Losing Money to Be a Tycoon

“Brother Qian, you’re not mad at me for spending too much money, are you? Do you think that it’s not worth investing so much in such a small company overseas?”

Pei Qian was speechless. “…”

Looking into Old Ma’s sincere eyes, Pei Qian felt speechless.

How should I put this…?

Pei Qian had been the one who told Old Ma to act when he saw the chance to and not to hesitate.

Pei Qian had also been the one who told Old Ma to invest in whatever he liked.

Playing Gods Rising with friends was one of Old Ma’s few hobbies. Since Old Ma failed to invest in Gods Rising, he had no choice but to back off and look for similar games companies overseas to invest in. What’s more, he threw all twenty million yuan into that one company.

In more ways than one, Old Ma had just been doing what Pei Qian had told him to do.

What’s more, this transaction looked quite unpromising on the surface. It fit perfectly with what Pei Qian wanted at first.

Yet, Pei Qian felt pained inside. He had a strong sense of deja vu with this company!

Was IOI in fact League of Legends (LOL) post-changes?

The main reason that Pei Qian felt so shocked by the turn of events was that he had found similar news online last year!

Based on what he remembered, Riot Games was founded in 2006. In 2008, they tried to raise eight million US dollars. Three investors provided them with funds. After that, Tencent bought it over for more than two hundred million US dollars. That happened in 2011.

According to his memory, LOL was released in 2009.

Now, they were in November 2010. In other words, the company should already have raised eight million US dollars by now.

Pei Qian tried to look online for news about this last year, but he could not find any.

At the time, he did not think much of it. He had thought that this was just another change in the world. After all, even the B-Site had become Aili Island. It would be natural if other companies underwent similar changes.

Pei Qian did not dwell on it either. The company was overseas, and he did not have a network that expanded throughout the world.

Now, Pei Qian finally understood why he could not find any news about this.

The company and game’s names were different now. Riot Games was now Finger Games, and LOL was now IOI. Thus, Pei Qian could not find anything to do with the original names!

Moreover, the entire timeline had been shifted back by two years. Finger Games was probably established just last year. Naturally, there would not be much news about a newly-established company online.

In fact, Pei Qian had wondered how Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games would look like in this world.

He just never thought that he would find out the answer today and in such a ridiculous manner at that…

However, after scanning the System’s screen, Pei Qian realized that everything was still the same.

The shares worth over two million US dollars should have been considered similar in nature to the villa. As special assets of the company, they should have been displayed on the System’s screen.

Perhaps this was because the purchase was not complete—not all the paperwork was done. Thus, the System could not formally list the shares as the company’s assets.

Many thoughts were flashing across Pei Qian’s mind. He stared into Old Ma’s sincere eyes, not knowing exactly how to respond at that moment.

Should he criticize Old Ma? Yet, that did not seem right. Old Ma had done exactly as Pei Qian had instructed him to, without missing anything out.

He invested all twenty million yuan into a small company overseas. This was exactly what Dream Realization Ventures was created for. Pei Qian could not possibly turn around and blame Ma Yang for that now!

Could he praise Ma Yang? Hmm, he should. This kind of investment had the potential to give Ma Yang lifetime bragging rights.

Yet… Pei Qian could not bring himself to praise Ma Yang.

Pei Qian took two deep breaths and forced himself to nod. “It’s nothing. You did quite well.

“But I don’t think we have any more spare cash for now. Old Ma, give everyone some work to do for now. Play some games if you want to. Wait for me to update you on the next step.”

Pei Qian stood up and prepared to leave. He could not spend a minute more in this heart-breaking place.

Suddenly, Ma Yang raised his hand. “Ai, Brother Qian, are you really not going to try playing a game with the professionals? They’re all gods with about 1800 points on the platform!”

IL

Pei Qian was speechless. “…”

Ma Yang spoke again. “I’m going to call Branch Manager Lin directly to arrange for the dinner on Saturday. Is that alright?”

Pei Qian was speechless.”…”

You still have the cheek to accept a treat from me!

Unable to speak, Pei Qian had no choice but to gesture an ‘okay’ with his back towards Ma Yang. Then, without turning back, he left.

When he arrived back at Tengda Games, Pei Qian sat down in his own office. He had already spent some time thinking back on his life. Now, he had to think about how to deal with what just happened.

The cycle had just begun, and yet someone had already pulled such a stunt. This came as a complete shock to Pei Qian.

They bought 20% shares and obtained the right to be IOI’s exclusive local agent. The nail had already been hit into the coffin. Pei Qian could not undo this investment or transfer the newly-bought shares to someone else.

That was because he had no good reason to do so.

What if he sold the shares later on? The shares in Finger Games would surely appreciate in value. If he sold them, he would definitely earn a huge sum of money.

The more Pei Qian thought about it, the surer he was that he could not sell the shares.

He would be stupid to sell them midway through!

If Finger Games could really become what Pei Qian imagined, the exclusive agency rightsin addition to the shares-would earn Tengda a lot of money.

Earning money was indeed akin to feces in Boss Pei’s eyes. Yet… Boss Pei could not ignore too many feces.

If IOI earned billions of yuan every year-no matter how the System adjusted the Profit Conversion Ratios, Pei Qian would still gain a lot of Personal Wealth. If it were merely millions of yuan, the sum would be insignificant to Pei Qian. However, billions of yuan would be a totally different story.

Moreover, if Pei Qian allowed his imagination to run wild, he might even be able to create unique skins and heroes named after himself!

All of that sounded pretty enchanting!

If this really happened, Pei Qian would just have to lie back and earn money without doing anything. That sounded like nothing short of a good plan, too. He could earn a lot of System Funds and spend it on logistics and physical industries to give back to society.

He could also earn foreigners’ money to give back to his own country. He would be the epitome of a rooted, patriotic, and young man.

Of course, none of these were guaranteed as well.

The entire world was different now. What’s more, the company and game were different from what Pei Qian remembered. Who could promise that IOI would achieve the same level of success as LOL?

Even if they did, that would only happen in two or three more years.

Until then, a lot of advertising and hard work still had to be down. The game could only conquer the global games market at the right time and in the right place.

Who could tell what would happen in three or four years?

While the grass grew, the horse starved. Even if Pei Qian could really lie back and generate profits in three or four years, Pei Qian’s current strategy would remain unaffected.

At the end of the day-for the sake of his long-term goals, Pei Qian had to keep the shares and exclusive agency rights.

If it generated profit for him in the short-term, he could think of other ways to spend the additional money. He could spend it on logistics, warehouses, or charity. In any case, he would just have to think of different avenues to spend money in order to do his part for society.

When he thought about things from this angle, the situation did not seem so bad.

He still had hopes of incurring losses.

What’s more, the more Pei Qian thought about it, the more inspired he became. Suddenly, a good idea surfaced in his mind.

“Just as well. I’ll use this opportunity to take more risks! Since IOI already exists in this world, it means that the future winner has already been set.

“If I create a MOBA game as well, isn’t it guaranteed to fail?

“It would become like a bottomless pit. I’ll be able to pour as much money as I want into it without seeing any returns!”

All of a sudden, Pei Qian found a new opportunity to spend money. One could say that every cloud did have a silver lining!

The future IOI was destined to become popular around the globe. A good-quality game like Gods Rising could still survive, but other client-side MOBA games would probably die a horrible death or be chucked to the back of gamers’ minds.

Since that was the case, Tengda Games could create a MOBA game and guarantee failure, right?

Pei Qian would invest fifty million yuan in the game first. If the situation looked negative, Pei Qian would invest another fifty million yuan into it. Ultimately, the game should not be able to compete with IOI and end up failing. That would make ducks and drakes of Tengda’s investment.

It would be the perfect scenario, right?

The more Pei Qian thought about it, the more reliable the plan seemed!

He had intended to give Tengda Games a budget of fifty million yuan, but he had no idea how they could spend it. Now, he no longer needed to worry. He had an aim!

At that, Pei Qian quickly called Li Yada in.

“I have an idea for a new game. Take some simple notes.”

Li Yada quickly retrieved her little notebook from her pocket. “Alright, Boss Pei. Please go ahead.”

Pei Qian pondered for a moment and asked, “Have you played Gods Rising before? Make something similar. The new game will be of the same genre.

“The name would be… GOG, which will stand for Glory of Gods.”

Since LOL, IOI, COC, and WOW already existed; Pei Qian realized that not many English alphabets remained.

That was why he chose GOG. There was no special meaning: he just wanted the game to quickly go GG[1].

Li Yada waited.

A minute passed. Puzzled, she asked, “That’s it?”

Pei Qian nodded. “That’s right.”

We’re just creating this game to spend as much money as possible. You all would be free to do whatever you want with it.

After some thought, Li Yada said, “Would it be… inappropriate if we just follow Gods Rising? Gameplay cannot be patented, but I think we’ll be cursed at for sure.”

Pei Qian nodded. “Yes, that’s logical.”

Boss Pei’s aim was only to lose money and not to destroy his or his company’s reputation. There was no need to attract unnecessary criticism.

“Since that’s the case, all of you can make amendments as you wish. Just make sure you amend it so that it becomes unrecognizable. Players should not think of us as copycats after playing the game.

“The first version will have about twenty-odd heroes. We’ll aim to release it in four months.

“The budget would be fifty million yuan. Work as hard and spend as much money as you need. If you don’t have enough, I can provide more.”

Li Yada was stunned. “Huh? That much? I don’t think we’ll be able to spend it all.”

You won’t be able to spend it all?

Pei Qian was unhappy that his own employees were not taking the initiative to think of creative ideas.

As if he had expected better from her, Pei Qian asked, “Do you need me to teach you how to spend money? Buy more art resources, models, actions, story backgrounds, and other details…”

Embarrassed, Li Yada looked down at her notebook. “But… Boss Pei, if we only need one image and twenty-odd heroes, we would not need that much money for art resources…”

Pei Qian was speechless. “…”

On further thought, that seemed true.

Thanks to the official website for resources, ESRO, the capital required for researching and developing games was now much lower.

It would indeed be quite difficult for them to spend fifty million yuan in just four months on one image and twenty-odd heroes.

What should he do, then?

Pei Qian fell into deep thought. Could he lend the experience of other MOBA games?

Many MOBA games had failed. Yet, did they fail because of poor gameplay, bugs in the system, or bad advertising?

Pei Qian really could not tell.

After much contemplation, Pei Qian finally thought of a decent way out.

He thought about games continually being tested after being produced and were never officially released because of the creator’s fears. That happened because those creators would be pronounced bankrupt once their games were released. Pei Qian thought that there was much to learn from their experience!

Of course, he could not steal their copyrights without paying

If he did that, he would not be allowed to release the game. If he failed to settle for two cycles, the System would shut down on Boss?Pei.

However, what if he bought the copyrights? How much would that cost?!

He would not have to worry about not being able to finish spending the System Funds! As long as he kept purchasing copyrights, he could spend as much money as he wanted.

This was a good idea to Pei Qian. “We’ll buy

IP!

“Be it domestically or overseas, we can buy any character IPs we find suitable. Even if they’re expensive-as long as we can insert them into our game, we will do so.

“Oh, forget about the popular IPs worth more than a million US dollars. We’ll just buy more cheap IPs.”

Purchasing expensive character IPs would allow Pei Qian to spend more money. Some especially famous IPs could not even be bought with money.

However, such IPs also had a strong attractive force. What would Pei Qian do if they brought loads of fans with them and made the game extremely famous?

What’s more, the bigger the IP, the more trivial matters the holding company would have to take care of. Pei Qian did not want to discuss details of contracts with large overseas companies all day. It would be a waste of his time and effort.

Thus, Pei Qian aimed to pick up as much trash as he could.

Be it domestically or overseas, he would find outdated or unpopular character IPs and buy them all with the aim of collecting rubbish. He would then insert them into the game and design special functions based on these characters.

If the ones he found were different in style from the game, he would engage in discussions with the creators first. Then, he would spend another sum of money hiring a professional artist to recreate the characters.

This way, he could spend money very quickly.

Moreover, rubbish IPs would prove utterly useless. They would not bring much traffic to their game, and their price-quality ratio would be through the roof.

Li Yada had many questions. After all, this was her first real project as the chief planner.

However, Pei Qian waved his hand. “Alright, that’s all for now. Go and have a think about it. Don’t ask me everything. I don’t want to influence your thought process.”

Li Yada pressed her fingers together and said, “Alright… alright, Boss Pei.”

She turned around and walked out of Boss Li’s office. Li Yada felt that this mission was too heavy, particularly because games like Gods Rising were not her forte.

The more she thought about it, the more impossible it seemed to improve a game like Gods Rising in such a short amount of time.

It looked like she had to consult Bao Xu in secret.

[1] This is an acronym for ‘Good Game’, which usually signifies the end of something.