Since we are both reborn, of course I would choose the rich woman!

Chapter 177 I finally got fooled! (6k subscription required)

Because of Lu Yao's previous operations, he successfully got two promising gaming industry practitioners to wear silver bracelets, hold stable jobs, and successfully eat public meals. Since then, the employees under his company have no longer had any evil thoughts.

The salary offered by Guang'an Online Games was not low to begin with, and with all the various benefits included it was nearly 300,000 yuan.

The company also promised year-end dividends, which was written into the contract.

After Lu Yao and his company's first game went online and generated a large amount of revenue in just a few days, the core employees of the game company calculated that their year-end bonuses had increased significantly in just these few days.

If they can keep up this momentum, the future will be very promising.

They can still tell the difference between having nothing and having something every day.

After failing to dig out any information from the employees there or the surrounding areas of the company, Penguin could only rely on the operations of its opponents to make predictions.

After a brainstorming session by the game business management, they were convinced that Lu Yao's business focus was definitely not this mindless and violent little game, and that Game Science was poached by Lu Yao not to make this kind of game.

This might just be a smokescreen to confuse them.

But they are all aware of the money-making ability of this small game. It has attracted so many users to download it within just a few days of its launch. What will happen if it continues to multiply?
Moreover, the results of the survey show that this mini-game can also be registered and logged in using third-party software.

But the main way to log in to this game is to log in with your mobile phone number.

It's as if this thing was designed to guard against penguins from the beginning.

"Perhaps Shangnan intends to use mobile phone numbers to seize a wave of the market first. After their core business is launched, users who have registered accounts with the game company will be able to log in to their new game directly."

That's right.

This was one of Lu Yao's ideas behind doing this.

Secondly, he also needs to make himself familiar to netizens so that they will be familiar with the company "Guang'an Network".

Finally, they use these small games to make money and throw them out as smoke bombs.

Penguin's guess is similar. There is some controversy among the management of the gaming business as to whether or not they should get involved in this area.

Under the premise that Shangnan has already launched the mini-game "Shoot Shoot", it is a very easy thing for Penguin, a ninja whose ancestral skill is "copy", to copy a new one.

But the problem is that the game cannot be copied and then users can directly download and play it.

Thanks to the good reputation of Penguin in its early years, whenever they release a game, they will be punished. It is said that Penguin is a big company and does not care about reputation. As long as they make a copy of the game, it will beat the original.

But if they really didn't care about their reputation, they wouldn't have spent so much money on a game like "God of War".

Also, because the reputation of "Douluo Dalu" has become increasingly bad due to the new operation, now whenever Penguin is mentioned on the Internet, it will be "heard of a barrage of curses."

Therefore, even if they want to follow, they are only planning to set up a small studio or another company. If a small game studio with no reputation wants to stand out, it must go through the promotion of the Penguin social platform.

The promotion costs here would be huge.

Because the performance evaluation of different departments is independent, even if they have their own promotion channels for their own games, they still have to spend money.

And because of the power of Penguin social media, their promotion costs are very expensive.

But any discerning person can see that the vitality of this kind of small game is limited. In two months, or at most three months, this game will gradually lose users due to its single gameplay.

In this case, is it necessary to follow this operation?

Based on various practical considerations, Penguin finally decided not to do it on its own, but to invest in a small studio outside and then send a technical instructor to supervise.

In this way, the promotion costs can be shared by the small studio outside.

This type of competition is also very common.

Just like many online writers who wrote books later, after a book became popular, in order not to ruin the reputation of their own book and maintain a good performance, they often chose to open another pseudonym and pretend to be a newcomer to write a book.

In order to maintain the glorious image of the parent company, many companies will also fund other small companies and use them as cannon fodder.

Although the companies that received investment also knew that they were destined to be cannon fodder.

But in the era of great competition on the Internet, they can only rush forward with gritted teeth.

Shangnan, Guangan Network.

Because of the sudden popularity of "She Le Ge She", Feng Ji, the founder of Game Science who was recruited to Shangnan, also made a professional business analysis specifically for this game.

Then he condensed the analysis into a few short lines and posted it on his circle of friends.

This is also an old habit of Feng Ji.

He basically updates his Moments once a week. Sometimes he takes a few days, and sometimes he may update twice a week. Many people in the gaming circle like to read his thoughts.

The rapid popularity of "Shoot" made Feng Ji start to reflect on what commercialization is and what made such a simple game so popular so quickly.

Lu Yao read Feng Ji's circle of friends and even read Feng Ji's analysis report, which was handed to Lu Yao by Feng Ji himself. After reading it, he still sat in Lu Yao's office, staring at it eagerly.

Lu Yao’s MCN downstairs only has a workspace but no office.

As a result, all executives in the MCN company only have workstations but no offices.

joke!

The company's largest shareholder and the company's most important network promoter didn't even have a comfortable and cozy office for himself. Would it be acceptable for your subordinates to do the same?
Therefore, many times, the character of a company's leader will determine the genes of the company.

When the personalization is washed away from the corporate structure, the grown company will become a deified aggregate of capital.

After reading Feng Ji's analysis report at his workstation, Lu Yao smiled and said, "Very professional. He analyzed the game's wit, graphics, sound effects, and real-time feedback, and all the analysis was correct."

Games like "Shoot a Shot" may look simple, but they actually involve very complex mathematical mechanisms.

The simplicity above is just to make it easier for players to get started.

But when it comes to the official game content, he pays great attention to strategy.

After upgrading again and again, the player does not die when he quits the game. On the contrary, it is just like a roguelike game. Whenever he quits the game and pauses, the enhancements and equipment he obtained will also be with him.

You can even choose to save the game after each upgrade and then open another one.

However, as long as the game character dies while clearing a level, all enhancements will be reset. Subsequently, the timing of the appearance of "elite monsters", "rare monsters", "mini-bosses", "safe zones", the content of "enhancement options", and the drops of weapons, equipment, and skins in each level will all change randomly.

You may have been lucky enough to reach a very high level in the last game, but you may be defeated early in the next game.

Only after you have actually cleared the level will the rare items you obtain be stored in your account backpack.

The game may look simple, but it actually hides a lot of thought, which makes many small studios that want to imitate it feel something is not right. The game materials and game mechanisms in it seem that they cannot come up with it in a hurry.

Lu Yao put down Feng Ji's analysis report and said, "In fact, many domestic games are not caused by insufficient technology, insufficient money, or even insufficient technology and operational thinking."

“The most fatal thing is.”

Lu Yao stared at Feng Ji and said, "Many games released by major domestic game companies are made by a group of people who don't like playing games."

Feng Ji was immediately delighted when he heard this!

This makes so much fucking sense.

When he was in college, Feng Ji spent all day in Internet cafes. He is really smart and really likes playing games.

But when he finally found a job related to games, he discovered that the people who produced the games didn't seem to care whether the games were fun or not. They only cared whether the games made money and whether they could make their resumes look more impressive.

Seeing Feng Ji's expression as if he had met a close friend, Lu Yao also felt emotional in his heart.

Many people working in the gaming industry always think that making a game requires a lot of things, including money, technology, and promotion. But they forget whether the game needs to be fun.

Let’s say ten years later, ByteDance, the parent company of Tik Tok, will be rich enough, right?
However, the MOBA mobile game they vigorously promoted in 2025 claimed to have billion registered users overseas and super high game quality, but when you really play it, you will find that the character modeling in the game is full of plasticity, the action binding is stiff and weird, and the character background story setting is even more shoddy.

It’s hard to believe that in 2025 we can still see such shoddy MOBA mobile games from big manufacturers.

The "plastic taste" of a game can only be polished away by "details" and "sincerity".

The most obvious manifestation is on the skin.

The skins in Honor of Kings are getting more and more fancy, with magic images, light images, and dazzling lights. When there is a team battle when a group of paying players fight, you can only see light effects flying all over the sky, and you can't even find where the heroes are.

The hero special effects in the League of Legends mobile game are also restrained and controlled. Although there are some particularly fancy ones, the League of Legends mobile game is trying its best to control the light pollution of special effects.

Not to mention in the context of hero design.

When League of Legends was popular, how many novels, animations, and film and television works were there based on League of Legends? Not to mention the subsequent "Battle of the Two Cities", which made Hilco a source of regret for countless people.

Foreigners’ idea of ​​making money is: I have to make this thing into a “culture” so that I can keep making money.

The idea of ​​making money in China is: I have to quickly scam some money! Otherwise, I will lose a lot of money (the money I don’t make is my loss)!

As they were chatting, Lv Yao turned back to the game project they were developing: "So the details and story must be told well. The heroes of different factions, and different regional city-states of the same faction, their backgrounds, styles, and even walking postures are all issues that need to be considered."

Feng Ji is very good at this.

He was good at telling stories and paying attention to details, so he smiled and said to Lu Yao: "Please rest assured, Mr. Lu, I will take good care of it."

Details are something you may not notice when playing, but they can be easily seen through comparison.

Just like the comparison between League of Legends mobile game and Honor of Kings mobile game, before the League of Legends mobile game was launched, there was no choice in China, so they could only be forced to eat shit.

At the beginning, Lu Yao was so angry about this crappy game, especially the ELO mechanism in it, which was so disgusting that Lu Yao was so angry that he smashed an iPhone.

But the King of Glory operator was still damn stubborn and refused to admit it until Brother Lei showed up and shattered the King of Glory operator's mouth, which was tougher than a Space Marine's ceramic steel power armor.

Unfortunately, Lu Yao had already quit by then.

Just one month after the launch of the League of Legends mobile game, Lu Yao could no longer play that stupid game, Honor of Kings.

From then on, I quit farming and the world became wider.

Although it’s easy to get tired if you play League of Legends mobile game for a few times, it’s really refreshing and comfortable to play a few games when you have nothing to do.

Lu Yao does not plan to replicate a League of Legends mobile game. It will be more detailed than Honor of Kings, but lighter than the League of Legends mobile game and less likely to make people tired.

As for how to strike the right balance here, that will depend on subsequent testing.

After talking about the game itself, they talked about commercialization methods. Lu Yao is an expert in this field, so he smiled and said, "In fact, marketing is not that difficult, but it requires a little bit of talent and a little bit of conscience."

Feng Ji: “.” Very good.

It turned out to be a method he couldn't learn.

However, chatting with Lu Yao when he has nothing to do has become one of the pleasures in Feng Ji's daily life, because Lu Yao can always come up with some creative ideas that transcend the current thinking framework.

……

Two weeks after the release of "Shoot a Shot", the number of downloads has officially exceeded 10 million.

Within two weeks, several game development studios funded by major companies have launched similar mini-games.

For example, small games like "biu le ge biu", "gun le ge gun", "endless range", "maze shooter" and so on. The financial backers behind these games include not only Tencent, NetEase and Alibaba, but also Shanda.

When he saw Shanda, he was stunned for a moment, and then he remembered that Shanda had not collapsed at that stage.

At this stage, Shanda is being beaten by Tencent. In a few months, Shanda will sell its "Shanda Literature" as a whole to Tencent, and then Shanda will gradually disappear from the Internet.

Shanda is also very interesting.

This company has always aspired to become the Disney of China, but its real fortune began with its role as an agent for Legendary.

Although Shanda became rich because of games, its CEO has always looked down on games and has said in public many times: "Legend is a bad game, and Shanda is a good company."

His disrespect for his own financial prospects ultimately led to his repeated failures in the Internet wave.

If we look back from the future, we will realize how big a cash cow and a kingdom Shanda's CEO has lost.

Unfortunately, there are no "ifs" in history.

“If” only Lu Yao has it.

Lu Yao downloaded and played all the games developed by his competitors one by one.

With Lu Yao's "future vision", relying on the strong technical team of Brother Wang and the artistic style supervised by Yang Qi, they spent more than a month to develop the small game, while their opponents only took one-third of their time to develop it.

The result of these things produced by the opponents is poor performance of details.

Just like what Lu Yao said to Feng Ji, details are something that cannot be noticed at first glance, but can be clearly seen through comparison.

Whether it's the music, the sense of attack, the art style, or the mechanism or operation, these mini-games are all a little lacking. When each of them is a little lacking together, it means a lot is missing.

Not to mention that Lu Yao's "Shoot the Shot" has been iterated twice.

So Lu Yao directly notified the project team to put the already completed "matching team battle" function online, and prepare to start the second phase of operation of "Shoot She".

The second phase of the "matching and team formation function" is a test for the subsequent MOBA mobile games, just a trial run.

At the same time, Lu Yao also plans to strengthen the social functions of this game.

The voice function and friend list function will be launched in a few days.

The new matching team function allows different players to participate in the same game. Everyone has the same starting point, but the "enhancement effect" of each upgrade is still random.

The original mindless and violent monster-killing game suddenly has strategy and confrontation - because the experience resources refreshed per unit time are limited, how to improve yourself to protect yourself and slow down the opponent's upgrade becomes something that users need to consider.

As a result, the popularity of "Shoot a Shot", which had been declining, suddenly began to increase rapidly.

Especially the "custom room" function, which allows friends to PK with each other and multi-person PK.

Without any level or combat power differences, the easy-to-play mini-game has shown an astonishing effect in attracting new users.

The weapon special effects and skins that were previously purchased with krypton gold now began to have a real place to be "displayed", so the revenue of "Shoot the Shoot" reached a new high. More than 10 million registered users contributed nearly 30 million in revenue.

So Lu Yao urged the project team to produce "new skins" and "new special effects", while asking the technical team on the other side to launch the voice function as soon as possible.

It doesn’t matter whether the voice function is good or not!

The important thing is to let the players hear the voice of the "young lady" in it.

Lu Yao's wave of updates made those small game development studios behind him a little dumbfounded.

He didn't tell them that there would be so many complicated things to do later. This put them in a passive position. The workload is completely different from what was said before.

But since it has been done, the copycat game studios can only bite the bullet and continue to follow suit.

But the Internet is always many steps behind if it is one step late. Lu Yao took advantage of the time when other similar games were unable to catch up and frantically recruited new users, while the registered users of other games were constantly lost.

The poor results made the supervisors sent by the big companies very nervous.

Office struggles in large companies are actually no less intense than those in the officialdom. If you mess up something, your resume will be tarnished, and it will be difficult to move up in the future.

So while these dispatched supervisors were worried sick, they also started to have some evil thoughts in their minds.

Lu Yao didn’t know what the supervisors of those studios were thinking, he just did his own thing.

In fact, the game "Shoot" made by Lu Yao is very similar to the later "Battle of Balls" and "Snake". Although these two games are not as popular as the later King of Glory, they have a lot of users and audiences.

Especially "Battle of Balls", which can be regarded as a game server exclusively for young ladies.

When Lu Yao was studying abroad in the future, he ate there a lot.

Therefore, there are many cute Q-version skins in the game "Shoot Them", or skins and special effects that are extremely girly.

It’s very simple to capture the hearts of female players, just go for pink!

This marketing method of emptying women's wallets later had a special term, called "pink economy", and then "pink economy" gave rise to another term, called "pink tax".

What this means is that for the same product, if it is accompanied by a product description with a female expression, it will be sold at a higher price.

However, in 2014, most people did not have this awareness.

Seeing that there are so many female-oriented contents in "Shoot 'Em Up", many young ladies were attracted, so they downloaded it to play it, and spent money on it if they thought it was good.

On the Internet, where feminist arguments are beginning to gain momentum, fairies are not stingy about spending money on themselves.

As for female users, Lu Yao also gave special care so that they can have more fun in the game, and the "randomly" refreshed enhancement options will also be of better quality.

Although it is good, it will not cause a generation gap.

This is carefully calculated.

Relying on one little idea after another and excellent product quality, this Don't Starve-style game "Shoot Me" has gradually gained a stable group of player users.

If it continues like this, maybe it can break its own "short-lived" genetic limitation and become an enduring game like "Battle of Balls" or "Snake".

If that's really the case, then Lu Yao will have to make this game a hit.

After all, this is Guang'an Network's first mobile online game.

Lu Yao's tricks are endless, and gradually several big companies come to their senses.

Matching mechanism!

In-game voice!
Team up and fight!

Aren’t these all elements of MOBA mobile games?

Could it be that from the very beginning, all the rumors spread by Lu Yao were false?
What board games, what MOBA mobile games are all fake! They are just smokescreens! What they really want to operate is actually this Gothic style game? ?

Ever since the launch of the mini-game "Shoot It", the update frequency of this game has been terrifyingly fast. Because the data proportion of games with texture and paper-cut art style is originally small, the amount of updates each time does not need to be too much, and players can afford to wait.

Then "Shoot the Shot" was updated almost every day, with a major iteration in between.

Including the team matching system, as well as the upper limits of in-game voice and friend lists, they have been operating for no more than a month and have already undergone three major iterations.

Such a large content could not have been planned on the spur of the moment, it must have been planned for a long time.

After an overnight brainstorming session among the management at Tencent, everyone gave the same answer.

Shangnan is using a great strategy of "passing off fakes as real ones", "substituting one thing for another", and "making the fake become the real".

This is so fucking dramatic. A game developer doesn't think about how to design games to earn money, but instead starts reading the Art of War?

So Tencent and even NetEase quickly took action.

They're going to keep raising the stakes!
The game style and mechanism are not particularly novel, but this market is a blue ocean. In addition, the Internet world is changing rapidly, and no one knows whether an Internet product will look insignificant at first, and then suddenly become powerful and unstoppable.

These big Internet companies are well aware of the opportunities and changes here.

The wind starts from the tip of the green duckweed, and the waves form from the ripples.

No one understands the value of this statement better than Internet companies.

Therefore, it is impossible for these big Internet companies to miss out on such a big piece of cake.

The big companies that originally only planned to support the development of small game studios to share Lu Yao's cake have begun to draw the best talents under their own systems to form studios, in order to produce products faster than their peers as much as possible and catch up with Lu Yao's progress.

They have even communicated with other departments regarding the subsequent promotional resource packages.

The rapid actions of several major companies have made the recent gaming industry turbulent.

Large companies already have many projects and do not have enough elite personnel. Now they suddenly have to set up a new game studio specializing in games like "Shoot Shoot", and the time is so tight, so naturally they can't have a small number of people.

Then the recruitment of gaming talents in the circle suddenly became lively.

Poaching is nothing new, and many prospective graduates who have outstanding works and performances on campus have also been targeted by human resources.

Some large game studios have even started to have their human resources go to training institutions and schools to poach college students to work as slaves.

Ten years ago was indeed a good time.

At that time, college students with good majors did not have to worry about finding a job. What they worried about was that there were too many jobs and which one to choose.
Of course, Lu Yao also caught these trends.

Seeing how lively the industry is, Lu Yao finally breathed a sigh of relief - it's not easy.

"Finally I got fooled!"

(End of this chapter)