Rebirth 08: Rise from copycat phones

Chapter 509 Young Masters and Young Ladies in the Virtual Game

Fang Junli was well aware of how much money virtual games could make nowadays, but he never imagined that his own small virtual game Magic Light Demon Sword could also make so much money!

During the first hour after the game was launched, he kept staring at the data statistics page, watching the growth in the number of online users and the growth in recharge data.

When the number of online players reached 500, he couldn't help but wave his fist... 500 people were nothing, the key point was that among these 500 online players, almost more than half of them chose to make the first recharge!
In order to stimulate consumption, the first deposit is very cheap, and the first deposit reward is 6.6 yuan, 66 yuan, and 666 yuan...

The cheapest first-charge reward is only six yuan and sixty cents... What does six yuan and sixty cents mean?
Roughly, that’s four minutes of usage time of the Yun VW virtual machine!
The entry-level models of the virtual experience centers officially operated by Zhiyun are priced at RMB 100 per hour, which comes out to RMB 1.66 per minute!

If it is a third-party virtual experience center invested and opened by other companies or individuals, it may cost one hundred and twenty, one hundred and fifty or even more per hour.

It depends on the population base, consumption capacity and business philosophy of the city where the virtual experience center is located.

This is equivalent to four minutes of usage time of the virtual machine, which is the price of the first charge of the Magic Light Demon Sword.

Fang Junli feels that given the spending power of virtual machine users, the RMB 6.60 should not be a big problem, and at least it can be an important means to attract users to start recharging.

But what he didn't expect was that... quite a number of users actually directly chose the 666 yuan option when they started the game and made their first recharge!

The number of this group of users is quite large, even accounting for about 20% of the total number of users... This is an abnormal data in any computer game or mobile game.

But it just appeared in front of Fang Junli, which even made him wonder if there was a problem with the data statistics.

Where do so many idiots come from? They spend more than 600 yuan on the initial recharge for a game that they just started and don’t know how long they can play?
Isn't this stupid!

Now, he has met so many big fools!
Of course, Fang Junli thought that these people were big fools... But the second-generation and third-generation young masters and ladies, as well as the young first-generation entrepreneurs, who he thought were big fools, were not at all concerned... It was just over 600 yuan, that's not even money!

When playing games, no matter whether you play well or not, since you are bored and come here to spend some money to make yourself have more fun, isn't that normal?
Since they have already topped up their account, there is actually no real difference between six yuan and six hundred yuan. Young masters don’t even bother to check if there are any first-time top-up rewards, they just top up and that’s it…

Some of the young masters played the game for a while and found the gameplay quite interesting. Well, it’s not bad, much better than some of the rubbish virtual games they had played before: live well and get rewarded!
So, I started to top up more money to buy various props. As long as I had fun and heard some shouts of "Big Brother is mighty" when I was slashing people, tens of millions of dollars were not money...

Fang Junli and his colleagues started out making mobile games for cheap users, so they were very familiar with this kind of tactics. They had long ago arranged for their employees to use test machines to play various roles. Some of them deliberately went to PK to stimulate people's mentality, while others pretended to be beautiful women or handsome men and shouted "Brothers and sisters, you are great."

In short, all kinds of tricks will be used just to make the rich man have fun!
These are the operational strategies that Fang Junli developed based on his previous experience with mobile games... But after the game started, Fang Junli felt that his previous game operation experience was no longer useful.

In the past, game operations were mainly focused on serving a small number of wealthy people.

If the few wealthy players in the server are happy, they will recharge more and have more cash flow, which can also encourage some small-time players to recharge as well.

As for those players who play for free or recharge little, we don’t expect to make money from them, but they are still very important because they are part of the game content... and provide emotional value to the wealthy and petty players!
But now… Damn, the game is full of rich people, how can we serve them? How to distinguish the important from the unimportant? Who should we favor? Who provides emotional value to whom?
This is not easy to do!
Moreover, Fang Junli soon discovered that these young masters and young ladies had extremely bad tempers and would start PKs at any time.

The employees didn't even need to stir up trouble; soon these young masters and young ladies started forming cliques and fighting each other.

The game has only been open for three hours...a group of players are still in the novice map, but they have already started forming gangs and fighting.

The small world channel, which costs 100 yuan to speak once, has never stopped speaking for a moment. The global channel, which costs 1,000 yuan to speak once, also speaks very frequently.

This scene shocked Fang Junli!

He had long known that in the virtual world, people's inner thoughts and emotions would be magnified... This was very obvious in the Kingdom's Top.

Gang wars in Kingdom of the Peak are very frequent, and gang wars break out at any time. He himself is also a player of Kingdom of the Peak and has participated in several gang wars before.

However, he only played with it for a while. Later, he moved the Yun VW virtual machine he bought privately to the company and used it as the only permanent testing machine in the company.

However, the fact that the virtual game he made could attract so many people to compete was beyond his expectations.

After all... Strictly speaking, the virtual game he made was a level-breaking game that focused on single-player and team-based level-breaking, and it mainly focused on playing level-breaking copies... Fighting in the main world was not the focus of the game development.

However, it is also surprising that these people do not fight in dungeons, but instead engage in gang fights in the main world!
Such a lively atmosphere has brought about a continuous rise in popularity... The young masters and young ladies all have friends, and when they feel happy being bullied or bullying others in the game, they will naturally drag their friends over.

Then, Fang Junli discovered that his game became inexplicably popular!

One day after the game was launched, the number of people online at the same time exceeded one thousand... This is a virtual game, not a mobile or computer game.

This virtual game has a thousand people online at the same time, which is a lot. The number of people online at the top of the kingdom is only about ten thousand people at the same time.

What does having one thousand people online bring?
Amazing recharge flow!
Today is a day, just one day, with the first charge reward, the fighting scenes after the game was launched were fierce, and there was intensive use of various shouting props.

The recharge turnover of the Magic Light Demon Sword on the first day reached more than one million!
The users who recharged the most have exceeded 100,000 yuan!
This is the first day, and there are only so few people!
Fang Junli still underestimated the money-making ability of virtual games, and also underestimated the appeal of the action-game he made to players: Many players said that although the game was simple and the picture quality and physical effects were very poor, the fighting was really fun!

It’s much more fun than those adventure-focused cartoon games like Top of the Kingdom with fighting!

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The Magic Light Demon Blade quickly rose to become the choice of many virtual game players, which is also related to the fact that there are not many virtual games these days.

There are only about twenty virtual games in the domestic market, and most of them are small and rubbish games.

Although Kingdom Come: Peak is very popular, not everyone likes to play it.

Although Magic Light Demon Blade is essentially a mobile game mode disguised as a virtual game, action virtual games are still relatively rare, so players are naturally willing to spend money!
During this period of time, as long as these high net worth players are satisfied, they will spend money like crazy!

The example of such a big game as "Kingdom of War" is right in front of us: with a maximum of only 20,000 simultaneous online users, this number of online users is not even ranked third-rate in traditional computer games, console games or mobile games!

In traditional computer/console or mobile games, there are hundreds of thousands of people online at the same time, and there are also quite a few with millions.

A mere 20,000 yuan is certainly far from a failure, but don't expect to make much money either.

However, Kingdom Peak is different. It has only 20,000 maximum simultaneous online users, but its monthly turnover can reach more than 300 million!

In addition, the game’s monthly active users and registered users are even bigger!

Because almost every virtual machine user...even virtual users who have only experienced it once or twice in the virtual experience center, have registered for this game and tried to play it.

There are still very few virtual games these days, and almost all of them are simple small games hastily launched by major game companies. As for the real large-scale virtual games, there are still only two so far: Armageddon and Kingdom Come.

The virtual device was only released in December, and now it is May, which is only half a year in total. This time is too tight, and those large game companies have not had time to complete the development of large-scale virtual games.

This also gives large-scale virtual games like Kingdom Peak a huge living space!

However, in addition to the Top of the Kingdom, Zhiyun Group regularly publishes the rankings and even turnover of virtual content every month in order to stimulate the virtual content market and encourage and attract more developers to join the content ecosystem of the virtual world.

Among a large number of virtual games, except for Kingdom Summit and Doomsday Battle, the revenue of other small games is also very amazing. There are many games with monthly revenue of millions, and quite a few with tens of millions!
This brought huge benefits to the first batch of game companies entering the virtual game market.

This further stimulated people in small and medium-sized Internet companies such as Fang Junli: these small games are not very good in other aspects except that they have the word "virtual". The graphics, character design, plot and so on are all very average... They are all hastily made in a short period of time, how good can they be!

But, these broken things are so profitable!
I can do it too!

Almost all game companies in the world are now focusing on the virtual world, and have more or less squeezed out some staff to work on virtual game projects... Of course, not all companies can do it.

Regarding virtual games, although Zhiyun Group provides an almost complete set of development kits, including virtual game engines and various development software, in theory, game companies only need to build game content on them and will not encounter any critical technical difficulties.

But even so, it is not easy to build content into a virtual game engine. It still requires technology and experience.

At the same time, due to the more immersive gameplay of virtual games, the graphics production is more difficult and more costly.

Virtual games are not that easy to develop!

Some of the seemingly hastily released small virtual games in the virtual world before, don’t underestimate them, because they were actually developed by virtual game project crews under some large Internet companies.

The virtual game studio under Yihai Technology alone has launched five small games in the past few months.

Several other large Internet companies, including some overseas Internet companies, are similar in that they have more or less launched their first small-scale virtual games.

As for truly small businesses and startup-type works…there actually weren’t any before this.

Fang Junli himself didn’t know that his company’s work “Magic Light Demon Sword” was actually the first virtual work from a small enterprise/startup received by Zhiyun Virtual Mall!
Therefore, Zhiyun Virtual Mall is still very important... The enrichment of the virtual ecology certainly requires the support of a number of medium and large Internet companies, but relying solely on the content of medium and large Internet companies is far from enough. They also need a large number of small developers to provide virtual content. Take Zhiyun APP Mall as an example. The ecological content provided to more than one billion Zhiyun mobile phone users around the world is more than two million!

That’s a total of two million. Even if you work the developers of medium and large Internet companies to death, they still can’t produce so much content.

In fact, most of these contents come from various small developers, including individual developers and developers from small companies.

Although the future virtual content ecosystem will focus on medium and large Internet companies, it will also pay attention to and even support some small developers.

After the staff of Zhiyun Virtual Mall conducted actual testing on the work of Fang Junli's company, Magic Light Demon Blade, they found that the game was quite complete and had rich gameplay. Although there were few models of maps, characters and monsters, the repeated level-breaking mode would not make people feel bored.

The main thing is that the numerical control is very fast, and it is quite rewarding to beat the levels one by one...

Moreover, as an action-oriented role-playing game, the action design is quite good.

It’s just that the picture quality is too poor, and the physical effects are also very poor!

If the graphics quality and physics effects were shown to the developers of Zhiyun's simulation game engine, they would curse: I worked so hard to develop this simulation engine, a top-notch game engine that can even simulate the images and physics properties of the real world to a certain extent... and you used this engine to produce such a piece of garbage?
However, the graphics and physical characteristics are at a medium to low level among a group of small games, but not at the bottom... This is already very good for a small enterprise.

You know, those small games at the bottom may not look like rubbish, but in fact, each of them was developed by the virtual game departments or large game companies under the world's top Internet companies!
Due to time and technical issues, all virtual games released now are works of large Internet companies or professional large game companies. There are no works of small companies at all.

The Magic Light Demon Sword from Fang Junli's company, this small virtual game can rank among the middle and lower reaches among the small virtual game works of a number of large companies. In fact, it has already defeated many virtual game project teams in large companies!
The person in charge of game operations at Zhiyun Virtual Mall personally experienced the Magic Light Sword, and combined with the reports from his subordinates, he felt that the game had great potential.

And it’s the work of a small company…which makes it very valuable for publicity.

The virtual games of big companies are very popular and profitable, and everyone thinks it is normal. Although they are envious and jealous, they also think it is reasonable.

But if a small company's work becomes a hit, then it's a completely different story... Countless people will think: If such a rubbish team can do it, why can't I? I can do it, too!
Stimulate the developers and paint a big picture for them so that they can work harder and more attentively on the development of virtual content and strive to enrich the virtual content ecosystem as soon as possible.

Only when the virtual content is enriched can it sift out the good and cultivate excellent content works, becoming one of the reasons that attract people to continue to enter the virtual space.

In the end, the Magic Light Demon Sword received special traffic support on the first day of its listing!

Otherwise, how could we give you a huge advertising package in the virtual space right when the game is first launched?

In fact, Fang Junli didn't know the inside story of these things. He only knew that Zhiyun Virtual Mall would provide some promotional resources to support its own games so that they could make preparations.

But I didn’t expect that the traffic support would be so great.

On the first day, the number of people online at the same time reached thousands!
Don’t think it’s a small number. There are few virtual devices these days. Globally, the number of people using virtual devices online at the same time is only a few tens of thousands.

It is not easy to achieve thousands of people online.

It doesn’t matter if there are few people, the key is high turnover!

The recharge turnover exceeded one million on the first day, and Fang Junli announced on the second day that bonuses would be given to everyone in the company, from the management and technical backbones to the cleaning ladies!

At the same time, all the main R&D personnel in the virtual game project team will be given shares!

He had a hunch that if nothing unexpected happened, his company would soon face a wave of poaching!
When those large Internet companies see that their own games have become popular, they will definitely be the first to propose acquisitions and poach people.

He had to prepare in advance.

Non-compete agreements have been signed and equity incentives have been provided before, but it is not enough... We must continue to increase the amount in order to retain these key technical talents.

Therefore, it is necessary to further increase wages, bonuses, and shares!

As a boss, if you want to make a lot of money, you must be willing to share the profits with your own people, especially the core management and technical backbones!
That afternoon, before the first day of the game's launch was over, he called more than a dozen core technical backbones of Magic Light Demon Sword to his office one by one.

They don’t use any of the usual tricks of making big promises. Instead, they just give shares directly, increase salaries and give high bonuses.

This was the most generous thing Fang Junli had done since he started the company... In the past, he had only given small favors and made big promises at best.

But it’s different now!

Fang Junli had a hunch that as long as he could keep the game of Magic Light Demon Blade stable, he would get rich, really rich!

In order to stabilize this game, the core technical team must be stabilized, even if it means losing a lot of company shares!

Otherwise, he had a hunch...there was no need to wait until tomorrow. Starting tonight, these technical backbones would receive a lot of calls or emails from various headhunters, inviting them to join other companies.

Some large companies will even take action themselves and poach the entire team: from the project team leader to the ordinary programmer, all of them will be poached away, and the original team will form a complete project team to develop new games!

Fang Junli doesn't want this to happen. After all, the game will need to be modified to fix various bugs and modify them simultaneously to launch more new content.

For example, they had not anticipated that players would love to PK in the main world so much, so they had prepared less game content in this regard.

Therefore, they plan to quickly launch some main world PK related content, such as improving the gang guild mechanism. The PK mechanism in the Wangshan main world should allow people who like PK to have fun, but also ensure that people who don't like PK will not be disturbed.

At the same time, we must prevent players who are PKed from quitting the game out of anger, so the losses caused by PK must be reduced.

You have to be able to be killed by PK, and then be a brave man again after resurrection, and fight back immediately... instead of being killed by PK, suffering huge losses, which makes you so angry that you quit the game directly.

There are so many things that need to be improved, and we cannot do without these technical backbones.

In order to make people stay willingly, the treatment must be adequate!

The employees also know that their company's game has become a hit and they are going to make a lot of money. You, Fang Junli, are the boss. You have invested real money to start a company for research and development, and you have also taken huge investment risks. It is normal for you to take the lion's share of the profits, and we agree with this.

But you should leave some soup for us technical team members, right? We are also betting the most precious youth of our careers to work hard with you!

Fortunately, Fang Junli is a smart startup company boss!

As soon as they saw the momentum was picking up, they immediately made big investments to retain people, which made the company's virtual game technical team very happy.

This Lao Fang is quite particular. He is a good boss. Keep following him!

Sure enough, that night, many people in their company, from management to ordinary employees, received invitations from HRs of other companies and even professional headhunters.

Of course, there were also people who chose to change jobs, but what made Fang Junli feel at ease was that none of the core technical backbones left and all chose to stay.

They worked hard for half a year and finally created a hit virtual game. In addition to bonuses and high salaries, Fang Junli also gave them shares to share the profits.

And this is a lot of shared benefits!

They are all smart people and know something about the game's revenue data. If the momentum continues like this, their company may even be able to go public just by relying on this virtual game of Magic Light Demon Sword!

Once listed, these original shares will be very valuable.

Even if it doesn't go public, the dividends will be a lot of money!

With Fang Junli's generous investment in retaining core technical backbones, it is actually very difficult for other companies to poach them, even for some large Internet companies!
Of course, a lot of ordinary technical personnel were poached... Fang Junli also came from the game industry. He is an insider in the industry and personally leads the development team of the Magic Light Demon Sword project.

He knows exactly who are the key technical talents in the team, who are indispensable, and who are ordinary coders with little value, so when he pays a lot of money to retain people, he doesn't pay everyone a lot of money.

For example, some ordinary programmers can find a large group of substitutes in minutes. The content of their work is not that important. Basically, they just need to increase their salary and give them a bonus. As long as they pay the penalty for breach of the non-competition agreement, you can go wherever you want!

While Fang Junli and his company were excited and even turbulent because of the game Magic Light Demon Blade, the Internet industry, or to be more precise, the game industry was also shocked by this virtual game, Magic Light Demon Blade, which popped out of nowhere.

A small virtual game developed by a tiny company became a hit on the first day of its release?
Judging from this momentum, the monthly turnover will reach tens of millions!

Is it really that easy to make money from this virtual game?

So jealous!

(End of this chapter)