Chapter 1 A Little Off

Pei Qian took a deep breath, trying hard to calm himself down.

Something wasn't right.

Calm, he had to stay calm!

Only now did Pei Qian understand the true expressions of these three people.

Huang Si Bo stared at the computer screen, mindlessly refreshing it again and again because the game's data far exceeded his best-case scenario expectations, making it unbelievable!

Xiao Lü was restless, obviously excited!

And Bao Xu was indeed contemplating life, but the reason for contemplating life was completely different from what Pei Qian had anticipated...

"Boss Pei, champagne!"

Xin Hailu handed over a bottle of champagne with a smile.

Pei Qian glanced at it. It was a rather unique bottle of champagne; the bottle's protective casing was made of platinum and covered in English words. Conservatively speaking, it was worth at least five figures.

But Pei Qian was in no mood for any of it.

Because he knew that the money *Fortress of the Sea* had earned him probably couldn't be spent even with a few hundred more bottles of champagne like this!

However, with everyone watching, Pei Qian couldn't just storm off.

He couldn't let anyone suspect the existence of the System or the challenge itself!

Pei Qian took a deep breath, took the champagne, and popped it open with a "bang."

Pale golden liquid gushed out, accompanied by a unique aroma, and a lively atmosphere instantly exploded in the office!

Everyone cheered. The two receptionists took out pre-prepared handheld confetti cannons and firecrackers, and a golden rain began to fall in the office!

Everyone began to sing and dance. Xiao Lü was even about to do an excited sliding kneel before Huang Si Bo grabbed him.

In this heated atmosphere, Pei Qian forced a smile: "You've all done a great job, keep up the good work."

Pei Qian maintained his smile, walked into his office, and closed the door.

Watching Pei Qian's back, Huang Si Bo couldn't help but sigh.

"As expected, everything is within Boss Pei's plan!"

"He had already anticipated all of this, so he wasn't excited at all. For Boss Pei, this is just an ordinary thing!"

"Ah, compared to Boss Pei, we're really like a bunch of country bumpkins, getting complacent with the slightest bit of achievement..."

"When will I be able to have a mindset like Boss Pei's..."

While sighing, Huang Si Bo refreshed the backend again.

*Fortress of the Sea* was a complete hit!

Of course, Huang Si Bo believed that this was, after all, a game whose direction was pointed out by Boss Pei, so it was normal and reasonable for it to be a hit. There was nothing to be surprised about.

After analyzing Boss Pei's design intentions, Huang Si Bo and Bao Xu had a feeling that this game was likely to succeed!

However, they didn't expect it to be such a hit, even knocking down *Bullet Marks*, which was developed by Tianhuo Studio!

What Huang Si Bo didn't expect even more was that Boss Pei had once again come up with a new trick!

With the game *Ghost General*, Boss Pei had already demonstrated how to achieve the best marketing results with the least amount of money.

At that time, Boss Pei had uniquely promoted it in the artist circles and successfully spread it to the general player base!

This time, Huang Si Bo was also constantly expecting Boss Pei to find another unique path, using a similar method of leveraging a small force to achieve a large effect to promote the game.

He even thought of a few relatively inexpensive ways to promote it himself.

But now it seemed that everything he had imagined was wrong.

Boss Pei had no intention of promoting it at all! Because Boss Pei knew very well that this game would be a hit even without promotion. The word-of-mouth from players, the 'tap water' (organic, grassroots promotion), and the official automatic recommendation mechanism were enough!

How domineering, how confident!

How much accurate market judgment was needed to achieve this kind of confidence!

Even when Boss Pei was opening the champagne, he maintained that calm, confident expression, as if he had just completed an insignificant little thing.

Huang Si Bo was completely convinced!

...

...

Inside Pei Qian's own office.

He slumped in his chair, not recovering for a long time.

What's going on? Did I get the wrong script...?

Why??

Why did this game still become a hit when I didn't do any promotion at all?

Is there no justice?

Is there no law?

This makes no sense!

This time, there's no Ruan Guangjian to actively promote it for me, so what exactly went wrong???

Pei Qian tried hard to calm down and opened his computer to try to restore the sequence of events.

If he didn't figure this out, Pei Qian wouldn't die in peace!

Logging into the official game platform, Pei Qian finally saw the accurate data for *Fortress of the Sea*.

He couldn't help but shudder.

One week after launch, the number of players online at the same time reached 100,000!

Moreover, this probably wasn't even the limit.

The number of players online at the same time reached 100,000 not because there were only 100,000 players, but because the cloud server bandwidth rented by *Fortress of the Sea* was only enough to support 100,000 players, and there were still many players waiting in line outside...

According to common sense, server costs aren't a major expense in the operating costs of online games, unless they reach the terrifying scale of *World of Warcraft* or *League of Legends*.

For general mobile games, if a server has about 3,000 active players, renting a cloud server would only cost a few hundred yuan; and the expensive part is mainly the bandwidth. The more players online at the same time, the higher the bandwidth requirements, and the higher the cost.

For a light card mobile game like *Ghost General*, server costs aren't a very large expense.

The same was true for *Fortress of the Sea*. As a player-versus-player FPS game, many people were playing the single-player mode, which was all local computation; and the versus mode was also divided into rooms, so there wouldn't be hundreds of players fighting a national war at the same time.

After dividing into rooms, the server bandwidth pressure was much smaller compared to those large-scale, massively multiplayer online role-playing games.

What's more, Pei Qian had accurately predicted that *Fortress of the Sea* would be a complete flop, so he hadn't prepared too much bandwidth for *Fortress of the Sea* at all!

However, in a few days, the number of active players in *Fortress of the Sea* had skyrocketed from a few hundred to 100,000 online at the same time, and many players had begun to queue up!

And as of now, more than a thousand Fire Kirins have been sold, netting more than 400,000!

Pei Qian collapsed in his chair.

Four hundred thousand yuan wasn't hard to spend.

The problem was, based on the experience of *Ghost General*, this was just the beginning!

As *Fortress of the Sea* continued to become popular, next week's income would definitely be more than 400,000, and with the skyrocketing number of players, more Fire Kirins would definitely be sold. Calculating it this way, the income for the first month would be at least three million or more!

This was still the effect after a discount.

Because of Pei Qian's pricing strategy, *Fortress of the Sea* was basically a free game. Downloading didn't cost money, and the game didn't sell anything other than the Fire Kirin!

In other words, a small number of whales would buy the Fire Kirin, but general players had no place to spend money at all!

If Pei Qian learned from other pay-to-win games and did more gift packs, promotional activities, and the like, this income could probably be pushed up by two or three times without any problems.

Deliberately using pricing strategies to hold down the players' hands and prevent them from reaching into their wallets, he still earned more than 400,000 in a week!

What the hell is going on???

Pei Qian was dizzy.