Chapter 60: Subtle Results
Chapter 60: Subtle Results
First, when Edwin saw that MFN had used the map generation system he had considered his secret weapon before him, his heart froze. If things went like this, rather than shocking gamers, it might instead give the impression that he had copied them.
Moreover, this game’s stylish medieval atmosphere and its combat were unfairly fun. To be honest, Civilization’s combat did feel a little bland.
Of course, I emphasized strategy by tying resource management, scouting, and diplomacy together…
But if one looked only at intuitive fun, he could not shake the feeling that his game was losing.
Even though public opinion of Civilization was not bad, Edwin could do nothing about the sighs that kept deepening.
And just as Insu and Edwin were conscious of each other, gamers also began viewing the two games as a pair.
They had similar systems, similar release timing, and similar genres, and both had drawn attention from the beginning. In a way, it was only natural.
[MFN VS Civilization]
Before long, posts like this became common on PC communication boards.
At first, Insu watched them nervously.
[If we’re talking strategic depth, isn’t Civilization much better?]
[The art and game atmosphere are cooler in MFN, though…]
[If it’s a simulation, realistic is better.]
[Civilization’s combat is boring.]
[That’s because you don’t know how to play it properly.]
[MFN is a god-tier game!]
But as he quietly observed, neither side was really being pushed back. They were only clashing evenly. For now, Insu felt his shoulders lift slightly at the fact that his game was fighting on a similar level with that Civilization.
Of course, Insu also bought and played Civilization, but it was not exactly the same as the Civilization he knew.
No, I never played the first one in my previous life either, so I’m not sure.
He remembered looking it up on YouTube. But since it was such an old game, he had never felt like actually playing it.
In any case, since two games that were drawing considerable attention kept being mentioned together, it felt as though the attention grew even bigger. Moreover, as the saying went, nothing was as entertaining as watching a fight, so even people who originally had no interest seemed to be drawn in, sucking up the attention of the gaming world.
This… might actually be good?
And some of that attention would definitely lead to sales. Moreover, unless the people fighting like that were extremely fanatical, they would naturally become curious about the opposing game too.
Of course, that was only Insu’s own speculation with plenty of personal assumptions mixed in, so he could not know what would actually happen. Still, it was true that it looked worth expecting to some extent.
“It’s been really hot lately, hasn’t it? The whole Civilization and MFN thing.”
This topic came up while the development studio staff ordered pizza for lunch and sat around the break room eating. Chris brought it up, and befitting his somewhat greasy-looking appearance, his personality was also fairly sly and smooth-talking.
“Oh! Right. These days, when I go on CyberCom, it feels like that’s all anyone talks about.”
Lee Suhyeon responded in slightly awkward, halting English. The people who had come from Korea were still quite lacking in English, but perhaps because they were working hard, one could see them improving little by little. Lee Suhyeon’s progress, in particular, was very fast.
He had the daring side to fly to America alone and go around by himself, and since Chris, who was on the same graphics team, talked to him a lot, he naturally improved.
“MFN is the game Yoonsu made in Korea, right?”
“Yeah.”
This place did not really have the word or concept of “senior” in the same way, so conversations were horizontal, but that did not mean there was no respect at all for people with experience. Especially as developers, since the Korean team had already completed and released a game, and it was now gaining popularity, the new members naturally had no choice but to evaluate them highly.
Yoonsu unknowingly puffed out his chest at Brian’s gaze, which was mixed with envy and interest.
Originally, he had been the ace of this team. Since he had sensed that the newly arrived Brian’s abilities were unusual and had felt both a sense of crisis and competitiveness, this made him feel even more satisfied.
As the team members excitedly talked about MFN like this, Insu also felt quite good. The slightly cold feeling he had gotten after seeing the first settlement payment seemed to disappear.
Before long, December arrived, and finally, the settlement payment from Japan came in.
Since both Korea and America had shown results somewhat different from what he expected, Insu felt his heart beat without realizing it as he opened the bankbook.
[Deposit – Techno Shoku CO., LTD Amount: USD 2,751,264.65]
“Oh!”
“Yes. Quite a lot came in.”
Seeing Insu’s reaction, Hyein smiled as if she found him cute.
It was a considerable sales volume. Insu picked up the calculator on the desk and calculated backward. Since the amount had been exchanged into dollars, trying to do mental math made his head complicated.
Roughly one hundred thirty thousand copies?
When Insu saw the number displayed on the calculator, the crease between his brows immediately smoothed out. The amount had not simply increased because the distribution ratio had gone up. The initial sales volume had clearly increased by thirty percent compared to the previous work.
Of course, Parallel Soft’s greater recognition had certainly helped, but even taking that into account, it was a number that made it reasonable to expect total sales to increase.
Insu was happy, but he also felt slightly uneasy. It was not because of Japan.
Although it had not been the main purpose, it was also true that they had come to LA in order to target the American market more actively. Yet the sales volume of their next work had increased everywhere else, while only America showed a negative indicator.
It was being mentioned alongside Civilization and raising the atmosphere, but the immediate indicator was certainly lower than the previous work.
Of course, MFN’s development and contracts were all finished before I came to America…
Rationally speaking, this indicator had nothing to do with his coming to America. But feelings were like that.
I’m going to make the game we’re developing now a real success!
Instead of losing steam, Insu clenched his teeth. Coming to America and settling down was a major challenge, so he was determined to use every little thing like this as motivation.
In any case, the revenue from Japan was extremely welcome. It was nearly three million dollars, so it would play a major role in funding not only this game, but also the MMORPG’s development.
But it still feels like a waste to just leave it sitting there.
Because he had memories of the future, leaving such a huge sum alone felt like letting an opportunity pass by.
Of course, this world was different from his previous life. But since it had more similarities than differences, he could roughly see how things would develop going forward.
But thinking coldly, with only this much information, it was hard to be certain of profit in the short term, even if long-term investment was another matter. In particular, the risk of unexpected bad news was too great.
If this were simply the past, he could remember striking events such as the LA riots, major earthquakes, the IMF crisis, the Lehman Brothers collapse, or COVID, then avoid them or bet against them and make huge profits instead. But in this world, he did not know whether the same events would happen, or when they would happen.
(Translator’s Note: IMF Crisis — Refers to the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, during which South Korea received an emergency bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after severe economic instability and currency collapse.)
(Translator’s Note: Lehman Brothers Collapse — Refers to the 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, a major U.S. investment bank whose collapse triggered the global financial crisis.)
Still, something like the dot-com bubble will probably happen…
(Translator’s Note: Dot-Com Bubble — A late-1990s stock market boom driven by internet-related companies, followed by a major crash in the early 2000s after many overvalued tech businesses collapsed.)
He could not know exactly what would rise, but it was an event where everything rose overall, so if he split the money across the IT sector, he would likely make a profit.
The problem was that if he did that, it would be difficult to pull the money out when he needed it.
After thinking it over, Insu chose a classic strategy.
First, he calculated the funds needed for the MMORPG. He would put part of it into bank products such as time deposits, and put the rest into gold. In Korea, there had been real estate, a product with high stability and good returns, but he knew nothing about American real estate, so there was no helping it.
And buying Korean real estate while traveling back and forth would be difficult too.
It was not simply because it was troublesome. The development team’s operating costs had now grown, and the MMORPG development that would soon begin would require an enormous amount of money. So he needed to place the money somewhere he could quickly convert it back into cash when necessary.
And he decided to diversify the remaining portion into IT stocks.
I think the bubble burst around 2000, so if I clear things out around 1998, it should be reasonably safe, right?
“Stocks?”
Seongcheol thought for a moment after hearing his son’s suggestion.
Unlike real estate, this was a high-risk investment. Korea was also in the middle of rapid economic growth, so there was plenty of talk about stocks, but there were also many stories of people becoming destitute after failed investments.
Because of that, when Seongcheol was in Korea, he had tried not to show any interest in stocks. He had thought there was no reason to gamble when they had real estate, an investment that was stable and had high returns while already giving them sufficient profit.
But America really does have a different atmosphere.
He could see that most investment funds flowed into the stock market. More precisely, it could be called securities, including bonds and funds, but it was also true that the share of stocks was growing due to the rise of IT.
Moreover, although this company was under his and his wife’s names, in reality, all its revenue was created by his son, and the shares were also his son’s. So he needed to listen to his son’s opinion on how to manage the funds.
And what he’s saying is reasonable and stable too.
If Insu had said he wanted to go all in on a specific company, Seongcheol would have stopped him. But even from Seongcheol’s perspective, this was a plan that seemed plausible.
“I’ll discuss it with your mother first.”
“Yes. I’ll leave it to you, Dad.”
Insu bowed his head to his father and thought that if he really did not have his parents, he probably would not have been able to focus so intensely on game development like this.
There were inconvenient aspects to being young, but precisely because he had parents who fully supported him, he could entrust complicated and difficult matters to them.
Of course, he was also lucky that his parents had those abilities.
Once the decision was made, his father moved quickly and bought stocks first. Of course, this was still an era where individuals had too little access to information and the risk was high, so rather than buying stocks directly, he used a fund.
“It’s an index fund called TechVision.”
“What’s an index fund?”
Since Insu was still the owner of the company, Seongcheol at least told him what kind of fund they had joined.
“It’s a fund that doesn’t choose individual stocks directly, but passively follows an existing index.”
“Ah…”
So it seemed to mean investing by following something like the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ index as it was. This would certainly mean broadly diversifying across the whole market.
(Translator’s Note: S&P 500 — A major U.S. stock market index tracking 500 large publicly traded companies, widely used as an indicator of the overall American economy and market performance.)
(Translator’s Note: NASDAQ Index — A major U.S. stock market index heavily focused on technology and internet-related companies, often used as a benchmark for the tech industry.)
There was also something Seongcheol did not bother explaining: index funds tended to have very low fees. After all, they simply bought mechanically according to an existing index.
Not long after they invested in IT stocks like that, Astra-G was released.
This finally came out.
As soon as Insu heard the rumor, he bought it and installed it on his computer.
One might wonder what kind of program it was. It was the GUI version of the OS program Insu had used before, allowing programs to be run through visualized icons and supporting multiple tasks at the same time. In other words, it was an OS like Windows from his previous life.
In fact, Windows 3.0 had come out in 1990, so when this still had not appeared even as 1991 was nearing its end, he had wondered whether Windows would not come out in this world.
But he had not gone so far as to think of making Windows himself. To be honest, it was closer to saying he did not dare.
He did not think games were low-level programs at all. But there was a clear difference in difficulty between games and an OS. And Insu only had knowledge of the future; his programming ability itself was not especially extraordinary.