Cannon Fodder Genius Game Producer - Chapter 5

Chapter 5: The Fifth Day of a Blockbuster

People came and went in the live broadcast room, but Pei Shu didn’t care; his focus was solely on the GM4 in his hands.

To be among the first to get the machine back then, Pei Shu had specifically asked several friends abroad to help with the purchase, and he finally managed to acquire it through various channels at the very first opportunity.

After this game console was released, the initial available units were very few due to insufficient production capacity of the new processor. It was said that to increase capacity later, the Biake Group found new hardware manufacturers and expanded production. However, many hardware enthusiasts believed that only the GM4s produced in the first three initial batches were the complete version of the GM4, and that later GM4s underwent a mysterious “technical castration” by the Biake Group.

And right now, the machine in his hands was the early model of the GM4 that console collectors and enthusiasts later referred to as the “Supreme Complete Version”.

Pei Shu’s usual speaking voice carried a hint of laziness, but because he was talking about his beloved console, his speaking speed was slightly faster, and the end of his sentences tilted upward, manifesting his good mood.

He continued to introduce the console in his hands unhurriedly, but the viewers in the live stream’s bullet comments were getting a bit anxious.

“What’s going on? Where did this bunch of top-tier streamers come from at this hour to split the traffic?”

“What a pity. WG just gave Teacher Bu Shu a homepage carousel. It was originally the best chance to gain followers. I thought Teacher Bu Shu had a chance to sprint into the top 20 of the overall newcomer rankings!”

“I thought so too…”

Chen Xiaopang was still lurking in Pei Shu’s broadcast room. Picking up a newcomer like Teacher Bu Shu during the afternoon stream had already pushed the broadcast’s effectiveness to the max. Unfortunately, if not for so many streamers going online, the strong push from WG could have gathered the maximum amount of website traffic into Teacher Bu Shu’s room, and he could have basked in some of that glory. But once those top-tier traffic streamers went online, the traffic dispersed, and the original ‘soaring to the sky’ trend of Teacher Bu Shu’s room was directly broken.

Time and luck. In recent years, there had actually been a few ancient Big Vs who restarted their broadcasts, but most failed to attract new traffic and eventually disappeared again.

Teacher Bu Shu would probably be one of them.

Chen Xiaopang shook his head and turned off his own live broadcast.

There was no point in continuing his own stream at this point, so he just stayed in Pei Shu’s room to watch this unboxing from 2013, treating it as a way to reminisce about his youth.

Pei Shu’s commentary style was peaceful and casual. He didn’t deliberately add humorous memes or specifically change his speaking style to forcibly establish a persona. However, because of his own understanding of the gaming field, even casual small talk could radiate many perspectives that others hadn’t thought of, making it captivating.

This was a charm emitted from his own being.

“Now that this GM4 is installed, I happen to have a GM3 model that I’ve been using previously right by my side, which is perfect for doing a comparison between the two generations of machines.”

“The Biake Group has always been committed to letting the GM series occupy a broader console market. As mentioned earlier, they adopted the same architecture as personal computers on the GM4 console for this purpose. This makes it much easier and more convenient for console game developers to create content based on the GM4 environment. This is good news for developers and also demonstrates the Biake Group’s ambition.”

As Pei Shu introduced, he took out the game discs piled beside him.

“The only pity is that this will make the GM4 console incompatible with previous-generation games. Games previously developed based on GM1, 2, and 3 will stop here. In the early release phase of the GM4, it cannot inherit resources from previous generations, and many games based on the new platform are still under development. This stage should be the expansion bottleneck for the GM4. Of course, before the release, partners were already invited to develop new games based on the GM4 platform, and some classic games were ported. Currently, whether the GM4 can stand firm in the early stage and survive the bottleneck depends on whether these classic and new games can meet players’ expectations.”

While speaking, Pei Shu first connected the GM3 console to the living room TV to demonstrate the game graphics and experience of the GM3.

There weren’t many people in the room right now, but the atmosphere was quite good.

“Good heavens, as expected of Teacher Bu Shu, to even have an antique machine like the GM3…”

“I remember Teacher Bu Shu unboxed the GM3 back then, and he reviewed the 2nd generation before that too.”

“Exactly, exactly. When Teacher Bu Shu reviewed the GM2, didn’t he find a system bug? Was there a response from Biake at the time?”

Inside Aurora Studio, Zhang Sui was also watching Teacher Bu Shu’s live broadcast. He didn’t know that Teacher Bu Shu was actually Pei Shu, who had just resigned today. To be precise, the resume on Pei Shu had only been seen by a few supervisor-level big shots like Wang Fei in the studio. But with Pei Shu’s terrible performance in the studio, the studio’s big shots had long forgotten his once brilliant resume.

As a top-tier game company in the industry, the practitioners within Universal, regardless of their capability or quality, were at least genuine game enthusiasts. Someone like Zhang Sui, due to work issues, might not be able to maintain high-frequency gaming experiences, but he paid attention to industry information every day to ensure his own gaming sensitivity.

Watching live stream cloud gaming was a very direct channel.

He had a small group of dozens of people, and basically all of them knew of this ancient Big V, Teacher Bu Shu. The people in this group were also currently watching Teacher Bu Shu’s broadcast together.

At the workstation to Zhang Sui’s right, which originally belonged to Pei Shu, all of Pei Shu’s related items had already been cleared. The computer originally allocated to Pei Shu had its system reinstalled by the technical department, and the newly reorganized computer and workstation happened to be taken over by the newcomer, Lin Cheng, who joined the company this morning.

Before his rebirth, Lin Cheng was also a game developer, but his ability was average and he lacked creativity; simply put, he was a game laborer who relied on gaming work for a living.

However, being in the game industry, Lin Cheng also had impressions of game trends and some games that had triggered crazes. To handle company tasks, he had even performed breakdowns of several classic games.

Unexpectedly, he, Lin Cheng, had actually run into the standard configuration of a novel protagonist: rebirth plus a system!

Reborn ten years into the past, with a vision that transcended the era and a “King of Games System”. He only needed to complete tasks to choose those classic games from his previous life from the system’s game library—based on the gaming trends of the next ten years in his head—and exchange them for their full sets of planning cases!

Just thinking about this made Lin Cheng’s heart surge with emotion, as if he could see the brilliant future ahead of him!

After his rebirth, Lin Cheng immediately completed a system task and exchanged for a small game with explosive short-term spreadability while in university, becoming a prominent figure there. Simultaneously, relying on his game appreciation vision that exceeded the era, he successfully passed the written test and interview for Universal’s Aurora Studio, completing the system-issued task of becoming a member of Aurora Studio.

However, in his eyes, Aurora Studio was merely a stepping stone. In the near future, he would inevitably be able to establish his own studio with the support of Aurora Studio, and from then on, relying on the classic game ideas in his head, become a superior being whom everyone would worship!

As for the method of the stepping stone, he had already thought it out. He remembered that Aurora Studio’s classic pillar game, “Super God,” had a massive blunder during the release of its first-half 2021 expansion pack, which triggered a fatal reputation crisis among the “Super God” player base.

During the post-mortem review, it was discovered that this was an incredibly low-level coincidence, but it was useless. Even if Aurora Studio gave players generous rewards, they couldn’t salvage the reputational impact brought by this mistake.

Later, not only did Aurora Studio review how this error should have been best handled to resolve the crisis, but various other companies also used this “Super God” crisis as a key point for review and research.

How to help Aurora Studio survive the crisis brought by the new expansion of “Super God” had almost become a piece of knowledge shared by everyone in the game industry and related enthusiasts.

Coincidentally, the new task the system issued to him was “Save the reputation crisis brought by Aurora Studio’s ‘Super God’ game expansion pack”.

Lin Cheng was completely confident about this event. He had come to Aurora Studio with the mindset of being the studio’s savior, and looking at the colleagues around him now, he felt a sense of contempt toward these mere mortals.

Lin Cheng casually turned on the computer and, following the HR’s instructions, looked over his routine work content during the internship period. While looking, he felt in his heart that this so-called top 3 studio in the industry seems to be nothing more than this. It’s not much different from the third-tier city trash web-game company before my rebirth.

Glimpsing Zhang Sui next to him actually watching a live stream during working hours, Lin Cheng’s feelings of disdain grew stronger. This was even worse than the people at his old company; his former colleagues at least knew how to hide it a bit when slacking off, but the people at Aurora Studio were actually slacking off so openly.

Zhang Sui didn’t know that the newcomer named Lin Cheng was criticizing him like this in his heart. After noticing the gaze from his side, he even moved a bit to let Lin Cheng see the live content on his phone clearly.

Zhang Sui asked: “You’re a newcomer, right? Do you know Teacher Bu Shu too?”

Lin Cheng actually didn’t know anything about Teacher Bu Shu. He hadn’t heard the name at all. But seeing the look of surprise in Zhang Sui’s eyes, Lin Cheng felt that knowing Teacher Bu Shu must be a good thing, so he vaguely answered yes.

Zhang Sui indeed raised an eyebrow and gave a thumbs up: “Incredible. There are too few young people your age nowadays who know Teacher Bu Shu. It seems you started paying attention to games from a very young age? No wonder I heard the newcomer coming this time is excellent.”

Lin Cheng accepted this praise without blushing, guessing in his heart that this Teacher Bu Shu must be some veteran-level big shot and deciding to quietly check later who this person was.

In the live stream, Pei Shu continued to explain the difference in gaming experience between the GM3 and GM4 in his hands. He had finished demonstrating the game effects of the GM3 and then connected the GM4, inserting a GM4 game disc.

On the live room’s public bullet comments, someone couldn’t help but laugh.

“Amazing, this really is an immersive experience of a 2013 GM4 unboxing! If I didn’t know the GM4 was a product from 8 years ago, I would absolutely think this was the latest generation product of this year!”

“Can’t stop laughing. Teacher Bu Shu’s comeback performance is truly impressive!”

“Oh, all you guys do is laugh. If you ask me, Teacher Bu Shu’s performance is very sincere. I just searched for a lot of key points Teacher Bu Shu mentioned. The overall development process of the GM4 he referred to matches the process just mentioned perfectly. The GM4 indeed dominated the console market for years later because of several classic GM4 exclusive games, even though it sacrificed certain interests in the short term due to its architecture and personal computer adjustments and almost had its market share overtaken by another console.”

However, some people also felt that the preparations Pei Shu made were nothing special. After all, this was content that had already been analyzed by people countless times after the fact. What Pei Shu was saying now would likely have made most people leave out of boredom if not for the gimmick of an immersive experience of a 2013 GM4 unboxing through time travel.

In Aurora Studio, Lin Cheng watched with Zhang Sui for a while but also felt extremely bored. After all, for him, the GM3 and GM4 were even more distant.

But Zhang Sui watched with great interest, occasionally chatting with colleagues in the company’s enthusiast group about some details mentioned by Teacher Bu Shu.

In his view, these post-mortems by Teacher Bu Shu required a massive amount of knowledge points adapted to different eras. Many people nowadays had already forgotten the years of various contents very vaguely, but every detail Teacher Bu Shu explained—he had just checked—was strictly limited to before the release of the GM4 in 2013. This seriousness regarding details made Zhang Sui quite admire him, not to mention that some of the views and content Teacher Bu Shu spoke about were from perspectives rarely mentioned by others.

Meanwhile, big shots in the group who collected consoles noticed another point.

“Sh*t, did you guys see that? Teacher Bu Shu’s GM4 is an early model!!”

Right at this moment, a Super Rainbow Cannon worth 1,000 RMB suddenly dropped into the live room, which originally had only a few hundred people online: “Ahhh! A GM4 early model!!! Teacher Bu Shu, is this machine for sale???”

The viewers in the room were instantly stunned: “What? This one Teacher Bu Shu is unboxing is an early model?”

After this first reaction passed, everyone was stunned again—wait! The one who sent this Super Rainbow Cannon seemed to be one of the top-tier streamers on WG? That wealthy streamer whose hobby is collecting game consoles, ‘Young Master Only Has Money’?

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