Losing Money to Be a Tycoon c1-883

by Inebriation-seeking Blue Shirt, 青衫取醉

  Hu Xianbin would have thought that someone had passed the wrong information if he did not hear Boss Pei speak himself.

  Pei Qian continued. “The name ‘Struggle’ is to allow players to re-experience their struggles in reality. The game will be sold in two different parts. ‘Rich’ and ‘Poor’ versions. They will be sold separately.

  ” ‘Struggle’ Rich version is to be sold to the poor. Its original price would be at 29 yuan and 19 yuan after discount; ‘Struggle’ Poor version would be sold to the rich with its original price at 99 yuan and the discounted price at 79 yuan.

  “The player will enjoy the discount if they buy only one version. However, they would have to pay the full price, a total of 128 yuan if they were to buy both versions.” Hu Xianbin blinked. “Erm… is there any deep meaning to this?”

  Pei Qian nodded. “Of course. The poor have no money but want to experience the life of the rich. Therefore, the price is lower. The rich have money but want to experience the life of the poor so the price has to be higher. There is no second chance in life so it will cost more to experience it all.”

  Hu Xianbin was silent and said with emotion, “Even Boss Pei’s pricing can be so philosophical…”

  Pei Qian continued. “No matter whether it was the rich or poor version, they would be divided into several stages. They would grow up from infancy and go to school before entering society, from work life to live, from entertainment to rest. We have to show as many aspects of the life of the poor and rich through as many scenes as possible.

  “In the rich version, the player plays the role of a rich man. He would have no worries from childhood. Everything would be smooth sailing for him. He could easily achieve success in all aspects of life, career, and relationships.

  “However, he would die in the hands of a homeless man.

  “In the poor version, a player would play as a poor man, having inadequate amounts of food and clothing. His path would be filled with thorns and have no way of making it even after he grew up. He could only continue his cycle of poverty.”

  Hu Xianbin was stunned. “And then?”

  Pei Qian: “And then? Nothing else. That is the entire content of the game.”

  Hu Xianbin was even more confused now. “Shouldn’t there be many endings for an interactive movie game?”

  Pei Qian shook his head. “No, this game would only have two endings no matter the combination and permutation of options you choose. The rich would be killed by a homeless man, and the poor continue to get poorer.”

  I will never make the same mistake of having many endings like the instance with Game Designer again! Pei Qian thought to himself. Hu Xianbin was shocked. “What would the players play for if everything was doomed from the start?”

  “The process will be different. There will be a different branch every time the player chooses a different route, but all the branches will return to the same ending,” Pei Qian explained. “The difference in the branches would not be reflected in the ending. “We must fill in as many details for all aspects of life under the big framework of this game.

  “For example, the poor can only attend ordinary schools with low quality of education while the rich attend expensive aristocratic schools. When seeking for jobs, the poor would often run into walls with interviews while the rich work directly for their fathers.

  “The girlfriend who had been with the poor for many years would break up with him because they couldn’t afford to buy a house while the rich brought different girls home from nightclubs every day. “When they get married, the poor will only be able to buy a small second-hand house with the help of the whole family while the rich would have mansions prepared. They need to do nothing but watch their estate grow more than the poor can ever earn with their hard work…

  “Do you understand?”

  Hu Xianbin’s lips twitched. “I… understand all too well.”

  “Oh, right, the backdrop should be in Europe. Find some foreigners for motion capture and dubbing,” Pei Qian added.

  “Boss Pei, does this game have… any profound meaning?” Hu Xianbin asked.

  Pei Qian laughed. “You don’t need to know; just do what you are tasked with well enough.

  “I’ll come up with the framework of the story; you and the production team will be responsible for improving the plot. Show me the plot when you are done to make sure that there is no deviation from my thoughts.

  i me

  “Alright, you can go prepare now.

  “You can work on art resources first. You roughly know what kinds of roles there would be with a little imagination anyway. People like parents, teachers, classmates, bosses, etc.”

  Pei Qian turned to leave after a few simple sentences.

  He left Hu Xianbin pulling his hair out, thinking hard.

  Teacher, that question was really out of the syllabus! I really cannot understand!

  Pei Qian was also fully prepared to lose all his hard-earned money this time. The pricing was meaningfulThe poor version could also be called the ultimate suffering version. One could suffer all the sins one had suffered in reality and be the ultimate masochist.

  The rich version could also be called the gold-foil-wrapped version. Everything was smooth sailing at first, which would make the player feel good. However, they would die in the hands of a poor person.

  Pei Qian specially set it at a low price of 19 yuan, taking into account that the rich version was wrapped in gold foil, which would only reveal itself at the end. Yet, the poor one was a full ride of masochism so he set it at a high price of 79 yuan.

  To prevent players from generating some inexplicable interpretations by playing the two versions together, Pei Qian deliberately increased the price of buying the two versions together.

  If the players really wanted to buy, the best choice would be to buy the 19-yuan rich version. It would not cost much, and the risk of Pei Qian making money was very low.

  The contents were more excessive. In addition to the masochism throughout the entire process, the key was that both endings were terrible. The players would not be able to change these two endings no matter how hard the player tried in the game!

  Who would play such a game? It was absolutely impossible!

  Pei Qian really steeled his heart to ‘bow down to reality’ this time. He would do his best to make ducks and drakes of the 40 million yuan. Please do not let a single penny come back to him!

  Chapter 474 - Walking the Way of Teacher Qiao, Force Him to Have Nowhere to Go

  April 6th, Wednesday…

  Pei Qian was finally done with the general plot of ‘Struggle’ after two days of struggle. The plot of the game could be roughly divided into several major stages: birth, school, exams, work, love, marriage, home purchase, childbirth, and middle-age crisis. That was the overall process. The poor and the rich versions would have the same stages, but they experienced completely different things.

  For example, the children of the rich would have a nanny to take care of them from birth to when they were schooling. When they grow up, they would play happily in the mansion. The toys they had would be very expensive. They would also hire very high-end tutors to get good preschool education.

  Children from poor families would not have these facilities at all. They could only watch TV and picture books at home. After their parents go to work, they could only play alone.

  The other major stages were the same. Anyway, one could roughly imagine the plot if one were to imagine it. Everything would go wrong for the poor while everything would be unimpeded for the rich.

  Pei Qian also considered adding some quantifiable data to the game, to let players feel the gap between the two more clearly. For example, the players’ current knowledge (professional knowledge, financial awareness, etc.), emotional intelligence (handling people, making friends, etc.), mental health, specific material wealth, etc….

  These data would ostensibly affect the player’s options. For example, wealth management consciousness of a ri
ch person could speed up his accumulation of material wealth; emotional intelligence could give him more opportunities to make friends with nobles; and his mental health could make it easier for him to adjust his mood at work. There would be problems due to excessive pressure…

  However, everything was just on the surface. In fact, they would only affect some trivial branches and would not affect the final outcome. The reason Pei Qian did this was very simple. If the gameplay could allow the player to visualize the final outcome, then how could he make the player feel disgusted?

  If the poor could counterattack and the rich could avoid the fate of being killed, wouldn’t it be a great ending?

  They must not let that happen!

  Moreover, the setting of ‘you have a choice on the surface, but everything was predestined’ was regarded as a failure in the game industry. Most games would be criticized for doing so.

  The game would last until middle-age, which was around 50 years old. As the saying went, be established at 30, have clarity at 40, and know the bidding of the heavens at 50.

  To Pei Qian, 50 was the best age to kill off a rich man player. Too early and there would not be enough content; too late and it would not make people feel disgusted.

  Fifty-year-old wealthy people were in their prime with their careers taking off. They had already obtained a very good standard of living. Most of them would have good marriages and promising children. Death at this time should be the most unacceptable time for players. As for the poor… life is basically fixated by the age of 50. The resemblance to their parents had also emerged, and this cycle of poverty has begun to take shape. In short, it was the best age to end this game. Of course, in addition to these fixed life processes, some unexpected events would also be added during the game. For example: car accidents, sickness, school bullying, pitfalls when buying a house, natural disasters, etc.

  These emergencies would also slightly change the flow of the game and, at the same time, clearly show the gap between the poor and the rich in their ability to resist risks when facing these emergencies.

  Pei Qian did not intend to do any voice-over this time after learning from the mistakes in Game Designer. All the content in the game would not contain any emotions or color. All dialogues and behaviors would be as objective as possible so that it would never induce players to have reverse psychology. Other than that, to prevent people with ‘ulterior motives’ from forcibly deepening their thinking, Pei Qian set the rich and poor as the two individuals whose paths do not cross at all.

  The homeless guy who would kill the rich man in the end would have no link to the poor.

  This homeless man would not be the simple, kind-hearted poor man that most people imagined. He had good hands and feet, but he was idle and lazy. He wanted to kill the rich because he was jealous. It was not because of some noble reasons that he resisted the oppression. The poor could reach the rich; for example, his boss would be completely unrelated to the protagonist in the rich version. They never had any idea of resisting. He did not want to generate any misunderstanding such as ‘the rich oppress the poor’. In addition to this, there was another important question: how to prevent the pesky Teacher Qiao from over-interpreting this game? Pei Qian had been thinking very hard about this point, and he finally had an answer.

  Force him to his grave with an official response!

  Who would listen to you if I were to explain it from the start? How could you backstab me if no one listened to you?

  Pei Qian could roughly guess the angles that Teacher Qiao could interpret from. It was nothing more than the rich-poor gap, the Matthew effect. The distribution of social wealth was unreasonable and the classes solidified.

  If his brain circuit was more peculiar, then it may be possible to analyze the poor’s lack of financial awareness and short-sightedness, why the rich could not understand the vicious cycle of life after falling to the bottom…

  In any case, the topic of the gap between the rich and poor was discussed all over the world. If one was divergent in one’s thinking, one could talk about many topics.

  Pei Qian decided to expose these problems as soon as the game was released.

  He would walk Teacher Qiao’s road so that Teacher Qiao had nowhere to go! Of course, Pei Qian was not so stupid as to stab himself in the back. He wanted to expose these problems officially, but he would definitely not do it in the same way as Teacher Qiao.

  The key was how to say it with the same reasoning. Quoting classics, forcing value and depth would definitely appear to be particularly alluring and would be easy for them to resonate with him.

  However, Pei Qian planned to use simple language and a straightforward way to point all these out. His goal would be to make it as boring as possible.

  It could even induce players to have some wrong views in the game such as the producer holding a view that ‘the caste system could never be crossed’, ‘fatalism’, etc.

  That reasoning was like telling a joke.

  red

  Teacher Qiao told jokes, danced, screamed, and shouted. First, he created suspense, making the audience burst with anticipation before giving the answers. The effects were excellent.

  However, Pei Qian did not need to lay the groundwork at all. He would just throw out whatever it was. This way, the audience would know what this burden was. No matter how Teacher Qiao created an atmosphere or suspense, this burden would not be able to surprise!

  Pei Qian felt that his actions were like announcing ‘this person is the murderer’ on the first page of a manga[1]. He would not allow Teacher Qiao’s Products of the Gods to have any new take on it!

  The more Pei Qian thought about it, the more he felt he was a genius satisfied with his own talents!

  Pei Qian sent the plot summary to Hu Xianbin after everything was completed, for him to expand. At the same time, different characters in the games would need to use different motion capture actors. All of whom must be foreigners so they had to be done in advance.

  Pei Qian could not be bothered with these as he left them to Hu Xianbin. Anyway, things would be better if they went wrong.

  It would be alright too if they did it well. As long as they firmly grasp the game plot and don’t run off the track!

  April 7th, Thursday…

  Pei Qian came to the office on time after eating lunch. He had already sent Hu Xianbin the plot summary of ‘Struggle’ yesterday afternoon. He also sent a message to Lin Wan about IOI’s domestic server and asked her to connect with He Desheng. He still had no idea on how to best handle the IOI domestic server. The possibility of making changes to the game was almost non-existent. It was difficult to push the price of the heroes and skins down. Dream Realization Ventures did not have a loud voice in the company since it only held 20% of Finger Games after all.

  IOI and GOG were not on friendly terms if one were to look purely from the eyes of the game’s charging model. GOG heroes were all free, and the price of their skin was several times lower than that of IOI.

  However, Pei Qian felt that this was not important. Some people were playing IOI locally; they had a good player base. To them, the biggest problem was not the price but the internet.

  The game was too laggy after using an accelerator to connect to its international server. It was impossible to communicate with foreign teammates in the game as well.

  These people would definitely switch to the domestic server once it was out, so there was no need to worry about the start of the IOI domestic server. It would be able to take off without much maneuver with the ability of Shang Yang Games.

  Pei Qian felt that the burden lifted from his body after temporarily settling two gaming departments. Nonetheless, he should not let his guard down. There were still many things waiting for him to settle. Knock, knock! A knock came from outside the office. It was Assistant Xin. “Boss Pei, this is the survey report on the fitness industry in Jingzhou City that you wanted. If you don’t want to see the data, you can just turn to the last page and look at th
e conclusion.”

  Pei Qian nodded and took the investigation report from Assistant Xin.

  He flipped it casually. As expected, everything in front was big data and technical terms. He did not understand them. Pei Qian turned to the last page very calmly and asked while reading the survey conclusions: “So, are gyms in Jingzhou making money or not?” Assistant Xin considered for a moment. “The key is how you operate it.”

  Pei Qian, “Hm? Tell me in detail.”

  Assistant Xin apparently had an understanding of the status of the fitness industry. She had conducted an in-depth investigation of the fitness industry in Jingzhou after receiving the mission from Boss Pei. She was extremely familiar with the contents.

  “Simply put, it is limited by the current level of economic development in our country. Most people do not have the habit of going to the gym regularly. Even those with fitness habits often cannot afford the expenses of those high-end gyms.

  “It is better in first-tier cities with more white-collar workers. This problem is especially obvious in a second-tier city like Jingzhou.

  “The low-cost membership strategy adopted by many gyms to attract customers is difficult to support daily operations like rent, equipment, labor, water, electricity, cooling and heating, fire protection, and other aspects of opening a gym; let alone create enough

  profit.

  “From this point of view, gyms are not profitable. Many closed gyms have closed down because they cannot make ends meet. The greater the investment, the greater the marketing pressure. “However, there were also gyms that really make a lot of money. The main way is to find high-net-worth clients to sell private training sessions. The more you sell, the more you earn.

  “The primary task of personal training in most gyms is not to teach students well, but to sell more classes. The internal group of personal training is similar to the marketing group. Whoever sells more classes will be sought after.

  “In short, the current model of making money in the gym is through membership cards, especially for newcomers applying for annual cards. Newcomers have no fitness habit at all, and it is difficult to stick to it. The gym will only make money if they join the membership without attending the gym.