LD Studio (8)
The outlets that had been silent after taking advertising money watched the mood shift and quietly began uploading article after article.
Some of them took LD Studio’s side, but most of the coverage was openly critical. They had dressed it up with the prettier phrase “variable odds”, but in the end it was no different from admitting they had manipulated the rates.
Kim Sung-gwun, the representative of KSGI, clicked his tongue as he looked over the flood of headlines.
“I never thought they’d actually blow the lid off the game-rate manipulation issue……”
The attack had landed exactly where it hurt, and LD Studio’s stock was still sliding downhill without end. There was no way David Lockhart could possibly know the Korean game market this well. This had to be Han Miru’s work.
Every time he makes a move, the whole market turns upside down.
Just as he was considering whether to call him first, his phone rang.
"Hello, this is Han Miru. I trust you’ve been well?"
“I’m always the same as ever. I’ve been following this situation closely.”
But Han Miru said something he hadn’t expected.
“You should join in as well, Representative.”
“Isn’t it too late to get in now?”
“You don’t really think LD Studio is the only company manipulating odds, do you?”
“……What?”
“Mobile, monetization, and random boxes aren’t unique to Brotherhood M. They’re a defining feature of Korean games as a whole. Do you really think LD Studio was the only one doing it? More of them will probably be dragged out one after another.”
Kim Sung-gwun straightened in his seat and listened more carefully.
“Would you explain that in more detail?”
LD Studio felt like a funeral parlor.
Not that long ago, LD Studio had been known to the public as Korea’s largest game company. But in just a few days, its image had changed into something closer to a nest of money-crazed swindlers.
It had gotten to the point where people were ashamed to say they worked there. Employees hid their badges inside their clothes whenever they went outside the building.
“What the hell is going to happen to our company?”
“We’re not actually going to have to compensate every single random box purchase we’ve ever sold, are we?”
“No way. Why would they reimburse people for something they bought willingly?”
“If Brotherhood M goes down, it’ll affect our development team too.”
“Why are the stock prices like this? I should’ve dumped the employee shares the moment I got them.”
“But why did Continue Capital target our company in the first place?”
“Exactly. We’re not the only ones who use random boxes.”
None of them could hide how shaken they were.
LD Studio depended on Brotherhood M for most of its revenue. If that one game went wrong, revenue would collapse.
That was why the stock price was crashing.
And the real problem came after that. If the crisis wasn’t resolved, it could easily lead to pay cuts or layoffs.
As Cha Soo-yeon listened to the employees talking, something suddenly came back to her.
He said his friend was going to get revenge……
And then this happened right afterward. Could that really be a coincidence?
After work, Cha Soo-yeon met Kang Seon-woo.
She asked him anxiously, “Did your friend really cause all this?”
Kang Seon-woo didn’t deny it.
“Yeah.”
Cha Soo-yeon couldn’t hide her shock.
Even though she knew almost nothing about finance, she still knew about Continue Capital. She knew they had a habit of turning everything they touched into a monster success.
“T-then does that mean your friend works at Continue Capital?”
“Well…… you could say that.”
“No way. That place is insanely successful.”
“It is.”
That wildly successful private equity firm had been built by her friend himself.
“How’s the company atmosphere?”
At Kang Seon-woo’s question, Cha Soo-yeon let out a long sigh.
“At rock bottom. Honestly, I almost wish they’d just admitted the manipulation and apologized.”
“No chance of that, huh?”
If they had been the sort of company that could do that, they never would’ve pulled a stunt like rate manipulation in the first place. They were probably just hoping to muddle through this crisis somehow.
Kang Seon-woo said with a dry laugh, “If you think about it, the real problem is that games like Brotherhood M are hits in the first place.”
The Korean game market was, in a sense, a Galapagos island of its own.
Console and packaged games made up an absurdly tiny share, while mobile games were overrepresented to an unhealthy degree.
There were practical reasons for that, too.
The standard price for a AAA console or PC package was sixty dollars. Even though development costs had risen several times over, that price had stayed the same for ten years.
Game companies were still playing a fierce game of chicken with one another over whether to raise the price by ten dollars.
That meant the only real way to make money was to aim at the global market, and that was no easy task.
Mobile games, on the other hand, could be made cheaply, launched for free, and used to pull in users before smothering them with monetization and random boxes until the money started rolling in.
Low production costs, huge profits — naturally, everyone rushed into that space.
But that kind of monetization structure only worked in Korea. Overseas, it had no chance.
Brotherhood M was actually being serviced in foreign markets too, but the revenue barely covered operating costs, and the overseas branches were all running at a loss.
The bigger problem was that while Korean game companies were busy worshipping monetization, foreign companies were fighting hard in the global market and growing stronger and stronger.
In a few years, the gap in development capability would probably become impossible to close.
If they wanted to wake up and catch up now……
“A game like that is better off dying, for the sake of the Korean game industry as a whole.”
After LD Studio released its statement, public outrage spiraled straight into the worst it could possibly get.
More precisely, it was fair to say that all the rage that had piled up for years had finally exploded because of this incident.
The comment sections of game streamers who had advertised Brotherhood M were plastered with abuse.
The quick-witted ones immediately pulled the ads and stopped streaming the game altogether.
Baek Geumho turned on his CapriaTV broadcast and vented his anger.
“You all know how much I loved Brotherhood. Any of you wrote even the slightest bad thing about Brotherhood in the chat, and I’d kick you out and ban you right away.”
The Brotherhood universe he had first encountered back in school was, to him, a whole new world. He had spent more time there than he had in real life.
He had met countless people and made plenty of friends. His guildmates were practically family.
Streaming Brotherhood had also given him a job as a CapriaTV broadcaster. So even when he was skipping meals and going into debt to keep paying, he had never really felt like it was a waste.
For a long time, he had praised Brotherhood with total blind faith and believed it was the greatest game in the world.
But now that belief had been crushed to pieces.
Even about failing to pull the Primordial Skill, he had told himself he was just unlucky. But that wasn’t the truth.
It had been designed from the very beginning so it would never come out!
And all that time, he had kept dumping money into it like a fool. How much had the operators laughed at him behind the scenes?
The thought sent anger surging through him again.
“No, fuck this! Even a vending machine gives you coffee if you put in a coin. Why the hell doesn’t this? And double gacha? Complete gacha? That is just too damn much!”
When people hear random box, they usually think of nothing more than paying money to pull a random item, but the random-box ecosystem of Brotherhood M was anything but simple.
It was so complicated and so deeply warped that even if a few math professors wrote papers on it, they still wouldn’t cover everything.
Double gacha meant pulling an item from a random box, then using that item to go into another round of pulling.
Another problem was complete gacha.
That was the system where one item was split into ten pieces, and you had to draw them one by one.
By the time you had already poured money into pulling nine of them, it became very hard to quit with just one or two pieces left.
So was that the end of it?
There was even double complete gacha.
You had to use an item pulled from a random box to pull yet another item from another random box, and only by collecting ten different items could you complete it.
At that point, it was hard to tell whether this was a game or a casino.
“I went back and analyzed the old video I uploaded about crafting the Aegis Shield, and to make that thing you had to collect ten metal fragments of different colors. Up until nine pieces, they hardly duplicated at all and came out fine. But after I got the ninth one, the drops started acting weird — it was always the same pieces I already had, over and over. You’re supposed to be drawing one out of ten, but even after a hundred pulls, that one missing piece still wouldn’t show up. Looking at it now, I think once people got nine pieces, they deliberately lowered the odds of the remaining one appearing, just to keep them pulling.”
Baek Geumho pulled up old videos on one side of the screen and pointed out the suspicious parts one by one.
“Fine, I get it if the odds are garbage. But at the very least, don’t manipulate them. And if you got caught manipulating them, you should apologize! What the hell is this ‘variable odds’ bullshit?”
When Baek Geumho saw the comment section, he bristled.
“Ah, fuck! I’m not a sucker! I’m just one consumer……”
He stopped himself mid-sentence.
Because all at once, a question had struck him.
If he was a consumer, then why was he being treated like this? Was it really normal for a customer who had spent tens of millions of won to be treated this way by a company?
Am I really a consumer?
No matter how he thought about it, the answer didn’t seem to be yes.
He called the guild leader of Dark Guild right away.
"Hey, bro."
"Yeah, Plta. What’s up?"
"Let’s send a truck to LD too!"
"What? A truck?"
"Yeah. Let’s do a protest for once. How much longer are we supposed to live like suckers?"
While users of other games had been protesting and lodging complaints all along, the Brotherhood M crowd had kept silent.
That was because whenever a problem came up, they were satisfied as long as the company threw them some compensation on the spot. And because of that, things had reached this point.
There was a brief silence.
“Well said. I was actually going to bring that up myself. If we’re talking about the money we’ve spent on pulls, we could’ve hired a hundred trucks. Everyone else is doing truck protests anyway — let’s do one too.”
At those words, Baek Geumho shouted with all his might, “Truck protest, let’s goooo!!!”
LD Studio’s headquarters stood in Pangyo.
Trucks, charter buses, and other vehicles were lined up in front of it, and all along their sides were banners and placards.
Apologize for the Brotherhood M rate manipulation and compensate users!
We are not LD’s slaves!
We’re done with this sucker life today!
We’re not living as suckers anymore!
In front of them, thousands of people had gathered.
They were the hardcore Brotherhood M veterans.
People who had played the game for years, and who had spent hundreds of millions — even billions — of won.
The casual users who played for a bit of mindless fun weren’t here. The moment this broke, they had already deleted their accounts, muttering, “I’m never touching this trash game again,” and were now eating popcorn while watching from the sidelines.