บท 23: [Bonus Chapter] 23 - Interest

Chapter 02 of Residual Devil was making a huge splash in Sandstone Bay. Both the city's players and the common population had heard about the game and started to pay attention to it after listening to the stories from their friends. Even Sandstone Bay Television was madly looking for the Developer who had made this game in order to get the rights to broadcast the game's story as a series, as the story this game had was several times more interesting than the programs they normally broadcasted.

This had never happened before.

Before watching a livestream of Residual Devil, the directors of Sandstone Bay Television still thought that rumors about the story of this game were just exaggeration. Many thought that someone was purposely saying this because they didn't feel like the network didn't make any interesting shows and just wanted to piss them off. Even if they were a few years away from making a really good program, it was impossible for a game made by a Game Developer to be more interesting than the programs they made, right?

Games made by Game Developers were known to be anything but fun, as Game Developers usually thought only about how they would make the players train in the best possible way, thus making their games extremely boring, repetitive, and arduous.

Initially they thought that Residual Devil would also turn out to be like this, but when they watched the prologue story of Residual Devil, they discovered that the rumors were not exaggerated at all. The story of that game was completely fascinating. Art directors, writers, music directors… all of Sandstone Bay Television's most capable professionals were present as they watched a livestream of someone playing the game and were shocked to discover that they couldn't even think of a way to make it better!

"Damn it! For the love of god, someone tell me whoever made this game is actually a retired old man who was just bored!" an elderly man with a scholarly appearance said angrily before slapping the table they were all seated around in frustration.

But no one in the room scolded the man for acting that way, as everyone else was just as frustrated as he was.

Although they were rooting for the Developer who had made this game to be an old man who studied art as much or more as they all did, the harsh reality was that the developer who made this game was just a young Developer who wasn't even 25 years old. Worst of all for the pride of these people was that this Developer had made this game so masterfully in just under 20 days - that is, in just 20 days a young man of no more than 25 years had managed to do something that they, who had been in this industry for decades, could not.

"Okay, Jannet has confirmed to me that the city government will meet with this Developer tonight and ask if he is interested in cooperating with us. As long as he approves of using the game images for our television network, and as long as he doesn't demand astronomical amounts of money, we will easily come out on top," another old man said in a slightly calmer voice.

Hearing what this old man said, the other old men in the room also calmed down a bit and sighed.

'The younger generation keeps pushing us. If we don't keep moving forward in a short time we will be overtaken…' Most of them were thinking exactly the same thing.

"I think there's also another way for us to earn money…" the old man who had spoken first continued.

This soon attracted the attention of the other old men, and soon the first man told them the idea he had.

…

Gabe was seeing how well Residual Devil was doing and was quite pleased. Player development in the game was very good. Even though there were some parts where most players died, it was still a lot of fun for them.

Of course, Chapter 02 was a lot scarier than Chapter 01, and to preserve the players' mental health and to guard against any sort of lawsuits or trauma claims, Gabe added a terms of use agreement and displayed an in-game notice that this would be quite frightening and that people with a low tolerance for that type of content would have to avoid it.

Gabe obviously knew that people were unlikely to fully read the terms of use, and even if they did they would still feel that they wouldn't be afraid of just one game and would accept the terms quickly before returning to play.

Some people probably couldn't take it, but the more experienced F-Rank Players wouldn't have that much of a problem anymore. Although they were still afraid of the game and quite scared, it wouldn't be enough to make them stop playing, as they had even killed monsters in real life. A mere game wouldn't be enough to make them terrified on its own.

So, seeing that most of the Rank F Players' Mana had already run out and they had to stop the livestreams to meditate and come back to play later, leaving only the E Rank Players or F Rank Players who started later, Gabe decided to stop watching the livestream and eat something since he was starting to feel hungry.

'How much money do I have?' Gabe wondered with interest as he looked at the stats screen of the game he made.

[Residual Devil: Village]

[Downloads: 10.351]

[Average Play Time: 3.3 Hours.]

[Accumulated Mana: 39,333]

[Available for withdrawal: $10,868]

[Available Mana: 10,679] (28,636 Mana Spent)

'I already have 10,000 more Mana Units! If I wanted to, I could even improve my max Mana to 400 Mana Units already, but considering I have to do Chapter 03, I'd better save that first and focus on the game,' Gabe thought as he nodded.

With the speed at which he was gaining Mana, Gabe understood that he could perhaps make the chapters even bigger, since while he was spending around 5000 Mana Units to make a chapter, now that he was receiving so much Mana he could start to make Chapters with 10 to 20 thousand Mana Units. The players would certainly continue to play if he chose to do this, making the return on investment come faster than posting little by little.

Of course, this would come at the cost that he would possibly receive less Mana in total than if he made small Chapters and posted them more often, but considering that his plan was to get enough Mana from this game to become a Developer Rank E, he could use the game for that purpose first and then let the game world develop itself with the accumulated Mana until the Seed became Rank E while he was developing other games. This meant that he could increase the strength of the monsters from Rank F of that game to allow Rank E monsters to further increase their Mana turnover.

As for earning money from the game, Gabe was already satisfied. For the time being he still didn't have any high requirements for money. Despite liking luxury cars and comfortable mansions, this was not something that could sway him to the point of making players pay a lot to basically give their livelihoods over to him.

'Is there the concept of paid games in this world?' Gabe wondered in surprise.

With the fame he was getting, he figured maybe he could start selling games.

While Residual Devil had started out as just a game for a young Developer who was graduating from Harrington University, now the next game he had planned was going to be different. The next game Gabe made would already be known as the next game from Electronic Arts, the developer of Residual Devil! That alone would be more than enough for the game to have thousands of downloads, or, if he intended to sell, thousands of sales, and considering that Gabe didn't intend to develop a bad game, the word of mouth for his next game would also play a big role for players to keep buying from him.

Looking at the game store on the computer, Gabe saw that all of the games were free, but looking closely at those games, Gabe saw that all of the games had a way of being monetized. But the way these games monetized made Gabe a little uncomfortable.

[Spear Throwing Training!]

[Are you tired of killing only normal fish? For just $5 you can unlock a new race to kill: the ice fish!]

[Are you tired of your spear being so heavy? For just $5 you can pay for an upgrade and your javelin will have the feel you desire!]

[Feel like the game is too easy, even for Rank F? How about unlocking the 'Max Rank F difficulty' so you can train against the most powerful fish in Rank F?! This for just $5!]

[…]

Looking at the long list of DLC players could buy in just the other top game in the contest alone, Gabe started to laugh.

'I was so worried about charging $3 for some Skins in the game while there are people who are blatantly removing features from their games so they can sell them as DLCs… I think these people deserve the EA title far more than I do, haha!'

Looking at the other games, Gabe noticed that this was extremely common. Developers were clearly removing features from the game and selling it as extras!

Looking at the players' reaction, despite some complaining, this was something so common that they didn't even care about something like this.

'If I made a LootBox, this world would go crazy, wouldn't it?' Gabe wondered with an evil smile, before shaking his head and erasing the idea from his mind.

'It's enough for EA in the other world to be greedy, but my goal in this world is to show that electronic games are also art. I can do things the honest way to earn money,' Gabe thought to himself.

Seeing as all games currently were free, if he made a paid game there would probably be a lot of people complaining. But suffice to say that the game would feature X number of hours of gameplay and all the content in the game would be included in the initial cost he felt people could probably handle that. Considering that he could put the game on sale for something like $20, if he had 10,000 players purchase it that would be enough for him to get $200,000 from the game!

Thinking of how many missions Rank E Players would have to do to get that much money while he only needed to develop a single game to receive that, Gabe was quite satisfied.

His stomach rumbled once more. Now, with over $10,000 in his account, Gabe was already looking for a highly rated restaurant to eat well at tonight, but to his surprise, his cell phone rang.

[Professor Brown is calling.]

Looking at the notification, Gabe was a little confused and answered it.

"Hello?" Gabe asked with a little uncertainty.

"Howard! That's great you answered. Do you have time now?" David Brown asked excitedly.

Gabe thought for a moment and replied, "I was going out to get something to eat. My last meal was breakfast."

Hearing this, David was surprised. Usually young Developers when they started to earn money would start living luxurious lives and flaunt expensive things, hiring several employees to serve them like kings, but Howard had spent the whole day without eating anything while his game was already generating so much success in the city!

"Don't worry about it then boy. We're also going to make a reservation at a restaurant. How about you join us?" David asked.

Gabe didn't see a problem with the offer and accepted, but he was just a little dubious.

"With us?… Who do you mean, professor?" Gabe asked.

"I'm with the University Director now. She wants to have a word with you. As we're already going to dinner, she suggested we invite you," David explained.

Hearing this, Gabe was a little interested in how this conversation the Director wanted would go.

//NunuNote//

[Bonus Chapter from Power Stones: 3/3]

Mass Release Target XD:

Based on weekly powerstone rankings!

Top30 = 1 Bonus Chapter

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...

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