Acquisition (2)
“Hmm… CEO Cho Yihan. I'm truly grateful for the investment, but… if it's an investment premised on an acquisition, I must respectfully decline.”
The founder of the startup developing a voice chat program looked visibly uncomfortable at our proposal. Unlike the X TV acquisition, this company hadn't suffered any public failure, so I'd anticipated that buying them out would be a harder sell.
“CEO Han. Honestly speaking… voice chat programs aren't profitable.”
“I'm sorry?”
“You know it as well as I do. Skyphia and TeamCommunication, the PC voice chat leaders, have been drowning in chronic deficits.”
“Hmm….”
It was an industry where even the frontrunners—Skyphia and TeamCommunication—couldn't resolve their losses and were mulling over withdrawal from the business entirely.
Not to mention, even Decode, the service that will eventually monopolize this market, ran at a loss.
In this market, popularity and profit existed in an inverse relationship—a reverse coupling. Capture the mass market and you bleed red ink; monetize with subscriptions and your user base shrinks. A market structure with no real commercial viability at all.
“After all, your plan was to sell the finished program to another company and exit, wasn't it?”
“….”
I'd hit the nail on the head; his eyes wouldn't stay still.
“If you're going to sell it anyway, why not think of selling to us first?”
“Hmm… Well, it's not a bad offer, but… the price difference is rather….”
In the end, he was asking us to meet him on price.
“Then let's confirm this first.”
“The codec?”
“Yes. The codec I developed.”
I took the document Seung-wook had prepared summarizing the codec's specifications and handed it across the table.
“Th-this is real? A codec like this actually exists?”
“It's one of the acquisition conditions. The program will be built using this codec. Once you get your hands on it, you'll naturally see for yourself whether these specs are fact or fiction.”
After a moment's deliberation, he read our proposal—conditions and all—thoroughly from top to bottom.
“The finished program becomes the property of PlayForge Nexus, the parent company, and until development is complete, I retain the CEO position and direct the development effort….”
All boilerplate clauses. The part he'd actually like came separately.
“A signing bonus of 300 million won, and 1 billion upon completion of the program. Is that correct?”
“Yes. Consider it our safety net. We'd like to trust you, CEO Han, but… once the company belongs to us, you might grow lax about the development, no? Consider it our earnest request that you give it your very best.”
I could practically see the gears turning in his head. Beyond the contract itself, there was the monthly salary, the payout for transferring his equity, the signing bonus and completion bonus on top. The total would come remarkably close to the maximum he could have hoped to earn by building the program himself and selling it off.
“Excellent! I look forward to working with you!”
“Likewise.”
Once he'd signed the contract, I handed him a thick stack of documents.
“What's… this?”
“Guidelines for the direction we'd like you to take.”
The requirements were nothing special.
Simply this: use my codec to build the finest voice chat program in existence. I'd be dispensing advice generously, drawing on all the technologies I'd witnessed in the future, so he was more than capable of pulling it off.
“Good luck with the work. Just email us progress reports once a week.”
After offering a few pointers, I headed outside with Kim Seung-wook. He looked somewhat worn down from the back-to-back meetings that had started that morning.
“Thanks for handling the coordination on your end.”
“Oh, so you do know. Do you have any idea how much hell it was finding a company that matched your precious criteria?”
“No need to fish for credit. That's what we pay you for.”
“Hah… CEO Cho Yihan. I have a lot I'd like to say to you right now, but… it's still working hours, so I'll restrain myself. I genuinely want to kill you.”
Nobody knew better than I did how much work Seung-wook carried. I'd dumped the lion's share of what used to be my own job onto him, after all. And yet—whenever I piled work onto employees, I felt at least a twinge of guilt, but with this guy, no matter how much I offloaded, my conscience stayed perfectly clear.
Maybe just be worse at your job.
He delivered on every expectation, which left me no choice but to keep handing him more.
“Hey, Yihan. More importantly—we spent way more money than I expected acquiring two companies. Is this actually okay? I get that we have cash cows, but aren't we burning through it a little too freely? Honestly, an internet streaming platform and a voice chat program? Those are just money-devouring hippos.”
Even though he'd done it because I told him to, Seung-wook had apparently run his own viability analysis on the businesses.
“Sure, the retained earnings look healthy right now, but if we keep spending like this, it won't hold. Even what Dot Hero and ACD bring in has a ceiling. And we don't exactly pay our people peanuts—monthly payroll alone runs close to 500 million won. That's more than double what companies our size typically spend.”
Seung-wook's concerns were legitimate. Generally speaking, a game studio's revenue explodes right after launch and then tapers off gradually, so even when the coffers look flush, the standard practice is to squirrel money away.
“Keep going like this and we won't last five years. It's not just payroll—you're being way too generous with benefits too. Even with all that money from Black Monday, spending like this will hurt.”
Seung-wook pronounced the company's death sentence with a grave expression.
“Five years, huh….”
“That's right. We can scrape through this round of expansion somehow, but at this rate—”
“We've got plenty of runway.”
“Huh?”
“I know it's your job, but don't worry about the money so much.”
It was January 2012, which meant if we just waited one year, 2013 would arrive. 2013—the year of Bitcoin's first boom!
“Seung-wook. I'm telling you this as a friend: there's something called Bitcoin. Start buying, even now.”
“Bitcoin? What's that?”
“Just buy it. Don't come crying to me later that you didn't.”
There was no chance of our company's finances deteriorating the way Seung-wook feared. Not with a regressor in the building.
One month and one week since development on the next project began.
Kim Jaemin, the Programming Team Leader, examined the prototype—delivered a touch past the deadline—and could only marvel.
I never expected it to come together this quickly….
It was merely a prototype, yet the skeleton of the game's core systems was all there.
When Director Cho Yihan had unveiled his design document, Kim Jaemin hadn't openly objected—but deep down, he'd assumed this development cycle would be a rocky one.
By Cho Yihan's design, the game they were meant to build was a quasi-AAA title. For a mid-sized studio like PlayForge, it was a slightly overwhelming undertaking, so by the standards of his own experience, the odds of this project collapsing were high.
But Kim Jaemin now had to admit he'd underestimated his boss, Director Cho Yihan.
No. Truthfully, I never thought of him as less, either.
During the development of ACD, and again when Yihan single-handedly built the codec, Kim Jaemin had watched the man's skill and been awed, reverent. Having witnessed Cho Yihan's versatility firsthand and concluded that coding was his single greatest gift, there was no way he could have discounted him.
And yet, once Yihan had hired administrative and clerical staff and freed himself to focus entirely on development, he operated on a different plane altogether.
So genius is what you'd call Director Cho Yihan, then.
Kim Jaemin was one of the company's talents, handpicked and endorsed by Cho Yihan himself—yet the more he measured himself against the man, the more acutely he felt how meager his own abilities truly were.
Had they split contribution to this prototype as equity shares, Cho Yihan would have taken four and the programming team six. He'd nearly outproduced a programming team of nearly twenty single-handedly, and the thought filled Kim Jaemin with an incomprehensible dread.
The Director with his limiter removed… doesn't seem human.
When the team members called Yihan things like the Coding Demon, the Constellation of Overtime, and the God of Debugging, he'd told them to cut it out as their team leader—but having lived through this, he found himself unable to dispute a single title.
As his reverence deepened by the day, Kim Jaemin came down to the sixth floor at the Director's summons to join the meeting.
“Everyone's had a look at the prototype?”
From Kim Jaemin at the head of the Programming Team to Cha Juhui leading the Art Team, everyone in the room nodded.
“Yes. The entire Art Team played through it.”
“That's the direction the game will take.”
“Director, I have a few questions prepared. May I ask them?”
“Go right ahead.”
Cha Juhui glanced down at the documents she'd brought to the meeting.
“The game's setting is Busan, right? A city. Are we allowed to reference real buildings for the architecture?”
“Reference them, yes—but if they're identical, we have a problem. The street layouts and zoning are practically carbon copies of Busan, so if the building exteriors match exactly, we could land in a copyright dispute.”
“Ah, I see. Then ordinary buildings aside… what about the landmarks?”
“Recreate the landmarks exactly as they are. We're negotiating with the landmark owners through Busan City Hall, and the responses have been positive, so it should go through. If the talks fall apart, I'll let you know.”
“Yes, sir!”
A round of Q&A continued between Cha Juhui, the de facto head of the Art Team, and Cho Yihan, and just as her questions finally ran dry, Kim Jaemin raised his hand.
“Jaemin. Go ahead.”
“W-with the prototype finished, i-isn't it time to m-move on to the v-vertical slice? M-may I ask which side you plan to f-focus on? The s-story mode? Or, if not, the single mode?”
The next project, tentatively titled Zombie, had two modes. One was story mode, showing how the world changed in the wake of the zombie outbreak's beginning. The other was single mode, where players survived alone in a fictional city.
Kim Jaemin was asking which mode the vertical slice—the demo to be shown to publishers—would be built around.
“I'm thinking single mode.”
“M-may I ask why?”
“A vertical slice distills the game's core fun into a concentrated form. The story mode we're planning runs about eleven hours of playtime. If we compress that into thirty minutes to an hour, is it actually going to be fun? Even if the player gets mauled to death ten minutes in, wouldn't single mode be the more entertaining demo?”
Kim Jaemin shook his head.
“I, I understand. A difference in scale…. S-single mode does seem more suitable…. A-as for the story, we could convey it through the design doc.”
“Don't wilt on me. It was a good question.”
Watching the Director give him a thumbs-up, Kim Jaemin smiled sheepishly.
“Any more questions?”
“….”
“Good. We'll end today's meeting here… and I'm heading out on a field trip, so if anything urgent comes up, don't use the office messenger—call my personal number.”
Kim Jaemin, who'd assumed full-scale development was starting today, regarded Cho Yihan with a puzzled look.
“D-Director? By field work, you mean…?”
“It's our reserved day at the motion capture studio.”
“Ah…!”
Motion capture that breathed life into the characters—it had his full endorsement.
I arrived at the motion capture studio together with Minji, who'd been put in charge of the animation side of this project.
“This is your first field trip, Minji?”
“Yes.”
“Don't be too nervous. Just do what you always do.”
“…?”
She stared at me as if to say, what the hell is that supposed to mean?
I'd said something pointless.
Minji was hardly the type to get nervous.
“Hello there~ Are you the folks from PlayForge?”
“Yes. I'm Cho Yihan—we have a reservation.”
“Confirmed~ Follow me, please. I'll show you the way!”
Trailing the staff member into the studio, I spotted the director I'd met when booking the reservation.
“Haha! Welcome, welcome! What's it been—almost a month?”
This was Director Choi, the owner of this studio and its motion capture director. In some ways, he and I were kindred spirits.
I returned his beaming welcome with a smile of my own.
“A little under a month, I think. Been keeping well?”
“Haha! Of course. By the way—once work wraps up today, drinks?”
“Ah… we've started development on the next project, so that'll be a bit difficult.”
“Tsk. What a shame. I found an absolutely mind-blowing raw fish restaurant, too.”
Minji, standing beside me, looked up at me with a meaningful glint in her eye.
“What?”
“Are you two already acquainted?”
“No. This is only our second meeting.”
“….”
“We got close having drinks after our meetings wrapped up.”
The motion capture studio Director Choi ran was one of the few studios with genuine skill that survived until my regression. It was still in its infancy, but its talent was plain to see, so I'd built the relationship over drinks—cultivating goodwill while it was cheap to do so.
“Was the moved-up reservation also thanks to this connection of yours?”
“Oh please. A connection? That sounds terribly unsavory. A booking simply fell through, and since we happened to be able to start work immediately, they bumped us up. That's all.”
“That is a connection.”
“Hmph!”
If he found that unfair, he could've used future knowledge to learn that Director Choi loved drinking and buttered him up like I did.
After following Director Choi a short way, we arrived at the studio's main shooting floor.
“CEO Cho! This is our studio's ace! Our technical director, Director Han!”
“I've heard a great deal about you. So you're the CEO of PlayForge…. I've been enjoying your games.”
“Oh! You've played our games? Which one?”
“I tried ACD. A friend talked me into playing together… it was genuinely fun.”
The technical director was one of our players—already, I had a good feeling about how this shoot would go.
“And this is our actor, Pyeonghwa! This young man can really act.”
“Pleasure to meet you!”
A man with facial markers stuck all over his face, dressed in a skintight blue suit, greeted us with plenty of energy.
After exchanging greetings with the studio staff, the shoot began in earnest.
“Alright, alright! Everyone focus! Ready? You've all memorized the storyboard, yes?”
“Yes!”
Once Director Choi confirmed the actor was in the zone, he shouted “Action!” and filming began. As I watched the actors perform against the storyboard Minji had produced, I quietly approached Director Choi.
“Director. Sorry—one moment.”
“Hm? Yes—cut, cut!”
Director Choi, absorbed in the monitor, paused the shoot.
“Yes, go ahead.”
“The protagonist's arc revolves heavily around the protagonist, right? Which makes his facial acting extremely important—but right now it's coming across a bit flat.”
“Hmm… finer, more delicate facial work. Okay. Understood. I'll pass it along to the actor.”
He was clearly the skilled professional I remembered—he grasped my meaning instantly and moved to coach the actor. But then—
“Director, this part should feel more like gazing at an unknown terror….”
“Cut! Going again!”
“Director, Sua should come across as more of an innocent, guileless child….”
“Cut! We'll take it from the top!”
Nothing satisfied me.
“Haah… CEO Cho, this is becoming a problem.”
Worn down by the endless retakes, Director Choi let out a sigh.
“This isn't a film or a drama shoot—it's motion capture. Motion capture. You know we only build the framework, and the detail work gets layered on in graphics by you, don't you?”
“I do know. But the more detail in the frames, the better the final product. I only mentioned it because I thought that, with your skill, Director Choi, it was absolutely within reach….”
“I appreciate the faith, but… your requests are far too abstract, CEO Cho. If you could show me an example, that'd be one thing, but this way, the work is impossible.”
Show him an example….
Since he just wanted to get a feel for it, I acted the scenes out myself.
“The scene where the protagonist sees his first zombie and feels fear—like this.”
“Oh.”
“And when he looks at Sua, a child he's never met, and sees his dead little sister—like this.”
“Oh…?”
I gave a rough impression of the scenes, and Director Choi, who'd been watching, grabbed me by the shoulder.
“You're good at this!”
“It's really not like that. I was just trying to show you the feeling I want from the shoot—”
“Director Han! Bring the rig over here! We're putting CEO Cho in the capture gear himself!”
“Excuse me?”
And so, in a daze, I found myself suited up in the skintight blue bodysuit, markers affixed to my face, equipment strapped onto my body.
“Starting now, CEO Cho is the protagonist, Minsu!”
“…?”
“Alright! Action!”
I'd stumbled into an acting gig.
At first I thought Director Choi was throwing a tantrum out of annoyance at my demands, but—
“Minji, was it? What do you think? It's good, right?”
“Oh. Definitely. It's good. I had no idea our Director could act this well.”
“Would you consider renting your director out to us? PlayForge is the one who requested this shoot, after all—there's no law saying the CEO can't do the acting. I'll give you a discount.”
“Works for me.”
By the time I came to my senses, I had become a motion capture actor.