Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 498 The Snowball Rolls, Reaching a Terrifying Scale
But soon, not even until the next day, Sato, who was on the train that night and went online again, discovered that on that very night, the third night after the Star Project was announced.

The number of reservations for the entire event has already reached an astonishing 2300 million.

This basically means that Starry Night Games, including Starry Night Tap, Starry Night Platform, and Starry Night Wallpaper, has already completed pre-registration for almost all of its daily active players.

This conversion rate is quite terrifying. For example, Tencent, which owns apps like QQ and WeChat with hundreds of millions of daily active users, might not be able to gather ten million people for a single event.

Moreover, as the event reservation period entered its third day, the popularity of the entire "Star Project" began to become increasingly exaggerated.

As the number of reservations increased, the rewards for "Night of Stars" became increasingly extravagant. At this point in time, no one knew that Chu Chen had prepared 3 million yuan in cash to fund this event.
So next, along with 100 million Star Sand Notes, 100 million bonus laser tickets, 20 Starry Night-themed T-shirts, and 20 sets of the deluxe edition of "Starry Night Art Setting Collection".

When the 50 million reward was unlocked, everyone was stunned, because the 50 million reward was 50,000 PS4s, although they were the cheapest PS4 Slims.

But the PS4 Slim is still a PS4, so together it should cost at least 100 million!
By this point, the atmosphere among almost all StarCraft game players, most StarCraft-related communities, and players on the StarCraft platform had shifted from the initial "participation is key" mentality.

They became so desperate to collect all the lottery tickets to increase their chances of winning.

Whether it's YouTube or Bilibili, almost all gaming channels are like that.

[A hard-working content creator personally tested and proven! The fastest way to get all lottery tickets in Starry Night!]

[A boon for office workers! Just 30 minutes a day to collect all the prize tickets!]

This time, the Starry Sky Project's user acquisition strategy is very comprehensive, ranging from downloading Starry Sky wallpapers to purchasing any game, playing classic old games, and even Star Alliance games such as Final Frontline, FGO, Azur Lane, and PUBG.

Then there's watching the Starry Night variety show and logging into the Starry Night merchandise store. However, all the tasks in this process are purposeful and not disgusting to complete.

With just a little effort, you can get a dozen or so tickets.

Generally speaking, unless you're particularly crazy, having these dozen or so tickets should be enough, since you need to confirm the lottery online before you can put the tickets into the lottery box.

So even if you use ten accounts, it won't work. You'll still need ten devices. And even if you use virtual machines, the official Xingchen website has warned that multiple accounts voting from the same IP address will be blacklisted, and participation will be useless.

This is a gamble.

Since Xingchen didn't specify how they would counter vote manipulation, you can manipulate votes, but it's very likely that the votes you get will be useless.

However, this has given rise to a strange "second-hand market," where many account scalpers put the accounts they've obtained through fraudulent means on the second-hand market.

Although it's not expensive.

Xingchen strictly prohibits this practice and states that such secondhand accounts are blacklisted and will not be included in the prize draw.

However, as the rewards became more and more extravagant, the number of reservations worldwide also became more and more outrageous, and more and more people were buying these "lazy person accounts".

It wasn't until many people reported that the purchased accounts were found to be abnormal that the problem was somewhat contained.

However, "hand-typed accounts" soon appeared on the market.

In short, while Xingchen was outwitting these scalpers, the number of reservations worldwide had already reached a staggering 4 million by the 26th, four days before the start of the Starry Night event.

When the number of participants reaches this level, the event itself becomes a super hot topic, and that's when the effect of StarCraft reaching players worldwide comes into play.

Therefore, many businesses are also "generous in their donations".

Even if you spend money on advertising on a regular basis, you won't find an opportunity to advertise to 60 million people worldwide. For example, Xiaomi, which is always eager to "join the fun," was the first to react and immediately launched 10,000 Xiaomi power banks.

Huawei followed suit, sponsoring 1 Huawei Band fitness trackers and becoming the second sponsor of the Starry Night event.

Then, it became completely unstoppable. 2017 was a critical period for Huaxia Brand to transform from "Made in China" to "Huaxia Brand".

They have good products and strong production capacity, but they lack a world-class stage to directly face global consumers.

And the "Starry Night" of Starry Sky provides just such a perfect stage.

Although the "Starry Night" event was unexpected and no one was sure how effective it would be as a promotional tool, there were reservations when it came to sponsoring it.

Costs were basically kept to the million level.

For example, Xiaomi, after giving away 1 power banks, followed Huawei's gift of a smart band and then sent out another 1 of its latest smart bands. But the problem is, there are just so many manufacturers in China.

And this is just for internet companies; for gaming-related companies, it's even more outrageous.

Headphones, gamepads, keyboards, and later, the Starry Night operations department even had to select the final partner manufacturers through bidding.

Ultimately, Betop won the bid to become the "peripheral" partner for this Starry Night event with 5 gamepads, Logitech with 5 keyboards, and Razer with 8 mice.

Nvidia and AMD also joined in the fun, each offering some graphics cards for a raffle. Although these cards weren't numerous and weren't expensive on their official websites, they were incredibly valuable in the current frenzy.

As more and more manufacturers join in the fun, the influence of Starry Night has completely broken through the gaming circle and is beginning to spread rapidly to a wider audience.

By the 27th, the number of reservations worldwide had reached an astonishing 1.2 million.

Of these, nearly 70 million have made reservations in China, 13 million in Japan, nearly 5 million in South Korea, nearly 20 million in the United States, nearly 10 million in Europe, and nearly 10 million in other scattered regions.

The nature of the event has completely changed now that things have escalated to this point.

Later, even Coca-Cola got involved, with its CEO recording a video, effectively riding the wave of popularity.

Don't forget, what we just mentioned about sponsoring were all physical products.

There are also virtual products, and compared to physical products that require costs, the delivery of virtual products is even more extravagant.

For example, Sony generously gave away 10 million PS Plus memberships. Although it was a stingy half-monthly card, it was still very generous for Sony.

Bluehole generously gave away 100 million copies of "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds," while StarCraft also directly gave away 100 million copies of its own games, "Final Survival Guide" and "Cat Cat." As for the 9.9 yuan mini-games on StarCraft's Tap platform, they were given away simply by watching the live stream.

In addition, Honkai Impact 3 and Onmyoji have also designed exclusive skins, which are given away starting with 100 million units, with the amount of gifts increasing continuously.

According to statistics, the total value of gifts at this Starry Night event has reached an astonishing 20 billion RMB.

Although there's a lot of exaggeration involved, it's still 20 billion.

The only marketing campaign of the same scale or level that could be compared to Alipay's "Collect Blessings" campaign, which only became popular a couple of years ago, is probably the Alipay campaign. It's safe to say that before today, no one could have imagined that a game company could create such a huge buzz.

Just like in the previous life, no one expected that a celebrity giving away dozens of cars could attract tens of millions of people to participate.

(End of this chapter)