Fee War (1)
Min Ah-reum had originally planned to fly back to Korea the very next day, but she pushed the trip back by three days.
Since MFW and Block Valley had already agreed to collaborate, she wanted to get a feel for the work and build a little rapport while she was here. So she began by asking questions with unusual enthusiasm.
When such a beautiful woman showed such keen interest in their game, Charles and Ken lit up at once and started explaining everything with gusto.
“Since some of our staff work from home, we gather in the large meeting room inside Block Valley when we hold company-wide meetings. Each person’s avatar steps forward to present and discuss things. You can even give presentations right here. The screen splits, and the PPT appears on one side.”
“So it’s not a video conference, it’s an avatar meeting. Something like this could definitely be adopted by other companies too.”
“Yes. If we need to, we can put a video feed on one side too. But just having the avatars move around is usually enough, so we don’t use it that much.”
Charles and Ken were easy to get along with, but Rufus was still not someone I could warm up to so quickly.
Still, Min Ah-reum kept talking to him.
“So this is how games are made. That’s fascinating. I don’t know anything about coding, though.”
“Y-yes…”
“Miru told me a lot about you. She said you’re a genius programmer.”
Rufus looked away and muttered in a mosquito-thin voice.
“I-I’m not a genius…”
“Charles and Ken said the same thing. They told me Block Valley would never have even gotten off the ground without Bailey. Men who know their way around computers are so cool.”
“R-really?”
“Yes. Can I ask what you’re working on right now?”
“I’m adding a physics engine…”
At first he blushed and dodged the conversation every which way, but by the time he was tired of avoiding her, Rufus had started answering her questions little by little.
He still wouldn’t meet her eyes, though.
Min Ah-reum didn’t just approach the developers. She moved from one employee to another, greeting everyone with a bright smile.
The illustrators showed her their designs and even asked her advice on the latest style trends.
Dong-ho watched the whole thing with an expression of quiet fascination.
“Why?”
“No reason. I just didn’t know she had that side to her.”
Min Ah-reum was known to the public as chic and aloof.
She was breathtakingly pretty, and her slightly cool impression made it hard for people to approach her.
But this was different. Right now, she was the one reaching out to everyone else first.
Was that just the kind of person she was, or had starting her own business changed her?
MFW had capital, but structurally it still felt a lot like a startup. After all, its CEO was running around the world in person, raising investment on the spot. In any case, she seemed to have the instincts of a true businesswoman.
Dong-ho had been staring blankly at Min Ah-reum for a while when he finally cleared his throat and said, almost to himself, “Hm. It’s nice to see someone working that hard.”
“Then let’s get back to work too.”
We went through the materials sent over from headquarters.
The game industry had been going through a major upheaval lately, thanks to the entry of the big tech companies.
That trend was breaking in two major directions: subscription services and cloud gaming.
“Aren’t those two basically the same thing?”
“Pretty much.”
In a sense, it was a subscription service that could run through the cloud.
The most aggressive player, naturally, was NS.
Starting with the acquisition of Majang, an indie studio, for two billion dollars, they had recently been spending hundreds of millions at a time to buy major game studios everyone had heard of and turn them into first-party developers.
They also turned each regional hub into more than just a data center, building cloud gaming centers so that games could run smoothly over the cloud as well.
Thanks to that, their subscription game service, GameFirst, had already crossed ten million subscribers and was cruising along.
Seeing NS’s success, everyone else rushed into the race.
The most prominent examples were Guble’s Stefia and Enple’s Bazaar.
“Stefia’s dead already.”
“Dead and buried.”
It had crashed so hard that most people didn’t even know Guble had launched a service like that.
They even formed a development team, saying they would make their own games, but once the investment was cut off, the whole thing was dissolved and scattered to the wind.
Unlike Guble, which gave up on Stefia, Enple refused to give up on Bazaar.
This time they poured in a huge amount of money, added thirty games, revamped it, and relaunched it. Even CEO Tim Keaton himself stepped forward to make the announcement.
“And it still failed.”
“And it still failed.”
Some analysts pointed to Block Valley’s arrival as the biggest reason.
After all, both Block Valley and Bazaar were collections of casual games you could enjoy in short bursts.
The difference was that Block Valley was free to use, while Bazaar required a $4.99 subscription.
On top of that, Block Valley let players enjoy a variety of games built with the same graphics style, all together with their friends through their own avatars, while Bazaar was nothing more than a bundle of several hundred games thrown together in one place.
No wonder everyone was flocking to Block Valley.
Still, in some ways, Block Valley was unfairly blamed.
Because it had been accelerated by me, the mobile version of Block Valley hadn’t actually launched until much later in the original timeline.
And even then, Bazaar had still failed.
Well, if the launch windows hadn’t overlapped, maybe things would have turned out a little better than they were now?
“How many subscribers does Bazaar have?”
“The last figure they announced was three million. But that was only because they gave two months free to users of their own devices. They never disclosed the actual number of paying subscribers, so no one knows.”
“They used to say they were going to catch GameFirst.”
Dong-ho snorted.
“That was nonsense. They weren’t even targeting the same audience. Bazaar was a collection of casual games aimed at light users, while GameFirst centered on triple-A video games and pulled in hardcore players.”
That was why GameFirst had not taken much of a hit, even with Block Valley booming.
“The game market isn’t that easy to crack. NS has been in the business for ages; they’ve had a dedicated gaming division from way back. They launched the Z Box, acquired studios, invested aggressively, and worked with countless second- and third-party developers.”
Thinking that money alone would be enough had been the mistake.
Dong-ho nodded.
“They may have swallowed their pride, but Enple isn’t going to back down from this fight anytime soon.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Just look at the way they’re blocking GameFirst from getting onto Enstore.”
Enple had rejected GameFirst’s registration, claiming that each game inside it would need to undergo separate review before it could be listed on Enstore.
But no one doubted the real reason was Bazaar.
If something threatened their success, they could always restrict a competitor’s service.
That was what made platform companies so frightening.
By the time we were deep into work, evening had already arrived.
I nudged Dong-ho in the back.
“Go out and have dinner with Ah-reum.”
“Huh? What about you?”
“I’ve got plans.”
That was a lie, but I figured I’d make some from here on out. Otherwise I’d just end up eating alone.
I’d lived abroad so long that eating by myself had already become second nature.
“Have a nice meal somewhere with a good atmosphere, and show her around the neighborhood too.”
“Hold on. I’ve never been around here either. How am I supposed to show her anything?”
“Has the internet collapsed or something?”
That was what Guble Search was for.
“But can you even make a reservation this late?”
Unless you were planning to walk into McDonald’s on the street corner, famous restaurants were usually booked solid weeks in advance.
But…
“If you ask the hotel concierge, they’ll recommend somewhere and make the reservation for you.”
They could handle not just restaurants, but concerts and plane tickets too.
That was the kind of service you got when you became a high-tier guest at a luxury hotel.
“Do your best.”
“Huh? What exactly am I supposed to do my best at?”
“…”
Honestly, how could a person be this oblivious?
Was it possible he hadn’t failed to get married because he’d been injured in the first timeline, but simply because he was incapable of getting married at all?
“And since Ah-reum’s leaving for Korea tomorrow, you should head back with her too.”
“You’re not coming?”
“I’ve got work to do.”
“What work? The game’s been launched and it was a success. Isn’t everything done?”
“Done? Hardly.”
There was still one important job left.
* * *
The next day, before she left, Min Ah-reum told me, “Please contact Yuna. She seems bored all by herself.”
“I do, from time to time.”
“If you do it more often, I’m sure she’ll like it even more.”
Come to think of it, I had been a little lax with my calls lately.
I nodded.
“All right. When you get back, the four of us should have dinner together.”
“I’ll be looking forward to it.”
And just like that, the two of them got into a car and headed for the airport.
Once I was left alone, I suddenly felt the quiet press in around me, and loneliness crept up on me all at once.
How long was I supposed to keep working as a foreign laborer in a strange land?
Fortunately, three days later, the call I’d been waiting for finally came.
Me: “What is it?”
Tom Scott: “Warning letters have come in from Enple and Guble.”
Me: “What did they say?”
Tom Scott: “They said that if we don’t stop Penny payments, they’ll delete the game from Enstore and Play Market immediately.”
Me: “Hmm. I see.”
Tom Scott: “Block Games got the same warning too. Can you come over here for now?”
Me: “I’m on my way.”
* * *
Jim Schneider, a reporter for GameSpark, had written about the process of making games with the Block Studio development tools and posted it on the webzine, where it drew a huge response from gamers.
The game he made became wildly popular with teenagers and earned a surprisingly healthy income.
As he kept writing articles analyzing the new games appearing on Block Valley, unexpected news came in.
Block Valley might be removed from the app markets run by Enple and Guble.
Block Valley had originally launched as a free game.
Later, payment features were added, but only web payments and Penny payments were allowed, with no in-app purchases.
At the same time, Nightlight quietly added Penny payments as well. It was, for all practical purposes, the introduction of outside payments.
Jim Schneider knew exactly what kind of companies Enple and Guble were.
They’re not going to sit still for this.
Just as he expected, the two giants moved to retaliate immediately.
Updates for Nightlight and Block Valley were suspended on the two major app markets, and Enple and Guble each sent warning letters to the companies involved.
Jim Schneider sat down in front of his computer at once and started writing.
(Abridged)
Which company runs the world’s largest ESD?
Gelview’s Stream? Legend Games Store? Sonyu Network? NS Game Mall?
No.
It is Enple.
Last year, Enstore generated $85 billion in revenue. Given the 30 percent commission it takes, Enple earned roughly $25 billion from Enstore alone.
Of that, about $15 billion—roughly 70 percent—came from games.
Then what about second place?
As you might expect, second place goes to Guble.
Play Market also pulled in $8 billion from games alone last year.
These two companies make enormous profits by selling mobile games through their app markets, and that revenue is growing by 20 percent every year.
The global game market is worth a staggering $250 billion, and 60 percent of it is mobile. In effect, Enple and Guble have seized control of that market.
And now Legend Games’s Nightlight and Block Games’s Block Valley have challenged them. They have bypassed in-app purchases by introducing Penny, a stablecoin, as a payment method.
Legend Games CEO Tom Scott has long criticized the excessive fees charged by platform companies.
He is well known for calling out Stream’s fees as too high and building Legend Games Store himself to cut the commission to less than half.
In a recent interview, he said that Enple and Guble were effectively exploiting their monopoly position to collect unfair fees…
(omitted)
Legend Games handles global publishing for Block Valley, and both companies are majority-owned by Continue Capital, which acquired a 70 percent stake in each.
That makes it hard not to suspect Continue Capital requested the introduction of Penny payments.
Block Valley and Nightlight are currently two of the most popular games, ranked first and second on the major app markets.
For Enple and Guble, removing them would also carry a heavy burden. But once stablecoin payments are allowed, other game companies are likely to demand similar payment methods.
That would deal a serious blow to the revenues of Enple and Guble. As a result, even if they have to give up part of their profits, they are likely to move forward with heavy-handed sanctions.
Can game companies really afford to give up such enormous markets as Enple and Guble?
All eyes are now on what choice Legend Games and Block Games will make.