July 29, Monday.
In the president’s office of Tenda Group.
The air conditioning was running high, and Pei Qian was wrapped in a small blanket, reviewing the work of various departments and checking online reputation and reviews of some new businesses.
At this moment, Pei Qian’s mood matched his physical sensation of temperature.
Although it was sunny with clear skies outside, Pei Qian inexplicably felt waves of coldness seeping through him.
It was a bit unbearable!
This month could be described as filled with one bad news after another. First, Outu Technology’s new phone and gaming router were hugely successful, followed immediately by the haunted house’s Foreign Traveler project and the Hot and Cold Animal Park.
At first, Pei Qian thought the gaming router’s great success was already something very difficult to understand, but now it seemed that was just the beginning.
So far, the folding screen phones were still out of stock, and quite a few phone cases had been sold as well.
Regarding the out-of-stock situation, Pei Qian didn’t have a good solution either. He could only coordinate with Shenhua Group to continue increasing production capacity and implement some measures to curb scalpers.
The gaming router was also increasing production capacity, though its situation was much better than the phone’s.
What Pei Qian found most difficult to accept was that the haunted house’s Foreign Traveler project and the Hot and Cold Animal Park had also become hugely popular!
To Pei Qian, the Foreign Traveler project seemed similar to other haunted house projects—all designed with malicious intent—but it had inexplicably become popular.
Such a frightening place, why were so many people eagerly trying to experience it? This made no sense!
The Hot and Cold Animal Park was even more ridiculous. There weren’t any rare animals inside, nor was there anything particularly praiseworthy about it, yet visitors were buying into it enthusiastically, coming in an endless stream.
Pei Qian had heard that the employees there were very talented, and each live event felt like a crosstalk comedy show or concert.
At first, he didn’t believe it, so he searched for videos online and found it was actually true.
This was just absurd! Pei Qian hadn’t been involved in selecting employees—these employees were all recruited by Tan Xinzhang from who knows where. Even if the high wages at the Hot and Cold Animal Park attracted employees with some bonus qualities, it shouldn’t have become this popular, right?
It was simply incomprehensible!
And in the current state, the Foreign Traveler project and the Hot and Cold Animal Park—these two new projects—were probably already beyond redemption.
The only somewhat comforting aspect for Pei Qian was that both projects were infrastructure projects with especially huge investments. Given the current visitor flow, even if they remained popular, it would take a long time to break even.
Of course, if one considered the boost these two projects gave to other attractions at the Frightening Inn and the entire commercial area, then there was no point in even discussing it.
Pei Qian could only self-deceptively ignore that portion of the revenue.
What’s past is past, and Pei Qian decided to look at the situation for the next two months.
August had relatively few events, just two things in total. The first was Tenda’s clothing brand, the Luxury fashion brand, and the VR game developed by Chixing Studio, which was about to be officially released.
The second was that the film “The Future You Choose” had completed shooting and was currently in editing and post-production. The Venice Film Festival was scheduled for late August and early September, and Zhu Xiaocai’s team had already confirmed their participation.
Previously, “Beautiful Tomorrow” had only won the Grand Prix (second place) at the Cannes Film Festival, not the Palme d’Or, which had been a regret for everyone in the crew.
After such a long period of tempering, whether it was Director Zhu Xiaocai, lead actor Lu Zhiyao, or other crew members, all had made significant progress compared to before.
This time, “The Future You Choose” had a similar theme to “Beautiful Tomorrow,” but with even more refined details in the plot. Director Zhu Xiaocai hoped to compete for the highest award at the Venice Film Festival with this film—the Golden Lion Award for Best Film.
Pei Qian had been quite supportive of this, providing maximum financial backing.
Although winning the Golden Lion would certainly create a wave of popularity for the film domestically, Pei Qian felt that participating in the Venice Film Festival wasn’t particularly crucial.
On one hand, the judges at the three major international film festivals were foreigners who naturally lacked cultural identification with the films produced by Tenda. It was already somewhat unexpected that “Beautiful Tomorrow” had won an award. “The Future You Choose” had many obvious intentions and was more straightforward than “Beautiful Tomorrow”—foreigners might not necessarily like it.
The probability of winning the Golden Lion this time was minuscule. At most, they might win Best Actor; they probably couldn’t even get the Grand Jury Prize—the Silver Lion.
On the other hand, even if they actually won awards at the Venice Film Festival, it wouldn’t necessarily significantly boost box office performance domestically or globally.
Although some Golden Lion-winning films had explosive box office results, those were often very successful commercial films. Most award-winning films had completely failed at the global box office.
For Pei Qian, winning awards was the long-cherished wish of Zhu Xiaocai and the entire Fei Huang Studio team. Although the chances of success were slim, it was worth encouraging.
He would allocate more funds to them, letting them enjoy themselves and have a good time in Europe.
At the current stage, Pei Qian was focusing more of his attention on Luxury clothing.
After thinking it over, Pei Qian felt a bit uneasy and decided to visit Chixing Studio to see exactly what this VR game had turned into.
…
“This way, Mr. Pei.”
Cai Jiadong was already waiting at the company entrance. After greeting Pei Qian, he led him directly to the experience area of Chixing Studio.
Then he enthusiastically introduced the new game and the new VR glasses equipment to Pei Qian.
Pei Qian was stunned: “New VR glasses? They’re already made?”
Cai Jiadong nodded: “Yes, Mr. Pei. Our studio isn’t just developing games; we’re also updating VR glasses equipment. However, these VR glasses don’t have a major redesign—they generally continue the previous design, so we didn’t discuss it with great fanfare.”
“Overall, we’ve maintained the previous design, with just some small detail changes.”
“The main improvements are in performance and resolution. After all, hardware technology is developing very rapidly, changing with each passing day. Phones and computers update and iterate quickly, and VR glasses certainly can’t fall behind.”
Pei Qian fell silent.
He had a very ominous feeling.
Hardware level updates definitely meant some parameters had improved.
In fact, the old Doubt VR glasses already had excellent parameters, completely outperforming most VR glasses on the market. For most players, although there was still a certain grille effect that looked like large pixels, compared to other VR glasses, they were already very high-definition.
And now the hardware had been updated again, didn’t that mean the resolution would further improve?
Since Chixing Studio’s VR glasses were currently the best-selling on the market, the chances of success were high, and there weren’t many competitive rivals in the market.
This undoubtedly laid a good foundation for Chixing Studio’s new game, further reducing the possibility of Pei Qian losing money.
Pei Qian said helplessly: “Let me see these new glasses first.”
Taking them from Cai Jiadong’s hands, Pei Qian examined them carefully.
He found that these glasses had a similar overall design to the previous version: the iconic crescent-shaped brow guard and flat hexagon with the raised Chixing Studio logo were preserved, with no major changes to the overall appearance.
However, many of the edges used different color schemes, making the overall look more trendy and cool, and also allowing the new and old models to be distinguished at a glance.
As for the controllers, there weren’t major changes—they were fully compatible with the old controllers.
Cai Jiadong explained: “We plan to name these VR glasses ‘Doubt Pro,’ meaning a high-end version.”
“Compared to the old model, the configuration mainly improves in resolution. This time, we’ve arranged 8K screens with over 800 PPI, and the refresh rate has been increased to 144Hz. We’ve used new battery technology, reducing battery size while slightly increasing capacity. However, considering the improvement in other hardware configurations, they can still only be used for two hours.”
“The glasses use the latest mobile chip, but it’s obviously impossible to drive this resolution with just a mobile chip. So in standalone mode, most games will run at lower settings.”
“To fully utilize this screen, you’d need at least a high-end desktop computer costing over 10,000 yuan. But for true VR gaming enthusiasts, this shouldn’t be a big problem.”
“In terms of price, they’re a bit more expensive than the old model—priced at 6,499 yuan, less than 2,000 yuan more than before.”
“Although this price increase is a bit high, it’s the result of stacking better components. Moreover, customers who can spend over 10,000 yuan on a high-end desktop for the ultimate gaming experience probably won’t mind spending 6,000 yuan on VR glasses.”
“Of course, we’ll also slightly adjust our previous games, adding a high-configuration version for the new glasses.”
Pei Qian couldn’t help but marvel at how quickly technology was developing and progressing, which was truly astonishing.
And according to Cai Jiadong, this technology hadn’t just appeared recently—it had been around for a while. But most VR glasses manufacturers couldn’t implement it because they couldn’t sustain such a high premium.
A pair of VR glasses costing over 6,000 yuan—how many would need to be sold to break even? Without sufficient production volume, it would be impossible to negotiate favorable procurement prices from suppliers, and without reducing costs, commercialization would be impossible.
However, Doubt VR glasses were now selling very well, with both individual users and business users like Starbird Interactive Entertainment Experience Hall and Slackin’ Internet Café purchasing in large quantities.
This massive user base allowed Chixing Studio to boldly stack high-end components in their glasses without worrying about excess inventory that couldn’t be sold.
Pei Qian silently put on these new VR glasses. He was also curious to see what effect forcefully stacking components to achieve ultra-high-definition resolution would have.