LD Studio (5)
Brotherhood M.
Among Korean games—no, among all Korean content—it was the game that made the most money.
Last year’s revenue alone came to a staggering 250 billion won.
Even across the entire global games market, fewer than ten titles had ever posted numbers like that.
What made it even more interesting was that, unlike other games that were serviced broadly across the world, Brotherhood M drew 97 percent of its revenue from Korea.
In practical terms, that meant it was making that kind of money almost entirely off Korean users.
As revenue surged, LD Studio’s stock price doubled in a single year and broke through 1 million won.
There had been an incident in the middle of that stretch where the management sold duplicated items in a newly released PC game, but it barely touched the stock at all.
After all, most of the revenue still came from Brotherhood M.
CEO Jin Taekyeong announced that he would expand Brotherhood M’s overseas servers and release Blood & Magic M.
Brokerages rushed to raise their target prices for LD Studio. Some analysts even put 2 million won on the board.
Then, all at once, massive short selling poured in through foreign securities firms.
Trading volume for a single day reached 350 billion won.
Compared with before, that was more than ten times higher, ranking first across both KOSPI and KOSDAQ and more than three times larger than the runner-up.
In the absence of any obvious negative catalyst, shorting on that scale was highly unusual.
“Where the hell are they selling from?”
“What’s the reason?”
“Could there be some bad news we don’t know about?”
Investors combed through everything in case there was a hidden risk they had missed, but nothing was wrong.
On the contrary, thanks to the Brotherhood M update, the company was expected to post record quarterly revenue.
The shorts did push the price down a little, but buying pressure was so strong that the stock still held firm at around 1 million won.
* * *
At last, the day of the Primordial Skill release had arrived.
The launch time was Sunday at 3 p.m.
Brotherhood M users logged in or watched the broadcasts.
The moment the clock hand hit three, everyone as one began pulling like mad. Streamers broadcast the whole thing live through CapriaTV, TwoTwitch, and ATube.
The streamers shouted at the top of their lungs as they hit the draw button.
“Taekyeong hyung!”
“Please, Taekyeong hyung!”
“Taekyeong hyung, please, just once!”
“Help me out, Taekyeong hyung!”
“Taekyeong hyung, I love you!”
“Taaae-kyeooong hyuuung!”
Everywhere, voices calling for “Taekyeong hyung” rang out.
Here, “Taekyeong hyung” referred to LD Studio’s CEO, Jin Taekyeong.
In Brotherhood M, there was a superstition that if you shouted “Taekyeong hyung” while drawing, your odds would go up.
At first it had been nothing more than a rumor, but then a plausible story spread that the phone’s microphone was recognizing the voice and boosting the rates, and before long, shouting “Taekyeong hyung” while opening a random box had become an accepted rule of the game.
If even a 0.0001 percent increase in the odds was possible, who wouldn’t do it?
So everyone shouted themselves hoarse, desperately crying out for Taekyeong hyung. All that came back, though, were useless skills.
Baek Geumho, too, started pulling the moment it hit three.
“Today I’m definitely pulling the Primordial Skill. Give me your energy, everyone!”
The odds of drawing a Primordial Skill from the highest-grade skill pack were 1.25 percent.
In theory, one should appear once every eighty pulls.
Each highest-grade skill pack cost about 2.5 million won to open. With the amount he had prepared, he could pull around 200 times.
At that point, no matter how unlucky he was, he couldn’t possibly miss.
“Tae-kyeong hyuuung!”
Seeing the flood of cheering comments from viewers, he pressed the draw button.
By the tenth attempt, a mythic skill popped twice in a row. It wasn’t meaningful in itself, since he already had those skills, but it was still a good sign.
-Whoa! Mythic skill twice in a row!
-Pluta hyung is fully charged today~
-This feels good for some reason~ Double down and go for it!
-Primordial Skill, let’s go!
-Feels like it’s about to hit soon.
-The flow is coming, Pluta hyung!
-One skill pack costs 2.5 million won, damn...
-Shit, one of those packs is basically my monthly salary.
-Is it true Pluta hyung owns a building?
-Is he some hidden child of a chaebol family or what?
Baek Geumho kept hitting the draw button.
Various skills poured out of the box, but the Primordial Skill he wanted never appeared.
He looked at the numbers below. The Primordial Skill count still read 0/12. That meant no one on the server had drawn it yet.
So no one’s pulled it yet.
Which meant he hadn’t been the only one to fail.
If this many misses have come up, shouldn’t it really hit now?
But that was just the illusion of people gambling.
There’s a thing called the gambler’s fallacy.
Gamblers tend to believe that past results influence the next round.
Something like: it’s come up heads so many times, so tails is due now. But, as obvious as it was, the probability of tails was still fifty-fifty.
No matter how many misses had appeared so far, they had no effect on the next pull. The odds were still 1.25 percent.
Meanwhile, the Crown balance kept shrinking.
What if he spent all this money and still couldn’t draw the Primordial Skill?
While the characters that did get it grew stronger, his own character would fall behind. Then viewers would leave, and donations would dry up.
At some point, everything in front of him went dark. His hand, pressing the button, began to tremble violently. No—his whole body was shaking.
But when he thought about the money he had already thrown in, he couldn’t stop here.
Please! Please! Just this once!
He forced a smile.
“Th-this time it’ll really come out. Taekyeong hyung, let’s go!”
But it was a miss.
The next one was a miss too.
And the one after that.
Another miss.
Still a miss.
Baek Geumho kept pressing the draw button as if possessed by something, until at last his hand stopped. Touching the screen didn’t trigger any more draws.
The Crown he had topped up with 500 million won was already gone.
The Primordial Skill never came.
-Why aren’t you pulling more?
-Can’t you see the Crown ran out?
-Wow, he must’ve blown about 500 million won and still didn’t pull one.
-Five hundred million on one skill???
-Say it straight. He didn’t spend 500 million on a skill if he couldn’t pull one. He just burned 500 million, that’s all~
-Lol this guy just got fact-checked hard.
-I was going to throw 100,000 moon balloons if he pulled the Primordial Skill^^
-Instead he pulled a ton of mythic, legendary, and hero skills, though.
-What’s the point if you can’t even sell them?
-He bought trash with money, haha.
-What the hell? It’s already over?
-What a huge letdown~ If you’re going to pull, you should keep going until you get it. What’s the point of stopping halfway?
-Feels like taking a dump and stopping halfway.
-Hyung~ Didn’t you say you’d definitely pull it? Sell a kidney and keep going.
-Just one more and I swear it feels like it’d come out. Too bad~
-Pluta’s gone bad too. Tsk. Ptooey!
-Wait! Lucipell just pulled the Primordial Skill!!!
-He’s jumping around and screaming right now!
-I’m going to that room too.
-Good work, hyung~
-Twenty thousand~
The moment he stopped drawing skills, viewers vanished in a tidal wave. The donations he had been expecting never came.
Baek Geumho stared blankly at the screen.
W-what the hell did I just do?
He couldn’t believe his own actions.
It had taken only 6 minutes and 40 seconds to burn through the full 500 million won.
In that brief span, someone had wiped out the kind of money another person might have to work a lifetime to save.
If only he could turn time back ten minutes.
Then he could start the draws over from the beginning.
Baek Geumho sat there for a long while like a man whose soul had left his body, then suddenly sprang to his feet and, like a madman, began smashing objects around the house in a fit of rage.
“Aaaaaargh! You bastard Jin Taekyeong!!”
* * *
Everyone had been hammering the button like lunatics to pull the Primordial Skill.
And yet it still didn’t appear for anyone.
“It’s been five minutes and not a single one?”
“They must’ve spent hundreds of billions.”
“Why the hell isn’t it coming out?”
“Something’s off here.”
“Why is it taking this long to pull?”
“Come on, logically, if this many pulls have happened, one should’ve come out by now, right?”
“Has it not appeared for anyone else yet?”
The very moment everyone sensed something was wrong, notifications suddenly began to appear.
You have drawn a Primordial Skill.
You have drawn a Primordial Skill.
You have drawn a Primordial Skill......
Primordial Skills were pulled one after another, and the count kept rising.
In just nine minutes, all twelve Primordial Skills on the Troki server had been drawn.
Those who got them cheered. Those who didn’t were devastated.
Brangwotan, the guild leader of TK Guild, let out a relieved breath.
Well, at least one got pulled.
He asked in the guild group chat.
Aside from me, who else pulled a Primordial Skill?
Everyone had rushed in and spent money like crazy, but including the one he drew, TK Guild members had only pulled three.
Does that mean the other nine were secured by other guilds?
He quickly checked on the situation.
Since they were always at war, they had a few spies planted in enemy guilds. That meant he could get the information immediately.
“Dark Guild only got two, and Dragon Guild only secured one, sir.”
After hearing the report from a guild member, he was startled.
“What!? Then where did the remaining six go?”
“W-well...”
The other guilds were shocked as well.
“TK Guild only got three?”
“No, if not them and not us, then who swept up six Primordial Skills?”
“What the hell is going on?”
* * *
The Primordial Skill update was, in every sense, a smash hit.
It was even covered by terrestrial news.
By Monday, LD Studio’s stock price had jumped 10 percent in a single day and hit an all-time high. But because the gains came from the release of random-box items, the response was not entirely positive.
Some users did raise the issue of probability manipulation, but since there had already been a few similar cases before, the mood was to brush it off.
And then... everything changed when one article was published through WST.
(Strategic report) President Lockhart stated, “We have uncovered evidence that LD Studio has been continuously manipulating the odds of its random-box items in order to maximize revenue. Probability manipulation is a serious criminal act no different from fraud. LD Studio should halt the manipulation immediately and compensate consumers. With the stock highly likely to crash, we urge investors to take caution. We have already gone short.”
What kind of place was Continue Capital?
It was the firm that had brought Thomas Motors down with a single report. Since then, it had also crushed the Hanrim Group and resolved the Blackwood Hotel ransomware crisis, among other headline-grabbing feats.
And now that same firm had raised the issue of probability manipulation!
After the article went out, LD Studio’s stock, which had climbed to 1.15 million won, plunged 15 percent in an instant and broke below 1 million won.
On the Brotherhood M board, furious users began posting in a flood.
As the stock collapsed and users went into a rage, LD Studio moved to respond.