Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 394 What is a "Surprise"?

Octover 10st

At 8 a.m., the orange-red sunlight of an autumn morning shone through the car window, casting dappled shadows inside the car, creating an indescribable poetic atmosphere.

Unfortunately, the scenery was beautiful.

Neither of the two people in the car seemed to appreciate it.

Chu Chen was leaning back in the back seat, his attention completely focused on his phone.

After a night of fermentation, Starry Night Games' announcement that "to compensate players who are queuing, we will directly give away limited commemorative skins" has once again pushed the reputation of Starry Night Games and FGO to an unbelievable height.

"I hereby declare that Starry Sky has been granted 48 hours of immunity from criticism. Who supports this? Who opposes it?"

"Holy crap? Giving away a skin only for 48 hours without needing to spray? I think it should be at least a week, didn't you see people in Japan are going crazy?"

"I hereby declare that from today onwards, I am a staunch supporter of Starry Sky. Anyone who criticizes Starry Sky will face my wrath!"

Similar comments are everywhere.

However, many people, especially those in the industry, are quite puzzled.

"Just giving away a skin? Is it really that big of a deal?"

Many people don't understand because, in today's world, giving away a skin is indeed considered quite generous, but to think that giving away a skin would cause such a global uproar is really possible.

That would be very strange.

If it were that effective, then every company would probably be doing it.

Just like many companies don't understand Xiaomi.

The principle is actually very simple: the operation of a company, especially in the Internet age, is never a simple matter of addition and subtraction. It is not that if you invest A, you will definitely get B.

It's more like a sophisticated chemistry process, requiring a catalyst and the right temperature and pressure to ignite a pre-planned reaction.

The core of this can be summed up in two words: emotion.

Even if you don't approve of Xiaomi's products, Xiaomi did a great job in creating emotional value.

Whether it's the slogan "Born for fever" or the repeated emphasis on the "sense of participation" of Mi Fans, the stress of "generosity," or the so-called "only making 5% profit," Mi Fan's marketing strategy remains consistent.

They're all just creating a "persona".

Xiaomi has been very successful in this area. The reason for this success is not something that happened overnight, but rather that Xiaomi has indeed done something extra compared to other companies.

These things helped some people establish the image of the Xiaomi brand.

Of course, this is not to say that Xiaomi has no problems, but rather that in terms of marketing, we need to think deeply about why Xiaomi can succeed while other companies cannot.

Ultimately, it all comes down to different emotions.

As someone who has been through it all, Chu Chen has been consciously doing the same thing since the very beginning of Starry Sky Games, and doing it even more thoroughly than Xiaomi.

After all, Xingchen's products are more specialized than Xiaomi's.

Compared to Lei Jun, Chu Chen has a stronger grasp on his products.

The ultimate result is that Starry Sky's reputation, the "sincere" persona, and Chu Chen's own image—all these factors combined create the effect of "compensating with a skin" leading to "global viral success." If it were a different developer...

For example, Tencent performs maintenance due to a common technical malfunction and then provides a free skin.

What will the players' reaction be? Most likely it will be, "Oh, not bad, at least you have a conscience," and then after claiming the skin, they'll still complain and churn.

This is a bland, transactional emotion, without any added value.

But switching to Starry Sky, although it sounds a bit like a self-promotional tactic, the situation is completely different.

The phrase "the server crashed due to too many players" in the first round carries a strong positive implication, constructing a grand collective narrative: "It's not that the game is bad, it's that we players are too enthusiastic!"

Afterwards, Chu Chen also posted a global message on Weibo and Twitter: "Please, all players, play the game rationally, play the game rationally."

This sense of "begging for mercy," coupled with the memes online thanking "Western players for crashing the servers," has essentially transformed the situation from a server crash into an "event."

This transformed players from mere consumers into firsthand witnesses to this "great miracle."

Under the influence of this collective sentiment.

Chu Chen posted another Weibo message: "Everyone's so enthusiastic! We received another server crash alert just one hour after the servers opened, it felt like we'd traveled through time [laughing and crying emoji]! To thank everyone for their support (and for sparing our servers), we will be giving away limited-edition skins to all players, and we'll also be opening a queuing system. Please stay tuned for the announcement for details! PS: We'll be adding more servers tonight. If we can't make sure everyone can play smoothly tomorrow, I'm going to find Yanchuan and make him wear women's clothes!"

That's what Weibo is like.

In today's global gaming community, only Chu Chen could have made something like this so that it would be shared wildly by players worldwide, with everyone saying they absolutely had to make Shiokawa dress up as a woman the next day.

Even though many people are shouting that tomorrow's server crash will force Shiokawa to wear women's clothing, those people don't even know who Shiokawa is.

This is the advantage that Xingchen, or rather Chu Chen, has accumulated.

So when executives from other game companies were baffled by the data reports and thought that StarCraft was just lucky or that the players were too "cheap," they didn't realize that they were playing a completely different game from StarCraft.

Of course, even if Chu Chen had anticipated that this incident would cause a global reaction, he was still surprised.

However, he did not expect that the Japanese market's reaction would be so intense as to be almost "extreme," and even describing it as "extreme" seems somewhat conservative.

If the internet on October 6th had a color, then in Japan, it would definitely be the blue of FGO.

This blue is not melancholic, but rather a kind of almost boiling fervor.

On 2ch, Japan's largest anonymous forum, the game's servers are undergoing the most severe test since its inception.

On ordinary days, this place is a battlefield where various game factions attack and insult each other, a stage for insiders and conspiracy theorists to dance together, and a dark corner where players vent and communicate.

But now, the entire page is almost completely flooded with posts about "FGO".

Posts like "[FGO Anniversary Celebration]", "[About the Star Compensation Skin]", and "[Shiokawa Crossdressing Prayer String]" were being pushed to the top of the list at an alarming rate, with the number of replies to each post breaking the limit every minute.

The compensation for the morning's incident was as expected.

But in the afternoon, just because there were too many people in the queue, and the queuing system was opened to "optimize the player experience" and "ensure the continuous operation of the server", they actually wanted to compensate?

It's still a limited-edition skin! ??
Furthermore, if you still have to queue to play "FGO Assassin" the next day, Stardust will continue to compensate you! ???
This time, Japanese gamers truly experienced what "surprise" meant.

By evening, all sorts of memes about the servers "crashing" had already appeared.

(End of this chapter)