Game development begins with destroying Girls' Frontline.

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Both are about attracting customers, but globally, the number of customers who haven't yet launched on Spark is naturally higher than those who haven't launched on Steam, and Steam doesn't cover maintenance costs.

In other words, publishers who have already launched on Steam will not receive payment.

From a capital perspective, this is easy to understand. Since the game has already been released on Steam, it's only natural that subsequent games will also be released on Steam.

On top of that, you also have to share commissions with the account managers. Isn't that a complete rip-off?

However, Spark does the exact opposite. It also pays commissions for maintaining users, which makes Spark's employees much more motivated than Steam, and gradually gives it the upper hand in the competition for customers.

Just like within ZA/UM, the bias has become quite obvious at this point.

Several key members of the team also felt that logging into the Spark platform was a good choice, but the company's investors and two directors still had some doubts.

At this point, the main creators had no idea that a series of dramatic events would unfold in the future. The investors they now considered "angels" would exploit, defraud, and acquire them after they became famous.

Ultimately, they will be ousted from the companies they founded.

However, that's all for the future. Right now, they still have some respect for these investors, since the money they used was provided by them.

You're beholden to someone who pays your way in the end, aren't you?

"I chose Spark because Spark has a huge Chinese market. A game with no advertising can sell a million copies on its first day, which speaks volumes."

"Can Chinese players understand our copywriting?"

“I think they should be fine, in fact, they should understand our copywriting better.”

"Because we're all next to Russia?"

"Hahahahaha."

Robert was amused by Rostov.

~~~

Compared to the relaxed ZA/UM office.

It was already late at night, and the WEGAME headquarters was in a state of utter desolation.

Lee Wei-hee sat in his office, and through the open door, he could see that the WEGAME office area was brightly lit, with everyone working overtime.

A scene of bustling activity.

However, Li Weixi was not in a good mood at this time.

He was the only one in the office.

Before him lay the feedback report for "Tomorrow" over the past two days. The data was excellent, practically perfect.

The initial release received an overall media score of 95, a 91% positive review rate in the first round of testing, and overwhelmingly positive player feedback.

While there's certainly a lot of exaggeration in it, anyone who reads this report would have to say it has potential.

However, Li Weixi was not happy at all when faced with such a "promising" report.

This good result for Penguin Games seems so insignificant compared to "My Perfect Strategy". What angered him the most was not actually the difference in reputation.

It wasn't their own publicity campaign; the other party hijacked it.

When he asked the development team when the game "Tomorrow" would be released, the answer he received was that it would be at least the first half of next year.

"The first half of next year?! The earliest you can expect is when it'll all be too late! What's the point of even trying then?!"

Chapter 473 Whose Fault Is It?

These were Li Weixi's original words at the time.

Even now, when he thinks about it, he still unconsciously grips the armrests of the chair tightly, his knuckles turning pale from the force.

The more he looked at the report on the table, the more annoyed he became. He picked it up and crumpled it into a ball, each wrinkle a testament to his dissatisfaction and anger.

If Tomorrow has reached a point where it can be released normally, or even this month, then he is confident that he can extract a tiger's tooth from Xinghuo's mouth.

After all, if Spark can ride on Tencent's traffic, Tencent can naturally ride on Spark's traffic as well.

As soon as "Tomorrow" is released, even if its reputation is not good, it will be able to gain traction thanks to Tencent's current marketing efforts and the sudden surge in interactive animated games in the market.

It is absolutely possible to make money.

However, the development team told him that the game was too underdeveloped to be released in the short term.

"Your completion rate is low? Then tell me, the Human Spark project was launched at the same time, so why was the Human project launched earlier?"

Lee Wei-hee spoke calmly, but the anger beneath the silence was intense.

He really couldn't understand it. With the same project start time, others had already released their games, while his was still a half-finished product.

Lee Wai-hee asked this question with emotion, and most people wouldn't dare to answer at that moment.

But there were also some stubborn people in the Tomorrow game development team, and someone actually used his words to analyze things for him.

According to this person...

The difference between Penguin's "Tomorrow" and Spark's "Perfect Strategy" is not actually a difference in development capabilities.

The difference lies in the project approval process.

When Spark's animated interactive game was first conceived, the plot framework and gameplay were clearly defined from the beginning, without considering the large amount of scene animation, background art, and gameplay.

The actual cutscenes and story sequences take about 6 hours.

In addition, Spark has a dedicated animation team and extensive connections in Japan, so once the technology matures, it can be accelerated through outsourcing.

Even based on some information that Xinghuo has revealed during this period.

Spark actively and intentionally sought out many Japanese animation companies for outsourcing, not to speed up the process, but to use outsourcing to help other animation companies understand the methods of interactive animation production.

This lays the groundwork for the large-scale rollout of this type of game in the future.

Spark's project was clearly defined, its framework was stable, the core production team clearly knew the final effect they wanted to achieve, and it also benefited from outsourcing and already top-tier animation production and review capabilities in China...

This is what enables rapid game development.

In contrast, Tencent's Tomorrow team was a "mixed brigade" or a ragtag group from the beginning, with members transferred from the animation department and those transferred from the game department.

Although the work was carried out in a relatively orderly manner thanks to internal coordination.

However, although the project was launched, the entire project team was like a small boat adrift. It seemed like the boat was moving, but no one knew where it was headed.

The entire Tomorrow project, from its inception to its establishment, had only one slogan: to create interactive game animations.

But what exactly is interactive game animation?

On this crucial issue, the entire production team was quite at a loss.

Li Weixi always had only one answer to this question: tell them to find similar games for reference. But the problem is that interactive games are extremely difficult to reference.

After all, the core of interactive games is the storyline.

Gameplay can be copied, but you can't just replicate the storyline exactly, can you?

More importantly, when Tomorrow was first conceived, the theme was already set as youth campus romance, and coincidentally, there are no similar games overseas.

In short, they had nothing to copy.

As a result, the entire production team became even more confused. If it weren't for Xinghuo releasing the "Perfect Strategy" demo later, the project's progress would have been even slower.

Moreover, even after the project started to have a direction, the entire production team was in chaos, partly because the script could not be finalized for a long time.

Secondly, after the script was finalized, it was repeatedly revised, leading to many conflicts between the previous and subsequent settings, which resulted in a sense of disjointedness within the game.

Take the fact that the protagonist of "Tomorrow" can see fragments of the future, for example. This was something that was just a random idea that came to mind at the beginning.

There are many similar problems, but in summary, there is only one problem: when the project was initiated, the project team had no idea what the game they were going to make would look like.

For a project like this to be able to release a demo of the first chapter at this time is already a great achievement.

However, Li Weixi was very dissatisfied with this very detailed answer.

"You mean I should be held responsible for the project's delays!?"

"You mean I didn't explain things clearly to you, which caused the delays?!"

Lee Wai-hee is the nominal producer of the "Tomorrow" project, so although what the young employee said makes a lot of sense, he cannot admit it.

"If this process is so slow, why didn't you raise these issues earlier? Instead, you wait until the enemy is about to draw their sword before telling me that we haven't even forged our iron yet!"

After reprimanding the employee, Lee Wai-hee returned to his office.

The truth is often the most hurtful. As the director of WEGAME and the person in charge of the "Tomorrow" project, Li Weixi did not admit his mistakes, so naturally, others could only be angry but dare not speak out.

An employee who tells the truth?

He might not be in the production team anymore the next day.

Li Weixi didn't believe in anything; honest advice, though unpleasant to hear, was beneficial.

However, at the same time, Lee Wei-hee himself was also very clear that this blame was not so easy to get rid of.

Without Spark, it wouldn't be a big problem if the Tomorrow project were to be delayed, need to be redone, or encounter even more outrageous issues.

But there is a spark in this world.

Lee Wei-hee could easily shift the blame to anyone in the team, but he couldn't change the fact that Penguin Games had once again become the clown. The marketing for "Tomorrow" was a huge success, but it was Spark that succeeded.

He had lost both his wife and his army.

But that wasn't the end of it, because he knew very well that even though he had pulled the entire project team up to work overtime tonight and given them a dressing down, it didn't mean the matter was over.

These things can be used as fertilizer for his posts on social media, to prove that he works hard, and to elicit sympathy.

However, there was no way to completely shift the blame.

The reason he wasn't called in for a talk today is simply because the matter hasn't escalated yet; tomorrow, Ma Xiao will likely cause him trouble.

What will we do then? How can we keep our positions?

Li Weixi fell into deep thought.

Chapter 474 Surely the broadcast can't have any problems?

Sure enough, the next morning, Ma Xiao pulled him into the office.

The moment they met, he launched into a tirade of abuse.

Li Weixi didn't dare to say a word. In some ways, he was not even as good as the employee who dared to explain the production team's problems to him yesterday.

At least, when he was being criticized, he really didn't have the courage to stand up and explain to Ma Xiao.

Of course, another reason is that even if he stood up and explained, it would be useless. Ma Xiao is an extreme results-oriented person. If the result is good, then everything is good.

The result was neither good nor bad.

Fortunately, Lee Wai-hee was still in charge of handling TGA matters, and this matter finally came to an end.

Fortunately, Lee Wai-hee's "Tomorrow" is not Penguin's last card.

Anyone who has played cards knows that when you still have chips in your hand, you won't get too excited even if you lose a round. Only when you lose your last chip and there's no hope of turning things around will you become hysterical.

At this moment, Ma Xiao still had one card in his hand, a card that, in Ma Xiao's view, was absolutely impossible to lose.

Thanks to this connection, Lee Wei-hee escaped a disaster.

"Use the remaining resources from WEGAME to promote that... Dawn Project..."

This was the last thing Ma Xiao said to Li Weixi.

Project Dawn is a new project that Penguin Boston Studios has prepared specifically for this year's Penguin Games Festival. Along with this project, there are also projects from several other large studios and partners.

It even includes worlds like Honor of Kings, Dungeon Fighter Online, Dragon Nest: New Era, Jade Dynasty, and a high-definition single-player game called CrossFire. It also features a demo of CrossFire X, developed by Smilegate, the Korean developer behind Lost Ark.

This whole thing is just a pie in the sky that Tencent hastily created, but it still looks a bit impressive.

One is a Tencent overseas studio, with the huge Boston symbol overhead, which looks very impressive. There are also two major Korean studios, as well as Shanda Games and Perfect World, two established studios.

However, this is something you really shouldn't think about too much.

You don't even need to look at the game itself; just look at their project proposals to know whether these projects are reliable or not.

The previous version of Honor of Kings borrowed from the open-world concept, while this version borrows from Star River Paradise.

Even the trailer has a suspenseful feel to it.

DNF World is a project that didn't exist in the previous life. It's purely because Tencent saw that Spark made too much money from IP games, so they checked their own pockets.