Block Valley (3)
The appearance of Block Valley sent shockwaves through the game industry.
Its polish was hard to believe for an indie game, and its potential for endless expansion was even more astonishing.
Within a week of launch, Block Valley had already drawn thirty million registered users.
The truly remarkable part was that more than half of them were teenagers under sixteen. And even now, new games were being uploaded without end.
At ATube, the equivalent of sixty years’ worth of video was uploaded in a single day.
The reason was simple: ATube shared advertising revenue.
ATubers uploaded more content to make money, and they worked harder to make that content better.
If ATube had tried to produce all that video itself, it would have been impossible even with hundreds of thousands of employees.
Block Valley was the same.
Inside the game, users could earn the in-game currency, Rox, by unlocking content or selling items and skins, and once they accumulated enough, they could even cash out.
After the game company took its 25 percent cut, the rest belonged entirely to the developer.
Money was always a powerful motivator.
Once word spread that developers would be paid fairly, more and more solo devs began sitting down at their computers every day and “going to work” inside the game itself, in Block Studio, to make games.
Game-focused streamers moved just as quickly.
They made Block Valley their main content overnight, or uploaded videos teaching viewers how to build games inside Block Studio.
CEO Tom Scott aggressively promoted the fact that streaming was possible not only through Twitch or ATube, but also through the Legend Games Store, and encouraged game broadcasts wherever he could.
As a result, Twitch, the world’s largest streaming platform run by AMZ, had started watching closely to see whether users might begin to drift away.
Outside the game industry and the streaming industry, there was another place that took a hit: social media.
The main source of revenue for social networking services like Facenote was advertising.
To make users see more ads, the platform had to keep them on the site for as long as possible. For that reason, it had long been run in a way that deliberately addicted teenagers.
But with the rise of Block Valley, the metrics showed that teens’ usage time was actually declining.
Facenote CEO Mike Goldenberg, after trying the game himself, was deeply shaken.
Unlike Facenote or Linstagram, where people only communicated through text and photos, Block Valley let avatars gather, talk, and play all kinds of games together.
It had a messenger function too, so you could stay in touch with friends who weren’t currently in the game, and even invite them straight into the world.
This isn’t a game. It’s a massive virtual world.
For many teenagers, it probably became their living space.
He came to believe that if Facenote wanted to keep growing, it would have to move beyond the old platform giants and push toward the metaverse.
He spared no expense investing in VR technology either, determined to seize the enormous market that would open in the future.
The metaverse was Facenote’s future.
And yet Block Valley had already realized an early form of it.
If only we’d acquired that company…
Coincidentally, the company that had acquired the Block Valley developer early on was Continue Capital.
Not only had they taken LinkLabs away from him, they were now stealing users through games as well.
Could that really be a coincidence?
He thought of the man he had met at the company before.
What if he’d been planning all of this from the very beginning?
Mike Goldenberg could see that the metaverse era was arriving much faster than he had expected.
And at the same time, he could see that someone else had already taken control of it.
When a single game succeeds, the ripple effect is beyond imagination.
Even if you combined music, concerts, musicals, dramas, films, and every other cultural industry, they still wouldn’t compare to a single game.
People were already saying Block Valley would become the most successful game in history, and Purple Games’ corporate value kept soaring without end.
The three men who had gone from indie developers to overnight star creators were suddenly flooded with interview requests.
Unlike Rufus, who avoided stepping into the spotlight, Charles and Ken threw themselves into the role and promoted the game with enthusiasm.
Charles: Our original development direction was a sandbox-style single-player game. It was a game where you could use blocks however you wanted.
Ken: Then it suddenly occurred to us that you could also stack blocks to make games. So we shifted course and started using blocks as a game engine.
Charles: Gamers’ creativity is astonishing. They come up with games we never even imagined.
Ken: Some of those games are way better than the ones we made. Honestly, we’re not that skilled. Ha ha.
Charles: The current fee is 25 percent. If revenue grows in the future, we plan to lower that rate further and continue supporting developers with a share of the profits. Our goal is to upgrade the development tools so that even more developers can make even better games more easily in the years ahead.
Charles:(excerpt)
Charles: The game’s success was made possible by the help of many people. Among the cofounders, Rufus Bailey, our current CTO, played the biggest role.
Ken: Continue Capital is the best partner we could have asked for. If not for Continue Capital, Block Valley never would have achieved the success it has today.
Once that interview became public, Continue Capital started drawing attention as well.
I asked the three of them, “How does it feel to have become the star developers everyone’s talking about?”
They all looked a little dazed at my question.
“Well…”
“It still doesn’t feel real yet.”
They didn’t know it yet, but this success was only the beginning.
I thought back to the reports and articles I’d seen before my regression.
Even by then, cumulative registrations had reached three hundred million, with fifty million daily active users.
Half of American teenagers had joined Block Valley, and the average daily usage time had climbed to 150 minutes, far surpassing ATube and Facenote.
It had become, in every sense, a playground for teenagers.
“Sonyu, NS, and Lintendo have all sent requests asking for a console version,” I said.
Cross-platform had recently become the trend, and simultaneous launches on PC, mobile, and consoles were becoming more common.
Nightlight was a prime example.
In the first timeline, Block Valley had only launched on PC. The mobile version came much later.
The reason we’d been able to launch simultaneously this time was Snow Crash.
From the development stage onward, we had designed it with cloud-based cross-platform play in mind.
Since you could enjoy the game simply by connecting to the internet, without downloading anything, porting it to consoles wouldn’t be all that difficult.
“Then we should start preparing that side too.”
Unlike Korea, which was practically a graveyard for consoles, console games accounted for nearly 30 percent of the market in the United States and Europe.
If we released a console version, we’d be able to secure users much faster.
Block Valley was doing incredibly well, but that didn’t mean everything was rosy.
No matter how hard you worked on a game, bugs were unavoidable.
Every dawn, the developers drew one of the game industry’s four legendary swords—temporary maintenance—and stayed up all night fixing whatever was broken.
Another serious problem was in-game sexual crime.
As Block Valley rose into the teens’ favorite playground, all kinds of sexual predators flocked to it.
They approached minors, asked for their phone numbers and school names, or offered money in exchange for meeting up.
So this time, we drew the blade of emergency maintenance again and pushed out a patch that let users report and block bad actors.
But that alone was never going to solve the problem.
As the saying went, if you get five people together, there’s always one troll in the group. In any online game with a large population, malicious users are guaranteed to exist.
Let them fester, and the bad drive out the good. If we left them unchecked, decent users would start leaving.
But if we regulated too harshly, ordinary users would end up getting hurt too.
I cut straight to the point.
“We need to handle this decisively from the start.”
“What do you mean?”
“We should outright ban the creation or play of any dating-related games.”
“Wouldn’t that damage the game’s freedom?”
It was common in online games for characters to date or even marry one another. In some games, that was used as content in its own right.
And then there was the classic twist where both characters turned out to be men.
Netkama, fujoshi bait, catfishing, and all the rest.
“Block Valley has an overwhelmingly high teenage user base. Teenagers treat virtual worlds as seriously as the real one. If we allow dating-related content, we’ll expose them to all kinds of sexual predation and grooming.”
In the case of sexual crimes, the line was never clear.
Offering money to a minor in exchange for meeting up was obviously illegal, so that part was easy enough to ban. But what about asking someone out and offering to buy them a meal or a gift?
In the end, after a long meeting, the operations team decided to ban all dating-related game creation and play outright, and posted an official notice.
Aside from that, there was the minor matter of Steve Bostick showing up at the company to beg and plead.
“Think back to the days we spent together. We came up with ideas, built games side by side. You all know how hard I worked back then. At least think of our old friendship and give me my share.”
Of course, not a single word of it worked.
Then he broke down, shouting and crying, “This contract is a scam! I’ll take the one hundred thousand dollars back, so give me 0.5 percent of the revenue! If you don’t, I’ll go to the press and expose you! Give me my money!”
I didn’t need to hear another word. We threw him out on the spot.
Ken didn’t bother hiding his contempt.
“You were right, boss. It was smart to cut him off with the hundred thousand back then.”
“You’ve got to remove the cancer before it spreads, or it’ll eat you alive.”
Charles turned to me.
“We’re thinking of changing the company name this time.”
Since that was exactly what had happened in the first timeline too, I wasn’t particularly surprised.
“Have the three of you already talked it over?”
Ken nodded.
“Rufus agreed too. Honestly, I never liked the current name anyway, since Steve came up with it. He kept going on about purple being his signature color or whatever.”
“What are you planning to change it to?”
“We’re going to rename it Block Games. We’re going to keep developing Block Valley going forward, after all.”
I nodded.
“If that’s what everyone wants, then let’s do it.”
And so Purple Games changed its name to Block Games.
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