Game development begins with destroying Girls' Frontline.

"We must make a good impression this year. Even if masks are no longer available, this online event might still be held."

~~~

The Summer Spark Festival gaining popularity is certainly a good thing.

However, there are still two months until the scheduled beginning of August.

So after a period of heated discussion...

People gradually calmed down. June of this year was a period of rapid development for the Spark platform, with a constant stream of excellent domestic games emerging.

Chapter 620 StarTok

June has arrived.

Xinghuo has entered a fully remote work mode.

Its timing is already three months later than the mainstream timing of the previous life, and this extra time is not only for Xinghuo, but also provides a relative buffer period for many industries in the country.

Because of the buffer period, working from home in this world didn't come as suddenly as it did in the previous life.

Each company can even make preparations in advance before implementation.

In the process, Spark also took the opportunity to open-source its online office workflow within the Spark Alliance.

After this set of processes, based on actual use by Spark, was fully opened up, it gained recognition from many companies. At the same time, Spark and Douyin's internal office software were also more widely used.

Finally, at the end of May this year.

This internal communication software has been renamed and officially launched.

The software is called StarTok.

This is a neologism in English. As for the Chinese name, the official name of this software is Xingyu (星语). Inside this software, there is something similar to a mini-program.

It includes Xinghuo's online office management program.

All of its features are completely free and open to the public.

Because it's completely free, and because Douyin and Xinghuo, one a video platform and the other a gaming platform, are both giants that have become leading companies globally in China.

Therefore, since its launch, StarTok has become the preferred software for many internet companies to work from home.

The first batch of users was quickly covered.

However, at this time, it was Alibaba's DingTalk that felt a sense of crisis.

As for the penguins, they were completely unfazed.

However, Tencent soon became restless, because after StarTok's first batch of users stabilized and all functions were confirmed to be free of serious bugs, it quickly began to expand outwards.

In early June, StarTok began to replace the chat function within the Xinghuo platform and Douyin, and started its first round of exploratory promotion to users.

This is an alternative to the internal chat function.

Simply put, now whether you're a StarTok user or a Douyin user, as long as you download StarTok, you can play without logging into the other two apps.

It can also receive information from both platforms.

Theoretically speaking, this feature is a bit like taking off your pants to fart.

After all, whether it's the Spark platform or Douyin, everyone has a mobile app. Even if a Douyin friend sends a message, can't I just reply on Douyin?

In reality, the launch of this feature actually brought StarTok a large number of early adopters.

Holy crap, I actually received a game multiplayer request from a friend on the Xinghuo platform on Douyin!

[This is awesome! The company uses StarTok for work, and I use StarTok to slack off.]

At this point in time, the problem isn't that the app's functions are useless, but that it has no functions available at all.

StarTok expanded its user base on a small scale by integrating its built-in chat functionality. After completing this round of expansion...

StarTok has unleashed its ultimate weapon.

Like other Spark apps, StarTok was deployed globally. Therefore, after the first round of external promotion, it actually absorbed many global users from within TikTok and Spark itself.

On this basis.

It’s April 6th.

Spark has launched Star Square, which is built into StarTok.

This feature is somewhat similar to Moments, but unlike Moments, its information feed is presented in a way that is more like TikTok.

Simply put, when you refresh your WeChat Moments, you only see posts from your own friends. But on StarTok's social media platform, when you refresh, you see "Moments" from other people that StarTok promotes based on your preferences.

The system quickly attracted the attention of countless netizens as soon as it was launched.

Because very quickly, users in China discovered that posts made on this platform were visible globally!

Furthermore, every post on StarTok Square comes with a comment section, which offers more features than WeChat's Moments.

Its perception is more like that of Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book).

Not only can you leave comments, but you can also repost Douyin short videos and upload pictures.

If Xiaohongshu's previous existence was an accidental initiation of the US-China trade dispute, resulting in a huge surge in traffic, then StarTok's current situation is like launching a nuclear bomb right from the start.

Because of this moment.

StarTok is currently facing a tremendous historical opportunity.

What is the current global environment like? For the first time in global history, almost all of humanity shares a common topic, and this topic is related to life.

With this topic already in place, there's no need for Spark to do anything.

On StarTok's public square, when users discovered they could communicate with users from other countries, they spontaneously began global reconciliation.

Are you under lockdown where you are too? How many people have died? Does the US government really not care about the lives of the American people?

How are prices? How much does an egg cost?

Do a large percentage of Japanese girls really go to Okubo to work as prostitutes during high school?

Why is it so common for Japanese high school students to work part-time?

What do Chinese high school students eat for lunch? What do South Korean high school students eat for lunch?

How much does your breakfast cost? How much is your salary? How much does a car cost where you live?

Eggs in our supermarkets have gone up to $10 a box. What about where you are?

$10? Are you crazy?

Egg prices are relatively stable here, but vegetables are ridiculously expensive; a head of cabbage costs 1000 yen.

without any exaggeration.

In just one day, StarTok's public square instantly transformed into a global "gossip hub."

In its previous form, Xiaohongshu was used for reconciliation between China and the United States, but in reality, there weren't many users involved. It was more of a "small circle of accidental events" that attracted more attention.

But on this timeline...

The global user base of Spark + Douyin is on a completely different scale.

Users from all over the world flocked to the event, beginning an unprecedented "global reconciliation."

Behind this global reconciliation was the surge in StarTok's downloads and users after the launch of the public square feature.

In just one week, StarTok reached the top of the download charts on Android and Apple app stores in 65 regions around the world.

Moreover, once they went up, they seemed to have no intention of coming down.

Then on June 12, two days after StarTok Square was launched, Xinghuo released a poster announcing that it had over 100 million users. Three days later, Douyin released another congratulatory poster saying that the total number of users had exceeded 200 million.

Its growth rate is simply astonishing.

Chapter 621 Exaggeration

For most apps in the world, reaching hundreds of millions of users is an incredibly difficult task. However, for Xinghuo and Douyin, it's a case of one foot pushing the other, and the other pushing the other.

In front of global internet companies, they demonstrated what it means to "climb the ladder to the clouds."

Interestingly, after Xinghuo and Douyin released these two posters, the event itself attracted a lot of attention. For example, some curious media outlets asked questions.

Why was Spark the first to release the poster? And it seems that Spark is the one leading all the activities?

After having doubts, these media outlets actually went to investigate.

Then they discovered that the shareholding ratio of this subsidiary StarTok was 6% for Spark and 4% for ByteDance, and the actual operating team was mainly Spark employees who were transferred to form this subsidiary.

In addition, with StarTok's launch of its global reconciliation program, more information about StarTok itself has been leaked, which also revealed that Lin Li has been continuously increasing his stake in ByteDance since 16.

It was only at this point that most players belatedly realized that Lin Li was actually a major shareholder of Douyin!

The numerous events of that year quickly transformed from "facts" into "stories," and then from stories into "legends."

Lin Li himself thought all the reports were nonsense, but he felt that nonsense was useless because the audience loved to watch it.

Japanese media went so far as to bestow upon Lin Li the title of "a once-in-a-millennium business genius," which shocked Lin Li so much that he quipped about it on his Twitter account.

"A thousand years!? That's ridiculous."

This single sarcastic remark gave the Japanese media outlet quite a scare, causing them to immediately remove the news and replace it with a headline like "A Business Genius Once in Five Thousand Years."

"Huh? I didn't say there wasn't enough time! What the heck!"

"Damn it! Who said the Japanese understand air?! Huh!!"

anyway.

This meme quickly gained traction after Lin Li's two comments.

This caused a lot of netizens to burst into laughter.

However, while netizens can laugh heartily, some people are simply unable to remain calm.

The rapid resurgence of tarTok also triggered a sharp drop in several stocks.

Among them, the penguins are naturally the most affected and the most deeply impacted.

This reconciliation is not like that of Xiaohongshu.

Because Xiaohongshu is essentially a social networking site, not a communication software.

But StarTok is a legitimate messaging app, and during this global reconciliation event, many users added their first foreign friend.

Based on data provided by Spark, some media outlets wrote a report titled "A New Landscape for Global Communication Software".

It states that 90% of StarTok users are having their first real one-on-one chat with a foreigner.

Everyone knows that capital likes to hype up concepts.

This time, StarTok has truly made a splash with its concept.

Some busybodies even posted a fake PPT, following Lin Li's previous press conference style, claiming that communication software 1.0 was computer chat software, communication software 2.0 was mainstream chat software in various countries around the world, and communication software 3.0 was global communication software.

And naturally, only StarTok fits this global communication software 3.0 standard.

Although it was later confirmed that this was a PowerPoint presentation created by a netizen.

However, this argument was quickly accepted by netizens around the world, and the concept accepted by the market naturally influenced the judgment of capital in the first place.

Since the launch of StarTok Plaza, Tencent's stock price has been hitting the daily limit down for several consecutive days, falling by 20% before it slowly bottomed out and entered a state of slow recovery.

This is even more terrifying than the rise of DeepSeek in my previous life, which caused Nvidia's stock price to plummet by 17%.

After all, even Tencent itself probably never imagined that in 2020, there would still be software that could carve out a path through the two giants of Tencent QQ and WeChat.

Besides Tencent, the stocks of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, and Twitter, which was not yet acquired by Musk, also fell sharply.

And the most interesting thing is...

In the past, when penguins were attacked by Xinghuo or Douyin, they would usually react quickly.

Lin Li had assumed that Tencent would soon announce the launch of its own global chat brand, but this time, nothing happened.

The penguins were very quiet.

Just like the American high-tech company that was attacked by DeepSeek in its previous life.

This silence wasn't due to anything else, but simply because of one thing: the attack was so fierce that it stunned everyone in the company.