The Board He Set
What is the single most important ingredient when forging an RPG that people will one day call a masterpiece?
Gorgeous graphics? Combat patterns polished to a razor’s edge? Characters who feel so alive you half expect them to step through the screen?
All of those things matter, of course. But they are also, every last one of them, secondary. They can elevate a game into the ranks of the greats — and still fall short of being the decisive factor.
The one thing that truly makes or breaks an RPG is how completely it can pull a player under. Through an RPG, people become someone special, someone nothing like their ordinary selves, and they set out across a vast world the developers have built for them. From that moment on, a developer’s only job is to keep that immersion unbroken — to never, ever let the spell snap.
By that measure, the event Powell Software had just rolled out — the Hero Search — had set fire to the chests of Nightfall players the world over.
A wicked Demon King bent on destroying the world. A hero who rises to strike him down. It was a story as stale and obvious as they come, and yet no story on earth has ever sold harder. On top of that, Powell Software had promised ten thousand dollars to the first person to take down the Demon King — a boss monster whose difficulty was, quite simply, unmeasurable.
In other words: land the world’s first kill on the Demon King, and you walked away with both glory and cash. At that point, the real surprise would have been if people hadn’t gone wild for Powell Software’s Hero Search.
And right now, in the situation room at Powell Software’s headquarters — a room that, only minutes earlier, had been holding its collective breath and watching events unfold in silence — the air was anything but quiet.
“Good God. The Managing Director’s interview video just broke a million views!”
“Geomju’s YouTube channel just crossed two hundred thousand subscribers. Our own account is up fifty thousand from yesterday!”
“The DLC pre-order site just went down under the traffic! Without more servers, I don’t think we’re getting it back up cleanly!”
“Nightfall sales are up forty-six percent over yesterday! Counting the numbers right before the site crashed, DLC pre-orders already passed five million!”
The only things filling the room were reports so absurd they barely sounded real, and the dazed faces of the staff listening to them.
“This is ridiculous. Never in my life did I think I’d watch a boxed game more than two months past launch start climbing in sales again.”
As a rule, a packaged game’s sales curve only points up for the first week — a month, if you’re lucky. Past that, the line almost always bends down. It has nothing to do with whether the game is good or bad; in this industry, it is closer to a law of nature. Anyone who means to play a title usually buys it right at launch.
No one had imagined that law of nature could be flipped upside down by a single human being.
“I wonder if this is what Einstein felt when he discovered relativity,” one employee muttered, shaking his head as he glanced toward the Managing Director.
“We just got lucky with who we lined up with.”
The Managing Director answered absently, his eyes fixed on the smartphone lying on his desk. Most people would never have guessed who he had been on the phone with through that very device only moments earlier — the kind of heavyweights ordinary people did not even dare to imagine.
“Looks like that video lit a fire under our investors’ feet.”
Ordinarily he was the one making every humble, hungry pitch for another scrap of funding. Today he did not have to. For this one moment, the Managing Director was the one holding every card, and the investors were the ones scrambling. Then again, if those people had eyes at all, they could hardly have failed to notice: failing to put money behind Yujin — the man currently turning the entire internet upside down — was itself a costly mistake.
“We really… got lucky. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all if this whole DLC campaign had gone down in flames.”
At that, the Managing Director’s brow twitched.
“…And what, exactly, is that supposed to mean?”
“I mean the way we promoted this DLC — it wasn’t a normal method at all, was it? We basically bet everything on word of mouth. Compared to hanging banners on portals or running proper ads, it was basically a gamble—”
“No.”
“…Excuse me?”
“What I mean is, this situation is not something we stumbled into by luck.”
The Managing Director shook his head slowly from side to side.
“Every piece of this came out of Geomju’s head. The position we’re in right now is a board that user set from start to finish.”
Every employee in the situation room went wide-eyed.
“A few days ago, when Geomju came to the company, he made me an offer. He asked if he could handle the DLC promotion however he wanted.”
By any ordinary standard, it was an impossible request. This was not some college group project. Could a company really hand the publicity for a game it had thrown its full strength into building over to a single streamer?
Of course, Yujin’s reason for making that proposal had been almost laughably simple.
“If you ever get a chance to talk to the person in charge over there, ask for the rights to promote the game yourself. That way you’ll have grounds to bill them for advertising fees.”
“Oh? Is that so?”
To Ecclesia, it had been nothing more than a little pro tip — a way to squeeze some ad money out of the company by securing the right to mention Nightfall’s DLC on stream. But Yujin and the Managing Director had both misunderstood the suggestion, and the snowball had started rolling in a rather unexpected direction.
“And I… accepted. We were already in a symbiotic relationship with Geomju, and I knew he had some kind of plan of his own when he made the offer.”
In truth, Yujin had no plan at all.
“Then today, out of nowhere, he dropped a DLC making-of video — basically a PV — on his own channel. No warning to us. Not a single word in advance. Why do you think he did that?”
Yujin had uploaded the video without thinking much of anything.
“The answer is… to build anticipation.”
“Sir?”
“Think about it. If we’d done the usual thing — TV spots, portal banners, slipping a little money to review houses and asking them to be nice — would people have cared about a making-of video or a PV?”
The employee shook his head hard.
“No, they wouldn’t. When we put out making-of videos and PVs for the Dark Ring series in the past, we never got a reaction anything like this.”
“Exactly. The difference is that this time, the information people could get their hands on was locked down almost completely. That’s why the video on Geomju’s channel hit the way it did.”
“Ah…!”
“Being thirsty with a faucet right in front of you and being thirsty in the middle of the desert are not the same thing.”
At that comparison, understanding began to dawn on the staff’s faces. Seeing it, the Managing Director let out a soft chuckle.
“He uploaded the video with no notice so that we would read the public mood and drop the interview at the perfect moment. And that strategy landed flawlessly.”
“Because we can gather and synthesize public reaction in real time.”
By now the room was feeding him the cues like professionals.
“Remarkable. Of course, anyone who studies business knows this on paper… but putting it into practice is a completely different matter.”
“You’d need nerves of steel to actually run a strategy like that.”
The Managing Director’s expression had turned genuinely intrigued.
“I can’t help wondering what kind of person he is in real life, to have an eye like that. At the very least a Seoul National, MIT, or Harvard graduate, wouldn’t you think?”
Regrettably, Yujin had dropped out after middle school.