Chapter 127: Landing in Japan. Next?
Chapter 127: Landing in Japan. Next?
This was still not an era when graphics tools were widely available, so even effects like these had to be created one by one by hand. Moreover, since resources were limited, they could not use a method that overwhelmed through quality. They had to make them at a resolution similar to the surrounding graphics and make them blend in, but expressing that convincingly was harder than one might think.
But this was definitely convincing. It caught the eye immediately without feeling awkward.
They said he was a capable animator, and his sense was indeed special.
“This is good. I look forward to working with you.”
Insu was greatly satisfied, but he also had to avoid praising someone with no results yet too highly and making him arrogant. It could make him overestimate his own value, become hard to control, and possibly demand too much compensation. So he only showed a moderate welcome and shook his hand.
Afterward, Insu continued gathering developers.
For now, the target was around thirty-five people. The number had grown significantly compared to the previous team, but by current development team standards, it was not especially excessive.
As computers developed and the game industry itself grew, competition intensified and the basic standard for games rose. Now, even small development teams commonly used around ten to twenty developers, and large development teams sometimes exceeded fifty people.
Moreover, in Diablo’s case, there were many elements that demanded development power, including a random map generation system, hundreds of items and rune systems, various characters and skill trees, and complex balance.
On top of that, while Diablo II took three years to develop, Insu intended to finish this within a year and a half.
It might seem like he was setting the schedule too tightly, but Insu had calculations of his own.
Blizzard had never been a particularly fast developer to begin with. If anything, it had a perfectionist tendency. And since Insu had already played the future Diablo, he could quickly approach the correct answer without trial and error, and he had already prepared detailed planning and design.
Originally, one of the best ways to speed up game development was clear design and direction. Individual coding ability and the like came afterward.
If that was not done, no matter how capable the developers were, they would only spin their wheels without moving forward.
But just because the target total was thirty-five people did not mean he planned to wait until all thirty-five were gathered.
Even gathering thirty-five part-time workers would take quite some time. Gathering developers, especially people who met Insu’s standards, would take several months.
So as soon as Insu recruited Michael, he began planning and designing together with him, while Lewis also immediately started working on concept art.
Insu did not know this, but when Yahoo from his previous life entered Japan, unlike WET, it attacked the Japanese internet market by laying down large-scale infrastructure all at once with overwhelming capital and pouring in strong marketing. Of course, that strategy worked, which was why it dominated Japan’s portal market even into the mid-2010s.
In the end, it was pushed back by Google, but even then, it survived while maintaining meaningful market share until 2025.
But that did not mean WET’s strategy was entirely wrong.
That was because when WET entered Japan, Japan’s computer penetration rate and internet penetration rate were still fairly low. In particular, internet penetration was around 3 percent. Because of concentrated government investment, the network infrastructure itself was relatively decent, but people used it more for PC communication than the internet.
Yahoo Japan invested enormous sums to maximize the first-mover effect and kill competitors in one blow, and it did work, but honestly, looking at Japan’s internet market at the time, spending tens of billions of yen could be seen as excessive investment.
Of course, it was not poured in all at once upon entry, but spent gradually over two to three years. Still, considering that internet penetration had not even reached 10 percent by 1998, it was definitely overinvestment relative to scale.
However, SoftBank probably had no choice but to be aggressive. After all, it had invested a staggering 150 million dollars in Yahoo to establish Yahoo Japan.
That was the cost of Yahoo’s name value, technology, and know-how. Since they had already spent that much, they could not allow Yahoo Japan to fail. So even if it was overinvestment, it was still small compared to the cost already invested, and they chose the sure method.
But WET was different from Yahoo. Since the entity entering Japan was not a Japanese company like SoftBank but WET itself, they did not need 150 million dollars. Moreover, since this was a time when they were under severe financial pressure, they could proceed slowly with investment at the most reasonable scale possible.
And even though they proceeded slowly like that, the recognition of being number one in America, the technology, and other factors that SoftBank had paid 150 million dollars to import still showed powerful strength.
No, WET was stronger than Yahoo. At the time, Yahoo was number one, but its market share was around 30 percent, and it had evenly matched competitors and plenty of formidable challengers. WET, however, was an overwhelming powerhouse with 62 percent market share.
On top of that, its technology was much stronger. Yahoo maintained first place through the first-mover effect and content, but it was still using an old-generation directory-type search engine.
(Translator’s Notes: Directory-type search engine — Early search engine format where websites were manually categorized into directories rather than automatically indexed across the web.)
By comparison, WET had already developed its own crawler-type search engine and even introduced a distributed crawling system.
(Translator’s Notes: Crawler-type search engine — Search engine format that uses automated bots to discover, collect, and index web pages.)
(Translator’s Notes: Distributed crawling system — Search engine crawling system that uses multiple machines or nodes to collect web pages across the internet more efficiently.)
It had the most advanced search technology even in America, so there was nothing to say about the Japanese market. In the first place, internet-based portals themselves were rare. They had barely moved beyond PC communication portals.
There was also help from Lunaria, its local partner.
“Yes! It’s possible.”
The developer from Lunaria answered confidently.
After creating the Japanese corporation, Parallel Soft needed to modify the search engine to fit the local language. Simply translating the language on the portal could hardly be called localization, and since the users were Japanese, Japanese natural language processing was needed.
(Translator’s Notes: Natural language processing — Technology for analyzing and processing human language so computers can interpret text, queries, keywords, and meaning.)
At the web collection stage, bots would split and collect sentences on their own regardless of language, but document structure analysis, keyword extraction, understanding user queries and making appropriate matches, and finally reflecting document relevance, quality, and user intent required the thoughts and perspective of locals.
Moreover, Japanese was very different from English. In particular, spacing was unclear and verb conjugations were varied, so if they used the existing English-based structure, it was highly likely to produce strange results.
That was why Japanese processing for the search engine was one of WET Japan’s important and high-priority tasks.
But Lunaria, from whom they had not expected much, showed considerable confidence in this natural language processing.
“What do you think? Does it seem good?”
“Yes. The search results are quite good.”
And in reality, the results from the engine adjusted with their help were decent.
This was because Lunaria was not merely a game developer, but a company that had developed enterprise software. Enterprise software often included document searches, customer data processing, and internal information exploration functions. To implement such functions, Japanese processing technology and know-how were needed, and Lunaria had properly maintained that technology and know-how.
Of course, even with that know-how, applying it to a search engine was a different matter. It was also fundamentally difficult work, so it took three months just to reach the first target.
It still did not show search quality on the level of America, but since there were no real competitors, they planned to launch first and improve it gradually. For now, their targets were six months and one year.
Aside from this technical support, Lunaria was also a great help in obtaining local content.
Lunaria was also a small company, so it did not have any grand connections. But since it was a local company, even relatively basic information such as what media companies existed in Japan, what tendencies they had, and how to contact them was helpful enough.
However, the major media companies were extremely conservative and rejected them, but there were also many progressive outlets, so there was no major problem filling the content.
And aside from this local content, WET’s own unique content, such as communities and WTALK, received a considerable response.
Thanks to that, WET Japan was able to record fifty thousand daily visitors only a few months after entering Japan.
Considering that the mainland was already reaching concurrent users in the millions, that number might feel too small, but America had not started with a million users accessing it either. Moreover, considering Japan’s internet population, it was an impressive number.
“That’s fast.”
“Right?”
Insu was amazed while looking over WET’s Japanese data. Japan’s internet user count was estimated at around two million. Fifty thousand was 2.5 percent. It might seem like a low ratio, but considering it was a foreign site that had only just entered the market, it was definitely not a small number.
That was even more true considering they had not used aggressive marketing.
Even WET in the mainland had a period right after launch when it barely had any visitors and was practically deserted.
“This means WET has some level of recognition in Japan too, right?”
“Right.”
Seongcheol reached the same judgment as Insu. This was a time when the word globalization had become familiar, but even so, barriers between countries were still thick. Information had not yet overcome physical distance and national barriers.
However, because internet users were still a minority, most had early adopter tendencies. As a result, information from America, which could be called the center of the latest technology and IT in this era, was relatively widely known, and WET was one of the major names among those.
Even if they had never used it, quite a few people had at least heard that such a thing existed.
“Since there’s already this much recognition, the marketing effect should be good too.”
It was difficult to make people aware of something they knew nothing about from scratch, but it was much easier to promote something they already knew about, even vaguely. In the early stage of WET Japan’s entry, their marketing had been a little weak because of a lack of funds, but now mainland WET was generating considerable profit, and TLF Online was also rapidly growing and producing stable revenue, so they had funds to invest in expansion.
But they did not intend to spend those funds only on WET Japan.
“Now we need to go to Europe too.”
“But didn’t investment come in from China?”
“Ah! That’s right. It’s a company called XinLink Technologies.”
Naturally, they had plans for Free China as well. But Parallel Soft did not have the ability to attack the entire world at the same time. That was why they were targeting markets in order of priority, considering computer penetration, internet penetration, infrastructure, national economic power, and other factors.
Free China was relatively low in priority. But the story changed if the other side approached first.
“Welcome. I’m Jung Hyein, president of Parallel Soft.”
“Thank you! I’m Li Zhaomin from XinLink.”
Li Zhaomin was a man who looked to be in his mid-thirties. His quite dark skin, though not as dark as a Black person’s, left an impression. He was also on the smaller side.
“You said you wanted to invest?”
“Yes. To be precise, we want to create a joint venture.”
The investment amount was fifty million dollars, and they wanted to create WET China with Parallel Soft holding 60 percent of the shares and themselves holding 40 percent. At first, they asked for 49 percent, but Hyein emphasized that Parallel Soft had no immediate intention of entering China and lacked the spare capacity, so they conceded a bit more.