The Period You Have to Place
“So. How much have they sold?”
“Within a week of launch, sir, sales in the United States and Japan topped fifty billion won.”
Ha!
A mercy they were counting royalties. Book the physical cards themselves as sales, and that figure already meant the target had been blown clean through. Park Yonghak set to calculating at once. Five percent of every pack sold was set aside as royalty, which meant you had to move sixty billion won in product just to have a bare three billion recognized. They were preparing new cards—an expansion pack—but even so…
Even then, it doesn’t add up. At this rate they could post the sales of a lifetime and still stand an excellent chance of missing the mark. No chance the youngest hadn’t known. So was there another scheme under it?
Hmm. A few moves did suggest themselves at a glance. Every one of them was possible only if you dragged the brand’s worth through the dirt. Surely not.
Hit the number however you can, and that’s the end of it? Long as it’s money, anything’s forgiven—that the thinking?
Park Yonghak looked down at the pack lying on his desk. Packaging so fine you would never believe it cost ten thousand won.
So what are you going to do? As if the question had pricked his interest, he quietly lifted the corner of his mouth.
Hannam-dong. The publishing house.
“Done!”
When my brother threw both hands in the air, the other developers let out breaths of relief. Let’s run it again. Once more, and we’ll do it better. Shall we think it over again? Again, again, again—and if that still wasn’t enough, meetings without end. Only after three straight weeks of that cycle had an OK finally come down.
“Would it be all right if we went home?”
“Of course. You should clock out.”
Say it that breezily, and a person might think he’d been sending them home every night. He hadn’t. For more than two weeks the Japanese developers had eaten and slept at the company, and their homes were a stone’s throw away.
“We’ll head out, then.”
“I… I should too.”
Afraid, maybe, that my brother would take it back and tell them to build the whole thing over again. A rush of feet—and not only the Japanese developers. Even Martin fled the building.
“Jihun. All that’s left now is the illustrations.”
He came toward me with hollow eyes. I’d wanted to tell him he’d worked hard. Unfortunately, he was a step faster.
“I hear the cards are selling like crazy?”
I nodded.
“Once the expansion pack is out too… the target Grandfather set. Can we actually hit it?”
“It won’t be easy.”
“Huh?”
I explained the five-percent royalty, and how much volume we still had left to move.
“There’s still that much?”
He looked more than a little shaken. Several billion won in sales, off royalties alone—by any normal method, an impossible figure from the start. Of course, bring an abnormal method to bear, and you could probably fill the gap.
Maybe he read that in my eyes.
“What? Why the look?”
He asked it carefully.
“It’s simple. We bring in gacha.”
“Gacha?”
The so-called pull. You break the pack into pieces and load them in at random, and then people have to keep buying until the one card they actually need turns up. A business model built to empty grown men’s wallets, you might say.
“There’s another way, too.”
“……?”
“You let them buy the whole pack at once, but you tier the bonuses.”
Idol albums come with something called a photo card. A freebie, of a sort. Nine members in the group, and you have to buy at least nine albums just to collect one card of each. If you can’t count on the public’s love being spread evenly, then the play is to wring the loyal fans for everything they’ve got.
“Is that really the only way?”
There was one, sure. Go to Grandfather and beg him to adjust the royalty. Call the existing five percent unfair, ask him to raise it to ten, and the immediate pressure would ease.
Long term, it’s a fool’s move. We’d run all this way to get him to recognize my brother’s ability, and at the decisive moment tuck our tails and plead for kindness? That would be my brother’s weakness for the rest of his life. Whichever method you chose, none of them really worked.
And yet he didn’t miss the quiet confidence in my eyes.
“There’s something. Isn’t there.”
“……”
“What? What is it, that you’re looking like that?”
In the end, all of this was something he had started in order to inherit the throne. So—
Months later.
Chairman Jeong Yeongju of Daebo Group watched the screen with a peculiar look on his face. For the past year he had been laying groundwork with the presidency as his aim, and now it was time to see what that work had borne. The beginning was today: the nine o’clock news. The day his name would appear for the first time in a poll of the next presidential contenders. The lead story, naturally, was as good as his.
Hmm.
He was staring at the screen, working to look unmoved, when it came.
At last. Jeong Yeongju’s bid for the presidency—
What?
He doubted his own eyes. But the picture changed at once, and there was an American bookstore with people lined up down the block. Even as his brow crumpled hard, the anchor went on.
In that instant an unwholesome suspicion shot through Jeong Yeongju’s head. Park Yonghak. Yes—that man, Chairman Park, had played some cunning trick. He’d die before he watched Jeong become president, so he’d inflated the grandson’s results by force, meaning to bury the poll. Just as his skull felt ready to split, the first story happened to end.
He wanted to kill the television right there.
“……”
He had to force the boil in his gut back down. It would come in the second segment. Surely. He made himself keep watching.
Wh—what?
Damn it. Had that man, Chairman Park, hauled sacks of money over to the network? Face twisted with rage, Jeong Yeongju yanked the cord out of the wall.
Every kind of news outlet reported what Dream Quest had done. Three million copies, and not a gacha system in sight—of course the praise poured in. Then the expansion pack launched at just the right moment, and the run kept going.
Even so, hitting the target on royalty revenue alone was anything but easy. What can you do. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen it coming.
Jihun foresaw all of it.
Park Yugeon boarded the flight to Japan, forcing a calm he didn’t feel. He’d thought he’d been to Japan a fair number of times. Maybe it was only that he’d never gone alone. He couldn’t help the tension lunging at him.
“Hoo.”
All the more reason to go back over what he and his brother had prepared. They had practiced, truly, without number—so much that he could recite it even in his dreams.
Still nervous, though.
How long passed that way? With a thud the plane settled onto the runway, and his heart kicked, kicked. The moment he cleared the airport, Park Yugeon caught a taxi.
“Where shall I take you?”
“Gotenyama, please.”
The driver tilted his head, then took the gearshift. A baby-faced student up from Korea, asking to be driven into the heart of the Japanese economy. Strange, certainly. He asked nothing more, and gave himself to the road.
The closer they drew, the more crowded the streets became. At this rate, one slip and he’d be late.
“Could you let me out here?”
“Of course.”
Once he’d paid, Park Yugeon headed straight for the main road. It was his first time on these streets, but that wouldn’t be a problem. He only had to walk toward the biggest building in the area. Minus ten outside. Everyone else had their collars turned up, and Park Yugeon walked on without even feeling the cold.
He arrived around six in the evening.
I really came.
The scenes he’d only pictured were about to unfold in front of him. He let out a long breath, as if setting his resolve. If he couldn’t do this, Jihun would be the one who had to finish it. Right. He would do his share. He strode up to the receptionist in the lobby.
“I’ve come to see Director Oda of the Entertainment Division.”
“…The director?”
At that, the woman tilted her head. But she was a practiced employee, and she smoothed the question off her face.
“Did you have an appointment?”
“Yes. If you say it’s Developer Park Yugeon, that should be enough.”
“The developer… that would be you?”
“Yes.”
“Would you wait just a moment?”
A little later, her face changed in real time as she held the receiver.
“Ah, yes. I’ll bring him up myself.”
She set the receiver down and immediately straightened her clothes. Then she turned a bright smile on him.
“I’ve been asked to receive you with every courtesy. Would it be all right if I showed you up?”
When the elevator opened, a middle-aged man with neatly combed hair came striding toward him.
“A pleasure to meet you. I am Oda, director of the Entertainment Division.”
An exceedingly formal greeting. Because of it, Park Yugeon had to bow a full ninety degrees as well.
“I’m Park Yugeon. The developer.”
“I had wanted to come out to the airport to meet you…”
“No, no. A taxi hardly takes any time.”
A company of this size would have its own protocol team for the Entertainment Division. Sending a single car to the airport was nothing.
Before a negotiation, don’t take on even a small debt. That was what he’d been told. Guided by the director, he soon headed for the conference room.
“You must come to Tokyo often, if only on account of Mideumsa.”
The director offered this and that. Perhaps he decided the awkwardness had eased enough. Only then did he carefully bring up business.
“I understand you are concentrating on music and film at present.”
“We have reviewed the proposal you sent, quite thoroughly. You wish to transfer the rights to Dream Quest?”
“More precisely, the rights to the sale of the physical cards…”
“Ah. I must have spoken too broadly. I apologize. When the contract is drawn it will be stated exactly, so you need not be concerned.”
Had he been too particular? The moment the other man apologized, a needless weight settled on him. He let out a breath. Get your head straight. Do it exactly the way you practiced with Jihun. You can, can’t you?
Right then, Director Oda opened his mouth with care.
“As you have declared your intention to sell, the essential matter will be settling on a price.”
“……”
“I regret putting it so bluntly to someone who has come so far. At present, however, the Entertainment Division is devoting its strength to acquiring companies overseas.”
If what his brother had said was true, they would take CBS Records and Maryland Pictures one after the other and rise as a monster of the content business.
“It is with that in mind that I speak…”
“If you don’t have the cash, equity is fine.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Too bold a reply? No. This was only the start. Jihun would have pressed even harder here.
“It’s an IP making tens of billions of won in a single quarter. If the treatment is going to be fair, I don’t think we need to insist on cash.”
“Ah.”
“And being paid in equity isn’t exactly an unusual case…”
“That is true enough.”
“Then would you report it?”
“Report, you say…?”
Park Yugeon made himself look straight at Director Oda. A look that said, You aren’t in a position to decide a transfer of equity yourself, are you. A reaction the usual Park Yugeon could never have imagined—the result, perhaps, of drill after drill. The other man seemed to sense at once that something was out of the ordinary.
“Then… as you suggest, I will make the report.”
“Yes, go ahead. I have a call to make myself…”
“……?”
“I came all the way to Japan and forgot to say I’d arrived safely. Imagine that.”
“Ah. For an errand of that sort, of course…”
He indicated the gray telephone on the desk, then went on.
“I will return as quickly as I can.”
After the director left the room—
“Hoooo!”
Park Yugeon let out the breath he’d been holding all that time. He’d pretended otherwise, but the tension had gotten to him more than he’d thought. He could barely remember half of what he’d said. Still, he’d muddled through this far.
This is only the first step. The real thing starts now.
His brother had stressed this part again and again. Park Yugeon picked up the receiver, heavy in his hand. A number he’d dialed countless times, and yet today it felt strangely unfamiliar.
“It’s Yugeon. Could you put me through to Grandfather’s study?”
A moment later.
“Still not home. What are you doing?”
Maybe because he could already see the whole scenario about to unfold. Just his grandfather’s voice was enough to make his heart clench.
“…I’m in Japan.”
“You brat—now you don’t even say a word!”
“……”
“Japan? And for what?”
“To fill a hundred billion in sales.”
“And how do you figure on filling a number like that?”
“I came to sell the IP.”
“You what?”
“The payment for transferring the IP counts as sales too.”
“……!”
An answer he clearly hadn’t expected. Maybe that was why. His grandfather held the words turning in his mouth for a long while before he spoke.
“Fill the sales… by selling off the cash cow? That the idea?”
“Ha!”
Pure disbelief.
“So. How much you aiming to sell it for?”
“I was thinking we’d have to get at least fifty billion.”
“And is there a place that’ll hand over that kind of money in cash?”
“There isn’t… so I’m going to take it in equity.”
“Equity? What company in the world parcels out fifty billion in shares? The pillars of the house would shake clean out…”
But that reaction lasted only a moment. Japan. A company that could give up more than fifty billion in equity in a single stroke. Had he already produced an answer from just those two facts? His grandfather asked, voice trembling thin.
“Yugeon. Where are you?”
“Tokyo.”
“Tokyo where?”
“Gotenyama.”
“Don’t tell me… you…”
At that line, Park Yugeon squeezed his eyes shut and answered.