Full-time: Starting from Ye Xiu vs. Faker

Chapter 448: Blue Rain's Path to Expansion (Part )
I have to say, Blue Rain is still too "arrogant".

They were so arrogant that they didn't do enough research on the fighting game market.

After all, fighting games are a genre that was extremely glorious in the past and dominated the arcades in the streets and alleys.

Of course, the senior executives of Blue Rain have more or less had the experience of watching others play KOF in the arcade.

This causes them to subconsciously overestimate the potential player base of fighting games.

This ignores how small the current fighting game community is.

To be honest, when they took out the contract, they were actually prepared that the kids would look down on it.

After all, he is the GOAT of Kof, and now bullying young people is just like playing. Giving him a contract of millions of dollars does not seem to be that impressive.

Especially considering that Tenghai had previously made a huge investment of 100 million to buy Ye Xiu.

But there is no need to rush. Fatty is staying in Guangzhou anyway. If he is not satisfied, we can negotiate until we get an acceptable price.

Blue Rain's expected mentality is that if the kid can still maintain first-class competitiveness in Street Fighter, he can at least get more rankings and firmly sit in the ranks of top players, even if he can't win the championship.
Then Blue Rain could use the kid's GOAT reputation to quickly build the club around him.

In this case, it is completely acceptable to give the child a seven-digit contract with a first digit other than 1 before he retires.

If the child is still able to compete for a championship, whether it is a national championship or a world championship, then there is still room for this contract to be valued upwards.

But they don’t know that this “basic salary contract” in their minds alone is enough to scare the children.

One and a half million...

Little-known fact: KOF previously held an Asian-level tournament in Shanghai, inviting sixteen top players from China, Japan and South Korea to participate. To be conservative, it is definitely not an exaggeration to say that it was world-class, and it was an official tournament.

This is definitely a high-level fighting game competition event, what is the total prize money?
Three hundred thousand.

The champion can only get 120,000, and the runner-up only gets 50,000 or 60,000.

And just like this, many professional players have been able to play small competitions everywhere just to get a ranking and compete for a ticket.

The essence of fighting games is a bit of rock-paper-scissors, which means that even GOAT-level players cannot consistently win the championship.

The kid calculated his income from playing games over the years, and found that even in those years when he won many championships, his income rarely exceeded one million and a half a year.

Blue Rain used 1.5 million to buy out my bonus...Is it likely that I will make a profit?

Yes, that's right. In his understanding, Blue Rain pays him 1.5 million salary every year, and all his commercial income and bonuses such as endorsements go to the club.

One million and a half was a number that was enough to make him excited.

As top figures in the same game, Ye Xiu and Zeng Zhuojun have completely different perceptions.

Born into a wealthy family, he has never lacked money in his life except for the two times when he ran away from home.

Money is just an insignificant number to him.

But Zeng Zhuojun is completely different.

Already in his thirties, he has already learned to compromise in everything except competition.

Blue Rain pays generously and should not have too many restrictions on the content of their games.

So what's his reason for refusing?
As for Blue Rain, seeing Zeng Zhuojun agreed so readily, they were also stunned.

How come there are still people who don’t want money?

After studying for a long time, Huang Shaotian finally woke everyone up from their dream with a word after hearing about it:

"He is the best in history. Of course he is brave and skilled. Isn't it better to grab the bonus than to take our fixed salary?" Huang Shaotian was very excited.

"Do you remember what Lao Ye did in Glory before the launch of League of Legends?"

"Isn't it just joining the major guilds, helping them beat records and bosses, and then getting paid?"

"I guess this great god has the same idea."

"The 1.5 million you gave him is not his salary, but your nominal fee. It does not mean that he will completely accept the management of Blue Rain's system like us."

"They took the money and used our Blue Rain name to compete. After we win the championship, we can add more honors to our display cabinet."

"As for bonuses and such, of course they take them themselves."

Then, taking Ye Xiu, who is also the GOAT, as an example, the managers of Blue Rain immediately understood clearly.

Got it, a GOAT-level mercenary.

Is a sponsorship of 1.5 million expensive?
Not expensive at all.

So Blue Rain hurriedly deleted all the normal professional player management clauses in the original contract and replaced them with mercenary clauses that could not be more relaxed.

As a result, Zeng Zhuojun misunderstood because they did not write the bonus sharing ratio.

Doesn't that mean the club takes it all?

That's fine, just take it all. I won't lose anything anyway.

From that day on, the two big words "Blue Rain" were put in front of the child's ID, which also caused an earthquake in the domestic fighting game circle.

Fighting games don't require clubs.

In a single-player game, there is no such thing as tactical coordination. Everything depends on the player's personal operation and understanding of the game.

The requirements for the training environment are not high. Everyone comes from a noisy arcade. If the environment is not good enough, you can't concentrate on training, and you are not qualified to stay in the circle of professional players.

In addition, the circle did not have much fame outside the circle before, resulting in the fact that most fighting e-sports players, both at home and abroad, can only be regarded as scattered soldiers.

Some of them seem to have a team ID in front of their names, but in fact, it may just be that the experts in a certain player group have a good relationship with each other, and they discussed and formed a team to participate in the competition.

Compared to the highly professional, highly systematized, and highly clubbed environment of other e-sports, fighting games have a primitive and wild beauty similar to that of early e-sports.

And now, the kid was the first to be recruited by the club, just like a god, simply...

It's really enviable.

The players were envious and jealous when they thought that the kids could still get a seven-figure salary from the club even if they didn't win anything for a whole year.

When will I be approached by a club with a million-dollar contract? Then the question is, will the kid go a whole year without any results?
Soon it won’t.

Street Fighter, this project was launched by Tencent Hai not much later than League of Legends. With no lack of technology and ideas, the development speed was very fast.

However, it was still delayed until more than a year after the launch of LOL to be officially launched, in order to avoid the situation where their own games collided with the release schedule and shared the popularity.

But it was also because of the long development cycle, and Tenghai specially invited the main creators of this world's kof, who had been optimized by the original company, to join the project team.
The entire project has money, time, experience and creativity, so it goes without saying how high the quality of the finished product will be and how well it will be completed.

To the extent that, after going online, there is no need to apply too many balance patches, and it can be used in competitions.

So, on the same day that Street Fighter was officially launched, Tenghai directly announced that it would hold a world-class invitational tournament for players from all over the world in half a month.

The champion alone can take home a prize of 100,000 US dollars, which is definitely intimidating in a fighting competition.

Considering that this game was not even included in the subsequent regular event system, and could only be regarded as an additional game when it was first released, rather than a T0 finals of the same nature as the S game, this prize money seems even more generous.

At least it is much more generous than the official KOF events.

The kid just picked up a contract worth 1.5 million for free. Although he was happy, he was a little uneasy.

After all, after he was named Blue Rain, many Blue Rain fans heard about it. Although they didn’t play fighting games and didn’t know Zeng Zhuojun, they also went to the kid’s live broadcast room to show their support.

Especially a few senior fans, their rockets never stopped, which made Zeng Zhuojun dumbfounded.

This was the first time he had a vague sense of the wealth of true e-sports giants.

But if the child gets too much money and fails to achieve any results, his or her self-esteem will not be able to accept it.

He just pays more attention to reality, he is not shameless.

So after making sufficient preparations, the child went to participate, holding the golden joystick that proved his identity.

This invitational tournament will be held only half a month after Street Fighter is released.

Moreover, except for two offline trial sessions before the release, no one had the opportunity to experience it in advance.

In half a month, facing a brand new game, let alone practicing my own favorite character, it is already very good to be able to familiarize myself with the differences between the new Street Fighter series and KOF and integrate into them.

So what do you rely on to win? Probably human performance and understanding of the essence of fighting games.

An abnormal fact is that Zeng Zhuojun, who is almost 35 years old and should have been buried in the e-sports circle for several years, happens to possess the best performance among all fighting players.

This is even more abstract than the fact that Ye Xiu is still the most skilled mid laner in LPL at the age of 28.

It is hard to imagine that a 35-year-old guy can win the championship in an environment like KOF where there are hundreds of characters to choose from, relying on three random questions (randomly selecting three characters, which is expressed as selecting three question marks).

Of course, it is impossible for a child to understand every character to the core. What he relies on is his extraordinary human abilities.

His reaction, operation accuracy, and judgment are all among the best of the best. He is not inferior to even a young genius like A Guang, who is at the peak of his physical functions at the age of 19.

Coupled with the extremely deep understanding of the field of fighting games brought by thirty years of experience, he is able to achieve such a feat.

This time, with a new game, the kid once again let those young people who thought he was too old and should retire from the front line see what a true god on earth is.

Veigar, also known as the General or the Security Guard, is a character that was released in a subsequent update in a parallel world's Street Fighter VI.

But Tenghai is rich and powerful, and because of its unique importance in the Street Fighter series, it simply squeezed out the original psychic Lao Deng JP and appeared as the first big boss.

Of course, regardless of the background, the performance characteristics of the General character will not change much.

Overall, it is very strong in every sense of the word, but its weakness is also very prominent: it has no anti-aircraft dragon ability.

The general is a rare character who does not have any rising dragon skill that allows him to be invincible against the air, and does not even have a skill that allows him to attack upwards.

This causes his anti-air capability to be unimaginably weak, which is a major restriction on his otherwise strong overall performance.

But the general in the child's hand is not played like this at all.

Sheng Long was the child’s specialty, and he was even given the name “Guangdong-style Sheng Long” for a time.

When it comes to the general, the children were forced to develop the unique skill of attacking the air with heavy punches when it was almost common knowledge that "the general had no air defense".

By the time he took the general to the competition, countless players had studied the version for half a month and came to the conclusion that "the general is weak against air pirates", and used the air to bully countless generals into security guards.

When facing the kid's general, he jumped in subconsciously, but was knocked unconscious by the kid's series of heavy punches.

The main theme is tragic.

The kid played like a fish in water in this game.

Human performance has always been his advantage. When the game was first launched, there weren't so many players with unique skills. He could use the characters that were strong in that version without restraint, without worrying about being targeted due to lack of understanding.

With the addition of the Guangshi Rising Dragon to make up for the general's weakness in aerial defense, he successfully stood out from 256 masters from all over the world, fought all the way to the end, and won what may be the first world championship in the history of Street Fighter.

Plus a bonus of $100,000.

The happiest one should be Blue Rain.

I originally thought that a player like this kid who is in his thirties and is trying a new game would need some time to adapt even if he can still achieve good results.

Maybe the entire first season will be wasted.

Anyway, the 1.5 million can be earned back by selling a decent youth training player in LPL, so Blue Rain can afford to wait.

As a result, it wasn’t long after that and he actually won a championship?
And he's a world champion?

Don’t say that this world championship has no value. It is an award officially certified by Tencent Esports. It is better to have it than not.

Blue Rain had never won even one world-class championship trophy before.

Blue Rain looked at their LPL division, which had just won the LPL championship with great difficulty and was still working hard to advance to the S League, and whose expenses had already reached tens of millions or even hundreds of millions.

Take another look at this world champion that he bought for 1.5 million.
The first thing they did was to find someone to make a replica of the child’s trophy and put it in Blue Rain’s display warehouse.

Another thing was to quickly find someone to bring the $200,000 bonus to Zeng Zhuojun as an encouragement.

As a result, I ran into a kid who was holding a 100,000 yuan prize and excitedly found the door of the club...

(End of this chapter)