Block Valley (2)
Strategy
In online and mobile games, studios have to keep feeding players new content. In most cases, though, the pace of content creation can’t keep up with consumption, and gamers lose interest before long.
But in Block Valley, the players create the content themselves.
You can invite your friends into a game you made and enjoy it together, or gather a group of friends who like one another and build houses and decorate a village together.
The development tools are so simple and intuitive that even a child can use them with ease.
If you want, you can build a social network or even produce animations. In this place, anything you can imagine is possible.
Block Valley is free to play, but it uses a freemium model. Developers can also make money inside it by selling avatars, skins, and items.
Block Valley isn’t really a game at all. It’s a game platform with limitless possibilities.
I can’t wait to see how many different games will come out of it in the future, and how many people will end up enjoying the games I make.
Block Valley launched on PC and mobile.
Because it was cross-platform, you could pick up your game on any device and continue right where you left off. The studio tools for making games, however, were available only on PC; on mobile, you could play, but not create.
It drew explosive popularity from the moment it launched, and within a single day, 15 million people had signed up. Legend Games’ promotional push had also helped a great deal.
"This is insane. Thanks to you, downloads for the Legend Games Store have shot up as well."
“It’s only the beginning.”
Block Valley was going to grow to more than 50 million daily users in the years ahead.
The Legend Games Store had even split Block Valley off into its own category so players could jump straight into it.
Thanks to that, Block Valley could make full use of the messenger, friend invites, voice chat, game broadcasting, and donations systems that Legend Games had already built.
That was only possible because Continue Capital had acquired both companies.
One of Block Valley’s defining traits was that its user base skewed overwhelmingly young.
Teenagers didn’t really treat it like a game so much as a social network where they met friends.
Dongho senior glanced over the screen and clicked his tongue.
“Wow. Block Valley was this huge?”
“I told you it would work,” I said.
“Even so, this is ridiculous. This thing could eat Brotherhood M for breakfast.”
“Come on. You’re comparing it to a game that does nothing but rig the odds?”
To compare a game this good with Brotherhood M was practically an insult.
Block Valley still wasn’t finished. We planned to keep expanding it by adding more and more development tools.
We raised our glasses.
“You all worked hard.”
The three of them still looked dazed.
They probably never imagined that the game they had made would become such a massive hit the moment it launched.
“O-our game really blew up this much?”
“This can’t be a dream, can it?”
“It’s all thanks to you, sir.”
Well, my role had definitely been significant.
Block Valley had originally launched as an indie game, so in the early days it had been normal for crowds to flood in and knock the servers over. With so few people on the team, fixing errors and bugs while adding new features had been a job in itself.
It wasn’t until about three years after launch that the service finally settled into a stable rhythm. This time, though, I had fronted the development money in advance, and with Legend Games and Snow Crash lending technical support as well, we were able to keep everything moving smoothly.
That was why the game could run stably despite its enormous success.
“Come to think of it, there’s one more person who played a huge part in our game’s success.”
At Charles’s words, Ken nodded.
“Right. He really was an enormous help. We might not have gotten this far without him.”
I asked, “Who is it?”
Charles grinned.
“Haven’t you seen him before, sir? Steve Bostick.”
“Ah….”
Ken said, “Whenever development got stuck and things got hard, we all kept going by thinking about Steve. We were able to keep developing just by imagining how great it would be to screw Steve over.”
Rufus added his own line.
“R-right. If it hadn’t been for Steve, we might’ve quit ages ago. Pffft!”
I’d never seen them laughing that happily before.
Honestly, Steve Bostick really had played a huge role in developing Block Valley.
I thought back to the face I’d seen only briefly before.
What kind of expression was he wearing now?
The success of Block Valley shook the entire game industry.
It was a different genre to begin with, so it wasn’t as if triple-A titles would be directly affected. Still, people were already saying that Block Valley might completely reshape the indie game market.
Everywhere I went in game companies, all anyone talked about was Block Valley’s success.
“How on earth did they even come up with something like that?”
“My son’s been obsessed with it lately.”
“For kids these days, it’s not even a game. It’s basically FaceNote or Linstagram.”
“Apparently they can’t even talk to their friends if they’re not on it.”
Listening to that, Steve Bostick felt like he was going to die of frustration.
It was just an indie game.
Even if it succeeded, how big could it possibly get?
But that had been his mistake.
At the start of development, Block Valley had been a single-player sandbox RPG. He had never imagined they’d turn it into a game platform and release it that way.
If I’d known, I never would’ve left the company!
In some circles, people were saying the company’s valuation had already climbed past $5 billion.
Even if Continue Capital owns 70 percent, a $5 billion valuation still means $500 million per person!
Because of Block Valley’s success, the founders had all become billionaires.
Even the employees who had joined early were said to have received bonuses worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet he, a co-founder, had been left with absolutely nothing.
Steve Bostick was so angry he could have spit blood.
“Son of a bitch!”
He had once been a co-founder and leader of Purple Games. Now he was just another employee at Dirty Dog.
He was swallowing his resentment and going to work when someone called him over.
The man who had summoned Steve was Neil Oldman.
He was a star developer in the game industry, the kind of name every gamer would recognize.
He had a reputation for being hard to get along with, but his talent was unmatched. He had joined Dirty Dog as a programmer and, by moving through game design and planning, had helped lift the studio to its current height.
And recently, after the parent company Sonyu recognized what he had done, he had been promoted to co-president.
Neil Oldman was in a very bad mood.
He had always believed he was the best. He had even won the year’s top game award, GOTY, twice.
All eyes in the industry were on his new release this year.
And then, out of nowhere, an indie studio nobody had ever heard of had released a game that became a colossal hit. Meanwhile, the guy who had supposedly founded the company was loafing around and drawing a paycheck for doing nothing.
Neil Oldman said something to Steve that felt like a bolt from the blue.
“Pack your bags and get out.”
“What? What do you mean by that?”
“You don’t get along with your teammates, you don’t do your job properly, and you’ve produced nothing. Why should someone like you stay at Dirty Dog?”
“Th-that’s….”
Dirty Dog was the largest first-party partner under Sonyu, which meant the company was packed with the very best talent in the business. Against those people, Steve Bostick’s shortcomings became obvious almost immediately.
He might have been a serviceable developer, but he wasn’t good enough to work at Dirty Dog.
And for all that, his pride was absurdly high, so he never showed the slightest willingness to learn.
In a cold voice, Neil told him, “At first I thought you just needed time to adjust, so I watched you for a while. Now I see you were simply terrible. Your résumé says you personally developed Hammer Warrior, but what I checked doesn’t quite match up.”
Steve clung to the last scraps of hope.
“Please, think this over again. If you fire me out of nowhere, where am I supposed to go?”
Neil Oldman sneered.
“Why not go back to Purple Games? It looks like they’re hiring a lot of people these days.”
“…….”
Kicked out of the company and sent home, Steve Bostick exploded with rage.
“Damn it!”
His friends had become billionaires thanks to the game’s success, while he had become unemployed.
What kind of unjust, unfair world was this?
I can’t just sit here and take this!
That was when a man came looking for him.
“Who are you?”
“Hello, Mr. Steve Bostick. I’m from the Dieterich Law Firm.”
Dieterich was famous in the game industry for copyright lawsuits.
As Block Valley became a hit, the founders’ story also spread to the public. Including the fact that one of the co-founders had left because they couldn’t agree.
America was a paradise for lawsuits.
And if you played it right, there was money to be made, so the law firm had come to him first.
The lawyer said to him, “Mr. Bostick, I hear you were a co-founder of Purple Games and provided the initial idea for Block Valley. Is that correct?”
At the question, Steve nodded quickly.
“That’s right. In the early days, I came up with the idea and developed it with them. Then, because of a conflict, I had no choice but to leave the company.”
“If that’s true, you should be able to sue Purple Games and receive a substantial settlement.”
His eyes lit up.
“Really?”
“Yes. You weren’t just an employee, you were a co-founder. Even if you gave up your shares, if your contribution to development can be confirmed, you could still receive proper compensation.”
“Compensation… how much are we talking about?”
“At least several million dollars. If you receive a cut of the revenue, it could even be tens of millions.”
Tens of millions of dollars!
Steve nodded at once.
“I want to sue them immediately.”
At that, the lawyer’s expression brightened.
“Then would you like to sign a contract with our firm?”
At that moment, he remembered the time he had signed a contract after meeting his former colleagues.
“Uh, actually, I already signed something once and got paid by Purple Games.”
“Could I see the contract?”
He dug the contract out of a drawer where he had carelessly tossed it and handed it over.
When the lawyer looked it over, he frowned.
“It says here that you waive all rights related to Purple Games and Block Valley. Why did you sign something like this?”
“What? Then… I can’t sue them?”
“How can you sue them when you gave up your rights in exchange for $100,000?”
“N-no! They tricked me. I had no idea Block Valley would become this kind of game.”
“If you’d been coerced into signing, that would be one thing. But if you signed of your own free will, then there’s no case. What a shame. You sold the possibility of tens of millions of dollars for a mere $100,000.”
The lawyer rose, as though there was nothing left to say.
Left alone, Steve stared blankly into space.
If I hadn’t signed back then… if I’d taken 0.5 percent of the revenue instead of $100,000…
He could have walked away with tens of millions.
But because of this single sheet of paper, everything had gone up in smoke.
Steve Bostick was so aggrieved that he collapsed to the floor and burst into tears.
“Hic, sob… That game you made. That game should have been my game. The money you earned, that money should have been mine. Waaah!”