Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 499 It's easy to add flowers to brocade, but difficult to provide charcoal in the snow.

For many Chinese people, the Spring Festival Gala in February 2016 was the first time many Chinese netizens experienced the "New Year's flavor" of the internet age.

That year's "Collect Blessings" campaign had over 100 million participants, with 790,000 people ultimately sharing 2.15 million yuan, each receiving 271.66 yuan.

This amount of money isn't a lot, but it's definitely not a small amount either.

This made the Spring Festival in February 2017 even more lively. The Alipay Five Blessings campaign was a resounding success, with approximately 1.68 million people collecting all five blessings and sharing a total of 200 million yuan in cash red envelopes.

Unfortunately, although more people participated, many found it uninteresting afterward.

After 18, the popularity began to decline. After all, for the "collecting blessings" thing, users' expectations were fixed, which was to share the total prize money.

While there is a chance of getting other amounts randomly, the random mechanism is not fixed and the probability is unclear, so it is not very attractive.

But a starry night is different.

Its reward mechanism is more like a lottery, and a lottery with an extremely high "winning rate".

The lower limit may be nothing, but the upper limit is much higher. People are always afraid of the unexpected. In fact, judging from the current number of participants, even if it's a prize worth hundreds of thousands or millions, it's still possible.

The odds of winning aren't very high, but what if? What if you win one of those 50,000 PS4s? What if you become the chosen one for AMD graphics cards? At the very least, getting a badge or a controller wouldn't be bad either.

This is an uncertain, but extremely high, expected value.

What ultimately manifests is an astonishing global influence.

This point had already been calculated for Chu Chen in his previous life. Of course, another reason why this event could attract so many people was its low entry barrier.

Unlike in the past, when 360 held a lottery and you had to complete a bunch of tasks to qualify, naturally fewer people paid attention to it.

Although Starry Sky has missions, the entry threshold is very low.

Click to make a reservation and then share to get two raffle tickets. This low barrier to entry has also helped the rapid development of "Starry Night".

~~~
December 30th marks one day until the official start of the Starry Night event.

Xiaomi Group Headquarters.

Lei Jun's office has huge floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the night view of the capital city, with its bustling traffic and dazzling lights. But inside the office, everyone's eyes are focused on the ever-increasing number on the projection screen in front of them.

"Global reservations: 1.6 million, that's incredible!"

A Xiaomi vice president muttered to himself, his voice tinged with a mixture of amazement and unease.

In Lei Jun's office, everyone was discussing whether or not to make one last round of promotional investment for Starry Night.

The planned 1 Redmi 5 Plus units are ready.

If we were to invest, those 10,000 Redmi 5 Plus units would represent a budget of approximately 10 million yuan.

Don't think that a budget of 10 million is small. You should know that the word-of-mouth conversion rate for such large-scale events with multiple sponsors is very low, unless you can throw out 1 million cases of Coca-Cola like Coca-Cola did.

Otherwise, the influence is actually very low.

This is why, for events like the Spring Festival Gala, which are watched by hundreds of millions of people, most manufacturers only give away products worth one or two million yuan, plus a bunch of coupons.

This year's Starry Night is no different; however, Starry Night is open to the world, so there are more participating manufacturers, resulting in a larger total number.

The problem is that as more manufacturers participate, the effectiveness of this investment is decreasing.

Although Starry Sky also distributes coupons for the corresponding products while launching them, it's easy to imagine that the conversion rate of these coupons is quite low. Therefore, Xiaomi was somewhat hesitant about whether to invest an additional ten million.

The Starry Night event was so successful this time, there were way too many participants. Yes, you heard right. The reason for the hesitation wasn't because the Starry Night event was bad, but because there were just too many people.
"President Lei, Xingchen has gone too far this time."

"Personally, I think that even if we invest another 10,000 phones, it won't significantly improve the overall brand image. Moreover, with so many participants in this event, I'm worried about whether Xingchen can handle it."

In contrast, the media hyped it up, the players cheered, and countless bystanders joined in the fun.

At the industry level, many manufacturers believe that this Starry Night event "went a bit too far." After pre-registrations exceeded 100 million, many manufacturers have stopped investing in the event.

The biggest reason for this is that with more people, not only does it become more lively, but the risks also increase exponentially.

Can the live streaming channels handle so many people?

Is the lottery system functioning properly?

Even the quality of the broadcast on this starry night, and whether it lives up to the "expectations" of so many people, are all risk points.

An event involving 1.6 million people, and that number is still rising.

This might not have been a big deal in 25, but in 17, who had ever seen a company hold a live-streaming event of this scale? Absolutely none.

Anything that no one has ever done before is a risky thing.

"Yes, Mr. Lei, they're riding too high. The higher they're lifted, the harder they'll fall. We have a good working relationship with Xingchen. If they don't handle this well and the public opinion backfires, we sponsors will also get into trouble. Maybe we should slow things down for now?"

It was clear that the attitude of the group was to wait and see.

This is actually quite normal, since many manufacturers have completely calmed down by now, and Starry Night's lottery list hasn't had any new entries for a whole day.

This shows that Xiaomi is not the only company aware of this risk.

However, Lei Jun, who had been silent until now, gently tapped the table.

Do you think Chu Chen wouldn't have thought of these things?

Everyone was stunned.

Lei Jun stood up and walked to the window.

“You’ve all dealt with Chu Chen before. From my personal perspective, Chu Chen understands the ins and outs of this better than we do. If other manufacturers are backing down, then we should step in even more.”

As the saying goes, it's easy to add flowers to brocade, but difficult to provide charcoal in the snow.

Lei Jun was also a little worried.

However, he is willing to take the gamble; for an activity of this scale, the risks and rewards are directly proportional.

Everyone only saw the failure, but they didn't consider that if it had succeeded, the traffic that night would have been the highest in the world this year.

In addition, Lei Jun had actually spoken to Chu Chen on the phone privately.

I know a little about the inside story of this Starry Night event. Leaving aside the specific video content, the live stream format was actually a "pseudo-live stream mode."

This is the same model used by Bilibili's New Year's Festival: pre-produced videos are then streamed globally simultaneously, and the prize draw is conducted using the Starry Sky app.

Therefore, at least theoretically, it is technically entirely feasible.

(End of this chapter)