The Fee War (11)
Even though fees had come down by roughly twenty percent and outside payments were now allowed, the lawsuit against Enple was still moving forward.
Once you’d started something, shouldn’t you see it through to the end?
After talking with Yuseong Electronics President Gu Dongjin for several hours, CEO Tom Scott said to me,
“We’ll get started on the Legend Deck right away.”
Because the Legend Deck was meant to account for data communication as well as cloud gaming, it would end up somewhere between a game console and a smartphone, developed through cooperation between Legend Games and Yuseong Electronics’ IM Division.
In general, the console market ran on exclusives.
It was inconvenient, sure, if you had to buy multiple consoles just to play the games you liked, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Companies raced to build more powerful machines and push them out at lower prices, while also buying up studios or subsidizing games still in development to secure exclusives of their own. That kept competition and investment lively across the industry.
But the Legend Deck would take the opposite approach.
The operating system was based on Linux.
By partitioning the device, users would be able to install other operating systems like NOS, and we intended to make it possible to install other ESDs as well, such as Stream or GameFirst.
That was the only way to maximize sales and drive the price down.
Behind that strategy was a confidence that both developers and users would naturally gravitate toward the Legend Games Store if its fees were low and its features were good.
CEO Tom Scott was due to return to South Carolina now.
We exchanged our reluctant goodbyes.
“Thanks for all your work on the lawsuit.”
“Not at all. Compared to everything you’ve done, it’s nothing.”
After Tom Scott left, I prepared to leave as well.
“You’re heading out too, sir?”
“Yes. I have to.”
I’d originally planned to leave after watching the Block Valley launch, but the lawsuit had kept me here for several months. Thanks to that, one thing had become clear: Santa Monica was a very livable place.
If I’d come in the summer instead of winter, it would have been even better. It was a little disappointing to have the beautiful beach right in front of me and never actually step onto it.
Right before I left, I heard something incredible.
“An engagement?”
Kent patted his friend on the shoulder and said,
“Even I didn’t know this guy, who’s lived his whole life knowing nothing but games, would ever get engaged.”
Charles gave an awkward laugh.
“Things just worked out that way.”
I was dumbstruck.
“Wait, what exactly did you do for that to happen...?”
As it turned out, Charles Griffin was getting engaged to lawyer Fiona Harrison.
From what I gathered, they’d met often while the lawsuit was underway, talked a great deal, and eventually found themselves compatible enough to start dating.
Well, when a young man and woman spend that much time together, that kind of thing can happen easily enough.
What surprised me was that one of them must have been busy updating the game while the other was preparing legal arguments, so when exactly had they found time to date?
Do people just make time for what matters, no matter how busy they are?
Kent explained beside me.
“Back when he worked at Stargate, this guy had a female coworker he really liked. He spent months agonizing over it, never managed to confess, and in the end he even watched her marry another man. So when I saw him tell her he wanted to date her right away this time, I was shocked too.”
Charles scratched his head.
“The moment I saw her, I fell for her. Normally I would’ve kept my mouth shut and let it pass, but thinking about what you once said gave me the courage to speak up.”
“Huh? What exactly did I say?”
“Didn’t you say that if you put your heart into an egg, even a rock could be cracked open?”
“...”
No, I said to infuse ideology into the egg. When had I ever said to put your heart into it?
They’d apparently translated it however they pleased and taken it in the most convenient way possible.
“Still, isn’t an engagement too fast? How long have you even known each other?”
“That’s true, but I kept feeling like if it wasn’t her, it couldn’t be anyone else.”
The woman in question was a beautiful lawyer.
What’s more, her father was the head of Archer & Harrison, a giant law firm.
But Charles didn’t have anything to feel inferior about, either. Thanks to Block Valley becoming a smash hit, he was now a successful game developer and a man worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Charles looked at my face and asked,
“Why do you look like that?”
“Huh? What’s wrong with my face?”
“You seem a little unwell.”
“Ah, yes. I think lunch may have upset my stomach.”
The moment I heard that, it really did feel as if something had gotten stuck there.
While I was busy taking on Enple and Guble, somebody else had been off leisurely falling in love!
Was that really acceptable?
“Anyway, congratulations.”
“Thank you. It’s all because of you, sir.”
Of course it was all because of me.
I was the one who had pushed the lawsuit, and I was the one who had named Harrison as lead counsel.
Come to think of it... Block Valley hadn’t originally had anything to do with this lawsuit. In fact, it had been firmly on the side of following Enple and Guble’s policies.
So Charles would never have had a reason to meet lawyer Harrison at all.
I didn’t know who he’d married in my first life, but had I accidentally changed not only his future, but his marriage partner too?
Unintentionally, I’d ended up taking responsibility for his romance and his wedding as well.
* * *
When it came time to leave the hotel I’d been staying at for several months, I found myself oddly reluctant to go.
I said my goodbyes to the staff and the manager, people I’d seen every day.
The elderly manager joked,
“I thought you’d ended up living here for good, so it’s a shame to see you leave.”
“Peak season’s coming up soon. A free guest like me ought to leave quickly so a paying guest can move in, right?”
“What are you talking about? The headquarters gives us subsidies for as long as you stay, so you’re always welcome.”
“I’ll come again next time. Until then, stay healthy.”
“We’ll be waiting.”
I was taking it easy so I could leave early the next morning when an unexpected guest came to the hotel.
A white man in his late fifties.
He had a lean build, stood around six feet tall, and his hair was completely white. He wore black-rimmed glasses and looked like a kindly neighborhood uncle.
“What brings you here?”
He smiled and said,
“Didn’t you say to come find you if I had something to say?”
“...”
I never thought he’d actually show up!
He held out his hand.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Tim Keaton.”
It was none other than Enple’s CEO.
I took his hand lightly and shook it.
“Han Miru.”
After exchanging greetings, we sat down facing each other.
Outwardly I acted perfectly normal, but inside I was astonished.
Money stopped mattering much after you’d earned past a certain amount, but meeting someone like this was a different matter entirely.
How often did a person get the chance to meet the CEO of Enple?
And not as a spectator at some keynote, either, but one-on-one like this.
Suddenly, Mike Goldenberg, CEO of Facenote, came to mind.
If he had been a confident, aggressive young man, then the man in front of me had the easygoing air of someone with deep experience and wisdom.
This was a man who moved the world’s largest company.
He was probably one of the ten most important people in America.
I was only someone who’d been lucky enough to regress and learn the future. If that hadn’t happened, I would have lived as an ordinary securities man like I did in my first life.
But he was different.
Tim Keaton’s name had become known to the world because he was Enple’s CEO.
Yet he had been managing Enple’s supply chain for more than ten years before that. He had joined the company around the same time Stevie Schiller returned to Enple.
If Stevie Schiller was the general who led armies into battle, then he was the administrator who handled supplies.
The former stood out. The latter usually did not.
One of the remarkable things about Enple was that it didn’t operate its own factories.
It only designed its semiconductors and outsourced production to PSMC in Taiwan, and its Enphone—which accounted for sixty percent of total revenue—was built in Chinese factories using parts sourced from supply chains all over the world.
There were plenty of companies that outsourced production.
But Enple was the only one that outsourced and sold hundreds of millions of devices a year while managing the whole operation flawlessly.
The man who made that possible was Tim Keaton.
“So what did you want to talk about?”
I’d assumed he was here to discuss the Enstore commission, but CEO Tim Keaton brought up something entirely different.
“Every product Enple sells contains semiconductors. That’s why we created a separate division called Enple Silicon and have continued to invest heavily in semiconductor development.”
I nodded.
“Yes. Enple’s semiconductor design capability is the best in the industry.”
Enphone was not only beautiful in design, but also unmatched in performance. That was what made it a luxury item.
“While building up Enple Silicon, we planned to acquire a fabless startup.”
“Did you get it?”
He shook his head.
“We failed.”
“Why?”
“Because while the acquisition talks were underway, Yuseong Electronics stepped in and bought them. Surprisingly, they didn’t even negotiate the price. They just paid whatever was asked.”
Hearing that, I thought I knew which company he meant.
He continued in the same calm tone.
“That company was called NP Semi. At the time, I only thought it was a shame. If they’d been acquired for the amount Yuseong Electronics paid, we would have considered it seriously as well. But looking back now, NP Semi was the masterpiece of Enple Silicon. If we had acquired that company, Enple Silicon would have been complete.”
He wasn’t wrong.
In my first life, NP Semi was acquired by Enple and developed the NP1 chipset by combining CPU, GPU, NPU, and memory.
The NP1 chipset delivered overwhelming performance and pulled far ahead of other companies, by more than one generation.
That technological edge justified Enple’s high prices, and the resulting profits were reinvested to widen the gap even further.
But this time, Yuseong Electronics had bought the company just before Enple could.
Rather than absorb NP Semi outright, Yuseong Electronics left it as an independent company and attached its own memory semiconductor design division underneath it.
As a result, its design capability rose dramatically.
At this point, Yuseong Electronics’ AP was being evaluated as having surpassed Snapdragon from Qualcomm, the undisputed giant of mobile chips.
“To be honest, I never expected Yuseong Electronics to acquire it. At the time, Yuseong had already finished hiring to strengthen its own design capabilities, so there was no reason for it to go after a fabless company. Later, I heard it was directly ordered by Chairman Yoo Jae-ho. I was also told someone had advised him to make the purchase just before that... was that you, Chairman Han?”
He was obviously asking because he already knew the answer, so I didn’t bother denying it.
“Yes.”
CEO Tim Keaton nodded.
“I thought so. Dongwoo Precision, NP Semi, RD Quanet, and ADM as well. Yuseong Electronics’ rise into a major force in memory semiconductor design and fabless development was all thanks to your advice, Chairman Han.”
“Anyone can offer advice. Whether to listen is the CEO’s decision.”
At this point no one could simply brush off my words, but back then I had only been a young man who’d quit after working at a securities firm.
It was Chairman Yoo Jae-ho’s judgment that led him to meet me and follow my advice.
If he had ignored me then, Yuseong Electronics would not be what it was today.
“The CEO’s seat is a lonely one. It would be nice if I had someone who could offer me advice like that too.”
“But Enple has plenty of capable people, doesn’t it?”
CEO Tim Keaton gave a wry smile.
“And yet no one has the same eye for things that you do, Chairman Han.”
Was this... an invitation to work together?
Yuseong Electronics was manufacturing-focused, so collaboration was possible. But Enple was a company that built its own ecosystem.
As had just been demonstrated through cloud gaming, the cloud had the power to leap beyond platform ecosystems altogether.
Would Enple really allow something that could neutralize its own ecosystem?
Probably not.
So cooperation between us was impossible.