The sales of Zhongmi 1 in the entire US market were actually very low-key.
Bell was already a very fringe mobile brand, and now with a new owner and a new model, even fewer people paid attention.
Moreover, the sales of Zhongmi 1 seemed to have no marketing whatsoever. There were no advertising billboards on various commercial streets, no commercials on television, and even some mobile phone stores had no posters because the Zhongmi 1 phone simply didn't appear in their shops.
The only promotion was probably a promotional poster pasted in the Bell Mobile Communications business halls and Atari Mobile Communications business halls, promoting the newly launched Zhongmi 1 contract packages. This was probably all the publicity Zhongmi 1 had at its launch.
This seemed like a hellish start. The phones of this brand should have appeared and died silently, and 99.99999% of people would not know that such a brand of phone had ever existed, just as almost no Chinese people knew that there had once been a brand of phone called Bell Mobile.
Of course, all this was just on the surface. Boss Lei, with the majority of his fortune, venturing into the US market, would not have started like this for himself.
Not to mention, both Boss Huang and Boss Lei were the top marketing gurus in the world. Their marketing tactics were always unfathomable, and one could never guess where they started.
Until many years later, when various public accounts, marketing accounts, self-media accounts, UP owners, etc., started analyzing the story and process of Xiaomi's entry into the US market, they would invariably mention the date October 3, 2004, and a post made on that date by an unknown user on Weibo.
The post read: "This score is definitely cheating, I suggest everyone report and ban this cheater!"
Upon seeing the text of the post, all viewers would surely be bewildered. However, after seeing the accompanying picture below the post, most viewers would understand what was going on.
It turned out that the picture was a screenshot of a leaderboard, where the first place was followed by a score of 1382. This point did not seem strange.
But the problem was that if you looked at the score of the second place, it was only 733. This meant that the first place was ahead of the second place by nearly 650 points, almost double the amount. The gap was so huge that it felt abnormal.
Not to mention that the game was the famous "Angry Bird" on Weibo!
Just as Boss Huang had worried, as time went by, the popularity of "Angry Bird" had been continuously declining, and the discussions on Weibo had become very few. The backend data download volume of oo mobile games had dropped from a peak of over a million downloads per day to only tens of thousands. It was estimated that it would drop to thousands sooner or later.
After all, the content of the game was quite boring. Most people would give up torturing themselves after playing a few times. The original massive download volume was actually attracting new players who were unaware and simply played out of curiosity.
Once the Weibo platform had covered most of its users, the heat would naturally decrease until it disappeared completely.
However, there were still some hardcore players, or those who played for the sake of face in their social circles, who continued to grind the game, resulting in the game's leaderboard being constantly refreshed.
From the initial score of only a little over 100, it had been refreshed to around 700 points.
Many players considered this to be a sufficiently abnormal score. Although after 400 points, the flying speed of the birds and the appearance speed of various obstacles would not increase anymore... because if they were to increase further, the screen would only show a blur, and the speed would still be too fast for the eyes to keep up.
But at such a frantic pace, even the top players could only rely on luck to push their scores higher.
On the third day after the game became popular, the top of the leaderboard had already reached 650 points.
But for the next month or so, the record did not see a significant refresh. Instead, it slowly increased by one point at a time. The final record of 733 points had remained unbroken for three full days.
But now, not only had this record been broken, but it had also doubled, increasing by 650 points and breaking the thousand-point mark.
What would be the mindset of those hardcore players who worked hard every day to refresh the leaderboard when they saw this achievement that they would probably never surpass in their lifetime?
It would surely explode instantly. So, a user posted this angry post on Weibo. Judging by the Weibo username, the person should have been the original top player on the leaderboard who achieved a score of 715. However, due to the existence of such a cheater, he had dropped to 11th place. It was unbearable.
But now, it was even worse. They had directly used hacks to surpass 650 points, completely abandoning all shame.
The anger of this top player was not just his own. Many other players who were also grinding the game were roaring on Weibo. In an instant, over a thousand Weibo accounts responded.
Of course, a thousand Weibo accounts were actually very insignificant within the current Weibo system. The heat might not even enter the top 100 on that day. Normally, it would not have led to further fermentation.
But miraculously, several topics directly made it to Weibo's trending list and were directly displayed on Weibo's homepage. At the same time, a famous Weibo reporter wrote a short news report of no more than 400 characters, fully describing the incident, in just four hours.
This short news report was also directly posted on Weibo's homepage, allowing all Weibo users to see it immediately upon refreshing their homepage.
Then, "Angry Bird" once again swept across Weibo after a hiatus of about 20 days.
Although the popularity of "Angry Bird" had passed, only about 20 days had passed. The netizens' minds still held memories. They also remembered how they had been screwed over by the game due to their own clumsiness, unable to even get 10 points, not even as good as the Chinese men's football team.
Then, when they saw this news, they became angry. It turned out that they were not bad themselves, but someone was using hacks. This was too outrageous!
Well, they completely ignored the fact that even without hacks, there were abnormal players who could achieve scores of 733. They only saw that the current first place was using hacks, and then they couldn't help but post various curses and condemnations on their own accounts.
The language was so unpleasant and the text so ugly that it was basically the bottom line of humanity. Currently, there were no laws in the world specifically governing online media and social platforms, so there was no need for any text review mechanism. Netizens could freely express any of their feelings and words on Weibo, after all, "Mili Jian" (likely a slang for the US) was free.
Of course, it was not acceptable for Huaxia's Facebook to do this. Without being instructed by the relevant authorities, Jiangnan Group had established its own review department and created a sensitive word filtering system with over 100,000 phrases, making domestic Facebook very harmonious from its inception. It completely hid any overt expressions of the wisdom of Chinese folk language and also began to cultivate various great literary figures early on, expressing their inner emotions through various other means.
It was unknown if it was because too many people were cursing, but later a competition for the most abusive vocabulary actually formed on Weibo, which was quite magical.
But no matter what kind of competition it was, the topic of "Idiot Bird" hacks had completely dominated the entire Weibo. Because most Weibo users had played or at least knew about the game, the discussion volume was extremely high, leading to the real-world media quickly following suit, and it was rare for news to report on mobile game hacks.
After all, even PC or console games rarely received such treatment.
And the audience's anger naturally needed an outlet.
Originally, the best target for venting was the first-place cheater. However, this first place only had a name, but no Weibo account, or rather, it was unknown which Weibo account belonged to them. Although oo mobile game center allowed adding friends, there was no private message function. Therefore, if the other party did not accept the friend request, all kinds of text could be completely ignored.
Since the players couldn't find the cheating object, their anger naturally had to be vented on oo mobile game platform. After all, the appearance of hacks was definitely the official's responsibility, and they were ineffective in cracking down on hacks.
So, many users flocked to the oo mobile game center's Weibo account. Initially, their tone was relatively harmonious, only asking the official to immediately delete the damn guy's score and also deal with the hacks.
After all, every game has loopholes, and hacks can be created, which is an unsolvable problem. Everyone could understand that, but at least you should delete the false records online, right!
The official's response speed was quite fast. Three hours after the incident fermented, the official website and Weibo account of oo mobile game center simultaneously released a message stating that they had received player feedback and were working on collecting, organizing, and reviewing the relevant data to see if there were indeed hacks.
This attitude was commendable, but players were dissatisfied with the official's subsequent remarks. This was because the officials stated that before definitive evidence was found, to protect the legal rights of players, they would not delete the scores, nor would they ban the account. Only after all investigations were concluded would final measures be taken to ask players to remain patient.
"This is definitely cheating, you don't need to think with your butt to know it's cheating, and the official still won't ban it?"
"Garbage official!"