Losing Money to Be a Tycoon

July 26th, Monday…

At Shang Yang Games…

Lin Wan had been scrunching her nose and trying Bloody Battle Song out for two weeks now.

In the beginning, she was contemptuous and confused. Now, she found that there was a purpose to a game like that.

The original Bloody Battle Song was a traditional game with paywalls. Ballers could spend money to buy experiences while ordinary players could play with ballers and act as their sidekicks or their punching bags.

In other words, those with money would show up with money while those without money would show up for their friends.

War games with paywalls, like Bloody Battle Song, were filled with negative emotions. The biggest problems were feelings of injustice and forcefully-generated hatred.

These were the same two reasons that similar war games with paywalls were criticized badly.

Such games were unfair because the battle power one could obtain in the game depended on the amount of money they spent. The richer one was, the stronger they would be. Game merchants would create three, six, or nine levels in a single game. Depending on how much one topped up in the game, they would get different experiences.

If one spent money, they could kill four parties at once and completely destroy other players' gaming experience.

This type of injustice could easily provoke negative feelings in players. After all, there was a saying, 'do not worry about scarcity but rather about uneven distribution'.

Moreover, such games could easily generate hatred by force because many game merchants would design the game experience to invoke a competitive spirit in them and cause them to spend more money on the game.

Take war for example.

If one could take over a city, they would be crowned the king. An announcement would be made to the entire channel, and all the players in the city would receive rewards. This was an excellent opportunity for one to show off in front of other players.

Many players wanted to be crowned king. This would in turn depend on who spent the most money on the game.

'If you top up ten thousand yuan, I'll top up thirty thousand yuan. If you top up fifty thousand yuan, I'll top up a hundred thousand yuan…'

This competitive mindset would form some sort of involution mechanism. Two ballers could compete with each other and end up buying a bunch of useless computer data. They would be playing right into the hands of the game merchants.

After each update, new equipment would be released. No matter how much the ballers had spent before, they would have to start from scratch in order to avoid being overtaken.

After one or two years, players—who had spent a huge amount of money on the game—would look back and see that they had bought nothing but emptiness.

However, from another angle, why would games like that become popular?

This was all because complete, rich, and dynamic worlds existed in the game.

Actually, traditional online MMORPG games were doing the same thing. Take Fantasy World for example; there were guilds in that game as well. The officials included guild leaders, guild managers, assistant team leaders, commanders, and the like. Players could also take on roles at different levels.

War games with paywalls, such as Bloody Battle Song, allowed players to become more engrossed in their roles. This was because the human relationships were much more complex, and there were many more levels.

The only difference was that a player in Fantasy World would pride himself in the amount of time he spent in the game and his understanding of the game's mechanics. On the other hand, a player in war games with paywalls would pride himself in the amount of money he had spent on the game.

Now, what Bloody Battle Song's update had done was to get rid of nearly all the paywalls in the game. This way, less negative emotions would be invoked in players. The entire game was now at the standard of traditional MMORPGs like Fantasy World.

At the same time, the complex levels and human relationships in Bloody Battle Song were retained. Every player could take on different roles, creating a pseudo-society in the game and allowing them to operate in an orderly fashion.

The 'Chosen One' system was an example of this. Each person had a chance to play a critical role. This experience was something that other games could never provide.

After being chosen by the 'Chosen One' system, players' skills would immediately surpass that of other players. They would be allowed to have a hack-and-slash experience.

Hack-and-Slash games could recreate this feeling as well, but one would only be fighting non-playing characters in games like that. It was all down to programming. On the other hand, in Bloody Battle Song, one would be fighting other real players. Behind each ID was a human player.

One would be invincible and help one's team attack critical locations on the battleground, thus showing off in front of hundreds of other players. It would be extremely difficult for other types of games to create the same sense of achievement.

Thus, the changes made to Bloody Battle Song could be summarized. As much as possible, the unique experience of war games with paywalls was retained while the aspects that invoked negative, 'toxic' feelings in players were removed.

Lin Wan only understood these things after playing Bloody Battle Song every day during this time and talking to many other players in the game.

"I see. It looks like I've been too childish. I never knew that there were so many ways about this. Now I understand why ballers liked to come here and spend huge amounts of money before as opposed to playing games like Fantasy World.

"Boss Pei's aim is clearer to me now. Why did he want to buy over Shang Yang Games, even as it incurred huge losses? He wanted to use Bloody Battle Song to try something very risky. He wanted to conduct an experiment that no one had thought about conducting!

"Boss Pei wanted his players to stop being slaves to money. He wanted to adjust his players' taste, and show them that it was possible to enjoy feelings that only ballers used to feel, even without having to spend money…

"I must admit… this motivation is noble indeed!

"Or shall I say… this is absolutely heaven-defying!"

Lin Wan could not help but view Boss Pei with fresh eyes.

Games with paywalls could be profitable because they sold unique, custom gaming experiences to ballers at high prices.

From golden, dazzling wings to the title of king in a war game, these were all products that had been custom-made for ballers. On the other hand, ballers did not mind spending thousands of yuan on these things.

Through this process, game companies stood to profit and ballers stood to enjoy a custom-made gaming experience. The only people who were getting hurt were the players who acted as the ballers' sandbags.

Now, Boss Pei was choosing not to make profits like that. He wanted to snatch the custom-made experience from ballers' hands and distribute that to ordinary players according to set rules.

Wasn't this a heaven-defying move?

Lin Wan felt that she was bearing an even heavier burden.

Boss Pei had spent so much money to create Bloody Battle Song: The Powerful Version in order to make up for the game's only shortcoming: its graphics. After the game was complete and given Tengda Games' strong marketing capabilities, the game might slowly revamp the entire domestic market for games with paywalls!

Of course, this might be too idealistic. Games with paywalls would not go extinct. As long as ballers were willing to pay, they would remain in the market.

However, as long as Bloody Battle Song: The Powerful Version could cleanse the games market a little and influence players' taste, it would have achieved loads for the community!

Some game developers wanted to tender to ballers and used games with paywalls for their own interests; other game developers wanted to create a reputation for themselves and develop standalone games very seriously.

Boss Pei was probably the only one in the industry who had already achieved huge success with standalone games but still bothered enough to intentionally get involved in messy situations elsewhere. He was willing to give up making huge profits, purely for the sake of influencing gamers' tastes and leading them to freedom from slavery to money.

How noble were his aspirations?!