from his tone whether he is being sarcastic or for real…”

“If you cannot tell whether he is being sarcastic or just stupid, always take it that he’s being stupid!”

“I counted. In this ten-minute video, you said ‘uh-oh’ more than thirty times. I’m very bored, and you’re a suck-up!”

“Uh-oh, awesome. This is my own moment!”

“It’s hard to believe the amount of money this Teacher Qiao—who has played countless games before—received before he agreed to make a sponsored video like that…”

“I’m beginning to doubt that he is getting paid for this video at all. Wouldn’t the big client get disgusted, seeing him suck up to this extent?”

“The key thing was… he was publicizing Tengda Games! From The Lonely Desert Road to the current Game Designer… I’m stunned. What happened between Tengda and Teacher Qiao…?”

“Was the game-dissing UP Master defeated with the evil games company’s money? I can’t help but picture what happened between them in my head!”

“Tengda seemed to have really published a new game today… called Game Designer. There’s a 99.99% chance that Teacher Qiao was paid to do this!”

“Is it really Tengda’s game? Is it the same company that published Ghost General and Ocean Stronghold? This… why is their marketing strategy so lousy? Or was Teacher Qiao sucking up on his own?”

“After watching this video, I was determined never to touch this rubbish game. However, after seeing that it’s Tengda’s game, I feel the urge to try it out. What should I do?”

“Don’t do it! You know that it’s sh*t; why would you eat it? Why do you hate yourself so much?!”

“I’m the exact opposite. I really want to see what kind of game could make my son suck up to this extent!”