Chapter 19
Chen Mo was quite satisfied. He was worried about the audio side of things of the game, so the skill book was a godsend.
Chen Mo always hired people to do BGM and sound effects for his game, as he did not have any musical bones in him.
For some of the classic games, it will be impossible to recreate them perfectly just from dictation. Therefore it would be better if he took matters into his own hands.
Chen Mo tapped and activated it immediately. The blue skill book turned into rays of light and entered his fingertips.
Chen Mo took out the keyboard from his office that had been provided by the competition officials. Thinking he wouldn’t be able to use it, he had put it away, as it was just gathering dust.
1From a pure money-making perspective, a Chinese pay-to-win mobile game from his previous life would be the best choice.
These games weren’t super high quality, purely attracting players using the coding side of things. You shouldn’t make such a game too much about monetization.
However, Chen Mo was worried about two things.
First was his coding abilities.
The reason Chinese pay-to-win games are able to keep their players paying was by stimulating them using well made code. Just because you improve your strength in game using money doesn’t mean the game would be profitable.
Therefore software engineers within the Chinese video game industry had very high statuses, only second to the producer as software engineers control the tempo of the game.
Making the code well would mean giving the game a proper foundation. The game can be saved even if the graphics looked bad or if the playstyle was repetitive. But if the coding weren’t done well, the game would be dead on arrival with no breathing room.
As Chen Mo didn’t even have thirty points in his coding abilities there were some risks to making a game like this, even with the help of the Memory Playback Potion.
The code for these games were always semi-hidden including combat calculations, attribute growth, effectiveness relationship, economy algorithms etc. Every one of these have their own proprietary configurations, and maintained by professionals, essentially a trade secret where the average joe has no access to it.
Because the code is such a big part of these games, as soon as the code is leaked, other companies will be able to use that as a framework and produce a knockoff.
Chen Mo would have to write all the code by hand if he made a game like this. However, he didn’t have confidence manipulating the code based on his current abilities.
There was another problem: player acceptance!
The main method of profit in this world still depended on sales per game.
Top-up services, especially pay-to-win, were not mainstream. Furthermore, there hadn’t been anyone fully committed to pay-to-win.
If he produced an average pay-to-win game and the gamers discovered it was pay-to-win, would they accept it?
Would they be strongly against it, negatively affecting him and the company’s image? Maybe there would be some players who would just boycott his next games?
1It was hard to say. Just because there was a low chance of it happening didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen. As this was Chen Mo’s first game, he didn’t want to take the risk.
The tastes of gamers and the place for pay-to-win games in this world were unknown, and the grounds needed to be tested, step by step. One misstep might be devastating.
Therefore, Chen Mo chose to make a safer choice, and make a stand-alone game and an honest living out of it.
Stabilizing himself using this game, at least putting the name of Thunderbolt Gaming out there, and then slowly testing the limits of the players was what Chen Mo had in mind!