Pei Qian took a deep breath, doing his best to stay calm.
Something was seriously wrong.
Stay calm. You have to stay calm!
Now he finally understood the truth behind everyone's expressions:
Huang Sibo wasn't staring at his screen in disbelief because the data was bad—but because the numbers were way beyond his best-case expectations!
Xiao Lu wasn't anxious because of failure—he was too excited to sit still!
And Bao Xu?
He was reflecting on life…
But not for the reason Pei Qian had imagined…
"President Pei, here's the champagne."
Xin Hailu approached with a smile, handing over a bottle.
Pei Qian glanced at it.
It was a very fancy champagne bottle, adorned with platinum detailing and covered in engraved English text.
Conservatively, it had to be five figures in value.
But Pei Qian had no interest in champagne right now.
Because deep down, he knew:
With the amount of money Ocean Fortress just made him, he could buy hundreds of bottles like this and still have more than he could ever spend.
Still, with all eyes on him, he couldn't just turn around and leave.
He had to keep up appearances.
He couldn't risk anyone becoming suspicious of the system or the nature of his "challenge."
Pei Qian took a deep breath, accepted the bottle, and—
POP!
The cork flew off with a sharp burst, golden bubbles gushed out, and the unique aroma of champagne filled the air.
The room exploded into celebration!
The twin receptionists launched their confetti cannons and flower blasters—golden streamers rained down like a festive downpour!
The whole office broke into singing, laughing, and dancing. Xiao Lu was so worked up he nearly slid across the floor on his knees—Huang Sibo barely managed to stop him in time.
Amid this chaotic energy, Pei Qian forced a smile:
"Everyone did well. Keep up the good work."
Still smiling, he walked calmly into his office and shut the door behind him.
As Pei Qian's silhouette vanished, Huang Sibo looked on with admiration.
"Truly, everything was part of President Pei's grand plan!"
"He foresaw all of this. That's why he's so calm—even now. To him, this is just business as usual!"
"Compared to him, we're just a bunch of wide-eyed rookies—overjoyed by a tiny bit of success…"
"Will I ever have a mindset as composed and enlightened as President Pei…?"
He muttered to himself while refreshing the backend dashboard again.
Ocean Fortress had officially exploded in popularity.
Of course, in Huang Sibo's mind, that was only natural—after all, this was a game directed by President Pei himself.
It was bound to succeed.
Nothing surprising about it.
Once he understood President Pei's design vision, both he and Bao Xu had a gut feeling the game would do well.
They just hadn't expected it to blow up this hard, to the point of crushing Bullet Hole, developed by the industry heavyweight Tianhuo Studio!
Even more shocking was how President Pei had pulled off yet another masterstroke!
With Ghost General, he had already proven he could achieve maximum marketing effect with minimal resources.
That time, he had gone off the beaten path, leveraging connections in the illustration community to generate buzz, which naturally spilled over into the mainstream player base.
This time, Huang Sibo had been waiting to see what new trick President Pei would come up with.
He even brainstormed a few thrifty marketing strategies himself.
But as it turns out?
He was completely wrong.
President Pei hadn't planned any marketing at all.
Because he already knew that this game doesn't need promotion.
Its word-of-mouth, grassroots buzz, and organic algorithmic recommendations would be more than enough.
How domineering! How confident!
Just how precise must one's understanding of the market be to show that level of composure and control?
Even when opening the champagne, President Pei maintained that calm, assured expression—like he had just completed a small, mundane task.
Huang Sibo was in awe. Fully convinced, inside and out.
. . . . . .
Meanwhile, inside Pei Qian's office…
He slumped back in his chair, stunned.
What… what the hell was going on?
Did I get handed the wrong script or something?
Why?!
Why did this game blow up despite me not doing any promotion?
Is there no justice?
No order in this world?
This makes absolutely no sense!
There was no Ruan Guangjian this time—no famous artist secretly boosting the game behind his back.
So where did it all go wrong?!
Pei Qian tried to calm himself, took a deep breath, and opened his computer.
He needed to reconstruct the chain of events—because until he got to the bottom of this, he would never know peace.
Logging into the official platform, he pulled up the backend data for Ocean Fortress.
The moment he saw it, he shivered.
One week post-launch… concurrent players: 100,000.
And that wasn't even the ceiling!
That 100k wasn't due to a lack of demand—it was because the cloud servers only supported 100,000 concurrent users.
There were still players stuck in queue trying to get in.
In general, server costs aren't the biggest expense in running an online game—unless you're at the scale of World of Warcraft or League of Legends.
For typical mobile games, a server hosting around 3,000 active users might only cost a few hundred RMB.
The expensive part is bandwidth: the more people online at once, the more bandwidth you need—and that gets exponentially more expensive.
For a game like Ghost General, a lightweight card game, server costs were negligible.
And Ocean Fortress, as a multiplayer FPS, had many players playing solo campaign offline using local processing.
Even the PvP modes were instance-based—small rooms of players per match.
In theory, the bandwidth strain should've been way lower than that of large-scale MMO battles.
And Pei Qian had calculated all of this.
He was so sure the game would flop, he didn't even buy much bandwidth!
Yet in just a few days, the game's active player count exploded from a few hundred to 100,000+ concurrent users.
People were literally waiting in line to play.
And the kicker?
Over 1,000 Fire Qilins had already been sold, raking in a net profit of over 400,000 RMB!
Pei Qian collapsed into his chair, completely paralyzed.
Four hundred thousand might not be that hard to spend in theory.
But this was just the beginning.
Based on his experience with Ghost General, the real money started flowing after the first week.
If Ocean Fortress continued to explode in popularity, next week's revenue would only increase.
With the user base growing exponentially, Fire Qilin sales would also climb.
At this rate, monthly revenue could easily break 3 million—conservatively.
And that's with Pei Qian's intentional "handbrake" pricing strategy in place.
He made the game completely free to download, and aside from the Fire Qilin, there was literally nothing else you could spend money on.
Only a handful of whales were even capable of spending money—and yet the game still netted over 400k in a week!
If he had designed it like a typical pay-to-win game—with gift packs, limited-time discounts, or event-exclusive gacha—Revenue could easily double or triple!
Even with all his efforts to discourage players from spending, Ocean Fortress was still raking in cash like a slot machine in overdrive.
Pei Qian just stared at the screen.
"What the hell is going on…?"
His brain had completely short-circuited.
<+>
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[1] https://www.patreon.com/collection/1399284?view=expanded
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