Chapter 262 - Gaming Platform Status

Chen Mo started going through the key points for The Stanley Parable and ICEY.

Both these games weren’t too difficult for the skill level the team was at. Moreover, these two games had really good reviews and were incredibly suitable to be used as filler.

The Stanley Parable is a classic meta game. The entire game is in first person, so all all that needed to be done was a few different endings and lines the player would experience. As long as the script was up to par, all that was left was creating the scenes in game.

And ICEY was a meta action game. The more complicated parts of the action aspect of the game included different moves and the designs of monsters. They were there to create an excellent combat experience, allowing players to kill monsters smoothly.

Moreover, the main selling point of ICEY was the story, and just like The Stanley Parable, it contained a lot of meta elements.

Both games were easy to develop and didn’t have a need for complicated scenes. Although there were many different branching stories, it wasn’t too difficult to make these games as long as the story was good.

In Chen Mo’s previous life, these two games gained immense popularity because they were meta games.

Meta games could be understood as a game about games. These show up often in TV series or novels, but games that utilize this are few and far between.

To put it simply, normally players would play from games for a bird eye view and the characters in game would never know the existence of the player. But in meta games, the fourth wall was constantly being broken, and the characters in the game would know the existence of the player and converse with them.

The main gist of it was, when you are playing the game watching the characters each and every movement as if you were some kind of higher being, but all of a sudden the character will turn around and look at you coldly saying, “Stop telling me what to do.”

And when the fourth wall is broken to a certain extent, it will be considered a meta game.

Excellent meta games will make the players feel surprised, or even that they have been played.

—

These games didn’t have much content, and the gameplay was fairly straight forward, everybody more or less understood the intentions behind the game after a simple explanation from Chen Mo.

There weren’t many questions this time around. Although they were surprised at a game like this, but all in all, everybody felt that a design like this was quite interesting.

Moreover, sales didn’t matter so much as these were smaller games. Especially when Chen Mo had made successful games on mobile, PC, and VR, he had enough funds to try making games he wanted.

The two games will be developed in parallel. Qian Kun was responsible for ICEY, Su Jinyu overlooked The Stanley Parable, and Zheng Hongxi Xi dealt with the story of both games.

Chen Mo on the other hand had bigger fish to fry.

—

In his own office, Chen Mo leaned into his chair, thinking.

On his screen were various statistics related to the Thunderbolt Gaming Platform.

Thunderbolt Gaming Platform had twelve games so far.

Mobile games included Flappybird, Plants vs Zombies, I Am MT, Thunderbolt Tabletop, Lifeline, Onmyoji, and Anipop.

PC games included Warcraft, Wulin Legend, Diablo, and Don’t Starve.

VR games included Minecraft.

And some of them were across multiple platforms.

Each and every game had different difficulties of development and different amounts of investment, but overall they were all successful games.

And players started getting the idea that Chen Mo’s game must be a high quality, something that only large overseas developers get.

All these games were oversaw by Chen Mo to ensure that they exceeded the quality of the originals in his previous life.

In reality, the number of games didn’t matter so much to the gaming platform. For example, Blizzard.net in his previous life only had six games, but it didn’t change the fact that it was one of the most successful gaming platforms in China.

The main point was still the quality of the game.

But the reason for Chen Mo making his own platform wasn’t just to have his own gaming platform like Blizzard.

He wanted Thunderbolt Gaming Platform to be a comprehensive distribution platform like Stanley.

And from some experience he had from his previous life, Chen Mo put a lot of emphasis on the importance of a video game distribution platform.

To developers, sure the quality of the game is incredibly important. As long as the games were good, their name would be well known, they wouldn’t have to worry about having no players or no money.

But the functions of a distribution platform greatly exceeds the players’ expectations. Many developers get down on all fours in front of video game distributions as they are forced to change many aspects of their finished game. There have even been cases of developers who buried their own game because they couldn’t find a good distributor.

And the power of the distributor’s game from its user base aka the players.

If a distributor had one million players, it could comfortably make money.

If a distributor had ten million players, even a garbage game could make money with promotion from the platform.

If a distributor had one hundred million players, it wouldn’t be far from monopolizing the entire video game industry.

Moreover, some of the games that gained immense popularity didn’t just depend on its quality, the power of the distributors shouldn’t be overlooked. In the videogame industry, whoever had the most players and built the biggest distributor, held the most power.

Chen Mo had been smooth sailing thus far, but he didn’t want to be restricted by any distribution platforms in the future.

Therefore Chen Mo decided to not depend on a single platform from the start. Even if he could lose players from this, he insisted on building his own platform, and even made games to expand the amount of players he had on Thunderbolt Gaming Platform.

At this point, Thunderbolt Gaming Platform was similar to Blizzard.net in his previous life, just a platform that collects games coupled with basic functions, yet it still did well for itself.

Thunderbolt Gaming Platform had 5.4 active users in the long term, and around 1.7 million daily active users, a night and day difference from when he started.

Most of these active players came from Thunderbolt Tabletop, Onmyoji, and Anipop. Warcraft players have been stable, and Minecraft players are seen to continuously increase.

This meant that Thunderbolt Gaming Plants was already one of the most influential gaming platforms in China.

Other than the official app store, the biggest gaming platforms in China included Emperor Dynasty Gaming Platform, Fantasy Gaming Platform, and Thunderbolt Gaming Platform (in order of largest to smallest), with Zen Entertainment following closely behind.

However, there was a difference between these four companies. Emperor Dynasty Entertainment focused on developing and its platform, Fantasy Gaming Platform basically only focused on its platform, and Zen Entertainment focused on developing games and largely ignored building their platform.