Why the bug I wrote became a core gameplay mechanic?!
Chapter 546 - 529: Excellent Work "Nine Swords

Chapter 546: Chapter 529: Excellent Work "Nine Swords

"Nine Swords"...

"I vaguely remember hearing about it; is the game still in operation?"

Lilith unconsciously opened the official platform to search and indeed found it.

However, from the current data, it seems rather bleak, not even squeezing into the top 100 best-selling chart for mobile games, and specific profit data naturally was unestimable.

"Our old friend Shengjing Group, when did they develop such a game, all silently.

"But that’s also normal; Shengjing Group is a big company after all, with so many games under its belt, some of which receive little investment, are just flukes, and it’s normal not having heard of them." Lilith said while browsing through the game’s introduction.

Gu Fan shook his head slightly, "No, President Li, this game is not just a fluke; it supposedly had an investment of up to a billion yuan."

Lilith was shocked, "What? A billion?

"A billion and this is what they came up with!

"Could they be laundering money?"

Gu Fan remained silent for a moment, "That’s... hard to say.

"Anyway, the game was planned very early, probably began development about ten years ago.

"It was developed for more than seven years and went live about three years ago. Since then, it has been barely keeping alive, as specific data has never been disclosed, so no one knows what the revenue level actually is.

"It’s never been on any best-selling chart, and players suspect that the game isn’t even making enough to cover operational costs, but Shengjing Group simply cannot accept their billion yuan going down the drain, so they keep it running without discontinuing the service.

"Oh, right, the Shengjing Group also launched a spectacular internal investigation a couple of years ago, sending some corrupt elements to prison.

"So, everyone is speculating that in the billion yuan claimed for development and marketing of Nine Swords, perhaps a traitor embezzled half. But without concrete evidence, it remains just gossip.

"But setting aside money laundering and corruption, just studying the game itself, we could still draw some valuable lessons."

At this moment, Lilith had found some of the game’s boring promotional material, including CG and PV, as well as live demonstrations.

At first glance, it wasn’t bad.

"Eh, how is there another game called ’Nine Swords’? Oh, it’s called ’Nine Swords Legend’, but this one is at 97th place on the best-selling chart!" Lilith asked curiously, "Did Shengjing Group remake it?"

Gu Fan explained, "No, no, no, this one is from another company.

"Because ’Nine Swords’ is derived from a very classic martial arts, or rather, immortal-hero novel. Its story is of a higher martial arts genre, a classic household title from decades ago.

"Then, this book’s various rights were sold a lot, so it’s not only Shengjing Group making a ’Nine Swords’ game, other companies are doing it too.

"However, it’s somewhat hard to swallow that ’Nine Swords Legend’ is a relative old-fashioned card mobile game with production quality that’s only up to the standard from ten years ago.

"While Shengjing Group’s ’Nine Swords’ is purported as a next-gen top-tier open-world 3A masterpiece.

"In terms of investment, whether the former hit ten million is uncertain, in contrast to a billion, there’s absolutely a hundredfold difference.

"The result is that Shengjing Group’s ’Nine Swords’ was outearned by the card mobile game ’Nine Swords Legend’, which clearly shows that Shengjing Group definitely did more than just one thing wrong; otherwise, it wouldn’t have ended up like this."

Lilith couldn’t help but show respect, "Mm, what you said makes sense!"

Before, although Lilith knew that ’Nine Swords’ was cooling off and failing, she didn’t have a clear idea of how cool or failed it was.

Now she did.

The income being exploded by a namesake rival a hundred times over is something so absurd that even writing it in a novel feels exaggerated, yet it actually happened in the real world.

It just goes to show that the world’s matchmaking mechanism is indeed quite remarkable!

And this also indicates one thing: the failure of ’Nine Swords’ definitely cannot be explained just by "corruption."

Even if corrupting a billion, at most half could be embezzled.

It couldn’t possibly be outperformed by a game whose investment didn’t even reach ten million, right?

So, there must have been a series of wrong decisions made to reach such a grand achievement.

And what specific mistakes were made? That’s worth some serious study by Heavenly Games.

Gu Fan continued, "And what’s more interesting is that within Shengjing Group, there is a very strict screening mechanism.

"When producing games, the competition between various projects is extremely fierce, even to the point of ’raising gu’.

"At every stage of project development, a comprehensive evaluation is conducted, if it doesn’t meet the expectations, major changes might be made, or it might even be directly scrapped.

"And ’Nine Swords’ is an interesting game: it was actually the king of errors inside Shengjing Group.

"During its development, it underwent many evaluations, and it passed each time.

"Even though there were certain project management issues within the team, which led to a waste of investment, generally speaking, the funds were mostly spent appropriately, otherwise the upper management of Shengjing Group wouldn’t have been oblivious until after the game’s release, only then starting a thorough investigation.

"So I believe, analyzing the failure of this game is very important for our success in the future."

Lilith nodded quickly, "Yes, absolutely!

"Gu Fan, you’ve successfully piqued my interest, so what exactly is wrong with this game? I’m very curious!"

Gu Fan spoke leisurely, "President Li, let me explain it slowly.

"First, let’s go back to when the ’Nine Swords’ project was initially approved.

"At that time, the ’Nine Swords’ project team was ambitious. Their idea was to create a groundbreaking mobile game using the standards of a 3A blockbuster and open-world gameplay.

"Gathering the best of everything, coupled with the strong IP of ’Nine Swords’ and various successes of previous games by Shengjing Group, wouldn’t a super hit game come easily?"

Lilith thought for a moment, "Hmm, that does make some sense.

"Wait, this sounds a bit like what you mentioned before.

"A 3A blockbuster mobile game?"

Gu Fan nodded, "Exactly, revisiting the failure of ’Nine Swords,’ the first issue was actually Shengjing Group deciding to develop a mobile game using 3A standards, and an important factor in this was the choice of game engine.

"We all know that the Illusionary Editor is cheap, easy to use, and stable, so during that period, most mobile games were made with it.

"But then, just when the official beta version of the Myriad Editor had been launched and wasn’t even open for use by ordinary game developers yet,

"Shengjing Group, being a large company and having the advantage of being ’close to the source,’ easily got their hands on the Myriad Editor.

Lilith considered carefully for a moment, "Wait a minute! The Myriad Editor, but it was full of bugs when we used it!

"During the beta, wasn’t it a disaster?

"Has Shengjing Group lost their minds? They weren’t looking to collect negative feedback from players, so why use this editor!"

Gu Fan explained, "This is of course hindsight from Zhuge Liang, but in fact, there were still quite a few gaming companies stepping on the same rake then, and Shengjing Group was just one of them.

"When the Myriad Editor first came out, everyone knew as a new engine it would definitely be unstable, but the extent of its instability was uncertain.

"It was only after three to five years, with a lot of gaming companies experiencing pitfalls, that a consensus gradually formed about the ’Myriad Editor’s traps.’

"At that time, there were many reasons for Shengjing Group to choose the Myriad Editor.

"Compared to the Illusionary Editor, the Myriad Editor indeed had many advanced features, which were also highlights of the official promotion.

"These included a fully automatic lighting system, which meant the creators no longer needed to adjust the lighting; an advanced scanning import system that greatly reduced modeling costs; and robust AI generation capabilities, which could save a lot of time on templated dialogue and motion production...

"Overall, these new features all had one common benefit - they could reduce the cost of developing large-scale 3A projects and gave smaller companies a chance to overtake others in the industry.

"The price to pay, however, was the engine’s poor stability, which led to various strange bugs, the game increasingly lagging over time, and several other unforeseen minor issues.

"But at the time, Shengjing Group thought these were minor solvable issues, assuming that spending a bit more time on optimization would solve them.

"In hindsight, Shengjing Group was overly optimistic, because these problems, with our joint efforts with the officials, were only barely resolved today."

Lilith felt a sense of regret, "Yes, it’s already resolved, such a pity."

Clearly, the first thing she thought of was "replicating the successful path."

Gu Fan continued, "But this success needs a qualifier: it succeeded on high-end computers.

"On mobile phones, so far, there hasn’t been a single successful game made with the Myriad Editor.

"After all, there’s a significant difference in hardware capabilities between phones and computers."

Lilith suddenly understood, "What about back then? ’Nine Swords’ was supposedly also labeled cross-platform compatible, right? How did it perform on mobile phones?"

Gu Fan coughed lightly twice and said, "Back then, players joked:

’The graphics of the game are indeed good. On high-end computers, it’s ’Nine Swords’; on mid-to-low-end computers, it’s ’Five Swords’; on mobile phones, it’s ’One Sword.’

"Because Shengjing Group, in order to ensure the game could run on mobile phones, had exhausted all conventional optimization methods and had no choice but to reduce the graphics quality and effects. Then the originally lush hillsides turned into green polygonal mounds, and the cool magical sword effects around the characters were directly cut to the ankles.

"However, looking on the bright side, it was still not bad, since despite being cut down to ’One Sword,’ these players’ phones still managed to run the game.

"Many other players’ phones would just freeze during shader compilation or when loading screens, eventually not even able to play ’One Sword,’ only able to play ’Zero Sword.’"

Search the lightnovelworld.cc website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.