Chapter 75: Portal Site
Chapter 75: Portal Site
A site that handled after-sales services such as patches, as well as product sales, online game client downloads, member management, and so on.
Simple examples would be things like Nexon.com, the Netmarble portal, or Steam.
But if I’m making a web portal anyway, adding a search engine and more general content to make it into a full portal site might not be bad either.
Originally, even focusing only on game development was not enough, so this had been an idea he pushed aside because it felt like he was spreading himself too thin.
Honestly, if he had not had his parents’ help, it would have been difficult to accomplish even this much with game development. At first, because he knew the future, he felt like he could do anything. But to actually accomplish even one thing, there was far more work to do than he had imagined.
Before even talking about limits of passion, it was simply physically impossible.
This was a problem that money could not easily solve either. No matter how much money he paid, it was difficult for others to have as much motivation as Insu himself. More importantly, no matter how detailed the blueprint and explanation were, almost no one could execute things exactly as he imagined them.
If I have to sit there explaining until they understand, I might as well just do it myself.
Moreover, everything Insu wanted to do was based on future knowledge, so to people of this era, it was unfamiliar and specialized. That meant even fewer people would be able to handle it.
However, a portal platform had been part of his original plan. If he did not want to make games only to benefit others, and if he wanted dominant influence, he needed to be capable of operating his own services.
And to do that, he would have to invest in relevant engineers and network equipment anyway. A portal site was something he could attempt by expanding the scale a little further from there.
And I’m already in a situation where I have surplus funds and need somewhere to invest them.
Of course, it could fail. But investments always carried a chance of failure. By now, he had enough room to endure that much, both financially and psychologically.
But if it succeeds...
He might even be able to take Google’s place.
Of course, saying Google reached that position through first-mover advantage alone would be far too dismissive, so this might be too big a dream.
But even if he did not reach Google’s level, reaching the level of Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, or AltaVista, which all occupied some share during the early era of search sites and portal sites, would still be a massive success.
(Translator’s Note: AltaVista — Real-world search engine launched in 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation in the United States. It became one of the earliest highly influential web search engines and was known for its web crawler and large searchable index.)
Since he only needed to reach out a little further from a portal platform, simply letting this pass felt like too much of a waste in this era.
Moreover, this portal site was also a business that made excellent use of the cheat called future knowledge.
In the absolute worst case, even if I burn through everything and go completely bankrupt, I should be able to keep the game side going somehow by listing the company and issuing stock based on the recognition I’ve already secured.
Insu had no experience of failure yet, but after experiencing the harsh reality of game development, he now understood clearly that simply knowing the future did not guarantee success.
So he had to think about the possibility of failure too.
Especially since this portal site business could be attempted in the early stages with only part of Insu’s current funds, but it was also a business where he would need to keep investing for quite a long time while prioritizing traffic acquisition over profit.
He needed to recognize that one wrong move could truly drain everything.
Well, any business will drain everything and collapse if you can’t cut your losses at the right time.
In any case, after making his decision, he opened a document program and began writing a business plan first.
“A new business?”
“Yes. Please read it once.”
Hyein accepted the proposal Insu held out and looked at her son’s face for a moment. She was amazed by his passion, seeing him say he would do something new immediately after they had just finished signing contracts.
Seongcheol felt similarly. At the same time, he worried that perhaps Insu had succeeded too smoothly until now and begun seeing the world too easily.
But after reading the proposal and picturing it in his head, that thought quickly changed.
This seems like it could work.
He used PC communication a lot, and he had also used the recently introduced internet quite a bit.
Because of that, he had personally felt several inconveniences of the internet compared to PC communication.
First, it was difficult to find the information he wanted. Unless someone told him a site address, there was no way to get there. Since they called it an address, one could compare it to a real-world address. But at least in reality, there was a physical location, so one could look around and find it. On the internet, there was no such thing, so if you did not know the exact address, you could not even connect.
That was why people had to obtain addresses through offline media such as magazines or visit sites through information introduced on PC communication.
Also, the information density was too thin. PC communication was a closed environment, but instead, all the information existed within a directory-like structure. If one entered the right category, one could easily access related information. Compared to that, on the internet, one had to find pages one by one.
At least there was a function called links, so related sites were often connected, but because one had to move horizontally from one page to another, the density was still thin.
But if something called a portal site exists, the story changes completely.
Especially if this search function became reality, it would preserve the advantage of infinite openness while achieving accessibility beyond PC communication.
Moreover, the proposal briefly explained how this thing called a search engine worked.
“So this web crawling means having a program automatically repeat web surfing in your place?”
(Translator’s Note: Web Crawling — Automated process where programs browse websites and collect data for indexing and search engines.)
“Yes. That’s right.”
The fact that Seongcheol knew the term web surfing itself meant he was quite interested in the internet. Insu looked pleased to learn that his father knew about this field as well and answered him.
Surfing was a method of using the internet through hyperlinks, one of the World Wide Web’s defining features.
Because the World Wide Web was originally created for academic purposes, hyperlinks were a system designed to make sources of information clear by allowing text to be clicked and connected to other sites. Continuing to move to other sites through those links was compared to riding waves, and so it came to be called web surfing.
In any case, since webpages were basically made to be shown to others, even when they were not used for their original academic purpose, they usually used links frequently to avoid isolation. Because of that, theoretically, if one repeated surfing infinitely, one could eventually access most sites.
Moreover, as the word “web” suggested, it was not a vertical structure but a horizontally connected structure, so one could explore many areas in fewer steps than expected.
It would be difficult to reach one hundred percent, but it meant one could relatively easily reach most sites, or a considerable portion, around seventy to eighty percent.
A search site used a program called a crawler to automatically repeat this surfing, then automatically stored information extracted from the sites it found.
“And then it classifies them with this indexing program so they can be searched?”
“Yes.”
It did not store entire pages. Instead, it extracted text from sites according to logic. In a library, things were ordered alphabetically or numerically, but a search engine automatically created an index based on the words extracted from each webpage.
Then it ranked search results based on factors such as language structure, the accuracy and relevance of the match between the search term and index, recency, search frequency, clicks, and so on.
...He really is a genius.
Because Seongcheol had personally felt the vast emptiness of the internet, he could only be even more amazed by this search engine. In truth, it was easy enough to think that it would be nice if there were a search function.
But how to realize that in concrete terms was a completely different matter. Seeing it designed in a structure he could logically and easily understand gave him chills.
“Is this really that amazing?”
Hyein read it several times and understood it, but honestly, she found it difficult to judge the business potential. So she looked at her husband and saw him in admiration.
“...From my perspective, it’s like throwing a ship with an automatic navigation system to someone floundering in a vast ocean. They wouldn’t be able to not use it.”
“Ah...”
After hearing her husband’s analogy, Hyein quickly understood what he meant. In truth, Seongcheol first thought of space and a spaceship rather than the sea and a ship, but he changed it to a more realistic analogy.
Since Insu had already proven himself several times, and since they also considered this company their son’s, Seongcheol and Hyein intended to agree unless there was a serious reason not to. But from their perspective, the idea was plausible, and the most important concept had already been concretely designed, so there was no reason to oppose it.
Moreover, he even wrote down the risks and exit strategy.
Seongcheol looked at his son, who had only just turned ten, with awe in his eyes.
Of course, feelings were feelings. If they agreed, they now had to proceed with practical work.
“Then we just need to recruit development personnel as written here?”
“Yes. Please.”
For now, they planned to form a team of around ten people. But they would not hire ten people immediately. They planned to find one person to serve as PM, or project manager, and one person to serve as system architect, then give those two hiring authority.
At first, Insu had planned to serve as project manager himself. But the game and MMORPG sides would continue growing in business scale, and he had many things in mind for the portal site business as well, so he judged that they needed someone separate to control this side.
“But they need to know NAVA, TCP/IP, DBMS, and various programming languages including C, and have practical experience and experience designing large-scale systems? I think someone like this will be hard to find at the bachelor’s degree level.”
NAVA was similar to Unix from Insu’s previous life. In this world as well, this operating system was widely used for building networks.
“Yes. They’ll probably need a master’s or doctorate. Or they should have worked somewhere as a senior. And they don’t absolutely need to have every skill or career item listed there. Those are just preferred qualifications.”
“Alright. Got it.”
Seongcheol felt somewhat overwhelmed, but he knew that real work meant somehow getting things like this done, so he brushed the back of his head and nodded.
For reference, he was also in the process of recruiting additional staff for the MMORPG. They planned to recruit ten people on that side as well. However, the basic design would be handled by existing staff for now, so within two or three months after development began, they planned to first recruit about three people who could handle technical verification and server architecture design.
After all, not every person was needed throughout the entire development period. In particular, people for security design and live services, namely GMs, community managers, security specialists, and similar roles, could be recruited near the end of development or just before release.
Afterward, Seongcheol went around universities and PC communication services, as he had done before, recruiting developers.
TLF2’s release was almost like a festival for RPG fans in North America. The previous title’s popularity and reputation were already tremendous, and because Parallel Soft had released some turn-based strategy game in between instead of immediately releasing a sequel, the wait had felt long.
But then they finally announced that they were developing the sequel, and unlike previous game companies, they continued sharing the development situation through PC communication, raising anticipation even further.
If there had been a long delay here, that anticipation might have cooled, but instead, they properly released it at the scheduled time, and Velocity, the distributor, carried out large-scale marketing to match it. The anticipation that had gathered exploded all at once.