My game, you have no right to award

Chapter 182 Separate Scroll
The team behind the wildly popular games "Vampire Survivor" and "Potato Brothers," which sold millions of copies, is bringing their latest masterpiece, "Joker," to the market soon!
A super-creative gameplay combining card games, roguelike elements, and poker! An innovative experience that will instantly send you into overdrive!

An addictive experience that you'll want to keep playing, waiting for you to take on the challenge!
【image】

Click here to add the game to your wishlist immediately: [Link]

Follow, retweet, and comment for a chance to win one of 100 CD keys for the game!

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The official Bilibili account of Qingyan Studio posted a long-prepared update, which instantly became a trending topic on Bilibili.

Unlike previous titles like Vampire Survivors and Potato Bros., which didn't generate much buzz before release but became wildly popular after launch due to their high quality and positive reviews, Joker Cards garnered immense hype even before its release.

Zhou Kuang's newly recruited head of the public opinion department naturally also oversaw some of the work of the marketing department.

It's no exaggeration to say that the scene has been completely transformed.

Zhou Kuang was naturally very satisfied; the money hadn't been wasted.

At first, he had some doubts, since headhunters typically offer high salaries to any employee in charge of the marketing department.

It's as if any talent involved in market functions has become a gold nugget.

The same applies to people you choose yourself.

If this money were allocated to the project, it might be enough to hire another five to ten senior employees.

But in the end, Niu Tieming and Feng Qi persuaded him.

Niu Tieming had actually brought this up many times, but Zhou Kuang finally made up his mind this time, mainly because Feng Qi had spoken up.

As a former employee of Antarctic Interactive Entertainment, his job naturally involved dealing with the marketing department.

Often, these tedious exchanges can even hinder their development progress.

However, through these experiences, Feng Qi also realized the power of marketing.

So when Megvii Games maintained its "retro" release style, Feng Qi still offered his opinion.

We still need to focus on marketing and increase advertising.

Zhou Kuang wasn't unaware of the benefits of doing this; he just subconsciously disliked this trend of prioritizing marketing over production.

This may be related to his experiences before he traveled through time.

He considered too many market factors back then, which makes him feel nauseous whenever he thinks about it now.

Feng Qi gave a good explanation without even having to think.

Megvii Games is currently focusing on "re-production," dedicating all its funds, time, and energy to the game's development.

What they need to do is simply change from tilting only to one side to taking both sides into account.

It's wonderful to have both "heavy production" and "heavy marketing".

Players finally learned about the relationship between Light Swallow Studio and Kuangshi Games from various KOLs.

Even if players didn't pay attention to the posts when KOLs came to Kuangshi Games, it's not a big problem.

After the official account of Qingyan Studio released a teaser post for "The Clown Card," many KOLs who visited last time shared the post and even commented that they "want to play."

Of course, this so-called "friendly reposting" is not that simple.

Many KOLs did share the post because of their previous hands-on experience, but many others signed a sponsored contract with Kuangshi Games and are preparing to make videos or livestream their experience of "Joker" after its release.

Many niche single-player game streamers on the platform have also received commercial offers.

For example, the amount of a live-streaming commercial contract varies depending on the agreed duration and the popularity of the streamer.

Top game streamers can earn tens of thousands of yuan just for streaming their gameplay for two hours.

Some streamers with just over four figures in followers, or even only four figures, might only earn a few hundred yuan for a day of streaming.

For them personally, this is certainly a considerable sum of money, but from the perspective of the game's overall marketing, it's not much.

Several factors combined led to a rapid increase in the number of viewers, comments, and shares of the post on the official "Joker" account after it was posted just once.

Kuangshi Games can see from the Steam backend that the number of followers and wishlists for "Joker" is also doubling and doubling again at an exponential rate.

It's fair to say that "Joker Cards" has already generated a buzz on Bilibili even before its official release.

While this level of popularity is far from matching the status and popularity of "Youming Shanhai" among players at the time, it is still quite considerable.

Many of their peers are absolutely furious.

You can understand why "Youming Shan Hai" became a hit across the internet and sold out, after all, games of this quality are indeed very difficult to make, and we can't make them.

But what about Qingyan Studio?
Many people can see that while their numbers and technical skills are considered excellent in the solo travel community, their overall strength is just so-so.

Many domestic game companies can easily assemble such a team.

While they don't have the same level of synergy as Qingyan Studio, they also don't have as much time to work together.

At worst, we can just pull out the top talent from various teams within the company and form a new team.

Ultimately, their strength is definitely far superior to that of Qingyan Studio.

The problem is, they simply don't have the same level of coordination capabilities as Qingyan Studio.

The other party is developing the game too quickly; it would be absolutely impossible without a top-notch project planner.

and……

Where do they get so many great game design proposals?
Vampire Survivor directly created a new subgenre based on roguelike games, which is the so-called "survivor-like" game.

Many industry peers scoff at this, asking, "Is this what you call innovation?"
Isn't this just adding some common elements to the base of pigeon meat?
Even from a gameplay perspective, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it a regression.

The problem is that, judging from market feedback, users are receptive to this approach, players enjoy playing it, and developers are very interested.

After looking at them all, it turns out that these people are out of place.

After its release, "Vampire Survivor" became a huge hit, selling millions of copies and completely igniting the genre.

Okay, we admit you're amazing. So we'll just have to bow down, come in and have some soup and scraps, okay?
While all companies were researching the survivor-themed genre and preparing to finally decide how to launch their own survivor-themed games, Kuangshi Games' "Potato Brothers" just popped out out of nowhere!
While others are still figuring out how to launch a project, you've already finished the second installment of the survivor game genre?
You fucking opened it!

After the game was released, industry peers realized that Light Swallow Studio had not simply created another reskinned version of Vampire Survivor without any creativity, but had made considerable innovations on its foundation.

Many players believe that Potato Bros.' changes to Vampire Survivor are even greater than Vampire Survivor's changes to ordinary roguelike games!

This is simply unbelievable!
Your peers may not care that you make money from a single work, nor do they care that your team is capable, but they really care that you can come up with good ideas without limit!

After all, this is the real factor in the gaming industry that can influence whether or not you can make big money.

If we lose in other places, so be it. We can always learn from our mistakes and win them back in one go.

But Light Swallow Studio keeps releasing top-notch creative games, it's practically leaving no room for others to compete.

With the release of "Joker Cards," countless industry peers are watching closely, hoping to see Kuangshi Games stumble.

After all, ever since Qingyan Studio came out, many people's bosses have been putting pressure on them every day with a dark expression on their faces.

You can't even compete with Megvii Games, let alone a small studio with less than fifty people?
They said these things without any real reason.

However, they lacked a leader like Zhou Kuang, and they didn't have enough creative ideas to directly apply to the game.

Then the only way to atone for all the guilt is to work overtime.

The problem is, employees are human beings, not machines! Longer working hours don't necessarily mean higher output!

There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and humans must rest well in order to have physical strength and energy.

Unfortunately, these bosses don't understand this; they just feel they've found another reason to continue exploiting their employees.

The employees, who were paid by their boss, were afraid of losing their jobs and dared not resist him. So they could only transfer their anger to Qingyan Studio, which had "affected" them.

This is why they were so furious when they saw "The Joker" become so popular.

The release date arrived quickly, and players finally learned the game's price.

98 yuan!
The initial promotional price for "The Joker" is 82 yuan!
It's almost 20% off.

Even so, this is the most expensive game released by Lightswallow Studio on Steam.

As expected, this price gave many people with ulterior motives an excuse.

As an indie game, 98 yuan is absolutely the highest price imaginable.

At least for domestically produced indie games.

A passerby posted a related complaint: "I don't know why they sell games so expensively. I originally wanted to buy 'Joker' at launch, but seeing how expensive it is, I think I'll pass."

I don't know how Bilibili's algorithm works, but this post just happened to be pushed to the homepage and seen by countless passersby and gamers.

This person was incredibly unlucky.

He has never posted a video, and his total number of followers is no more than twenty, with more than a dozen of them following him automatically because of his wheat products.

My social media feed is almost entirely filled with reposts of giveaways, but I've never won a single prize.

This time, I finally had some free time and suddenly had the idea to post a status update, complaining about my dissatisfaction with the price of "The Joker Card", which resulted in Bilibili pushing me to the forefront.

Instantly, players with all sorts of opinions flooded his comment section.

There were direct insults, expressions of doubt, strong support, and sarcastic remarks.

The comments section is no longer about discussing this person's updates; instead, it's become a battlefield, where people are attacking him relentlessly.

As the main character, this person was naturally caught in the crossfire.

"You're so poor, you can't even afford a hundred yuan, but you could earn that with a day's work."

"Why should I pay? They just don't like it, what's it to you?"

"Anyone who doesn't like playing the Joker card will be the Joker for life."

"Dian! You've got it backwards. The real clowns are those who pre-ordered the game before it even came out."

"I don't understand why you guys are so hostile towards domestically produced games. One hundred yuan isn't expensive at all."

"Those who inflate prices deserve to be condemned. If 100 yuan isn't expensive, who are you, young master? Oh, that IP address... that's not surprising then."

"Should we blindly support domestically produced games? Other games sell for fifty, why do you have the right to sell for a hundred?"

This whole thing has escalated in a very strange way. While the price of "The Joker" is indeed a bit high, it certainly doesn't deserve to be attacked like this.

As it was an unexpected event, Zhou Kuang quickly learned of the news from his employees.

However, he wasn't too worried, since it wasn't the first or second time that Kuangshi Games' games had been attacked.

At least no one spread rumors this time, so that's good.

However, the newly recruited head of the public opinion department had a different opinion.

Seeing that the other party was eager to retaliate, Zhou Kuang shrugged, indicating that they could do whatever they wanted.

As long as it's not a direct attack on the player community, it's not a big problem.

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"One minute left..."

Black Cat watched the countdown to unlock the Joker card, which was finally ticking in its final loop, and felt a strong urge to play.

Last time he went to Qingyan Studio, which is the company of Kuangshi Games, he got to try out "Joker".

Although it was only thirty minutes long, the game's unique gameplay and experience left a deep impression on him.

So when he got home, he was itching to get to the main game as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, despite being a well-known streamer, Kuangshi Games still couldn't give him special treatment and allow him to play the game ahead of time.

Therefore, he could only pre-order the game and wait for its global release to play with other players.

"Has everyone bought the game yet?"

To distract himself, the black cat asked casually.

"Bought"

"Did not buy"

"A gift from someone else"

Too expensive

“Can I play on my phone?”

Looking at the different answers, the black cat silently counted them in his mind.

It seems like the number of people commenting "bought" and "didn't buy" in the comments section is about the same, but there are still more people who didn't buy.

However, it's quite remarkable that half of the reviewers pre-ordered the game.

It seems that his fans have similar tastes in games as he does.

The black cat nodded to himself in thought.

But actually, his thinking wasn't entirely accurate.

Besides the similar tastes, he also underestimated his own appeal.

As a single-player game blogger, Black Cat may not have the most followers, but his followers have an extremely high level of recognition.

When someone posts a status update, they might get a few dozen comments at most.

However, his posts can easily get hundreds of comments.

This number is terrifying.

Therefore, many of his fans have seen him promote the game "Joker" multiple times, and naturally become interested in it.

"You can play now!"

Black Cat turned off the alarm clock, its eyes gleaming, and frantically refreshed its Steam library.

Sure enough, the Joker card displayed the words "Start Game".

Black Cat clicked the left mouse button without hesitation, and since he hadn't enabled the pre-rendering function in Steam settings, he entered the game almost instantly.

(End of this chapter)