“It’s a pity that the Profit Conversion Ratio is a little too low. But oh well, losing money is much easier than earning it!”
Pei Qian felt as though his luck was off the roofs!
Pei Qian contemplated for a moment before filling the space with his thoughts: Tengda Network Technology Co., Ltd.
Tengda represented Soaring in ‘Soaring to meteoric rises’.
That was his wish – for the company to soar to great heights as soon as possible!
<“Tengda Network Technology Co., Ltd.” registration completed.>
With the final step completed, the words on the screen disappeared and the menu returned to its initial state.
Pei Qian pondered over the meaning of the additional notes.
He can’t have any unannounced products a week before settlement.
That made sense.
If there wasn’t such a rule, he could dump any remaining System Funds before the settlement into the development of the new product, causing the System Funds to empty out and that would be a loophole.
With this rule, Pei Qian had to push out all his products on hand a week before settlement such that they would be accountable for any profits or losses – this was a step he couldn’t avoid anymore.
“Another loophole closed. But, it doesn’t matter.”
“So, what I have to do next is to turn the System Funds from 50,000 down to 0 while increasing my Personal Wealth from 443 to 50,443.>
“I just have to start losing money within the rules, right? That doesn’t seem too difficult.” Pei Qian was brimming with confidence.
Opening a company while creating value and new products in a normal way.
As the company’s boss, all he had to do was let that normalcy go slightly astray.
Wasn’t that all there was to it?
Of all the companies created, there were only few which had succeeded while everyone else failed. It’s clear which was the easiest path to go about!
Chapter 2
Translator: Atlas Studios Editor: Atlas Studios
“So, the question now is which field I should enter.”
After pondering about it, Pei Qian decided that he should first get to know the situation of this world.
Opening his laptop, he ran a search on Qiandu search engine and began looking up recent news, particularly those on technology.
“There’s some differences, albeit small ones.” Pei Qian had a rough idea of things.
…
Similar to his previous world, the trend still revolved around the Internet, technology, games and cultural industries.
Pei Qian could choose to enter any industry – that was something the system had no restrictions on.
However, in order to create value and not violate the system’s rules, Pei Qian had to employ relevant professionals while starting the company.
Towards industries that he wasn’t familiar with, Pei Qian had no confidence in navigating things – what if the professionals he employed were really incredible and ended up making the project a success?
After much contemplation, Pei Qian decided on the games industry.
Even though Pei Qian hadn’t been in the games industry personally, he had played tons of games. With such an influence, he had a rough understanding of the industry.
Compared to the other industries, he felt more confident in his ability to navigate through the games industry.
By changing some of the gameplay slightly, he could create a game that could fail – that was a huge advantage he had!
Besides, it was easy to burn money in the games industry.
For physical industries, he could still sell the fixed assets to recoup and that wouldn’t be a total loss. However, in the games industry, the losses would be thorough and result in worthless codes.
With his memories of the world 10 years later, as long as he intentionally avoided creating profit-making games, wouldn’t he be done?
Step One: Make the game!
Step Two: Lose money and have the System Funds converted to his Personal Wealth entirely!
Step Three: Spend to his heart’s content!
Ah, that’s how perfect things are going to be.
Pei Qian felt that he was an absolute genius!
…
After deciding on his direction, Pei Qian looked up the official site of the Bureau of Commerce and downloaded his company’s management profile by logging in successfully with his ID Card Number and an initial password.
There was a company registered under his name – Tengda Network Technology Co., Ltd. – and there was 50,000 yuan worth of funds.
This must have been registered for him using the system’s black technology.
In the aspect of entrepreneurship, there’s a huge difference between Pei Qian’s previous life and this parallel world of simplified difficulty.
In order to encourage more citizens to start their own businesses, there was a low barrier of entry to creating companies and most of the procedures were intelligentized and could be completed online and at the client’s end.
This was extremely helpful for entrepreneurs and was even Pei Qian’s previous world that was 10 years ahead could not match up in this aspect.
There were other similar changes.
For example, thanks to the rapid advancement in telecommunications and cloud technology, many industries gathered their networks and resources and that raised the efficiency of working online.
Take the games industry for example, there was a unified official organization – Entertainment Software Ranking Organization. ESRO for short, they are in charge of regulating and auditing across different genres of games.
At the same time, ESRO has an official website for resources that’s open for all entrepreneurs.
One could view ESRO’s official site as a compilation of the domestic games market’s resources. Here, one could pay to purchase universally usable art resources, programming templates, design manuscripts or even hire professionals to customize their own games.
These art resources, programming templates and whatnot were all shared by individuals or companies within the industry and anyone could use them at a cost.
But of course, these were all resources that were more common and on the lower end.
On the website, one could contact certain hotshots such as top tiered designers and negotiate with them to work together.
Other than that, ESRO has even compiled all the common game editors on the market and simplified them to launch an official game editor of their own. As long as one would take the effort to learn, most people would be able to handle it even without actual programming background.
Chapter 3
Translator: Atlas Studios Editor: Atlas Studios
The current ecosystem in the games industry was similar to 2009 in Pei Qian’s previous life.
For example, the hottest internet games had gone from World of Warcraft to Fantasy World, CS to Counter Strike, DOTA to Gods Rising. They may seem different on the surface, but their gameplays were about the same.
There was a clear improvement for mobile games probably owing to the faster hardware development here compared to his previous life.
For example, in Pei Qian’s previous life, mobile card games only started gaining traction in 2012 thanks to the smartphone trend. However, due to the earlier development of smartphones in this world in 2008, similar games have already appeared since then and the game genre have already matured by now.
“If that’s the case, the situation’s rather optimistic.”
“All I have to do is to spend the 50,000 yuan completely on the website to purchase templates and art resources. I’ll then create a game that nobody wants to play and can’t sell out! Two weeks later, this will count
as a loss!”
“Perfect!”
Decided, Pei Qian started searching for templates that he wanted on the website.
“Driving simulator basic template. 20,000 yuan with a complimentary drawing of a car’s exterior and interiors.”
“Background template – desert road template. 15,000 yuan. If I want the environment to change accordingly, I’ll need another 8,000 yuan. That adds up to 23,000.”
“A little expensive, but that’s exactly how I want it to be!”
“I’ve still got some money leftover.”
“Radio music. Choose 30 out of 100 songs or allow it to play randomly from the system’s song library. 6,000.”
“1,000 yuan left, hmm… I’ll get a simple ranking function then. Can’t afford anything else anyways.”
After contemplating, Pei Qian placed the orders furiously on the website and wiped his 50,000 yuan clean.
In truth, these resources were not expensive.
Inserted into the game editor, the driving simulator template would be able to create the basic functions of a driving simulator game.
Accelerating, braking, turning and crashing et cetera – they were all complete.
As for the desert road background, the game editor supports editing of its distance that causes the desert background to appear with random changes as well.
Coupled with the environmental change function, there’s sunsets, sunrises and sandstorms alongside other changes.
Because these were universal templates, many indie game creators would purchase them as well so there was a 100% chance that there would be similarity clashes.
In order to not have clashes, some creators would customize some art resources to create variations. Naturally, that translates to an increase in investment costs.
However, that wasn’t something Pei Qian was concerned about?
Clash? Go on! I’m here to lose money anyways! If gamers choose not to play this game because of clashes, I couldn’t be happier!
Pei Qian began to create his game.
Even though his aim was to lose money, the game had to be good enough to pass through ESRO’s vetting approval before it can be sold successfully.
If it’s a half-finished product because of functional deficiencies and failed ESRO’s vet, the system may judge it as Pei Qian’s violation of the rules.
As such, no matter how messed up the game is, it has to be functional.
After inserting the basic and background template into the game editor, the framework of the game was done.
Upon entering the game, players would be able to start driving on a desert road.
However, the purchased resources must not be wasted.
Pei Qian added a radio function to the cars such that players were able to turn on the radio while driving to listen to music.
They were all simple or old and classic tunes – the trending songs couldn’t be purchased so cheaply.
Thereafter came a crucial problem.
What should be the core gameplay of this game?
Pei Qian had no idea at all.
Should it be a racing game?
Nah, no way. He had no money for that.
All he could afford was a basic template with an image of a car and a background.
As for those complex racing tracks and flashy cars along with the algorithms for competitive racing, he couldn’t afford them!
How could he create those gameplays if he couldn’t afford it.
Slapping his head, Pei Qian got it.
The core gameplay of the game was simple – to just drive!
One would complete the game just by driving from the start to end point!
However, that alone wouldn’t work. Since everything was compiled together with universal resources and there wasn’t any innovative breakthroughs in gameplay, he wouldn’t be able to make it through the vetting process.
He had to make some changes to ensure that the game got through the vet. Yet, the changes mustn’t be too spectacular – he still had to ensure that no one would want to play the game such that it would lose money!
Pei Qian pondered over it and decided to extend the desert road’s background indefinitely… and extend the gameplay to eight hours!
That’s right! The players would have to drive for eight hours before they could reach the end point! Also, there would be a turn every now and then along the way!
That would make it impossible for the players to pass the game by pressing just a single button!
That way, he should be able to pass the vetting process since the gameplay differed from the existing driving simulators in the market.
Besides, with such a messed up gameplay, wouldn’t he just be lambasted by the gamers? There’s no way this game would earn money!
Pei Qian was overjoyed and lamented over what a genius he was.
Finally, he created an endgame interface with an extremely simplistic method that merely displayed a single line of words: “Congratulations for wasting eight precious hours of your life!”
Even if someone were to complete the game, Pei Qian had to ensure that they would be so pissed that they wouldn’t want to play any games from his company ever again!
In order to not waste the ranking function he bought, he created a ‘Time Wasters Ranking’ to tabulate the ‘Number of Completions’ as well as ‘Effective Game Time’ of every player.
This was a useless ranking system which purely exists because money was spent on it.
Before long, he was done with it.
All of the functions were considered basic functions of the game editor and required simple drags and changing of parameters to execute – basically, anyone with hands could do it.
It took Pei Qian less than two hours to complete the self-learning of the game editor, purchasing of resources and creation of the game.
“This retarded game is definitely going to lose me some money!”
After he was done with creating the game, Pei Qian tested it on his laptop.
After five minutes, he exited the game and was close to barfing.
The only thing he did was drive, drive and drive! It was bloody boring!
Satisfied, Pei Qian published the game right away.
Game Title:
Game Summary: Driving for a couple of hours on a lonely desert road will bring you some realizations about life.
When he wrote the summary, Pei Qian was conflicted.
Should he brag about it? No, what if he were to attract a bunch of people to discuss on the title and he were to make less of a loss?
Should he talk bad about it? No, that would be too obvious. On the one hand, the system may rule it as a violation. On the other hand, gamers might see it as reverse psychology – what if they were more tempted to play the more he talked bad about it?
Therefore, he decided on writing a summary so honest that gamers should not feel the slightest bit of interest just by reading it!
Next up, it was to set the price.
Pei Qian decided on a sale price of 1 yuan.
He did not want to set it too high lest some brain-dead idiots really decided to buy it – he would then be losing less money!
By setting the price low enough, Pei Qian was ensuring that it wouldn’t affect his loss even if a few dozen gamers were to buy it.
After settling everything, Pei Qian uploaded the game. Once it passes the vetting process, it would automatically be published on the official games platform.
The entire process would usually take between a couple of hours to a couple of days.
The platform uses an automated recommendation system. New games of the same batches are recommended according to tracking of background data changes and unless there is intentional manipulation of rankings, admins wouldn’t interfere in it.
Pei Qian was completely unworried.
Such a trashy game was bound to disappear from sight soon after it gets published. Once the two weeks deadline is up, the 50,000 yuan w
ould be his! Amazing!
Closing his laptop, Pei Qian was relaxed as blissfulness spilled from his heart!
Chapter 4
Translator: Atlas Studios Editor: Atlas Studios
That noon, his schoolmates returned one after another.
One of them waved a plastic bag in his hands containing food he bought from the canteen.
Pei Qian recognized him to be his former incarnation’s dorm mate, Ma Yang—his huge, long face left a deep impression.
“Brother Qian, you’ve really got guts to skip class! But you really lucked out, the Vice-President didn’t take attendance.” Ma Yang looked at Pei Qian with a ‘What kind of godly luck is that’ expression.
The other roommates started turning on their laptops.
“No classes in the afternoon. Anyone up for games?”
“I’m on. Hurry! Ma Yang, where are you?”
“Hold on, I’m not done eating yet.”
“Hurry up, you slowpoke. Someone go get more people from the other dormitories!”
The other people in the dormitory had already turned on their laptops and propped up small, makeshift tables on their beds.
Those were the dreary conditions of a school dormitory such that there wasn’t even a dedicated table for every bunk bed and they could only play games while sitting cross legged.
Pei Qian had always suspected that his back problems may have stemmed from this period of time.
In order to obtain the best gaming experience, even if they had their own laptops and it was convenient to organize gaming sessions within dormitories, many students would prefer to head to internet cafes.
Ma Yang was holding on to his stainless steel bowl that contained a plastic bag with food inside. Wolfing down a few bites hurriedly, he threw the entire plastic bag into the trash bin.
The reason why everyone bought food from the canteen was because they had class that afternoon.
If they had no class, everyone would be lying in their beds like corpses.
If someone finally decides to head to the canteen, the rest would ask to get ‘carried’.
But of course, takeaways appeared later on. However, they didn’t have any takeaway apps at that time and would order through making phone calls. Some of the poorer students would do it as a part-time job to earn some side income.
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