The Great Building Era
Monday, January 30th.
Purge Day had been a success, and the stock was still climbing. Sunday's counseling content had drawn solid praise — people saying they'd discovered a more serious side of me they hadn't seen before. My stream was still sailing smoothly today.
And I wasn't the only one making progress.
With the new year, Miho had taken over the official YouTube channel and successfully uploaded her first video, titled "Greetings from V-Live." A week later, it was sitting at a respectable ten thousand views.
YouTube operations look like a loss in the short term, but you can't just leave them alone either.
If live streaming was a stable paycheck, YouTube was a lottery ticket you bought every week. It felt like you were constantly bleeding money, but someday a big hit could come back around. And the occasional fourth- or fifth-place wins quietly covered your costs.
What did that mean, exactly? Among the handful of viewers who drifted in through the YouTube channel, if you got lucky, there might be a whale. I'd actually seen cases like that before the regression. Among the hardcore fans of Park Na-na — famous as the early Candy-power GOAT among Pangea TV virtual streamers — a fair number had fallen for her through YouTube videos.
On top of that, YouTube was a matter of pride for a streamer. Honestly, even now, saying your job was "streamer" still got you a pretty rough social reception. It carried that underground-culture vibe. YouTube, on the other hand, was seen as far more mainstream — a service used by an absurd number of people worldwide. The actual work wasn't all that different, but in regular people's heads, streamers on broadcasting platforms were nobodies while YouTubers were treated like corporate employees. Of course, that perception only applied once you had a decent subscriber count.
And Lucy's doing well too.
Just as I'd handed the official YouTube channel to Miho, I'd delegated management of our V-Live Naver fan café to Lucy. All the members had admin privileges and looked after their own boards to some degree, but someone still needed to handle the overall picture — creating event-related boards when something was happening, deleting them when it was over, archiving materials separately, that sort of thing. The café managers handled the minor day-to-day work, but we needed someone who could primarily communicate with them and hand down orders. Managers were helpers, nothing more. Final decision-making authority had to stay with us members. And true to her meticulous nature, Lucy was running the café without a single slip-up.
Our café membership already passed three thousand.
We still hadn't caught up to Decrescendo café's peak membership numbers, but we had something they didn't — a future full of possibility. It felt a lot like looking at Mayo, who was still a minor. Give her a little more time to grow and she'd stand tall as an adult, carrying her own weight. Our crew still had plenty of gaps, just like Mayo, but we would grow into something impressive. I was sure of it.
"Huh? Mayo's ears are suddenly itchy, geosida. Someone's definitely talking trash about Mayo, geosida. The culprit is among us, geosida!"
That was why you couldn't underestimate sharp-eared Mayo…
Lately, Rena World had exactly two hot topics: the newly appeared Mythic-grade gear, and each company's Landmark construction funding.
This morning, Rim-ani had stepped up as Mu-yang Group's representative to challenge for the Golderite Sword. Shockingly, she succeeded on her fourth try, earning the title of God's Hand.
Four tries? Was that even real?
Considering Tu-nyang-i had burned through over sixty million Rena just pulling for a Witherite Sword, watching Rim-ani walk away with a Golderite Sword for a little over ten million Rena was the purest embodiment of the phrase "luck-based garbage game."
Once that news spread, individual investors who'd been too scared of the massive costs to even try started jumping in aggressively. Sure, they'd have to kick a cut of the profits back to their companies, but everyone had a little personal pocket money, and as streamers they all coveted the attention-grabbing title of "Mythic-grade gear holder."
But probability always converges toward the average. The individual investors who'd casually thrown ten or twenty million Rena at the gacha all ended up with their heads cracked open, sprawled out clutching Netherite ingots infused with an "unknown aura." Fortune didn't come that easily.
"Grrraaagh! Anyone got a Coin Fragment U to spare? Grrraaagh!"
"There's a child starving at home! Please, just one Coin Fragment C, I'm begging you!"
"…"
Every time I stopped by Genesis Village and saw the homeless who'd blown their entire fortunes, reduced to begging for luck Coin Fragments, a flicker of anxiety crossed my mind. Come to think of it, my gacha luck in mobile games was absolute garbage — what if that carried over when we pulled for Mythic-grade gear? If we actually hit the pity ceiling while some other company right next to us succeeded in a few tries and skipped off humming a tune, our mental states would shatter on the spot. Anyone who could endure that situation would basically be a bodhisattva.
Honestly, ten million Rena sounds like nothing, but that's at least three days of hardcore mining. Thinking about that amount just vanishing into thin air…
And the pity ceiling? That was nearly a hundred million Rena. Viewers could sit back and cackle through the entertainment, but for the streamers who'd actually earned that money, every failure message would make their hearts drop through the floor.
Please, Ju-ttak, you bastard. You made me like this — at least take responsibility for my luck.
If we hit the pity ceiling even twice on Mythic-grade gear pulls, our company's current razor-thin margins would leave us completely left behind. This was the domain of pure "luck," and even as a regressor I had no way to control it. All I could do was pray to Ju-ttak — a god I never usually bothered invoking.
Hmm? Come to think of it, turning this into a company-versus-company content format would be pretty fun. Nice — I'll jot the idea down for now.
Picture each company's leaders stepping up one by one to attempt Mythic-grade gear pulls. How nail-bitingly tense would that be? From a viewer's perspective, you'd be hard-pressed to find content that dumped dopamine that hard.
Anyway — looks like it's almost Mu-yang Group's turn.
Mu-yang Group had finished their light warm-up with 430,000 Candy from Diamond CK funding. Through recent meetings, they'd locked in their Landmark: Munastiris, a parody of the defensive fortress Minas Tirith from The Lord of the Rings.
The construction funding competition mission decided in those meetings was set for late evening on January 31st. That was a razor-sharp strategic choice. There was a saying in the streaming world: aim for the start of the month. When a new month rolled around, people psychologically felt like they hadn't spent anything yet that month, so wallets opened more easily — and checking the Candy calculator sites confirmed a meaningful data spike in Candy donations at the beginning of each month.
Choosing 10 PM was equally brilliant. Pangea TV capped daily Candy top-ups at 10,000, and just two hours later the date would change and the limit would reset. It was a terrifying strategy for wringing fans' wallets twice over. Before the regression, Akatsuki had used this exact method to pull in 1.12 million Candy with only six people — the effect was that good.
It hit even harder for Akatsuki because most of their fandom was casual floaters. Once you hit a fan's wallet, the aftereffects linger — but with floaters, they're likely to leave anyway, so you might as well squeeze them while you can.
Of course, that was pure numbers talk. Squeeze too hard and the backlash was inevitable. During our Sky Island construction funding, even though viewers had suggested it, I'd refused to use that method out of concern for our image. I believed that protecting the brand was the better long-term play.
I'm not just streaming for a year or two. Gotta look further ahead. That's why I'm investing in YouTube too.
If I had the bandwidth, I'd have liked to run a personal YouTube channel as well, but it wasn't feasible yet. Every last bit of money was currently locked up in Pangea TV stock. Once I liquidated in the second week of February, I'd have a little more breathing room.
That said — can Mu-yang Group hit 1.4 million Candy again this time?
An irregular like me and V-Live Company had appeared and recorded 750,000 Candy in funding that never existed in the original history, absorbing a portion of the casual viewers' and Mu-yang uncles' Candy in the process. That was bound to have some impact. Whether it would shrink their numbers or, conversely, spur Mu-yang Group's fans — stung by the fact that a seven-person company with no major corporate streamers had pulled 750,000 — to unite even harder and surpass their pre-regression funding total… I had no idea.
Nobody knows until you flip the cards.
Either way, the core point I was making was clear. Mu-yang Group was about to fire the starting pistol for full-scale Landmark construction funding. Sure, we'd made the first move, but our impact couldn't compare to Mu-yang Group's reach. This Munastiris construction funding would generate enormous buzz, and every other company would have no choice but to pay attention.
And then what?
Naturally, every other company would scramble to jump into Landmark construction funding themselves. I wasn't just talking — the Munastiris funding wave was so massive that the same construction funding fever even broke out on Seona Land, across servers.
This is how it begins. Rena World's Great Building Era.
Time to get ready for a new age.