Why the bug I wrote became a core gameplay mechanic?!
Chapter 197: Road Rage Simulator

Chapter 197: Chapter 197: Road Rage Simulator

Gu Fan paused briefly before adding, "If our company is to continue developing and expanding into new business areas, I am the best candidate. President Li’s arrangements are very reasonable and there are no issues."

Upon hearing this, everyone fell silent.

They looked at each other, and although they couldn’t ask questions openly, they immediately understood each other’s thoughts through eye contact.

Was President Gu making sense?

There was certainly some logic to it.

Although there’s a saying that "sustaining a business is harder than starting one", on the whole, developing new business in a different field is definitely more challenging than continuing successful past ventures. After all, the latter can draw on some existing successful experiences, whereas the former is like crossing a river without any stones to step on.

Besides President Gu, who else could take on the heavy responsibility of developing new business areas for Nitiandang’s games?

Zhou Yang? Wei Chengjie? Feng Hui? Zhao Haiquan? Or Su Tong and Xiao Mingyu?

Obviously, none of them could.

At most, they were good at managing their own areas of responsibility, but when it came to overall coordination and independent decision-making, President Gu himself had to step up.

If anyone else were to take over, it would make the development of the new business significantly more difficult and the chances of success would greatly reduce.

But...

Did that mean President Li’s arrangement was unproblematic?

Of course not!

Because it was clear to everyone that President Li’s arrangement seemed to have an ulterior motive, as if she distrusted President Gu, hence his transfer away from the core game development department. It was labeled as "exploring new business", but in reality, it was marginalization!

So, even if the arrangement was somewhat reasonable, everyone definitely wouldn’t regard it as a wise decision by President Li, but only felt sorry for President Gu, who once again toiled away for the sake of Nitiandang’s games.

Feeling sorry for President Gu!

In any case, following Gu Fan’s definitive statement, everyone finally accepted the arrangement.

Zhou Yang asked timidly, "Then... what exactly is the new business our company will be working on?"

Lilith took a look at Gu Fan, "The specifics will be decided by President Gu. The new business has no inherent limitations, there is just one condition: it needs to be directly related to our main gaming business."

Gu Fan nodded, "Very well, President Li, I will give it deliberate consideration."

Having smoothly achieved her goal, Lilith was delighted and clapped her hands, "Good! Then let’s consider the matter settled, and you may all leave the meeting."

Everyone turned to look at Gu Fan. After he got up and left, the others also started to stand up.

But immediately afterward, Lilith said, "Zhou Yang and Wei Chengjie, the two of you stay back."

Zhou Yang was startled and sneaked a glance at Gu Fan, and after receiving an affirmative look, he and Wei Chengjie sat down again.

Soon, the meeting room was left with only Lilith, Zhou Yang, and Wei Chengjie.

Lilith cleared her throat, "With President Gu no longer handling the gaming business, the two of you will be fully responsible for the new project.

"Here is the design plan for the new game, which is an idea left by President Gu.

"You must develop it carefully, according to the plan, and not let President Gu’s hard work go to waste!"

As she spoke, Lilith handed out the printed design plans to them both.

"This is not the final draft, so if you have any suggestions, you can still offer them. Once the final version is confirmed, according to our company’s custom, it cannot be changed."

Since it wasn’t the final draft, Lilith had only printed two copies for the time being.

Zhou Yang hurriedly reached out to receive his copy, looking respectful, but inwardly he scorned the idea.

Any suggestions can be offered? Pull the other one; who doesn’t know that you never listen to serious feedback...

However, as cunning corporate players, neither Zhou Yang nor Wei Chengjie showed any dissatisfaction, simply reviewing the design plan from beginning to end.

It had to be said, the game’s name was quite striking.

Road Rage Simulator!

Rather blunt and forthright.

This game was inherently a single-player game but supported online play.

Moreover, this time the online play was different, requiring higher internet bandwidth!

Nitiandang had previously developed some online games like "Infernal Trajectory" and Prometheus, but at that time, the networking issues were relatively easy to handle.

To facilitate the average independent game developers, the official platform itself provided multiplayer servers. This was one of the inherent features and services of the platform, which were maintained through the platform’s share of the game sales.

Otherwise, those independent games wouldn’t have been able to afford the server costs.

The official platform had comprehensive regulations for server use, allowing games with small volumes and low concurrent player numbers to use the official servers for free.

However, if the developer’s own strength was considerable or the concurrent player numbers of the game reached a certain threshold, then additional payment for cloud services was required.

Nevertheless, considering company size, game sales, concurrent player numbers, and required bandwidth among other factors, some small companies could still get significant discounts on cloud servers, with the price of a small server supporting 20 people being as low as 90 Game Coins per month.

Based on a calculation of 100,000 concurrent players in a game, after receiving official discounts, the server costs would only be around 400 thousand.

This was a huge boon for independent games. After all, a game with 100,000 concurrent players would definitely bring in far more revenue each month than the server costs.

And for games like "Prometheus", there was even less to worry about because there were various ways to connect online, such as players using their own consoles to connect or creating their own servers to play on.

Therefore, the server costs for Nitiandang’s previous games were not particularly high, and when factored into the research and development and marketing costs, were not particularly significant.

However, the situation with "Road Rage Simulator" was slightly different.

The concurrent online player count for "Infernal Trajectory" and "Prometheus" was not high, as players were split into individual rooms to experience the game.

But "Road Rage Simulator" supported up to 2,000 players on the same server!

Bear in mind that some of the larger MMORPGs currently have server populations of around 5,000 players.

The more players there are on the same server, the greater the amount of data exchange within the server will be, resulting in an exponential increase, and naturally, server costs will rise accordingly.

Moreover, Nitiandang Games had grown to be a medium-sized company, no longer able to enjoy the various preferential policies offered by official platforms to smaller companies.

There was no doubt that this time the server costs were not to be underestimated.

But this wasn’t exactly a big problem, after all, Nitiandang now had deep pockets, sufficient to cover the costs. The only question was... was it really necessary to spend so much extra money to complete this online feature?

"Road Rage Simulator" was going to build a virtual city about 15 square kilometers in size.

In the world of open-world games often spanning dozens or hundreds of square kilometers, this map size was not particularly large—it was slightly larger than Fallout 4 and Spider-Man, but a bit smaller than GTA 4.

But for Nitiandang, which had developed games with much smaller maps, this size was quite considerable.

While some open-world racing games have gone beyond 70 square kilometers, featuring vast expanses of rural and pastoral scenery, "Road Rage Simulator" was focused mainly on cityscapes.

The gameplay differed too, with racing games encouraging players to speed, while "Road Rage Simulator" aimed to realistically recreate the constricted nature of city roads to generate negative emotions in players, resulting in a different approach to map creation.

In online mode, a maximum of 2,000 players would be squeezed onto this 15 square kilometer map. It wouldn’t be impossibly crowded, but definitely far from spacious.

Of course, even in online mode, there would be NPC-driven vehicles around these 2,000 players to keep the city streets at a certain density of traffic.

Especially during the morning and evening rush hours.

Zhou Yang continued reading, and soon he discovered an even more shocking feature.

The game itself was still outrageously cheap, priced at 88 yuan. Considering the significantly higher server costs, this pricing was obviously not very reasonable.

But fortunately, there were value-added services within the game.

However, upon closer examination, Zhou Yang found that the in-game purchases were not for vehicle appearances or skins, but for lives!

Yes, the lives of the players in the game.

When players got injured, disabled, or died in the game, they could spend money to buy a life. They could use Game Coin or top up with real money.

There were three ways to earn Game Coin in the game, corresponding to three different professions.

Office worker: Commute during rush hour every day to receive a fixed salary, with penalties for tardiness.

Taxi driver: Earn money by carrying passengers.

Internet celebrity: Stream within the game and make money based on viewer count and popularity metrics.

In terms of income potential, internet celebrities had the highest ceiling; theoretically, they could earn unlimited money as long as there were enough viewers, but their income was the most volatile. Office workers had the most stable income, getting a sure harvest as long as they commuted to work on time. Taxi drivers were in between, with a higher minimum than internet celebrities but lower than office workers, and a lower maximum compared to internet celebrities but higher than office workers.

But what came next was the main focus of the game.

In the game, all players had to be extremely cautious and strictly follow traffic rules. Otherwise, they would be fined or penalized with points!

But on this basis, the system would frequently arrange NPC vehicles near the players to change lanes repeatedly, cut in line, and perform other uncivil driving behaviors, aiming to provoke the players’ anger as much as possible!

In the event of an accident, players still had to stop and follow the correct steps for rescue.

If the rescue was performed correctly, they could earn a small bonus; but if done incorrectly or if they simply drove away, they would also be fined!

Beyond that were some finer details, such as the types of vehicles players could drive in the game, the specific traffic rules, and so on.

Due to the lack of car manufacturers’ copyrights, most vehicles in the game were knockoffs of popular real-life vehicle models and brands. Needless to say, the driving experience of the vehicles in the game couldn’t possibly be exactly the same as in reality.

However, the game thoughtfully allowed players to ride motorcycles, and there was a wide variety of motorcycles to choose from, which was a small but significant highlight.

After all, not many other racing games incorporated motorcycles. Even if they did, they would develop separate motorcycle racing games instead of mixing them with cars.

Clearly, the real purpose of this design was to further exacerbate the players’ road rage through motorcycles, thereby generating more negative emotions!

Besides, the game also included electric bikes and bicycles, again allowing players to ride them, even for commuting or streaming as an internet celebrity.

But if the player had a car, there probably wouldn’t be many who would choose to ride these things.

After finishing the design draft for "Road Rage Simulator," Zhou Yang couldn’t help but take a sharp intake of breath.

Good lord, how on earth did this game manage to combine so many infuriating elements all at once!

He looked at Lilith: "President Li... is this truly President Gu’s idea? Did he design all these details too?"

Lilith nodded: "Absolutely true! If I’m lying, I will go to ’Hell’."

Zhou Yang cleared his throat twice: "President Li is overestimating, there’s no need for that..."

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