Chapter 92: TCG and IP
Chapter 92: TCG and IP
(Translator’s Note: TCG / Trading Card Game — Card-based game genre centered around collecting, deck-building, trading, and strategic battles using customizable card sets.)
Online systems already had delays due to physical limitations to begin with. But if they used a file-based method, there would be processing time for handling incoming commands on the local machine, and since operations had to be processed sequentially to support multiple users, players would die of frustration waiting around.
But if API protocols were established, frequently used results and indexes could be cached in memory, making responses far faster. In other words, instead of accessing the disk every single time, processing could be handled directly through memory.
Put more simply, it meant both sides were already in a state of reaching out their hands toward each other in preparation.
And once they considered parallel processing, scalability advantages, error-handling capabilities, and memory caching, there was no choice but to use APIs.
The problem was that in this era, no standard protocols existed yet, meaning Insu’s development team had to create everything manually themselves.
Request and response rules were merely the most basic part. They also had to create error-handling methods, encryption systems for security, and because there were no dedicated testing tools or manuals yet, everything had to be built entirely by hand from scratch. On top of that, for future maintenance, they also needed to systematize and document the protocols themselves.
Insu began calculating the time required while listing each task one by one.
“Two weeks for communication method design, one week for defining data formats, and at least another two weeks for the request-response structure... Even if we move as fast as possible, this is still going to take at least two months. Haah.”
The other team members, who had been quietly watching, all ended up wearing hopeless expressions.
Even this estimate had only come relatively quickly because Insu understood the basic concepts and the team members could brainstorm together to decide what needed to be built and how. If they had truly tried creating an MMORPG from complete ignorance, just reaching this point might have taken several months, or perhaps even years.
In any case, after producing an enormous amount of work assignments, Insu once again became a mother bird, diligently tearing them apart and distributing them among the team members. Though this was their first MMORPG project, the experience they had accumulated so far allowed him to somehow divide the work even in such overwhelming circumstances.
Yoonsu and Brian will probably chew through it somehow.
In truth, after splitting the workload roughly, he had mostly finished things by shoving the difficult or unclear sections toward the team’s two aces.
Of course, Clayton and Rick, whose specialties were networking, received even more work than that.
The burden would certainly be heavy, but now that the development room was growing in size, they would soon begin establishing ranks based on ability and differentiating salaries as well, so it could not really be called unfair.
While Insu and his team were throwing themselves completely into development, an interesting new genre appeared in the gaming world. It was not in PC gaming, but in the offline market instead.
It was a card game titled Chrono Sigil, featuring a system where players gathered resources through resource cards, then used units and magic to battle against their opponents.
It was a TCG, a Trading Card Game.
America had long possessed a well-developed collecting culture, including card collecting. It had originally begun in the late nineteenth century when tobacco companies used cards for product protection and promotion, then expanded into full-scale collecting in the early twentieth century by printing images of sports athletes on them.
And in the West, including America, card-based games had existed for ages. Not just poker, but numerous different board games as well.
Built upon that foundation, TCGs received tremendous enthusiasm immediately after release.
“Haah.”
Despite selling hundreds of thousands of cards within just a few months of launch, the company’s representative, Elliot Prest, could not bring himself to celebrate wholeheartedly. Elliot was a twenty-nine-year-old doctoral student in mathematics, a skinny white man with an unusually tall frame.
It was not that the sales were unsatisfactory. The game had sold extremely well, and moreover, it had been designed around a strategy of steadily expanding sales by building up players over time and releasing additional expansion packs. If things continued this way, growth would become exponential.
“So why the sigh? It’s selling well, isn’t it?”
Mara Bern, the lead art director, had excitedly rushed to the president’s office after seeing the sales figures, only to find the company president sighing deeply enough to collapse the floor.
Mara was a young twenty-five-year-old woman. Though slightly shorter than Elliot, she possessed a far sturdier physique.
“It’s selling well for now. But the copycats are the problem.”
“Ah...”
Mara’s expression immediately darkened as well. Less than a month after Chrono Sigil launched, a similar game called Creatures had appeared.
But contrary to Elliot’s claim, it was difficult to confidently call it a mere copycat. While the systems were similar, they were not identical, and the quality was high enough that it was hard to believe the game had been produced within only a month.
“Why is that downgraded knockoff so popular?”
Compared to Chrono Sigil, Creatures was far simpler. Skills only functioned in two ways: either activating immediately or activating as counters whenever the opponent performed an action.
Elliot described it as an unbelievably simplistic inferior imitation, but in reality, even that alone allowed for plenty of strategic variety. And because of that simplicity, the entry barrier had been lowered dramatically, allowing the latecomer to attract an enormous wave of new players.
But that was not the only driving force behind Creatures’ explosive pursuit.
“You really don’t know? You already know why. It’s because of D&D.”
The D&D Mara mentioned was an IP nearly identical to the D&D from Insu’s original world. Apparently, this world had also settled on the same title as the most appropriate way to represent that kind of IP.
Creatures had been created after purchasing the D&D IP license. Its lore accuracy and illustrations were quite good, making it visually appealing, and because the original fandom was incredibly powerful, it achieved impressive sales right from the start.
“Haah...”
Elliot knew that perfectly well himself. His original plan had been to steadily release expansion packs and establish his own worldbuilding until he created an IP capable of rivaling D&D. He simply had not expected to clash with them directly this early.
The other team members did not seem to feel much of a sense of crisis, but Elliot felt as though he was standing at the crossroads between ruin and success.
At this rate...
Mara did not particularly sympathize, but seeing the president acting like this was also a problem, so she casually threw out a suggestion.
“Then why don’t we bring in a good IP too?”
“Haah...”
Elliot frowned as he looked toward Mara, then lowered his gaze back to the floor and sighed again.
Naturally, he had already considered that himself. The opposing side’s successful strategy was obvious, and no one would ignore such a thing. The problem was that bringing in an external IP diverged from the strategy he had originally envisioned, making it difficult for him to commit to it.
But a crisis was looming right before his eyes. At this rate, they could end up being crushed by that knockoff.
I don’t want to be remembered as the game that created TCGs only to disappear after being overtaken by latecomers because of weak gameplay!
After agonizing over it, Elliot finally spoke again.
“...”
“Huh? What did you say?”
“...What usable IPs are there?”
Mara’s eyes widened in shock. She already considered the president an incredible person because he was highly intelligent and creative, but he was also unbelievably stubborn.
When successful, people called it conviction. When they wavered or failed, they called it stubbornness.
He really must feel a serious sense of crisis.
Mara decided to think about it more seriously. Then one particular title came to mind.
“Ah! Have you heard of TLF by any chance?”
“Huh? I feel like I’ve heard of it somewhere before.”
Elliot was busy, but as a game designer, he still kept track of all famous digital games.
“You know, that PC RPG. The one with the grid-based party battles.”
“Ah! The one that recently got a sequel?”
“Yeah. It actually looked pretty good. It has lots of unique magic, and especially this class called the Summoner. Apparently, it can turn almost every monster or creature in the game world into summons, so it kind of gives off the same sort of feeling as a TCG.”
“...Right. I heard something about that.”
Elliot thought for a moment before pulling a game magazine off the bookshelf and flipping through it.
[Summoner Strategy Guide!]
The Summoner craze in TLF2 had become so intense that magazines were already dedicating entire sections to it.
But Elliot was not particularly interested in the detailed systems themselves. Instead, he focused on the illustrations and settings of the recommended summons featured inside.
Afterward, he dug through additional TLF2 magazines to look up more illustrations, magic, and related content.
“For a PC RPG, it definitely seems pretty deep. But there are also parts that feel somewhat similar to D&D. Is that okay?”
“Ah! I actually read an article about that before. Apparently most of the similarities to D&D are fine because D&D itself borrowed motifs from older legends and myths too.”
“Really? Even so, let’s look into it more first.”
“Huh? Then... are you seriously thinking of using this?”
Although she had been the one to recommend it, Mara had never expected Elliot, who was normally so picky, to accept the idea this quickly.
“...I’m just thinking about it for now.”
Elliot noticed what Mara was thinking and awkwardly responded that way, but in truth, his thoughts had already tilted heavily toward the idea.
“Do you know what a TCG is?”
During lunch break, Insu went upstairs to the second-floor office after being called by his father, only to receive an unexpected question.
“Yes. Trading cards... no, Trading Card Games, right?”
It was not really a field he was personally interested in. But regardless of his preferences, it occupied a massive portion of the gaming industry, and because the genre later experienced a second golden age after moving into mobile environments, there was no way Insu could not know about it.
For research purposes, he had even spent considerable time personally playing several of them. Though they were not really his taste.
“That’s right. The offline board game that came out recently.”
Unlike Insu, Seongcheol was actually quite interested in it. He had always been fascinated by American culture, so even ordinary card games like poker that appeared frequently in media had looked fun to him. And now there was something that combined those ideas with the ability to enjoy detailed PC-game-like rules offline, naturally making him curious.
He had not actually played yet since he still lacked people to play with, but he had already bought several cards and examined them. Hyein had said she would play with him someday, though since she did not seem particularly interested, his hopes did not look promising.
“But why the card game?”
“Oh. A TCG company sent us a collaboration request.”
“A collaboration?”
In Insu’s previous life, collaborations had been so common that he immediately understood the meaning. But as far as he remembered, early TCGs, including Magic: The Gathering, had been extremely serious about establishing their own worlds and absolutely never did collaborations with outside content, which made this feel rather strange to him.
“Yeah. They said they want to use our IP.”
“Seriously?”
Chrono Sigil was practically identical to the Magic: The Gathering that Insu remembered as the origin of TCGs. To people uninterested in the field, that title might not sound particularly impressive.
But Magic: The Gathering earned millions of dollars in the very year it launched. Starting the following year, it generated tens of millions annually, then grew into a business worth hundreds of millions by the 2000s. It continued growing until it surpassed one billion dollars in 2021, and by 2025, shortly before Insu’s death, it had exceeded 1.7 billion dollars.
And that was speaking only of raw revenue. As the originator of the TCG genre, it had also profoundly influenced countless later games, especially mobile games.
And this was not merely about directly adapting TCGs into mobile form.
The collectible-content systems inseparable from mobile gaming could largely trace their roots back to TCGs.
Anyone familiar with mobile games knew that many gacha animations were blatantly styled like card pack openings. And the rarity systems ranging from R-grade to SRR-grade, along with evolution and enhancement systems, were all extremely similar to those found in TCGs.