Chapter 189 - What Should the New Game be About?

Pei Qian opened the email. En, there were males and females, and a total of twenty-odd of them. Since they were all history majors, there were more females than males. Most of these people’s resumes were clean. Basically, they had not gotten many awards. They did not even have many strong points.

As for their looks—to put it politely, they were ordinary.

That was expected. Companies would probably be willing to hire beautiful ladies. Even if they did not have many skills, they would be pleasing to the eyes.

These were leftovers in July. Basically, they had the following merits:

Their grades were poor, and they did not qualify for postgraduate studies. They had no connections, and nobody could find jobs on their behalf. They had not done any student jobs or worked part-time and could not find jobs for themselves.

All in all, they were perfect!

En, he would really be taking in a bunch of hoodlums this time, wouldn’t he?

Pei Qian was very satisfied. After looking through their resumes, he decided that he would take every last one of them!

There was a particularly apt saying: ‘There is no rubbish in the world; there are only misplaced resources.’

To Pei Qian, these people were appropriately referred to as misplaced resources!

“However, I have to think about what job to give them.”

Pei Qian began to ponder about the positions he had on hand.

Could he send them to the games department?

That wouldn’t be right.

The games department’s framework was largely complete. Their operations were proceeding without any problems as well.

At the very most, these people would be doing odd jobs in the games department. No matter how horrible their skills were, they would not be able to cause real disturbance to the games.

Pei Qian could not possibly parachute them into management positions in the games department as well. It would be too illogical, and he would arouse suspicions.

Can I send them to Fish-Catching Internet Cafe?

The roles there were more physical—they would be waiters or deliverymen. These people were his seniors after all. It would not look nice on his part to send them to clear tables or serve food.

What’s more, anyone could do jobs like these. Their true value would not be realized.

“I should start a new company for these people.”

Pei Qian’s eyes lit up. He had an idea.

He would start a new company and send all of these people in. They would be able to fully realize their potential. How great would that be?!

Of course, the boss of this new company had to be one of his own. On one hand, this boss could not be someone who made cheap shots and evaded taxes. These people were his seniors, but they were strangers after all. Pei Qian could not trust them. On the other hand, immediately placing them in management positions would not make any sense. People would get suspicious.

Pei Qian began to look for a lucky man from his own company. He would make this man the boss of the new company and put people under him to be in charge of finance, administrative work, and the like. Then, he would recruit this new batch of employees into that company. That would make much more sense.

After that, the company would start running and incurring losses. Everything sounded perfect.

Pei Qian pondered over this for two more minutes and suddenly thought of another idea.

Don’t I still have hidden danger to deal with? That’s just as well. I’ll settle it once and for all!

Ma Yiqun is still writing plots and plans for Tengda Games. Pei Qian had hired him initially to act as a lucky charm so that he could neutralize his own luck. However, he could not come up with any more reasons to allow Ma Yiqun to continue idling. That was why he reluctantly arranged for him to be in charge of plots for the games.

In the end, Ma Yiqun beautified the synopses and added a bunch of points to the game narratives of several games.

Pei Qian had to think of a way to send someone like that away!

This time, he had a chance to. As for how he should do it… Pei Qian had thought about this a long time ago.

He would create a website for webnovels!

First, this was Ma Yiqun’s dream. Helping employees achieve their dreams was Boss Pei’s mission.

Second, Ma Yiqun failed consecutively each time he tried to write novels. This proved that he did not have what it took to make it in this line. If Pei Qian put him in charge of this company, he could relax.

Last, it would be relatively easy for Pei Qian to incur losses in the online novel industry.

There was already a very developed and established website for online literature in this world, and it was called Limitless Chinese Language Network. It was now a large-scale website with a huge scope. Other people had tried entering the market, but very few of them succeeded. Most of them failed.

Pei Qian could enter the market and act as if he were completely fooling around. He would invest a sum of money into nurturing a group of editors and authors. Under Ma Yiqun’s leadership, the company would incur losses for sure!

Actually, on second thought, he should have started a website for online literature long ago. The range of money one could invest in a business like this was huge. There were ways to invest a million yuan, and there were ways to invest a hundred billion yuan.

He could buy over the goods of various websites with high prices, pour huge sums of money into establishing marketing channels and dealing with copyrights, and so on. This would result in extremely high expenses.

However, if he just wanted to create an ordinary website, he only needed to hire a group of editors and buy lousy manuscripts at low prices. He could pay token sums as remuneration and spend a little money to rent a cloud server and domain name online. In fact, a million yuan would probably be enough to set up a website like that.

Pei Qian pondered for a while and decided that he could give Ma Yiqun a million or so yuan to play around with. If he could really incur losses, he would pour more money into the venture.

At that thought, Pei Qian’s mood improved vastly.

Pei Qian arrived at the office in the afternoon.

The first thing he had to do was assign the work in the games department. After updating the downloadable content, the games department was allowed to skive off for a while. Now, since the new cycle had begun, Pei Qian had to start giving them work to do.

After all, the system mandated that employees could not remain passive and slack at work. They had to release new products every once in a while. Everyone was waiting hopefully for the research plan for the next game to be announced.

However, Pei Qian did not ask everyone to gather for a meeting this time. There were too many people in the office now. The conference room could no longer accommodate everyone.

He only asked Lu Mingliang, Bao Xu, and the other core members of the various departments to attend the meeting

This time, Pei Qian planned to explain the general concept he had in his head to all of them. He would set a rigid template for the direction of the game and allow them to think about the details on their own.

The main problem was that Pei Qian could not set the details even if he wanted to. He just did not have the necessary skills to think about them…

Soon, everyone arrived in the conference room.

Lin Wan was present as well. She held onto her small notebook, ready to take notes. Ma Yiqun was in the conference room, too. He did not have a notebook in hand, but he looked especially serious.

Silently, Pei Qian thought about them. I’ll deal with the two of you once the meeting ends!

Pei Qian pondered for a long time about the concept of the new game. By now, he roughly knew what had to be done. He had to learn from his experience and not commit the same mistakes that he made before.

Pei Qian could not create a lousy game and sell it at a high price to con others because of the system’s rules. Although he had the freedom to set the price within a fixed range, he still had to make sure the price he set largely corresponded to the amount of money and effort he invested into the game.

At the same time, thanks to the first few wildly popular games, many gamers now had their eyes on new games produced by Tengda.

This new game would probably be popular even before its release. Pei Qian could not hope for the same circumstances as The Lonely Desert Road and Ghost General. He could not just plan not to market the game and hope that nobody would find out about it.

Since that was the case, he had to create a niche, public game. He had to invest huge amounts of money into it. He had to create a game that people would not buy and play even if they knew about it!

Pei Qian knew many games like that. Souls-like games and difficult 2D platform games were examples of such games.

Pei Qian had no plans to create a 2D platform game because it did not require much investment. This meant that he could not incur much loss. If he wanted to create a game, he had to make it complex. He needed to spend more money on art resources.

Of course, Pei Qian also knew that Miyazaki Hidetaka’s Souls-like games were extremely successful. Their sales were high, and they were not loss-incurring products.

However, when considering a problem, one had to think about multiple factors. For any type of game genre, there were unpopular and popular games. The key was in the details.

Many game producers wanted to produce Souls-like games as well, but how many of them actually succeeded? In the end, they all failed, one by one. This proved that only Miyazaki Hidetaka had relevant expertise.

Pei Qian did not think that he would be as skillful as Miyazaki Hidetaka.

What’s more, even if he wanted to persist and create perfect Souls-like games, he would not be able to do so. He did not have that much money. Considering the eight million yuan that the system had and the income from various games and other areas and then deducting the various expenses…

Pei Qian guessed that the most he would be able to spend on this game was about twenty million yuan or so.

This sum would not be enough for him to create a true AAA game.

He probably had enough researchers and developers. After all, it took thirty people to create a game like Metro 2033. Pei Qian had about sixty to seventy researchers and developers on hand. He was even going to recruit more after this.

However, considering that they only had four months to research and develop a new game, the employees would probably still have a lot on their plate. They would still have to find ways to compress the game’s content.

In other words, he would only be able to create a compressed version of the game. The contents of the game would be greatly reduced.

This would further increase the chances of the game failing!