Losing Money to Be a Tycoon

Pei Qian took in a deep breath and tried to calm himself down.

Something was amiss.

Calm down, I have to calm down!

Now, Pei Qian finally understood why these three people were reacting the way they were.

Huang Sibo had been staring at his computer screen, refreshing every second, because the game figures had far expected the best-case scenario he imagined in his head. He could not believe his own eyes!

Xiao Lu looked restless because he was so excited!

As for Bao Xu, he was indeed thinking about his existence; but the reason for this was completely opposite of what Pei Qian had thought.

"Boss Pei, champagne!"

Xin Hailu was smiling as she handed a bottle of champagne to Pei Qian.

Pei Qian glanced at the champagne. This was quite a unique bottle of champagne. The sheath of the wine bottle was made of platinum, and it was covered in English words. Even a conservative estimate of the price of this bottle of champagne would be a five-figure sum.

Pei Qian was completely unexcited about popping this bottle of champagne.

This was because he knew that the amount of money Ocean Stronghold would make for him was far more than the cost of hundreds of bottles of this champagne.

However, while everyone was staring at him, Pei Qian could not just walk away in anger.

He could not allow anyone to doubt the system; neither could he allow anyone to challenge or suspect his own existence!

Pei Qian sucked in a deep breath and took the bottle of champagne. There was a 'pop', and then it was open.

The light-gold liquid poured out of the bottle, together with a unique fragrance. The atmosphere in the office immediately became much more excited and passionate!

Everyone was cheering. The two girls at the front desk took out their already-prepared handheld confetti and caused golden rain to fall in the office! They all began to sing and dance. Xiao Lu even wanted to slide on the floor on his knees. Huang Sibo had to stop him from doing so.

While everyone else was in such a celebratory mode, Pei Qian tried his best to put on a smile. "Good job, everyone. Keep working hard!"

Pei Qian kept a smile on his face and entered his own office before closing the door.

Huang Sibo watched Pei Qian's back view and could not help but sigh. "Of course, everything is in Boss Pei's plan! He expected that all of this would happen. That's why he isn't surprised. To Boss Pei, this is completely normal!

"Ai, compared to Boss Pei, we are really like children who have never seen the real world. Achieving this little bit of success has gotten us all so excited…

"When can I become like Boss Pei…?"

Huang Sibo kept sighing sorrowfully as he refreshed the platform.

Ocean Stronghold was through the roof!

Of course, Huang Sibo thought that this result was normal, given that Boss Pei had personally designated the direction for this game. All of this was to be expected; there was nothing to be excited about.

After analyzing Boss Pei's design and intentions, Huang Sibo and Bao Xu both had a feeling that this game would likely succeed! However, they did not expect that it would become as popular as it did. Even Sun Strike Studios' Bullet Hole was taken down by the game!

What came as even more of a surprise to Huang Sibo was that Boss Pei had thought of something new!

Boss Pei had already shown that through a game like Ghost General, one could achieve the greatest marketing effect while paying the lowest price.

At that time, Boss Pei employed a unique method of marketing within the artist circle. In the end, he succeeded in publicizing the game to ordinary artists!

This time, Huang Sibo wanted to see how Boss Pei would similarly market the game in a way nobody had ever done before in order to achieve huge results.

He even thought of several marketing techniques that would save costs.

Yet, from the looks of it, he had been thinking along the wrong lines entirely.

Boss Pei had no intention to market the game at all! Boss Pei knew for a fact that this game would be popular even without marketing. Just the word-of-mouth of the gamers alone could draw attention to their game naturally. Official and automatic recommendations were more than enough!

How aggressive and confident!

One would only be able to achieve something like that if they had experienced a fair share of success and could accurately judge the market!

Even when Boss Pei was popping the bottle of champagne, he could remain composed and confident. It was almost as if this little achievement was no big deal to him.

Huang Sibo truly admired him!

…

…

In Pei Qian's own office…

He squatted down on his chair and did not sit down for a long time.

What was happening? Was the plot all wrong…?

Why?

How did this game become popular even though I did no publicity whatsoever?

Was there still law in this country?

Was there still order?

None of this was logical.

Ruan Guangjian had not marketed this game for me on his own initiative this time. Where did I go wrong?

Pei Qian kept trying to calm down as he opened his computer and tried to find out what exactly happened.

If he did not figure this out, he would not die in peace!

After he logged onto the official games platform, Pei Qian saw the accurate data for Ocean Stronghold.

He could not help but curse under his breath.

It was only published a week ago, and yet the people currently online on the game had reached a hundred thousand!

What's more, this was not yet the peak.

There were only a hundred thousand players online now, not because there were only a hundred thousand players in total… but because the bandwidth of the cloud server that Ocean Stronghold rented could only accommodate that many players. There were still more players outside, queuing to get in…

Logically, the overhead cost of a server was not considered huge compared to the operating expenses associated with maintaining online games. Of course, that was unless one could come up with a game of as terrifying a volume as World of Warcraft or League of Legends.

For general mobile games that only needed to accommodate about three thousand active players at the same time, the cost of renting an appropriate cloud server would only come up to a few hundred yuan. The more expensive ones were so because of the bandwidth requirements. The more active players a server had to accommodate, the higher the bandwidth requirements and the more expensive the server would be.

For mobile card games like Ghost General, the cost of a server was really not much.

It was the same for Ocean Stronghold. As an FPS game with PVP mode, many people liked to play in stand-alone mode locally. Since PVP mode was conducted in separate rooms, it was unlikely that there would be hundreds of players fighting at the same time.

After being split into separate rooms, the pressure on the server's bandwidth would be much less compared to MMORPGs, in which many people remained in one location at the same time.

What's more, Pei Qian had expected Ocean Stronghold to fail thoroughly and completely. That was why he did not prepare an even better server with greater bandwidth for the game.

Only a few days had passed, and yet Ocean Stronghold had already reached a hundred thousand active players. There were even a significant number of people waiting to enter the game!

Moreover, in just a few days, more than a thousand Red Kilins had been sold. From this alone, they earned more than four hundred thousand yuan.

Pei Qian's body went limp on his chair.

It would not be difficult for him to finish spending four hundred thousand yuan.

The problem was, given his experience with Ghost General, this was only the beginning!

As Ocean Stronghold got more and more popular, the income they would receive in the following week would far exceed four hundred thousand yuan. What's more—as more and more people played the game, they would sell more and more Red Kilins. Based on his calculations, they would probably earn more than three million yuan in this month alone!

This was already the effect of greatly discounting the game.

Because of Pei Qian's pricing strategy, Ocean Stronghold was practically a free game. It did not cost anyone anything to download it. Apart from the Red Kilin, they sold nothing else in it as well!

In other words, only ballers—who were in the minority—would buy the Red Kilins. Most players would not spend a single cent on the game!

If Pei Qian had learned from other games with paywalls, he would have created more gift packs and offers. Their income would easily double or triple.

Even after Pei Qian deliberately used a pricing strategy to suppress players and stop them from reaching into their wallets, he still managed to earn more than four hundred thousand yuan a week!

What the hell was happening?!

Pei Qian felt lightheaded.