Kingmaker (1)
It had been two weeks since I’d returned to Korea.
Fortunately, the time difference hadn’t been a problem. I’d worked and slept whenever I felt like it even when I was in the United States, so my body had already learned not to care about clocks.
I got home early from work and found Seonwu already there.
He was running himself ragged these days, darting all over the place to build a game company from scratch. It had to be exhausting, but maybe because it was the thing he wanted most, he looked brighter than ever.
Watching him, I was reminded of something simple: people really did need to live doing what they wanted.
“Hey, President Kang. How’s the company coming along?”
Seonwu let out a long sigh.
“I used to talk all the time about how I wanted to start my own company, but actually doing it? Man, this isn’t easy at all.”
Once he said he was raising investment to launch a game studio, a good number of the people who’d worked on Development Team 3 said they wanted to come with him.
After all, once the team was dissolved, everyone had been scrambling for a place to land and going through internal interviews anyway.
“Luckily, some people from other game companies have shown interest too, so I think I can fill the roster well enough.”
“Other game companies?”
“The whole of 3L blew up, didn’t it?”
The fallout from the probability-manipulation scandal had been brutal.
Truck protests had continued, user forums had held heated meetings, and the executives had been apologizing day after day.
“Come to think of it, what happened to those games? Did they go under?”
“As if. You know how forgiving Korean gamers are.”
Thankfully—or perhaps unfortunately—nothing that dramatic had happened.
They’d apologized at the appropriate level, thrown out compensation, and moved on. Brotherhood M had taken a nasty hit in revenue, but it was still running just fine.
Still, 3L’s image had crashed straight through the floor.
LD Studio, especially, was being treated as if it were practically full of money-crazed lunatics. Talent was leaking out of the company, and with revenues falling, layoffs would probably start before long, too.
“Right now, 3L seems to be banding together and fighting tooth and nail to block the bill regulating loot boxes. If that passes, they’re done for.”
“……”
What kind of games had they made that they couldn’t even stay afloat without random boxes?
The Korea Game Industry Association was suddenly talking about making probability disclosure transparent, introducing probability-certification systems, and tightening self-regulation across the board.
On top of that, they’d started laundering their image by donating money to children’s hospitals and the like.
And yet the stock price, which had already fallen off a cliff, showed no sign of climbing back up.
“Come to think of it, Legend Games has been doing really well lately. How’d you even acquire it? WiChat must’ve had its fingers in it years ago.”
“It took a lot of work convincing CEO Scott.”
“Ever since Island Mode was added, I heard kids in the U.S. and Europe have been grinding like crazy.”
Nightlight had originally been losing to Battle Island.
But once Island Mode was introduced, everything changed.
Players could decorate their own islands, which made them spend far more time in the game, and new-user numbers multiplied several times over. That fed directly into revenue growth.
“That was my advice.”
Seonwu’s eyes widened.
“Don’t blow smoke up my ass.”
“I’m serious.”
Well, even if I hadn’t said anything, they would’ve probably added it eventually.
Not only Nightlight, but the ESD division’s Legend Store was also doing well. Its losses were shrinking fast, so I was expecting it to swing back to black sometime next quarter.
“When you’re ready to start development, give CEO Scott a call. You know Surreal Engine 5 is basically finished by now.”
“You want us to build games on Surreal Engine?”
“Yeah. It supports VR too, so we’re planning to use it for virtual offices as well. Maybe not right away, but isn’t the era of VR games going to open up for real someday?”
Once again, the fastest-growing industry among all content sectors was gaming.
In terms of revenue scale, even music and film combined couldn’t catch up. And on top of that, games were receiving the full benefit of digitization.
What would happen if that merged with virtual reality?
The market would grow beyond anything most people could imagine.
Game companies were fighting viciously to carve up that future for themselves.
The winner in my first life had been WiChat.
WiChat had acquired the dying LD Studio and finished the VR MMORPG project Seonwu had been in charge of back then, then hit it big.
But this time, things would be different.
“Let’s get dinner.”
We were talking about what to eat when my phone rang.
I answered.
“If you have a moment, could we meet briefly?”
“Yes. I’ll come to your office.”
I hung up and told Seonwu, “Let’s eat dinner another time. I’m heading out for a bit.”
“Who is it?”
“The chairman of Yuseong Group.”
Since my last meeting with Han Mi-ru, Yoo Jae-ho had fallen into deep thought.
The reason was what Han Mi-ru had said.
President Oh Young-hwan’s term had less than half a year left.
His approval ratings were miserable at the end of his term, and public sentiment for a change in administration was higher than ever.
Im Chang-sik, the leader of the Woori Kookmin Party, was the single strongest presidential candidate in either camp.
People were already saying the next president had basically been decided. As a result, conglomerates were quietly lining up behind the scenes, and Yuseong Group was no exception.
Im Chang-sik’s politics leaned toward the center, and he was on good terms with lawmakers from both parties. Judging by his record so far, his economic policies also seemed unlikely to cause major trouble.
And yet I was told he mustn’t become president. Why?
The person Han Mi-ru had proposed as an alternative was Namgung Seok, a three-term lawmaker from the Woori Kookmin Party.
He had originally been a physics professor at Silla University—a tenure professor, no less.
Then, for reasons of his own, he’d kicked down the ivory tower door and jumped into politics. His path after becoming a National Assemblyman was, in its own way, fascinating.
As Yoo Jae-ho reviewed the material on Namgung Seok, he murmured to himself, “Why him?”
If anyone else had said it, he would’ve brushed it off. But if Han Mi-ru said it, that was a different matter entirely.
He had correctly predicted that Prince Rashid would become crown prince.
If he had recommended Namgung Seok instead of Im Chang-sik, then there had to be a reason.
Yoo Jae-ho recalled something his late father used to say.
Politics is third-rate, administration is second-rate, and business is fourth-rate… no, wait.
Yuseong Electronics was now a first-rate company that could compete with the world’s biggest names.
But Korean politics and administration had barely changed since then.
Unlike in the past, when companies could rely on political support, politics was now the greatest risk any business faced.
They couldn’t dismantle a conglomerate the way they had during the Fifth Republic, but there were still plenty of ways to make life miserable for a company you disliked.
If someone attacked you with open malice, you could at least respond. But if they simply ran politics into the ground, there was no answer at all.
There was a saying that if Korea collapsed, Yuseong Group wouldn’t collapse; but if Yuseong Group collapsed, Korea would collapse.
By that logic, even if Korea were ruined, Yuseong Group itself would not fall.
And yet that would only mean the company would be walking its own road to decline.
If all a company needed was a large market, then every firm would have moved to the United States or China; if it were only about labor costs, they would have rushed en masse to Southeast Asia or Africa.
So why did Yuseong Group keep building factories in Korea?
Because it was profitable, of course.
Every year, talented people who were more than capable of standing anywhere in the world graduated from universities and graduate schools, then rushed to submit applications to Yuseong Group.
On top of that, the country provided the social infrastructure and administrative capacity needed for business to function.
How many countries in the world could claim that?
For Korea to do well was for Yuseong Group to do well.
And if that was the case, then it was better to have a capable president than an incompetent one.
But no matter how he thought about it, Namgung Seok didn’t seem to have any real chance of becoming president. He would almost certainly lose to Im Chang-sik in the party primary that selected the presidential candidate.
In the end, after much hesitation, Yoo Jae-ho contacted Han Mi-ru.
It started as a business discussion.
After Yuseong Electronics announced its entry into the data center industry, the first thing it did, as expected, was an acquisition.
It bought the American server company HyperMicro for forty-five billion dollars.
That was the largest acquisition in Yuseong Group’s history, and it instantly pushed the company into the world’s top ten by server scale.
Syd rewrote all of the security and data-management software from scratch, and once that work was done, we started moving Snow Crash’s data over to HyperMicro’s servers.
“The cloud companies all seem pretty nervous.”
I nodded.
“There shouldn’t be any real problems.”
After the Blackwood incident, Snow Crash had become so close with ZWS that they were even cooperating in the security field.
As long as ZWS, the market leader, stayed still, the other players would have a hard time openly moving against us.
“Ah! By any chance, could I meet with one of Yuseong Electronics’ PR people later?”
“What about?”
“I wanted to recommend an ad song.”
Yoo Jae-ho looked at me as if I’d said something completely out of nowhere.
“An ad song?”
“One of our company employees, Kim Beom-seok, sings a song called Magic Castle, and it’s been hugely popular lately. I thought it would fit Yuseong Electronics’ image really well.”
“……”
I wasn’t speaking on a whim; Magic Castle really would end up being used as Yuseong Electronics’ commercial background music.
I looked around the chairman’s office.
It had felt strange the first time I came here, but by now I was fairly used to it.
Once the less important talk wound down, Yoo Jae-ho finally got to the point.
“I’ve thought about what you said last time.”
“About what?”
“The Korean presidential election.”
“Ah, that. Yes, it matters.”
“I won’t ask why you recommended Namgung Seok instead of Im Chang-sik. But do you really think Namgung Seok has even the slightest chance of beating Im Chang-sik in the primary?”
“Honestly? It’ll be tough.”
Senator Phillips was always going to become president of the United States, and Prince Rashid was always going to become crown prince if left alone.
But Namgung Seok was different.
If no one intervened, his chances of becoming president were zero.
So something different from the first timeline would have to happen.
“What if Yuseong Group backs him?”
Yoo Jae-ho nodded.
“Direct intervention would be difficult for us.”
In truth, Yuseong Group had enormous influence over politics.
They almost certainly managed powerful politicians on both sides, and the money they poured into lobbying must have been astronomical.
There were probably plenty of politicians taking their money without even realizing it came from Yuseong Group.
Asking for something in exchange when you give money was something only amateurs did.
Real experts scattered money like a farmer sowing seeds, waiting patiently for the day of harvest.
Once someone had taken your salt, they were bound to thirst for your water—once they took the money, they naturally started paying attention to your interests.
But secretly spreading money and openly stepping in to favor someone were two different things.
Unlike the United States, where CEOs could openly endorse a specific candidate, if a Korean conglomerate tried that, it could end up in very serious trouble.
There were simply too many things that could go wrong.
By contrast, I was extremely free in that regard. If I had been burdened by those kinds of problems, I would’ve already been arrested and locked away long ago.
In the end, was I the one who had to step forward?
There wasn’t much time left before the presidential primary.
If I wanted to win here, I had to raise Namgung Seok’s name recognition.
What kind of event could put him on a collision course with President Oh Young-hwan and Im Chang-sik while also drawing the attention of the entire country?
I thought about the things that were going to happen in Korea from here on out.
……
Then something came to me.
But how was I supposed to connect it to Namgung Seok?
He was the kind of man who would push all the way through on anything he believed was right.
During the Hanjeong Group scandal, he had even submitted a bill to protect minority shareholders by raising issues with the governance structure of conglomerates.
If I used that personality well, maybe I could make this work…
Yoo Jae-ho asked, “Did you think of something good?”
“Before that, there’s something I want to ask you.”
“What is it?”
I looked at him and asked, “Are you on my side?”
“I’d say I am.”
“Then if I fight a conglomerate, whose side would you take?”
He must have realized by then that I wasn’t asking for no reason.
“Which one?”
“GL.”
A look of surprise flickered across Yoo Jae-ho’s face.
GL Group.
It was one of Korea’s four major conglomerates, alongside Yuseong, LK, and Daeyun.