"Why? Why is all our traffic going to Lianzhong, yet Lianzhong's daily online users are growing so slowly?" Brother Ma looked at the backend data with a helpless expression.
In early February, QQ and Lianzhong had officially completed the procedural integration. Users could directly log in to Lianzhong using their QQ numbers, and could also access Lianzhong through interfaces within QQ.
Even the name of the Lianzhong platform had been changed to QQ Lianzhong Game Center.
At the same time, Lianzhong excitedly announced to the public that on the first day of the merger, the total number of registered users for the QQ Lianzhong Game Center had surpassed one hundred million. This number not only crushed all of China but also surpassed the world outside of China.
However, those who understood knew that Lianzhong had directly imported all of QQ's registered users into the Tengda Lianzhong Game Center's registration user database. This meant that all QQ registered users had become users of the QQ Lianzhong Game Center, naturally leading to the user count exceeding one hundred million.
Although industry insiders viewed this as a joke, it didn't stop the QQ Lianzhong Game Center from promoting it as a major news story. They even spent millions to purchase news releases from some offline media, attempting to replicate the previous success of wCG's news.
Regarding such matters, Brother Ma did not support them. He had always believed that advertising and marketing were of little use, as truly influential factors for programs and services online were very few. The key still lay with the product itself.
This was especially true when spending millions on promotion for a milestone of reaching one hundred million users, a feat that was mocked by industry insiders.
However, there was nothing that could be done. Currently, the QQ Lianzhong Game Center was not controlled by Brother Ma, but by Bao Yueqiao.
This was an unavoidable situation.
Not to mention that even if Brother Ma wanted to replace Bao Yueqiao, he couldn't find a suitable candidate in a short period who could take over from Bao Yueqiao and maintain the stability of the Lianzhong company.
In fact, Brother Ma had no intention of replacing Bao Yueqiao. Bao Yueqiao had been managing Lianzhong up to this point, and his performance had been quite good, even making the company profitable and leading to rapid user growth. Brother Ma could find no reason to dismiss Bao Yueqiao. Even when Bao Yueqiao feigned a desire to resign and hand over his position, Brother Ma had to expend considerable effort to retain him, such as offering a clause to return 5% of Lianzhong's shares upon completion of five years of service. This successfully retained Bao Yueqiao, and he was promised rights within Lianzhong no less than before.
This was also a consistent characteristic of Brother Ma's management style. After acquiring a company, he generally did not change the company's management team, allowing the original management to operate the company, a stark contrast to his competitor, Alibaba. This approach had also yielded good results.
Although Bao Yueqiao's extravagant spending on publicity made Brother Ma very displeased, the news did indeed become a hot topic for a while. After all, reaching one hundred million users was a very impressive piece of news in 2001. It also led to a real increase in the number of users for the Lianzhong Game Center.
However, as time went by, by March 2002, Brother Ma began to notice that something was amiss. The user growth of the QQ Lianzhong Game Center had started to slow down. By March 12th, the number of concurrent online users of the QQ Lianzhong Game Center experienced its first negative growth in history, decreasing by several hundred people compared to the previous day.
This number might not seem large, but it struck Brother Ma like a bolt from the blue. After all, before this, the number of concurrent online users for the Lianzhong Game Center had been increasing by hundreds or even thousands of people daily. Especially after receiving the traffic boost from QQ, the user growth in the first few days was calculated in the tens of thousands. On the first day, it even exceeded 200,000 people. How glorious it was then!
But in the blink of an eye, it had become negative growth. How could Brother Ma tolerate this? This was a gaming platform supported by tens of millions of traffic from QQ! How could it become a negative number?
---
"I'm so bored. Is there anything fun to do?" A young man, about 18 years old, with a cigarette in his mouth, sat bare-chested in a net bar chair.
He had found a girlfriend online and had come out specifically to chat today. However, his girlfriend's reply speed was particularly slow, often taking two or three minutes to see a response, making the time in between feel exceptionally boring.
He could have played "Legend of Mir" to pass the time, but "Legend of Mir" was undergoing maintenance and would be down for the entire day. He had to find something else to entertain himself.
Just then, QQ popped up with an advertisement for the QQ Lianzhong Game Hall. The young man slapped his head, clicked to download, and then launched the game hall.
"Let's play Dou Dizhu!" The young man was quite confident in his Dou Dizhu skills. However, when he entered the Dou Dizhu lobby and prepared to find a table to sit down, he discovered that many tables were already full, and the empty tables had no players. He finally found a table for two, but when he clicked on it, it showed that it had already been taken by someone else.
The young man searched for a full two or three minutes and still couldn't find a table to sit at.
"Damn it!" The young man cursed and then saw a "Quick Seat Finder" button on the UI. He joyfully clicked it.
"System: We sincerely apologize, but you are not a member and cannot use the Quick Seat Finder function. You can choose to manually search for a seat or click the link to activate your Lianzhong membership."
"Open your-"
If the creation was successful, he would also be rewarded with 100 oo bean seeds.
What the heck is oo beans?
Completely uninterested. Who would plant vegetables in a virtual farm!