Remake (1)
Yoo Jae-ho looked a little surprised.
"Do you think that's possible?"
Normally, a console generation was considered to last about six or seven years. And when a generation sold like gangbusters, the total sales would reach one hundred million units.
I answered with confidence.
"Legend Deck sits right between a console and a mobile device. Since it supports cloud gaming, it can run high-spec games and mobile games without a problem. And because it's a handheld, it isn't a one-household, one-device product. It's a one-person, one-device product."
"Well, game demand is enormous."
These days, whenever people talked about smartphone performance, one of the first things they mentioned was how well it ran games.
If you weren't going to play games, why buy the latest phone at all?
"If Legend Deck gets widely adopted, wouldn't that also have a positive effect on Cosmic Phone sales?"
Legend Games Store was still barred from Enstore and Play Market. The only way in was through cloud access in a web browser.
Cosmic Store, on the other hand, was working in partnership with Legend Games Store.
Through Legend Games Store, you could continue a game on any device.
So if someone used Legend Deck, it naturally increased the chances that they'd buy a Cosmic Phone too.
Yoo Jae-ho smiled faintly.
"Then we should move even faster. If we do this right, we may be able to bring the launch forward by about three months."
I was stunned.
"Really?"
"Yes. I've already instructed all of the parts suppliers."
Pulling up a production schedule wasn't nearly as easy as it sounded.
The reason this was possible was because Yuseong Electronics was one of the most vertically integrated companies in the world. It could manufacture everything itself, from semiconductors and other components all the way to finished products.
Who should I tell this happy news to first?
Of course, I told my friend first.
"I've got good news."
"What is it?"
"Legend Deck's launch looks like it'll be about three months earlier."
"Oh? Nice. That's great."
"Can you make a launch title in the meantime?"
At my words, Seon-woo looked flustered.
"Huh? What are you talking about?"
"You said before you'd try making one."
"I said I'd try, not that I would. Developing a triple-A game takes at least five years. Maybe I don't know about simple casual games, but if you want to make a proper one, even in the best-case scenario it takes a year at minimum... and now you're telling me the deadline got cut by three months?"
"Is it impossible?"
Seon-woo answered flatly.
"Obviously. Even if we started now and worked without sleeping or eating, in full crunch mode, there's no way."
"Can't we just brute-force it with developer sweat?"
Then Seon-woo exploded.
"Hey, you insane bastard! You think games just pop out if you squeeze enough programmers dry?"
...
So it really was impossible?
Right now, Quickshark Ocean World and Welcome to Needer were still racking up hit after hit, but they were only Block Valley games, only promotional titles for the brand.
What I needed was a game that would define SW Games' identity.
A launch title for Legend Deck would have been perfect, but the problem was that there simply wasn't enough time to develop one.
Honestly, even while I was saying it, I had thought it probably wouldn't work.
"So here's the thing. I've got a good idea."
"Hm. The moment you say that, I suddenly get nervous."
"It's serious. Just trust me once."
"What is it?"
"I'll tell you when I get back."
CEO Jin Tae-kyung.
The history of the LD Studio he founded was, in essence, the history of the Brotherhood games.
The PC MMORPG Brotherhood opened a new era for Korean MMORPGs, and it was still running as a long-lived classic.
And Brotherhood M, which was released on mobile, recorded the highest revenue and profits in Korean gaming history.
Thanks to that, LD Studio held on to the undisputed number-one spot.
But once Brotherhood M began to wobble, LD Studio wobbled with it. They couldn't rely on the Brotherhood IP forever, so they needed a new game.
That was why LD Studio had gone to work on a new project.
As Korea's largest game company, it had thousands of highly paid professionals on staff, each earning well over one hundred million won a year.
Scenario writers, illustrators, graphic designers, programmers, and more.
The problem was that they didn't have a creative director to command them. Even the people they did have were overwhelmingly concentrated in mobile games.
Game development was the act of creating something from nothing.
Because so many variables could intervene that games rarely came out exactly as originally intended, the director's role was immensely important.
Now that they were trying to make a new game, I found myself, once again, regretting the absence of Kang Seon-woo.
The games he made, Quickshark Ocean World and Welcome to Needer, had established themselves as flagship titles for Block Valley.
They became must-play games for teenagers, and even drove up sales for Block Valley and the brands tied to it.
Given that most of the Development Team 3 staff had followed him when he quit and started his own company, he clearly had a lot of personal charisma too.
When you think about how the most important thing in game development is managing people, that's a talent in itself.
And yet, instead of recruiting a developer like that, they had kicked him out.
Why the hell didn't I know?
During development, CEO Jin Tae-kyung had received several reports from Kang Seon-woo and spoken with him briefly. Back then, he hadn't imagined that the man possessed talent of that caliber.
If LD Studio had supported him while he was still there, so he could make games like this?
Then every bit of that profit would have gone to LD Studio.
Though, if he had actually stayed there, he probably would have just been churning out random-box systems instead...
One thing I couldn't quite understand was how, exactly, he had received investment from Continue Capital.
Thanks to that, even as a newly founded game company, he had drawn market attention and secured plenty of capital.
Could it really be true that he was personally acquainted with someone on the Continue Capital side?
In any case, there was no need to worry about someone who had already left.
What I needed now was a creative director capable of steering a large-scale development project.
If there wasn't anyone suitable inside the company, hiring from outside was one option.
Fortunately, LD Studio had enough cash on hand that they were already considering acquiring a game studio.
While they were busy scouting targets, CEO Jin Tae-kyung received an unexpected report from Vice President Park Su-hyeong.
"Continue Capital requested a meeting?"
"That's right. They said they'd like to meet you in person."
The person who had reached out was Han Miru.
Jin Tae-kyung was well connected in the business world, too, so he had already heard plenty of rumors about Han Miru.
He was someone dispatched from headquarters rather than the local branch. Officially, he was a team leader, but he might have been positioned even higher than the head of the Korean branch.
There were even rumors that he had been the one directing everything Continue Capital had done in Korea.
That probably includes the LD Studio short, too.
Before the probability manipulation scandal broke, Brotherhood M had boasted the highest revenue and profit of any single game.
But once the manipulation was exposed, its image crashed to the ground, and revenue and profits went into free fall.
Because of that, he had even been dragged all the way to a parliamentary audit hearing.
Meanwhile, Continue Capital, the company that exposed it, had shorted LD Studio and pocketed more than two trillion won.
Just thinking about what had happened made my teeth grind together, and now the mastermind behind it had suddenly requested a meeting.
"What for?"
"I'm not sure."
If it were up to him, he never wanted anything to do with Continue Capital again.
But he couldn't afford to ignore them.
The reason was that Brotherhood M was on the Legend Games Store.
Compared to the existing 30 percent cut taken by Enple and Guble, Legend Games Store took only 12 percent.
That alone cut in-app payment fees to less than half.
In the case of Brotherhood M, the payment amounts were enormous and more than 90 percent of transactions happened in Korea, so they could have built their own payment system if they wanted. But if they did that, they wouldn't be able to use the various features provided by Legend Games Store.
The voice chat and messenger functions in Legend Games Store were now practically essential to gamers, so most game companies followed its policies.
Thanks to that, Legend Games Store had now grown into an ESD as important in the mobile market as Enple's Enstore and Guble's Play Market.
CEO Jin Tae-kyung nodded.
"Tell them yes."
The driver pulled up in front of LD Studio headquarters.
"We've arrived."
LD Studio's main office had originally been in Samseong-dong. Then, during the Pangyo development boom, they bought land in Seongnam and built a new headquarters there.
The site covered more than ten thousand square meters, with thirteen floors above ground and seven below.
Inside were a cafeteria, an in-house clinic, a daycare center, and more. According to Seon-woo, the showers and dormitories were also so well equipped that you could live inside without ever needing to go out.
The company had as many as 4,500 employees.
For reference, the famous IceStorm had around 5,000 employees. At that scale, LD Studio could easily be counted among the world's giant game companies.
As soon as I got out of the car, I saw a truck protest in full swing in front of the main gate.
[A game for streamers who mock ordinary users!]
[Expel promotions that deceive customers!]
[Ordinary users pay with their own money! Pro streamers pay with someone else's!]
[Hey, LD, we have pride too! If you keep screwing around with promotions, then we'll stage a real-world siege, got it?]
Honestly, there was never a day without a protest here.
Just then, I saw a carriage gliding past from the building across the street.
"...Huh?"
For a moment, I thought I'd seen wrong.
What the hell? Why was there a carriage here?
Written across the carriage were the words: "Irresponsible notices! Endless user deception! Reckless management! Talk to us now!"
Then a man shouted at the top of his lungs.
"What do you mean payment is each customer's individual choice and you don't consider it harm? The CEO should get out here right now and apologize!"
Apparently, even carriages had now been drafted into protests.
But had the operators really said something that outrageous? Unless they wanted to go under or had lost their minds, did that even make sense?
I was about to investigate what was going on, then decided against it.
Pangyo was exactly the kind of place where nothing would surprise me no matter what happened.
Thinking that, I went inside the building.
When I entered the CEO's office as directed, there was a middle-aged man in a suit waiting there.
Generally, when you met CEOs, they gave off the impression of being very well maintained for their age.
"It's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Jin Tae-kyung."
"Hello. I'm Han Miru from Continue Capital."
We exchanged greetings and sat down.
"I hear you graduated from Korea University."
I nodded.
"Yes. Economics."
The reason CEO Jin Tae-kyung had suddenly brought up college was that he himself was a Korea University graduate. The legendary Class of '87, in fact.
That made us linked by alma mater.
"While I was in school, I heard a lot about the legend of Korea University's Class of '87."
There were a surprising number of Korea University Class of '87 graduates in Korea's IT industry.
It was a time when personal computers had just begun to reach households, and the very concept of the internet was still unfamiliar.
Students at the time spent all night in club rooms, playing with computers. And each of them built the programs they felt they needed.
Some made portals, some made word processors, some made games.
After graduating, they rode the IT boom of the 1990s into entrepreneurship, and those companies later became pillars of Korea's IT industry.
Neotin, Tapioca, Diom, NOT, LD Studio, Lexion, Hunmin Word, and more.
The founders of the famous portal companies and game companies whose names everyone knew were, in truth, all people who had once eaten from the same pot together at the same university.
CEO Jin Tae-kyung was one of them.
Originally, LD Studio had started as a company developing enterprise software.
Then, with the addition of his junior, Kim Jae-gyeong, it released Brotherhood and stepped fully onto the path of a game company.
"I could hear the commotion at the entrance on my way in."
CEO Jin Tae-kyung replied as though he didn't care.
"There's always going to be a consumer with complaints."