“We’ll see what the players’ feedback is in a couple of days.”

Pei Qian didn’t pay much attention to this matter. As long as Meng Chang was still striving for his commission, he was trustworthy.

Whether this promotional strategy would work or not remained to be seen.

Although news about “Ghost General 2” had been released along with a combat demonstration video, generating some response among the “Ghost General” player community, the buzz hadn’t spread widely yet.

Most of those expressing excitement about “Ghost General 2” were veteran “Ghost General” players and fighting game enthusiasts. This group represented only a small portion of the gaming community, so their attitude didn’t represent much.

“Ghost General 2” had received substantial investment. Whether it could recoup its costs depended on how far beyond its niche it could reach and how many non-fighting game players would willingly pay for it.

If only fighting game players liked it, the best outcome would be breaking even at most.

So Pei Qian wasn’t in a hurry and planned to observe further.

At this stage, he had many more important matters to attend to.

“Let me see how ‘Safe Driving’ is doing.”

“Hmm…”

“The game has high popularity, but sales are acceptable, slightly better than I imagined.”

Pei Qian first checked “Safe Driving” game sales and found they weren’t as explosive as many other Tenda games.

“Safe Driving” itself had massive investment, so these sales figures clearly wouldn’t recover costs in the short term.

As for why the sales seemed relatively optimistic, Pei Qian had a rough guess.

The game’s design had worked!

Currently, most racing games on the market were similar, with low entry barriers at the beginning, allowing both keyboard and controller users to handle them well.

Even some particularly hardcore driving simulation games would at least include driving assistance systems, allowing players to smoothly complete the entire initial process after entering the game.

But “Safe Driving” was not only an extremely hardcore driving simulation game, it also innovatively included a driver’s license test section!

This section was the ultimate deterrent for controller and keyboard players.

Of course, some keyboard and controller masters could pass the driver’s license test with their exquisite micro-operations, but such masters were few, and they also had to invest considerable time and effort.

So the driver’s license test discouraged many people.

After failing the test several times, players would check the time and realize they were still within the refund period.

Why hesitate? Just get a refund!

This time there was no official mockery like in “Turn Back to Shore,” so players were very decisive about refunding.

After buying a steering wheel and passing the driver’s license test, the game experience would indeed improve dramatically, but most players wouldn’t persist to this point.

Spending several thousand yuan on a steering wheel just to play a game? It’s like saying “you give me a dish of vinegar, and I’ll specially make a batch of dumplings”?

Many people had this mindset, so they’d rather be cloud players, watching streamers fail the driving test repeatedly, than suffer in the game themselves.

This resulted in the current situation: many keyboard-mouse and controller players had been discouraged, while many others were hesitating about whether to buy a steering wheel, taking a wait-and-see approach.

Although “Safe Driving” had sparked discussions online, for now it had only drawn attention from the streaming community and hardcore driving simulation players. It hadn’t truly broken through to reach the “national game” level of some racing games.

After seeing this, Pei Qian couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief.

That’s good!

After the Passat’s collision results came out, Pei Qian had been worried for a long time, fearing that the game’s collision feature might trigger some terrible chain reaction causing the game to go viral.

But now, the situation didn’t seem so bad?

Although popularity had indeed risen, it didn’t seem to have affected game sales for now.

While many people online were making memes about the Passat incident, severely impacting new Passat sales in China, most people wouldn’t choose to buy a game just because it exposed quality issues with the Passat, right?

Pei Qian felt somewhat reassured.

“Let me check how the safe driving simulator sales are doing.”

“Hmm… not bad either.”

Looking at the sales data, there wasn’t the same sales frenzy as with the Fully Automatic Leverage Machine and Smart Fitness Clothing Rack. The product detail page didn’t show any out-of-stock situations, which seemed fine.

“Perfect!”

Pei Qian was pleasantly surprised; the current situation was already beyond his expectations.

The game hadn’t gone viral, nor had the simulator equipment. Wasn’t that a great success?

Pei Qian had long since stopped hoping for the game to fail completely. He didn’t need the game to be completely ignored—as long as it remained within a very niche scope, high acclaim wouldn’t matter. If it couldn’t break through, it would never recover its enormous investment costs.

Given Tenda’s current scale, every new project involved full investment, so the definition of “success” was increasingly high. Achieving what an ordinary small company could achieve was no longer considered success at all.

“Since that’s the case, can I rent or buy a few more large warehouses?”

“I should go check the warehouse situation!”

On impulse, Pei Qian decided to check the inventory situation.

Tenda had several large warehouses and many storage rooms in Jingzhou. The storage system had a network layout: large warehouses in different directions of Jingzhou’s suburbs, smaller storage rooms near the Tenda physical industry complex centered around Slackin’ Internet Café, and finally some goods stored in Upwind Stations.

Other cities had similar arrangements, all planned according to this model.

This three-tier storage layout was like a series of dams on a river upstream, ensuring that Upwind Logistics could deliver products to customers as quickly as possible while also guaranteeing, to the greatest extent possible, that items wouldn’t be out of stock.

Of course, these stockpiles accumulated into a terrifying inventory backlog. Once prices fluctuated and forced discounted sales, such massive inventory would be enough to kill some financially fragile small companies several times over.

But this was exactly what Pei Qian wanted.

From the current perspective, as long as no one bought the backlogged goods at their current prices, it was a win-win: Pei Qian would win twice!

Whether being forced to sell at a loss or stubbornly refusing to lower prices while letting the inventory continue to depreciate in warehouses, Pei Qian would make a killing.

Of course, the worst-case scenario would be if all these goods sold smoothly, and no amount of stockpiling could stop the bleeding. That would be terrible.

But that situation shouldn’t occur now.

Naturally, these warehouses weren’t just storing driving simulators. They were categorized and filled with various Tenda products—whether new products, old products, digital products developed by Outu Technology, or furniture and home appliance products made in collaboration with other manufacturers—they all had inventory.

Upwind Logistics was striving to achieve the ultimate goal of “delivering goods in the shortest possible time.”

Pei Qian wondered, if all the driving simulators in inventory hadn’t sold, could he justifiably rent new warehouses?

With warehouses, the more the better!

With this in mind, Pei Qian called Ye Zhizhou, saying he wanted to visit the suburban warehouse.

After seeing the warehouse situation, he could also conveniently chat with Ye Zhizhou about the game’s recent developments.

…

An hour later, Pei Qian arrived outside Tenda’s largest warehouse in Jingzhou’s suburbs.

Ye Zhizhou should already be waiting inside the warehouse.

Actually, Pei Qian had originally wanted to invite Chang You too, but Chang You was still suffering on the island and wouldn’t return until the end of the month, so he didn’t call anyone else from Outu Technology.

But as soon as Pei Qian got out of the car, he sensed something was wrong.

Two large trucks were parked at the entrance—one unloading goods, the other loading!

The truck that was unloading was filled with safe driving simulator equipment. Some were complete packages in large boxes, while others were smaller items like steering wheels and gear shifts packed separately.

Several forklifts and workers were busily unloading in the heat of the moment. The two truck drivers looked quite young, sitting casually nearby, smoking and chatting while watching the loading and unloading.

“Have you played ‘Safe Driving’?”

“What’s that? Never heard of it.”

“Never heard of it? It’s this stuff we’re hauling! All these simulator steering wheel devices!”

“Is it a game? The name sounds kind of odd.”

“It’s a game about driving big trucks. It’s really fun.”

“What? You drive trucks for a living every day, and that’s not enough? You want to keep driving big trucks in games? Did you burn your brain?”

“Hey, that’s no way to talk! It’s really different. Try it and you’ll know.”

The two chatted animatedly, not noticing Pei Qian, just treating him as an ordinary passerby.

But Pei Qian immediately lost his composure upon hearing their conversation.

What’s going on?

Even truck drivers who haul cargo are playing this game?

That’s ridiculous!

But on second thought, these were drivers hauling goods for Tenda, so learning about the simulator’s purpose and buying it out of curiosity to practice their driving skills at home in their spare time seemed reasonable.

Truck drivers playing “Safe Driving” wasn’t a big issue. The key question was: why were large trucks still loading and unloading goods?

This was the real reason for Pei Qian’s high alert.

Logically, Tenda’s stockpiling should have been done before the safe driving simulator was officially released. After receiving goods from the contract manufacturers, they would first transport them to Tenda’s several large warehouses, then gradually distribute them to other cities, including some small warehouses and Upwind Stations.

In other words, inventory should have already been distributed, filling all warehouses.

So what was going on with such large-scale incoming and outgoing shipments? There shouldn’t be so many sales!

Walking further inside, Pei Qian noticed the large warehouse was also busy.

As Tenda’s scale grew larger, the warehouses became more standardized.

When Tenda first established its own storage, it had just one small warehouse with shelves full of digital products, memory, graphics cards, and the like from other manufacturers—quite makeshift.

Now, not only had the number of warehouses increased significantly, but the insides had also transformed, becoming uniform, tall shelves that systematically housed various products, with small forklifts for loading and retrieving goods.

Several small forklifts were busily working, organizing various goods.

Ye Zhizhou had already arrived. Seeing Pei Qian, he hurried over.

“Mr. Pei!”

Pei Qian looked at the warehouse situation with great vigilance: “Recently… has there been a significant increase in safe driving simulator sales?”

Ye Zhizhou nodded: “Yes, Mr. Pei, you already know?”

Pei Qian was stunned, not knowing how to respond.

What do you mean I already know?

I don’t know a damn thing!

I completely deduced this from past patterns and the abnormal movements in the warehouse!

Seeing Mr. Pei’s expression, Ye Zhizhou realized: “Oh! Mr. Pei, you didn’t know—you predicted it, right?”

Pei Qian: “…”

While feeling this was absurd, Pei Qian was also puzzled because game sales didn’t seem to have surged.

Logically, the number of people buying safe driving simulators should show a certain positive correlation with game purchase numbers. The proportion of players using steering wheels for racing games among all players should remain relatively stable.

Now, with game sales not yet surging but simulator purchases skyrocketing, what was going on?