Quick Shaka Ocean World (4)
I was reminded of the first timeline.
Unlike me, who had just been an ordinary securities firm employee, Sunwoo was already a famous developer back then—one of those names people in the industry would recognize at a mention.
Even so, he hadn’t been this ridiculously good at development.
There was no way he’d suddenly awakened some superpower for making games out of nowhere.
Even after he’d been fired from LD Studio and we’d ended up running a fried chicken shop together, Sunwoo never missed a single one of the famous games released afterward.
What if he didn’t remember them consciously, but all of those experiences were still sitting in his head just the same?
Then it wouldn’t be strange at all if his development ability had suddenly gone up, would it?
Sunwoo lowered his voice for no reason and said, “I think... maybe...”
What was this? Did he actually think of something?
I leaned in and listened.
“I think some sealed power just awakened in me.”
“...Huh?”
What the hell kind of nonsense was that?
“Think about it. How else do you explain me suddenly making games this well? The genius talent that had been sealed in my right arm finally awakened. That has to be it.”
“Suddenly?”
And why is it sealed in your right arm? Are you a black-flame dragon or something?
“Probably quitting was the trigger. Like, the overpowered game developer who quit his job... something like that, right?”
“No. Absolutely not.”
What is that, a web novel title?
To me, it seemed more likely that this had something to do with regression.
I wondered for a moment whether I should tell him, but decided it would only confuse him for no reason.
Besides, there was also a chance it had nothing to do with regression at all.
Either way, if someone who already had strong development skills also carried a memory of future experience in their head, wasn’t that basically a jackpot?
We shifted back to business.
Sunwoo asked me, “So, how’s the Legend Deck development going?”
“Very well.”
“If the hardware comes out decent, I feel like it’ll explode. If you build it right, it could pull demand from consoles, PCs, and mobile all at once.”
Flipped around, that meant if we botched it, it would end up being neither one thing nor the other. That was why we were pouring everything into it.
“The biggest problem with portable gaming devices is that they’re weaker than consoles and PCs, but fortunately, cloud gaming can overcome that.”
Sunwoo looked impressed. “How’d you come up with something like that? CEO Tom Scott really is smart.”
“That was my idea.”
He stared at me in shock.
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s true, idiot. I’m the one who told him to build it. I was the one who connected him with Yuseong Electronics too.”
“Hmm, really?”
Well, if I was being honest, it had come from seeing the Stream Deck in the first timeline.
Since the topic was already on the table, I passed along what CEO Tom Scott had said.
“The Legend Games side was asking if you could make a launch title for the Legend Deck.”
“Exclusive to the Legend Deck?”
“No. Multi-platform.”
The Legend Deck was being built to support not only games distributed through the Legend Games store, but almost every mobile game as well.
Still, if there was a launch game alongside the existing titles, it would help both sides sell more.
Sunwoo thought it over, then said, “Could we even develop something in time?”
“You think that’d be hard?”
“Hmm. But it also doesn’t seem impossible...”
“Then give it a shot.”
Sunwoo nodded. “I’ll try. Ah! Nightlight’s battle pass was a total smash hit this time.”
“Yeah.”
With Block Valley doing well, CEO Tom Scott apparently decided he couldn’t afford to lose, so he released Nightlight’s battle pass.
There were three types, and you could buy them with in-game currency.
The price was around ten dollars.
And in just one day, it raked in a whopping fifty million dollars.
By simple arithmetic, that meant over five million people had paid for it.
Then again, with three hundred million registered users, that wasn’t all that surprising.
“If it’s a game people actually enjoy, spending money on it doesn’t feel wasted.”
A battle pass, in a way, was a lot like a shopping mall membership.
You could shop just fine without joining the membership, but if you did sign up, you’d get points, coupons, and other perks.
The important thing was that the benefits only came if you actually kept shopping.
Just as people who spent more in a store got more rewards, battle pass users got more rewards the more they played steadily and cleared various challenges.
It wasn’t just selling items; it motivated players to engage more deeply with the game, which meant the company got paid and saw higher retention at the same time.
“When Nightlight first said it was going to launch a battle pass, all the Korean game companies sneered and said, ‘Who’s gonna pay for that?’ But the second it became a hit, they all started scrambling to say they’d adopt battle passes too.”
Of course, there was a practical reason for this too.
If you wanted to define Korean mobile games’ business model in one word, it would be random boxes—loot boxes, basically.
But after the last Brotherhood M probability manipulation scandal, public hostility toward loot boxes had grown, and regulation was tightening as well.
So it had become harder for game companies to strip money from players with loot boxes the way they used to.
That was why battle passes were spreading like a trend.
“Even games like Luminous, Cinnamon Story, and Children, which had all had trouble with random boxes before, quickly announced they’d be adding battle passes too.”
“So those games won’t sell random boxes anymore?”
At my question, Sunwoo snorted.
“As if. They’re planning to do both—add battle passes and keep selling random boxes too.”
“...”
I figured as much.
“What about LD Studio?”
“There? They’re screwed. I doubt they’ve even started thinking about it.”
LD Studio had recently gotten a major windfall.
That was the reduction in app market in-app purchase fees. In Korea especially, the share of Cosmic Phone users was high compared with the U.S.
Thanks to the growth of the Cosmic Store, Korean game companies’ in-app purchase fees had dropped sharply, and that was huge good news.
So what had happened to LD Studio’s stock price?
It had risen briefly, then quickly slid back down.
The reason was that the outlook ahead looked grim. Because of the probability manipulation scandal, the revenue that had already fallen once showed no sign of recovering.
That didn’t mean they could just introduce a battle pass like the other companies, either.
Brotherhood M had been designed to wring as much money as possible from a small number of whales.
Without the random boxes, the game itself couldn’t even survive. And no matter how much criticism it took, it was still making huge profits that way.
If they carelessly introduced something like a battle pass, the heavy spenders would revolt and revenue would probably drop instead, so it was the kind of thing they wanted to do but couldn’t.
“Originally they planned to release another P2W game like Brotherhood M and fleece people the same way, but the game flopped and all they got was hate. Now there’s only one path left.”
“What is it?”
“Make an actually proper game and earn money through normal monetization.”
“I see.”
Wait. What was that supposed to mean?
Thinking about it again, it was kind of ridiculous.
“No, isn’t it obvious that a game company should make proper games and monetize them normally?”
Sunwoo gave a bitter smile.
“That obvious thing isn’t easy at LD Studio.”
Brotherhood M.
Once upon a time, it had been Korea’s undisputed number one in game revenue, and even among games worldwide, it had ranked in the top five.
But after the probability manipulation scandal, revenue had collapsed, and its image had sunk to the bottom.
Then the users sent trucks to the company headquarters again and staged another protest.
The trigger was stealth marketing.
To prop up its falling revenue and image, LD Studio paid AI tubers and streamers to play Brotherhood M.
That advertising budget naturally got spent on random draws and upgrades.
Brotherhood M was a P2W game—pay to win—where the more money you spent, the stronger you got.
If both sides were fighting in a war game, but only one side got the advertising money, then of course the side that didn’t would be at a disadvantage.
The users erupted in outrage.
LD Studio denied it at first, but the truth eventually came out, and another truck protest followed.
The only saving grace was that it hadn’t become a huge issue like before.
There were only a few articles about it, and the terrestrial networks didn’t report on it at all.
But that also meant public interest in the game had dropped that much, too.
Brotherhood M’s revenue kept falling, while Nightlight and Block Valley steadily expanded their share of the Korean market.
There was no way the company could keep running forever by relying only on Brotherhood M’s earnings.
If another bad shock hit in a situation like this?
That would be a genuinely serious problem.
Even among the employees of LD Studio, a sense of crisis was spreading that this could not go on.
“Is our company going to be okay?”
“The stock price keeps dropping.”
“At this rate, the employee shares we got are going to turn into trash.”
“They need to develop another game fast.”
“Why did they dissolve Development Team 3 anyway?”
“Because Kang Seon-woo quit and started SW Games. He took everyone from Development Team 3 with him.”
“Wait, seriously? Maybe I should contact him too.”
Fortunately, LD Studio still had more than a trillion won in cash from all the random boxes it had sold over the years.
With that kind of money, they could develop new games as much as they wanted.
LD Studio CEO Jin Taekyung immediately ordered them to start developing new console, PC package, and online games.
But the answer that came back was unexpected.
“What? There’s no one to develop them?”
“Yes, sir.”
After hearing Vice President Park Suhyeong’s report, CEO Jin Taekyung asked in disbelief, “What do you mean there’s no one? There are so many developers here.”
“There are plenty of mobile game developers, but we have almost no one for package games. We’ll need to hire new people for development.”
LD Studio was a massive game company with 4,500 employees.
There were more than enough developers for mobile games built around randomized draws. What they lacked was anyone who could actually make a proper game.
The few developers they did have had all left, too.
That left them in the absurd position of trying to make a different kind of game now, only to discover they didn’t have the developers for it.
“Then what about the online game side? You know, the online game we made before—Fantasia Tales.”
“Executive Director Park Hyunjong dissolved the team, so everyone quit and went to SW Games. As for the rest, a lot of other developers left too, so there isn’t even anyone fit to be a director.”
“...”
The number-one force keeping LD Studio alive was, of course, Brotherhood M.
Because of that, the Brotherhood M team and the other development teams were treated very differently from the start.
The rumored six-figure annual salaries in the media applied only to the Brotherhood M developers; they didn’t apply to the other employees.
The company had no will to invest in or develop anything else, and it didn’t treat people well either, so of course they left.
That situation wasn’t unique to LD Studio. Other Korean game companies were in much the same state.
For years, they had only made mobile games built on randomized items, so most of their development manpower was concentrated in that area.
As a result, finding developers for console and package games was like plucking stars from the sky.
CEO Jin Taekyung muttered in disbelief, “We’ve got money and we’ve got employees, but no developers who can actually make games...”