Remake (2)
I asked President Jin Taekyung, “What do you think about the truck protests?”
He let out a sigh and shook his head.
“Honestly, I don’t really get it. It’s not like someone held a knife to their throat and forced them to pay, you know?”
…
So they were basically saying, If you hate it, quit?
“The protests have caused a tremendous amount of damage.”
He didn’t seem to have even considered that the users were protesting because they were the ones suffering the damage.
Then again, with a mindset like that, I could see how they’d end up doing something as filthy as manipulating the odds.
Still, this was the best game company in Korea. How had it ended up like this?
Hard to believe, but LD Studio had once been beloved by gamers, hailed as the pride of Korean MMORPGs.
Now, though, when people heard LD Studio, there were only two things they thought of.
Random boxes and rigged rates.
I remembered what Seon-woo had told me.
A well-made game didn’t necessarily become a hit. And a hit didn’t necessarily mean it made money.
Take StarCraze, for example—the game that once sparked Korea’s PC café craze and was now practically called a folk game here. The game was sold as a package title, but DuelNet was free-to-play, so once you factored in server maintenance, the profit margin wasn’t much to speak of.
By contrast, Brotherhood M still held the top spot in Korean revenue, even while drawing that much hatred.
But how long could that situation really last?
After the rigging scandal, public backlash against random boxes had reached extreme levels, and governments around the world had begun classifying them as gambling and moving to regulate them.
As Nightlight and Block Valley had already shown, the game market was changing.
Just making another game that looked the same wasn’t going to work anymore.
President Jin Taekyung probably understood that too, which was why he was in such a rush to make something new.
They’d announced one project after another, but none of them seemed to be going very far.
I said to him, “Thanks for making time for me when you must be busy.”
“Not at all. I’ve wanted to meet you myself. I heard you’ve been leading the Korean short-selling situation all this time.”
I smiled and waved it off.
“No way. I’m just an employee. I do whatever the company tells me to do.”
He didn’t seem to believe that for a second.
Jin Taekyung looked at me and asked, “So what did you want to see me about today?”
“I have a proposal for you.”
“What kind of proposal?”
“There’s a game LD Studio developed a while back. Do you know a title called Fantasia Tales?”
Jin Taekyung nodded.
“Of course. It was a game our company released two years ago.”
It had been launched as a PC MMORPG with some real expectations behind it, but after a mess of sloppy operations and one incident after another, service was shut down after just a year. A miserable, tragic little title.
He wore a puzzled expression.
Why bring up a failed game now?
“I want to buy that game.”
Apparently that was not the answer he’d expected, because Jin Taekyung looked mildly thrown off.
“You mean the IP?”
“Everything.”
“Everything, meaning…?”
“The IP, of course, but also the development data. All of it.”
In other words, hand over the game in its entirety.
Jin Taekyung’s eyes narrowed with the wary look of a man thinking, What the hell is this guy plotting now?
“Why do you want Fantasia Tales?”
I gave him the reason in a single line.
“Because it’s a game my friend made.”
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Everyone has at least one thing in life they regret.
If the Primus incident had been that for me, then for Seon-woo it was Fantasia Tales.
Fantasia Tales began as Kang Seon-woo’s concept.
Ever since he was young, Seon-woo had been obsessed with light novels, web novels, anime, games, and everything in between, and he’d always dreamed of building a fantasy world of his own.
To make that dream real, he chose game development.
The first project he designed was Fantasia Tales.
It was a game centered on characters and story, but with a wide range of activities—raids, dungeons, exploration, adventure, PvP, and more.
That proposal made it through, and Fantasia Tales was formally approved for development.
Ryu Myung-hoon, the man who had made Blood & Magic, took on the role of creative director. Development Team 3 was formed, and Kang Seon-woo joined as both planner and lead programmer.
He was the number two man under the director.
But around the same time, development began on Blood & Magic M, and Director Ryu Myung-hoon became so busy worrying about that project that Seon-woo ended up effectively running Fantasia Tales himself.
Once Kang Seon-woo took on the practical role of director and started steering the project, development actually gained even more momentum.
But the process was far from smooth.
Game development takes hundreds of people and hundreds of billions of won.
The development team does the building, but the business team provides the money.
So if it’s an indie game funded with your own cash, that’s one thing, but in a major game company, the business side’s influence can never really be kept out.
It’s common for a game in development to be shelved or for the direction to change.
The exploration and adventure content that had been considered most important during the planning stage was drastically reduced or cut entirely, while PvP was beefed up instead.
The reasoning was that money was made by pushing users to compete with one another.
Even though both were MMORPGs, Brotherhood and Fantasia Tales were completely different kinds of games.
Brotherhood’s main content was PvP, while Fantasia Tales was built around adventure, exploration, and bonds with NPCs.
And yet they grafted on every last Brotherhood-style monetization scheme they could and smothered the whole thing with random boxes.
On top of that, the original design had been to make every piece of content fun even for free or low-spending players, but they adjusted the difficulty so that you couldn’t unlock higher-tier content without paying.
As a result, the final product drifted farther and farther away from the original concept.
Even so, the game itself was fun. If they’d handled operations properly, it would have grown into an IP that could have supported LD Studio for years.
Instead, the management team duplicated items and sold them off, flooded the game with currency under the pretense of rewards and triggered inflation, deleted accounts at will, halted new updates…
After one scandal after another, service ended a year after launch.
And so Fantasia Tales remained Seon-woo’s sore spot.
It must have bothered him deeply, because even later on, whenever he drank, he’d go off on a long, bitter rant.
“Fantasia Tales was a damn well-made game.”
“I’m not saying that because I made it, either. It really was a good game.”
“It was never supposed to die like that.”
“Damn it! If they’d just handled operations properly, it would’ve been a monster hit.”
“There were so many campaigns and scenario arcs after that too, and they scrapped all of them.”
“The characters were incredible too.”
“If it weren’t for those LD bastards…”
Back then, I’d just assumed it was the drunken whining of a failed developer.
But a few years later, a Chinese game company released a multi-platform game called Phantom Continent, and it became a runaway hit not only in China but around the world.
It was successful enough in Korea to push Brotherhood M aside.
When Seon-woo saw that, he was shocked.
“Hey! They copied Fantasia Tales!”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m serious. The setting, the backdrop, the animations, the characters—there’s so much they ripped off. It’s basically half a copy-paste job. This is how my game should’ve come out in the first place!”
“Come on, no way…”
As it turned out, that was true.
Wang Xuewei, the director of Phantom Continent, openly said he had drawn strong inspiration from Fantasia Tales.
Strictly speaking, Phantom Continent wasn’t a straight copy of Fantasia Tales.
Many parts were similar, but it was much better—and in fact, it was closer to the form Seon-woo had originally planned.
Seon-woo assumed the initial design documents must have leaked in that direction, though that was only an assumption.
And then…
That company later used the money it had earned from Phantom Continent to acquire the collapsed LD Studio.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
I looked at Jin Taekyung.
He would never know just how great a game he’d killed. Though once the company was on the brink of collapse, he’d end up learning whether he wanted to or not.
“So it really was true that Team Lead Kang… no, Representative Kang, had ties to Continue Capital.”
“Yes. We’ve been friends since middle school.”
“You didn’t invest just because he’s your friend, did you?”
“Something like that.”
SW Games was known as one of the three companies backed by Continue Capital.
But strictly speaking, Continue Capital hadn’t been the one to invest.
The investment in SW Games came from a private equity fund under Continue Capital’s umbrella. And the owner of that fund was Kang Seon-woo, one hundred percent.
It was only right that Seon-woo received his share, after he’d invested in me before the KNC International incident.
“So you’re saying you want to return to your friend a game he once planned?”
“Something like that.”
I kept my tone as gentle as possible.
“At this point, it’s not like LD Studio has any real use for it, is it?”
“Would it be different if it ended up in Representative Kang Seon-woo’s hands?”
I didn’t deny it.
“Probably.”
The one who planned and made Fantasia Tales was Kang Seon-woo. Which meant the only person who could truly fix it was Kang Seon-woo as well.
If I took Seon-woo at his word, he could definitely turn that trash game into a god-tier one.
Honestly, asking him to develop a game in time for the Legend Deck launch had been impossible from the start.
But what if, instead of starting from scratch, he was remaking a game he had made himself?
That would still take time, of course, but at Seon-woo’s current level, wasn’t it possible?
Jin Taekyung looked deep in thought for a moment.
If I’d pitched this to a cash-strapped studio, they would’ve taken it on the spot. But LD Studio wasn’t exactly desperate for money.
Fantasia Tales was useless to LD Studio. How many shut-down games had they had over the years, anyway?
But now that they knew I needed it, the calculation had probably changed.
Once you realize something you were planning to throw away is valuable to someone else, it suddenly starts to feel worth keeping.
“What if I say I won’t sell?”
I smiled.
“Come on, no way. You absolutely won’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll sell it.”
His expression hardened a little.
“That sounds like you’re forcing me to sell.”
“That’s right.”
At my answer, he frowned.
“What did you say?”
I didn’t especially like threatening people with superior leverage, but this was different. Against LD Studio, I figured a little corporate bullying was fair game.
“I’m going to buy that game, no matter what it takes.”
If they refused to sell, then there were only two options.
Either take over LD Studio entirely, or smash it to pieces.
Unless he was an idiot, he had to know I wasn’t bluffing.
“I don’t think it’s a bad offer. If you can sell a game that’s already dead and service has already ended, isn’t that basically a win-win?”
“But if a game that died at LD Studio is revived by another company, then I’d look ridiculous.”
“I’ll pay enough that your position won’t be ridiculous.”
“How much are you thinking?”
…
So this was the old How much did you price-check before coming here? question.
Everyone gets asked that at least once in their life. Usually when buying a phone at a temple discount shop, or shopping for a graphics card in Yongsan, and the like.
How much should a dead game cost before people say it was a good buy?
When it’s hard to set the price yourself, the best move is to kick it back to the other side.
“Tell me the price you want. I’ll make the deal cleanly.”
He didn’t know it, but I was a man who had once pushed his Merona Market customer rating all the way to 97 in my first life. I’d never received a single complaint review.
Still, just in case, I added one more line.
“I’m sure you won’t say anything absurd.”