Chapter 118: First Results
Chapter 118: First Results
This place really feels like a city.
As someone who remembered the early open beta, seeing the once-empty main street of the city filled with people made him forget this was a virtual world.
Eric wandered around the city for a while before joining a party.
Originally, he planned to do the tutorial, recruit at least one companion, then try team play. But when he heard they were making a full party of nine using only main characters without companions, he became interested.
<You have joined the party.>
[Hi!]
[Hi. Are we really filling all 9 slots without companion characters?]
[Yes. With you, we already have 6 people.]
Honestly, it was not an efficient choice. Right now, everyone was probably on their first run, and first-run characters had truly rock-bottom stats. On top of that, everyone was low level, so there was no way they had proper skills or equipment. They had basically filled the population slots with shabby melee units.
[Good. We’re moving out!]
But this was a game anyway. Even in reality, there were plenty of people who did something first if it seemed fun, so that was even more true in a game.
Among the many people logging in, they were the oddballs who popped out.
Of course, it was not completely without advantages.
At the very beginning, recruiting companions was difficult anyway, so players had to hunt alone. With this many bodies, they could at least hunt slightly stronger enemies.
Though whether it was truly beneficial was questionable, considering that having more people made judgment and movement take longer, while experience and rewards had to be split anyway.
[Anyone played beta?]
[Me! I played since the first day of beta.]
[Oh. What was your beta ID?]
[I played closed beta too.]
[What’s beta? I heard this opened today.]
[Anyone live in LA?]
[Any girls here?]
Another advantage was that they could chat while playing. Especially in this game, the party leader handled movement in the field, which made chatting even easier.
Some people chatted, clicked with each other, and added each other as friends, but Eric did not get that immersed in the conversation.
It was not because he was negative about making friends online. On the contrary, during open beta, he had filled his friend list and had actively participated in circles and guilds.
Because of that, he knew there was not much meaning in adding someone as a friend after seeing them briefly at such a low level.
Even in games—no, precisely because it was a game—relationships were maintained and deepened only by continuing to play together. And to play together, levels had to match and playstyles had to be similar.
It might sound like he was being too picky, but there had been many cases where he thought he got along with someone, registered them immediately, and then never talked to them again. Of course, if they truly clicked, they could keep whispering to each other even with different levels, but that simply meant he had not met anyone like that yet.
Still, this party play was fairly fun.
[Die!!]
[This is the power of the masses!]
[Revolution!]
[LOLOLOLOL]
Normally, monsters like “man-eating softshell turtles” could only be hunted after leveling up a little, but level 1–2 characters swarmed them in a full party and beat them down, which felt incredibly cheerful.
Everyone was barehanded or barely holding something like a stick, but early on, players normally soloed, and when soloing, they were alone or barely had one companion. That meant they exchanged blows one or two at a time. But with nine people, they struck nine times in one turn, meaning at least 4.5 times and at most 9 times more attacks. Because of that, even though the turtles were slightly higher level, they died and flipped over without being able to resist.
However, this party did not last very long.
As mentioned earlier, it was not very efficient, so the levels and items gained were not very good relative to the time spent. After they moved hunting grounds and ended up facing monsters that were difficult to withstand at this early stage, party members began dying one by one, and the mood rapidly cooled.
<USAEmperor has left the party.>
[Ah, I died. I’ll stop here.]
<DoubleBarrelSexGun has left the party.>
Still, perhaps because everyone had joined the party half as a joke, even though the party leader made a mess of things, no one really hurled curses. It simply ended with everyone drifting apart.
If they had obtained some amazing item through this party play, it might have become an interesting story, but in the end, they had only hunted monsters around level 5, so there was nothing especially satisfying.
Still, the benefit was that they had targeted monsters slightly higher level than the level 1–3 players who currently made up the majority, so competition was low, and with the power of dogpiling, their hunting speed was fast.
It might even be faster than leveling alone?
The items they obtained were also from slightly higher-level monsters than most other gamers were hunting, so supply was relatively low and prices had not dropped much. That meant his income was slightly higher.
Of course, it was still an amount that would become pocket change after a little time passed, but at this very early stage, it was precious money that could give him a few more options.
I’m not buying equipment.
In this game, equipment did not drop often, so prices were basically high. And since everyone was at a similar stage in the beginning, early equipment was being traded at fairly expensive prices.
The price of early equipment like this crashes after just a little time.
Even if the equipment was shabby, his level and stats were even shabbier, so its immediate usefulness was not bad. But its efficiency was poor.
As for learning skills, the skills he could learn with this amount of money all had rather subtle performance. He would just end up wasting one of the early acquisition time bonus counts for no good reason.
After some thought, Eric chose to recruit a slightly expensive companion.
[Half-Orc Kruornik]
He was one of the characters in a tavern tucked away in a corner of the city.
In truth, the quality of mercenaries that could be recruited at low levels in the first run was obvious. Even so, one of the fun parts of this game was agonizing over which companion to recruit in order to secure someone with at least slightly better potential and traits.
However, Eric gave up on potential, traits, and even preferred race, and looked only for a character with a higher level.
Of course, hiring a high-level character was difficult, but characters known as mercenaries relaxed their conditions in exchange for demanding a lot of money. Thanks to that, Eric was able to hire a level 9 character, slightly higher than his own level rather than similar to it.
Honestly, in terms of growth potential, the character could be called trash. But because he had level and age on his side, he was strong in the short term and more than enough to use temporarily as a leveling helper.
He’s landing hits like crazy.
And once they actually arrived at the hunting ground, he was practically Lu Bu. He might be a shabby mercenary, but he easily cut down level 4–5 monsters far below his own level.
(Translator’s Note Lu Bu — A famous warrior from China’s Three Kingdoms period, known in popular culture as an overwhelmingly powerful fighter.)
In truth, a level gap like this would be caught up to quickly, so one might wonder whether there was any need to recruit a companion with poor growth, high costs, and who would ultimately be dismissed. But Eric had realized something during the brief party earlier.
Right now, everyone was stuck in the level 1–3 range, so competition for hunting targets was fierce. But even a slightly higher level drastically reduced the number of competitors.
Thanks to that, Eric was able to surge ahead quickly from the beginning.
The peak concurrent user count on the first day was said to be 55,000, and that referred to the number of people actually connected to the game during peak time. Of course, since it was a highly anticipated title and the first day of launch, a large portion of purchasers either logged in or attempted to log in, so the ratio of concurrent users to purchasers was high.
“135,000.”
That was the total number of paid registrants. In the second-floor office, Insu quietly read the number written on the document his mother handed him.
“From what I see, it looks like a huge success. What do you think?”
Seongcheol asked with a bright expression. His parents had not developed the game themselves, but since they managed the money, they had been constantly anxious while watching not only development costs but also enormous ongoing investments pour in.
But now that the lid had finally opened and they saw a convincing number inside, they felt joy beyond simple relief.
“Yes. I think so too.”
Insu also met his gaze with a bright expression.
At 9.95 dollars per person, they had already generated over 1.3 million dollars in revenue on the first day. Moreover, in the American market, the package purchase rate was far higher than purchases of only online usage rights.
“Roughly 70 percent seem to have bought the package.”
Package sales revenue would only come in much later, but online payments went directly into the company account, and they could check the total number of paid registrants in real time, so they could roughly estimate the ratio.
And since packages had a higher base price, even after deducting distribution fees, the profit was much higher than monthly subscription revenue. Almost twice as much.
“Then revenue should exceed two million dollars.”
Of course, since TLF Online was an MMORPG, sales did not all concentrate on the first day of release the way they did for package games, nor would users increase explosively only at launch. So there would not be an enormous difference between first-day revenue and first-month revenue.
However, because it was a monthly subscription, this revenue would occur every month. If they secured two million users as Insu targeted, monthly revenue would reach nearly twenty million dollars.
Packages were a special move usable only on launch day or during major updates, so the figure had to be considered based on monthly subscriptions, which was why it was twenty million.
Even if they failed to reach the target, if revenue remained steady at the current level, they would not only recover their investment but also earn substantial and stable profits.
Seongcheol and Hyein were already satisfied.
That was only natural. Insu had continued winning until now, but package game development was fundamentally a high-risk business.
In the beginning, there were many one-person developers, so investment costs were low, but development costs were gradually rising now. Fortunately, the market was also growing rapidly, so success guaranteed high profits, but because the results could never be certain, anxiety was inevitable.
That anxiety had grown even greater recently as they began making massive investments for WET’s service and TLF Online’s launch.
The result was unknown, but the investment amount was large enough to wipe away all the accomplishments they had accumulated so far. Feeling anxious was natural. But now that revenue would come in every month like a salary, that anxiety melted away all at once.
Unlike their relief, however, Insu could not completely relax.
That was because he knew there was no guarantee these users would continue playing the game.
Competitors would soon appear, and no matter how much this game was a sandbox-type game, it was not a perfect virtual reality. Some people would inevitably grow bored.
(Translator’s Note: Sandbox-type game — A game design style that emphasizes player freedom, open-ended systems, and emergent play rather than a strictly linear experience.)
Fortunately, online games had the characteristic that they could be updated even after launch.
We need to develop content.
It had truly not been easy to come this far, but launching the game did not mean they had crossed the finish line. Rather, the race was only beginning now.
However, he did not intend to update content recklessly from the beginning like online games from his previous life. In accordance with this era, he planned to observe the game’s condition and user reactions for the next few months, stabilize it through debugging and balance patches, and watch the speed of content consumption before proceeding.
Of course, they still needed to start development first.
TLF Online was undoubtedly an innovative game that would remain in gaming history.
Like its predecessors, it still belonged to the RPG category, but by combining with online systems, it had been reborn as a completely new genre that had not existed before. It clearly delivered a powerful and new shock to gamers and developers alike.
But this was an era when new things were pouring out.
And on June 30 of the same month TLF Online launched, another innovation appeared in the world.
[Riftborn]
When Insu saw that it belonged to the first-person shooter genre, he initially thought it was just one of the many Slayer-like games being released lately. But after checking the graphics, he immediately realized it was not.