Outrageous Charges; Desperate Numbers

Loading game...

Game loaded.

A blocky world much like Minecraft appeared before him.

After all, it was a game where players could create things. If it weren't made of blocks, the game data for each object would be enormous.

Chen Ze took a close look at Mini World's graphics.

Honestly, they were better than vanilla Minecraft's.

But... that was all.

Minecraft had plenty of shader and texture packs. The texture pack and shaders in Utopia Adventure Journey alone were better than Mini World's.

The sky... huh? Why did it look so familiar?

Chen Ze studied the sky and finally realized why it looked so familiar.

Wasn't this the sky from Bicycle Simulator, moved over here?

He grumbled inwardly but kept it to himself. He'd been paid, after all. He couldn't very well complain about the game while trying it on stream.

Although he hadn't said anything, the viewers in his stream had already noticed something was wrong.

[Holy crap, look at that sky. Isn't that the sky from Bicycle Simulator?]

[You're right, bro. The sky and the ground clash so badly they don't even look like they're from the same game.]

[Good grief, they're really taking the stitching to the extreme here, huh?]

[And the trees and stuff on the ground don't look much better than Minecraft's to me.]

[They're not just no better; they're way worse than Minecraft's. Minecraft has tons of high-quality texture packs that look a lot better than this.]

The viewers discussed the game in the live chat.

Although Chen Ze hadn't said anything yet, everyone could already tell something was off.

Wasn't this just a stitched-together monster that copied Minecraft and patched in a few scenes? And they were actually selling it?

While the stream buzzed with discussion, Chen Ze prepared to try the game.

Empty-handed, he went up to a tree and prepared to punch it. It was a sandbox game, after all, so he would definitely need wood.

He attacked the tree with his hand and, sure enough, saw a progress bar. It was similar to Minecraft, except for the addition of something like a progress bar.

Soon, a block of wood dropped, and Chen Ze calmly prepared to craft something.

The next second, a prompt appeared before him.

Unlock wood: 1 yuan.

When Chen Ze saw the prompt, he wondered for a moment if there was something wrong with his eyes.

Wait... it costs money to unlock items?

Are you kidding me!?

He wasn't the only one. Even the viewers couldn't hold it together.

[No way, guys. You have to pay to unlock items in this game!?]

[That's right, your eyes aren't fooling you. It costs one yuan to unlock wood.]

[Has the world gone mad, or has Qisheng lost its conscience? They turned a game into a pay-to-win game. You can't do anything without money.]

[Forget it. I'd rather play a couple of rounds of Bed Wars than watch this crappy game.]

[I'm out, guys. Call me when the trial's over. I mean it this time.]

Chen Ze noticed the change in his stream's viewer count. It had fallen from over a hundred thousand to ninety thousand.

But he couldn't say anything. He could only stare at the payment prompt before him, the corner of his mouth twitching.

He gritted his teeth. Qisheng had told him they would cover all the payments.

If they didn't, he would definitely wander around aimlessly in the game for an hour and then close it.

He paid and unlocked the wood.

Chen Ze opened his inventory and saw the wood inside.

He looked at the inventory interface. Its layout was identical to Minecraft's.

After sighing, he placed the wood in the crafting grid, and four planks appeared.

But when he clicked to craft them, another prompt appeared.

Unlock planks: 1 yuan.

Heh.

Chen Ze no longer had the energy to complain about the game. He promptly paid to unlock the planks and started messing around.

He wandered around the world and looked at things at random. He didn't even want to build the wooden house he liked.

After an hour, fewer than fifty thousand viewers remained in the stream.

He promptly closed the game, opened the Xingye Gaming Platform, and logged into Minecraft.

No, he had to have a taste of the good stuff. A game like Mini World had nearly made him sick.

Shencheng, Qisheng Game Company.

Liu Nong was looking at the game's download dashboard, cold sweat beading on his forehead.

So far, fewer than a thousand people had downloaded their game.

But the promotional period had already passed, and the streamers had finished promoting the game. How could there still be fewer than a thousand?

He nervously pulled up the total payments in the backend. As long as there was enough money, everything would be fine.

But when he pulled up the payment records and saw the total amount, his heart gave two heavy thumps.

82,327.7 yuan.

A little over eighty thousand in total!?

That wasn't a lot. It was... far too little.

That figure included the money the thousand players had spent buying the game.

Once the cost of purchasing the game was deducted, the total spent on top-ups was less than twenty thousand.

That even included the expenses the streamers had necessarily incurred while playing.

He opened the game's backend statistics. The average player had spent only ten minutes in the game.

That meant players had opened it, played for a bit, and closed it. No players had chosen to play for an extended period.

He slumped in his chair, unable to recover for a long time.

This game might be about to flop.

It was about to flop before players had even played it.

His arm trembled, and it took him several clicks to select the option to print the data.

Liu Nong was extremely anxious. He didn't dare face President Teng, because President Teng would definitely scold him over numbers like these.

But... what else could he do? In his position, failing to report it would be a serious dereliction of duty.

"Bzz, bzz, bzz~"

As the printed data came out of the printer, Liu Nong grabbed the still-warm paper, but his heart had already gone cold.

Damn it, I'm definitely finished this time.

Why aren't Mini World players willing to play? Their Mini World clearly has better, more impressive graphics than Minecraft, so why won't they play it?

Minecraft has already surpassed ten million players. Surely Mini World should have reached ten thousand on its first day, no matter what.

But the reality was that fewer than a thousand people had downloaded it. The figure was glaring and painful.

When he arrived outside President Teng's office on the top floor with the data, his legs were still trembling.

He stood at the door and took a deep breath before knocking on the office door with a trembling hand.

"Knock, knock, knock."

Inside the room.

Teng Hua was in an extremely somber mood. He had also just watched some game streamers playing Mini World.

The comments were almost all cursing them.

But so what? As long as he could make money, it had nothing to do with him, no matter how much they cursed.

Right now, he only wanted to know what the game's backend statistics looked like.

When he heard the knock at the door, he said, his tone somewhat excited, "Come in."