Chapter 147: The Beginning of the Bomb Commando World Tournament
Chapter 147: The Beginning of the Bomb Commando World Tournament
“Anyway, the launch has been a massive success.”
At first, they had worried that the high price would make distribution difficult. However, the recent fight with the telecommunications companies ended up becoming a blessing in disguise, allowing them to achieve results far beyond their initial targets.
The inventory of 200,000 units they had stockpiled vanished in an instant, to the point where even slightly relaxing their vigilance could now result in supply shortages.
Fortunately, unlike electronic devices, magical devices had an extremely low defect rate, which was the only reason they were somehow managing to keep up with demand. They had reached the point where products underwent only the bare minimum inspection before immediately being loaded up and shipped out.
Ras spent a long time 고민ing over whether to expand the production lines. In the end, however, he decided not to increase them.
He calculated that although things were good right now, this level of enthusiasm would not continue forever.
“After all, the consumers flooding in right now were originally latent consumers anyway. The issue just attracted attention, causing them to buy earlier than they otherwise would have.”
The consumer base for the Magical Connector was limited. Even setting that aside, the market size itself was limited, so if they increased production just because it was selling well right now, they could later end up collapsing from oversupply.
After all, Ras’s final plan was ultimately to distribute Magical Connectors to most people who owned computers.
As the issue surrounding the Magical Connector settled down, the controversy on Spirit Space also gradually quieted. In its place, huge numbers of user reviews began flooding in.
<This is insane! It’s ridiculously fast!>
The first thing people reacted to was its performance.
That was understandable. Previously, speeds had been around 0.15kb/s, but now they had risen to 6kb/s. In raw numbers alone, that was a fortyfold performance increase.
Before, when connecting to Spirit Space to read posts, users had to wait as lines loaded one by one like something printing out. Now, entire pages loaded at once, making it feel like a completely new world.
Naturally so. At 6kb/s, it was now possible to transfer not only text but images as well, meaning this was not simply a performance improvement but practically a generational leap.
Like going from 2G to 3G on smartphones.
Of course, Ras was also preparing content upgrades to match this improvement in performance.
<At this point, you could probably even send actual games through it?>
<Are you crazy? How are you going to handle the phone bill?>
<This thing doesn’t use telephone lines though.>
<Oh right?>
And the topic that followed immediately after performance was the drastically cheaper usage fees.
Ras had anxiously worried that people might react negatively to Spirit Space starting to charge usage fees, but that turned out not to be the case at all.
<But are you sure there’s really no telephone bill?>
<It doesn’t even use telephone lines in the first place. Meta Soft just collects the fees directly now.>
Perhaps the previous war with the telecommunications companies had influenced this as well. Consumers tended to understand the conflict as a fight over who got to collect the usage fees for Spirit Space.
And naturally, consumers sided with Meta Soft, which charged far less.
As a result, rather than thinking that a previously free service had begun charging fees, people instead saw it as Meta Soft replacing the telecommunications companies as the one collecting the fees.
This understanding was also tied to the difference in how the Republic of Smite and Korea viewed telephone fees.
In Korea, telephone networks tended to be viewed as a kind of public infrastructure or national service, so phone charges were perceived differently from ordinary service fees. In fact, people in the past had even thought of telephone fees as “telephone taxes.”
But in the Republic of Smite, they were simply the services of private companies.
So from the users’ perspective, things had simply become cheaper, giving them no reason to object.
In any case, with the burden reduced, users began spending more time on Spirit Space, causing the network world to become even more active.
And right at that moment, there was another hot topic igniting Spirit Space even further.
That topic was the Bomb Commando World Tournament.
Even while Ras had been fighting the telecommunications companies, the company itself had continued running without issue, and Arcade Game Land’s event management team had been fully focused on holding the tournament.
Right now, Spirit Space was absolutely blazing with discussions about the ongoing preliminaries.
“If things had gone wrong, the attention might’ve ended up split.”
Ras muttered while looking through the posts on the bulletin boards.
They were in the mansion’s lounge. It was a comfortable space furnished with novels, comic books, computers, game consoles, and projection devices, and ever since moving there, Ras and Ella had spent most of their time there.
They had both decorated their personal rooms nicely as well, but somehow things had naturally turned out this way.
“Seriously. It really could’ve gotten buried.”
Ella, who was sitting right beside Ras while browsing the bulletin boards on her own computer, reacted similarly.
And understandably so. These days, it felt like more than half the posts were about the tournament.
Even though the Spirit Space management team had hurriedly created a dedicated tournament board and were directing users there, it was still the same.
And ever since this online world had come into existence, the speed of information exchange had clearly accelerated. Even though the preliminaries were still ongoing, discussions about regional powerhouses and championship candidates were already appearing.
“But discussions about who the top players are have always been all over the community anyway.”
“True...”
Ras nodded at Ella’s words.
Bomb Commando was an especially community-driven game, with lots of offline gatherings and active information exchange, so it was only natural that there was already a lot of publicly available information.
Still, watching real-time updates about the results of high-level matches, who had survived, and the heated debates surrounding them every single day was quite entertaining.
“Wow...”
Xiao, a Bomb Commando player from the Nuchin Kingdom, stuck himself to the airship window and stared at the ground far below.
Since it was the first time in his life riding an airship, he could not stop marveling.
Truthfully, he had never imagined he would ever ride something like an airship.
Spirit Space was still separated by country, so information about foreign nations was not widely known yet. Moreover, although the Nuchin Kingdom had secured a place as a tournament participant nation, it was still considered a weak country because it was poor and very few people there played games.
Because of that, nobody on the community boards knew Xiao’s name.
Even if they had somehow heard about his skill, if they saw this skinny and small Beastman boy standing there with a dazed expression like now, it would be difficult to imagine him as a championship candidate.
The airship carrying the Nuchin Kingdom players, including Xiao, headed toward the Republic of Smite.
They had been assigned there because the Pluta Constitutional State would be holding matches in Brunyard, which belonged to the same cultural sphere, so the remaining countries had simply been grouped into the Republic of Smite.
And the fact that the Republic of Smite was slightly closer to the Nuchin Kingdom was another reason.
Nine days later, the airship arrived at Ranchert Airport, and Xiao followed the group down to the ground.
Although it had taken nine days, airships had spacious interiors, so it had not felt particularly cramped. There were even areas where people could take short walks.
Moreover, since they had brought Bomb Commando game machines onboard and continued practicing, there had barely been any time to feel bored. By the time they heard they had arrived, it almost felt too soon.
Stepping onto foreign soil for the first time in his life, Xiao was first overwhelmed by the airport’s enormous scale.
Of course, he had boarded an airship at an airport in the Nuchin Kingdom too. But the Nuchin Kingdom’s airport was a tiny one with only two airships total. The difference in scale compared to this place was on an entirely different level.
After leaving the airport and entering downtown Ranchert, his shock only deepened.
“Wow...”
Even people living in the Republic of Smite became country bumpkins when they visited the capital. So for people from the Nuchin Kingdom, an underdeveloped agricultural nation still stuck in many premodern conditions, the skyscrapers and automobiles filling Ranchert looked like another world entirely.
At first, the coach and manager tried to keep the players under control, but eventually they too became country bumpkins and began looking around in every direction.
“Tch...”
Baron Taito clicked his tongue in irritation at their behavior for a moment, but since he also remembered having reacted the same way himself once, he simply let it pass.
Xiao’s amazement continued even after arriving at their accommodations.
Baron Taito was by no means stingy, so he distributed the accommodation vouchers sent by Meta Soft directly to the players, allowing them to stay in a luxury hotel for the first time in their lives.
Of course, it was not some grand first-class hotel suite or anything like that. But in the Nuchin Kingdom, it was still common for ordinary citizens to live in thatched mud-brick houses.
Even people living in cities usually lived in homes where bare cement blocks remained exposed without even wallpaper or paint. So the well-maintained hotel rooms felt almost like palaces.
“Wow... this really feels like a place nobles would live in.”
Uzkaran, Xiao’s partner, jumped onto the bed and enjoyed its softness while speaking.
“Right?”
Uzkaran was a human boy around Xiao’s age, with dark skin and large eyes as his defining features.
As expected of someone Baron Taito had personally selected as a player, his game skill rivaled Xiao’s.
The two got along quite well. More specifically, their teamwork meshed perfectly. Even without shouting instructions during matches, they naturally synchronized with each other.
Xiao had not become a player because he loved games. He had become one to earn money. Even so, there was no way he would not feel interested in the tournament venue where the competition he had practiced for so long would finally take place.
The two immediately got off the bed.
That did not mean Xiao hated games. In the first place, Baron Taito had originally noticed him because he had shown overwhelming skill while playing at arcades.
“This really is a developed country.”
“Right?”
The two whispered quietly while walking through the streets behind the coach after coming down from the hotel.
Actually walking through the place they had looked down upon from the hotel earlier felt strangely surreal.
In truth, being able to see the roads and hear outside noise from the hotel usually meant the location was not particularly good. But to Xiao, it was simply a fascinating sight.
The “developed” scenery, completely different from his homeland of the Nuchin Kingdom, left an incredibly strong impression on him.
Then, after arriving at the stadium not long afterward, he became completely overwhelmed.
It was not merely because of its gigantic scale.
“So this is where the matches are held?”
As he muttered those words, he felt pressure from the fact that the game he had desperately practiced in cramped little rooms would now be played in a place this grand.
And once he entered and saw the vast interior and the spectator stands filled with enormous numbers of seats, he felt himself shrinking even further.
“You’ll be entering those boxes over there to play the matches.”
Xiao looked toward the boxes the coach pointed at.
Those structures, like tiny rooms, appeared even smaller because of the immense scale of the venue. Somehow, they reminded him of his own intimidated self, yet at the same time, he felt slightly relieved that there was at least a place where he could hide.
“There are game machines inside those?”
“Yeah.”
As Xiao listened to Uzkaran asking the coach questions, he imagined himself competing inside one of them.
And only now did he finally feel like he understood something.
He understood why someone as important as Baron Taito had brought kids like them here and invested so much effort into them.
There were many people inside the arena besides themselves, all busily working.
This was a tournament prepared by so many people in a place like this.
That meant it had to be something important and valuable.
Of course, even before this, Xiao had already intended to do his best to earn the rewards Baron Taito had promised.
But now it felt like another motivation had been added on top of that.
‘I’m definitely going to win the championship!’