Channel Backstab

In Xu Meng's view, the task issued by the Game of Life System should be considered complete here.

Yet for some reason, that very low-profile system didn't react at all.

By midnight that night, the first official day of the Frost Snow Project remastered version ended, and all-channel gross revenue astonishingly surged past 38 million in one go! Among this, more than two-thirds came from mobile devices—meaning players using smartphones and tablets to play the game.

This also caused the Frost Snow Project to surge to the top ranks of single-day mobile game sales across multiple channels.

—Several channels even directly broke into the top three.

This was the mobile game charts, not the ACG Game charts!

A proper dark horse posture! To the former Dream Builder, this was completely an unreachable dream.

Yet to the current Frost Snow Project, it was merely a beginning.

There was still an entire month left in June, and the Frost Snow Project still held back an ultimate skill with brand-new gameplay; this turnaround battle was far from settled.

By the end of the month, the total revenue of the Frost Snow Project would definitely deliver a massive shock to the entire industry.

Xu Meng was full of confidence regarding this!

A night passed, and the heat that Xu Meng had painstakingly hyped up for the Frost Snow Project began to slowly cool down.

The Weiguang trending searches had long since vanished, and even yesterday's hottest topic, "Dream Builder boss burns programmer to death," discussions were gradually decreasing.

Right now, everyone was gossiping about a certain female celebrity's affair.

That P Station trailer, which Xu Meng had hyped through reverse psychology and which had flourished briefly for two days, also lacked staying power, stopping its view count at 4.6 million.

—More people had run over to Weiguang or Dreamjin to watch the "uncensored" version.

Yet this drop in popularity was merely an illusion—

In the ACG Game circle, the popularity of the Frost Snow Project remained in a tier of its own! Before major version updates from top-tier ACG Games like Abyss of Gods, Warring Kingdoms, and Divine Bird, there were completely no other opponents capable of putting up a fight.

Player concurrency and activity levels were also far higher than industry averages.

Total player counts were still growing steadily.

Judging by ACG Game standards, this growth rate was already quite considerable.

Yet compared to the explosive growth driven by trending searches for traffic, it was far too slow.

—From launch yesterday until midnight, the Frost Snow Project gained a full 7 million registered users in 12 hours, averaging nearly 600,000 new users per hour! But today...

Although early in the morning on a workday, there were still tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand user growths per hour—a result that, placed in the ACG Game circle, was an achievement capable of making countless companies green with envy and wishing they could take its place.

Even Song Zhicheng, an old hand, was extremely excited upon seeing this growth, reporting the good news to the boss almost every hour.

Only Xu Meng looked at that leisurely growth curve, filled entirely with once you've seen the ocean, ordinary waters are hard to impress.

He just always felt it was slow!

This led to him having rather low work enthusiasm all morning, simply slacking off and ignoring everything else, studying the Intelligent Collaboration Development Tool by himself in his office.

Over the past month, all departments at Dream Builder had grown accustomed to this set of tools, and were astonished by its iteration speed.

Especially the technology-savvy programming department, who regarded it as miraculous.

Only Xu Meng knew—

He hadn't done any iterations for this tool.

The iterations felt by the employees were actually the intelligent core of this tool growing on its own.

Just like an AI large model ingesting massive amounts of training data and constantly iterating to become smarter and smarter.

The intelligent core of this Intelligent Collaboration Development Tool was also greedily absorbing knowledge in drawing, modeling, programming, and even communication and creation like a sponge absorbing water amid the high-intensity use by Dream Builder employees, insatiably.

And this continuous grinding and evolution, manifested in usage, meant it became increasingly handy and efficient.

Everyone was busy with work and had no time to think too much.

—Normal people wouldn't think a single boss could develop an artificial intelligence large model, let alone that massive training data wasn't something a cash-strapped, near-bankrupt company like Dream Builder could afford.

Yet Xu Meng was different; having experienced a sudden death, he paid close attention to his workload and would also leave spare and empty time for himself.

Therefore, he quickly realized:

The potential of this intelligent core went far beyond this!

Its evolution speed proved that its learning ability far surpassed the AI large models on the market.

It was very likely that it could achieve rapid evolution without requiring such terrifying amounts of data training.

That was to say—

If things went well, Dream Builder might actually be able to support it themselves!

If this thing were really raised, that would be extraordinary! Developing games, testing bugs, fixing bugs, gathering information, arguing online, daily banter...

How much help could this provide?

Xu Meng grew interested, starting to attempt copying the intelligent core out independently, while pondering what interfaces to add to this core and what "textbooks" to feed it.

Once fully immersed in research work, time passed very quickly.

In the blink of an eye for Xu Meng, it was already noon.

Little assistant Chen Mengling gently knocked on the door, waking the working boss up: "Boss, it's time, we should head out for the team dinner."

"Oh, right." Xu Meng sobered up from the world of 0s and 1s, shaking his somewhat itchy head, "Coming right up."

He nimbly saved the code, preparing to get up and head out.

Yet right at this moment, an anxious voice suddenly came from outside—

"Boss, it's bad!"

Inside the office, Xu Meng and the little assistant exchanged glances, question marks popping up over both their heads.

Chen Mengling: Why does this line sound so familiar?

Xu Meng: Isn't this your catchphrase? The office door happened to be open, and an anxious Song Zhicheng didn't bother with any etiquette, walking straight in:

"Boss, it's bad, something happened!"

"Don't rush, speak slowly, what happened?" Xu Meng placated him.

Yet Song Zhicheng couldn't calm down at all: "The Frost Snow Project has been delisted by the channels!"

Now Xu Meng couldn't remain calm either: "Which ones?"

Like most ACG Game peers, in order to secure as many users as possible, the Frost Snow Project had several cooperative channel servers in addition to its own official server.

Unlike those small game developers who handed games over to channels for operation, Xu Meng and Zhang Yang had huge ambitions, aiming for the major manufacturer model from the very beginning.

Although lacking bargaining power and unable to achieve multi-platform interoperability at the start, they had also made practical efforts to achieve this step once they had the strength in the future.

—The critical rights for long-term game operation were clutched tightly in their own hands, and for this, they didn't grudge losing some promotional resources.

Among these channel servers, the most prominent was naturally P Station, the hometown of ACG Game.

As for the rest, they were game distribution channels built by hardware manufacturers and third-party app stores established early on by internet companies.

As for higher-threshold console platforms and overseas servers, those weren't things a rookie company like Dream Builder had the strength to do.

—In fact, the ACG Game circle only had Abyss of Gods and Warring Kingdoms making accomplishments in these two aspects, while Divine Bird only opened overseas servers and hadn't ascended to console platforms.

"Snow Factory Le Commerce, Green Factory Cloud Intelligence, and Bear Factory Mobile Assistant," Song Zhicheng replied swiftly.

Xu Meng paused for a moment, mentally translating Song Zhicheng's habitual industry jargon before figuring out the situation.

The first two were mobile hardware channels, while the third was a third-party app store—backed by Bear Claw Search, the largest search engine in Xia State.

"The reason?" Xu Meng asked, "It can't be that they delisted our game for no reason?"

As soon as he finished speaking, he reacted: "Because of character exposure issues?"

Unexpectedly, Song Zhicheng shook his head immediately: "There's that aspect, but more importantly: we've been reported by too many people."

"Reported? Water armies? Or that wave of social justice warriors?"

Ever since its transformation, the Frost Snow Project had constantly been attacked by extreme feminist and water army organizations, so Xu Meng thought of them first.

"Probably not water armies." Song Zhicheng shook his head again.

"Water armies mostly come from competing manufacturers, and they maintain a sense of proportion when attacking us without crossing the baseline."

"This is also an industry tacit understanding and self-protection, because once the baseline is broken, they won't fare well themselves either."

"So it's those social justice warriors?"

"Most likely." Song Zhicheng nodded, "Those brainwashed extreme feminist organizations have completely no scruples."

"They've been instigating female netizens to report the Frost Snow Project together, and now too many people have been instigated—so many that the channels can no longer ignore it."

"Not only that, they also used unified messages to threaten the channels, saying that if they didn't delist the Frost Snow Project, they would report the entire channel to higher-level authorities."

"And then they delisted our game?" Xu Meng confirmed.

"Yes, just a few minutes ago," Song Zhicheng said helplessly. "Not only was the game delisted, even the servers can't be logged into anymore."

Now Xu Meng was truly stunned.

The Frost Snow Project being targeted by extreme feminist organizations didn't surprise him—this was practically to be expected.

What puzzled him, however, was: were these channel operators really this easy to bully?

Asking for monthly passes, pursuit readings, and recommendations!