I Just Want Players to Save Money, They Insist on Giving Me!
Chapter 100 - 57: A New Game with Normal Pricing?_1

Chapter 100: Chapter 57: A New Game with Normal Pricing?_1

Make a card-drawing game!

That was Ke Jin’s first reaction when he received this special assignment.

Although the previous few games had made some money, the company’s available funds were just under 20 million.

But for a game that’s even slightly larger in scope, this amount of money is like a drop in the bucket.

Not to mention the classic AAA titles of the past, any one of which involved an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Even for some high-quality 2D games, to polish them well often means tens of millions of dollars being poured in.

Although games like ’Hollow Knight’ and ’Stardew Valley’, which can be completed by one to a few people, only cost a few million to develop, it seems they don’t cost much.

But you have to realize, their small development team’s corresponding price is the lengthy time investment.

It took several years to polish and create such a 2D game.

Having so many IPs in hand, I can’t possibly wait several years to make a single game.

Otherwise, by the time I’m old and gray, there won’t be many genres of games available to play on Blue Star.

If one wants to rapidly produce games in a short period of time, a large workforce is needed.

In the game development sector, aside from the necessary hardware expenses, the most costly is human resources.

Even if an employee is priced at the lowest rate of three thousand a month, a mid-tier AAA game requires at least a team of 500 people.

A month’s wages for just the labor alone would be 1.5 million.

But in reality, it’s impossible to pay wages this way. Employees at Ke Jin’s company responsible for programming have a base salary of over 7K, and other departments have also seen wage increases.

Not to mention motion capture equipment, off-site coaching, outsourced art, sound effects, etc. (After a quick search, it appears that a team of 500 people would struggle to make a AAA game without considering outsourcing. For reference: the development team for ’Big Bro 2’ had a whopping 3,000 people working on it for eight years, with an investment of nearly 5.5 billion RMB).

With the rise in the system’s level, the quality of games released later becomes increasingly higher.

And with high game quality generally comes along with the design schemes, almost never resulting in the release of a finished game product.

Therefore, Ke Jin needs to prepare a sum of money to have on hand.

So that when it’s time to work on a large-scale game later on, there’ll be a plentiful financial reservoir without needing to seek help everywhere.

With the temporary lifting of system restrictions, card-drawing games are obviously the quickest way to recharge funds.

Emphasize high production speed and aim for a long-term, steady stream of revenue.

However, what card-drawing game to invest in also needs careful consideration.

Firstly, it cannot overlap with the type of game that’s currently a big hit on Blue Star.

The Blue Star players have already become aesthetically saturated with the mainstream game genres.

Turn-based, the ultimate mainstream genre, has been played out in every conceivable variation by Blue Star designers.

Competing in that genre is practically a death wish; even bringing over high-quality turn-based games from Earth wouldn’t necessarily make a splash.

Puzzle games like match-three are also plentiful, without differentiation it’s hard to attract players’ favor to the maximum extent.

So, pass on that too.

And thus, the answer is clear.

The original...

Turns out, it’s Arknights!

The reason for choosing it is simple.

It’s cheap.

When Hypergryph made Arknights, the total registered capital was merely 10 million, even smaller than what I have now available for my top player.

The initial horrific character designs and nearly monotone voice acting.

Especially Amiya’s absurdly off proportions, the best proof of this impoverished little workshop.

Later, as it slowly became popular, they started adding investment, and everything gradually improved.

If I get hold of Arknights’ project plan, naturally there would also be the series of beautiful character design drafts under today’s fourth‐year version.

Having drafts for the artists to refine will obviously save a great deal of time.

Secondly, Arknights belongs to the tower defense genre.

It seems that tower defense games don’t even exist on Blue Star.

To be safe, Ke Jin went online to do a search.

The results were as he expected.

There’s nothing at all, not even a mention heard.

If you have to say, there was an interview article from 30 years ago, which Ke Jin had dug up.

A veteran domestic game designer had once mentioned a concept while envisioning future game genres.

’We can design a game similar to building and defending the Great Wall, like ancient military formations. Players, acting as defenders and consolidators of the Great Wall, need to continuously allocate troops and resources to resist the attacks of the Huns outside the wall.’

This is probably the oldest concept of a tower defense game Ke Jin could find on Blue Star.

However, this veteran’s idea seemed to require substantial investment, hard to achieve with the equipment of that era, and as the game industry evolved somewhat abnormally, the inspiration for tower defense games never surfaced.

Whether it was Goose Duck Kill or Gotham, they were hardly marketed and still attracted many players.

Now that I can apply full effort, Ke Jin will definitely maximize the marketing efforts.

Apart from production costs, invest as much money as available.

Show Blue Star players the charm of tower defense games!

Once Ke Jin had the general plan in place, he wanted to try upgrading the system to see if he could increase the limit of the blind box entries.

But unfortunately, as the system level increases, so does the experience required.