After seeing Zhang Zuting off, the Shangyang Games team began busily editing the footage into suitable advertisements.
Advertisements placed on websites, video platforms, and other channels had different formats and duration requirements. For instance, some places only allowed banner ads or pop-up windows, while others required short videos of a few seconds or a dozen seconds.
Therefore, the same material needed to be converted into many different formats.
Cutting a thirty-second advertisement down to a few seconds naturally required finding ways to preserve the most essential parts of the advertising message.
At this point, everyone began to recognize Mr. Pei’s foresight.
The recorded video could be edited into perfect browser game advertisements with minimal effort!
Because the lines Zhang Zuting had spoken were mostly short phrases containing substantial information, they could be cut and spliced without significantly affecting the original meaning, giving the post-production team considerable creative freedom.
If players eventually grew tired of seeing a particular advertisement, a slight edit would create a new one.
“Mr. Pei, Zhang Zuting’s Mandarin isn’t very good and feels a bit awkward. Should we hire a voice actor to dub it? Voice acting isn’t expensive these days,” Ye Zhizhou suggested.
Pei Qian immediately shook his head. “No, leave it as is! You should trust the Best Actor’s performance and line delivery skills. Besides, this natural feeling can subtly bring the audience closer. If we get professional dubbing, it would lose its soul, understand?”
“Uh…” Ye Zhizhou vaguely felt something was off about Pei Qian’s reasoning.
But then he thought, since they’d already finished filming such an awkward video, why worry about how it was cut?
According to Director Lin’s guess, the reason Mr. Pei deliberately hired a past-prime Hong Kong star to film this somewhat awkward video was to attract as many traditional browser game players as possible.
If that was the case, this advertisement had nothing to do with being sophisticated, so making it a bit awkward seemed reasonable.
With this in mind, Ye Zhizhou didn’t say anything more and simply prepared the promotional materials. Once the game development was complete, these advertisements would be blasted everywhere.
“Hot-Blooded Battle Song Power-Up Edition” has been in development for about a month and a half so far.
Although this game was being created from scratch, its gameplay essentially adopted the mature mechanics of “Hot-Blooded Battle Song,” and many art resource requirements were very clear—they just needed to be updated to a new generation.
The main workload was on the art side, and the game’s art had been outsourced to several companies that could produce resources quickly.
According to projections, the game should be completed by early September, slightly ahead of schedule.
With the game finishing development early, more time could be spent on testing, fine-tuning specific game data, competing with other rival games for timing…
In short, there were many advantages.
Now that the promotional aspects were settled, Ye Zhizhou planned to focus all his energy on development, allowing this game to meet players as soon as possible.
……
……
Meanwhile, Pei Qian was also busy.
He was monitoring the development progress of Tenda Games while keeping a vigilant eye on Fei Huang Studio’s situation.
The development of “Turn Back to the Shore” was also proceeding smoothly, with about 60% completion to date. Based on this progress, and accounting for testing, adjustment, and optimization time, the game would likely officially launch around mid-October.
Pei Qian asked Li Yada to release a playable demo soon, as he wanted to experience it personally.
On one hand, he wanted to see if the game’s difficulty had reached his expected level; on the other hand, he wanted to find an opportunity to secretly insert Mr. Pei’s exclusive weapon, placing it somewhere nobody could imagine.
The system required that Pei Qian complete this game through his abilities.
To be fair, Pei Qian wasn’t particularly unskilled, though he wasn’t exceptionally good either.
He was an average player, the kind who could somewhat carry in casual games.
The system set this requirement mainly to prevent Pei Qian from exploiting loopholes.
For instance, Pei Qian might set the first level’s ordinary monsters to be N times stronger than the player’s base attributes, with attack power, attack frequency, movement speed, and other attributes all overwhelming the player. Even skilled players would be instantly defeated, or only an extremely small number of elite players could barely pass.
This would effectively deter players with malicious intent, which was quite unreasonable.
Now, with the system imposing this requirement, it meant that an above-average ordinary player who understood the game mechanics thoroughly (Pei Qian could fully comprehend the game mechanics) and made many determined attempts could complete the game.
This way, although the game might still be relatively difficult, it at least gave the vast majority of players a possibility to persevere.
However, being as clever as he was, Pei Qian naturally came up with corresponding countermeasures.
He considered it from three aspects:
First, the system required him to complete the game, but didn’t specify how long it should take!
If he played this game a hundred times, starting from when the demo was released and continuing until the day before the game’s launch, that would still count as completion.
Second, the system didn’t specify how he should complete the game.
If he secretly hid an extremely powerful weapon that ordinary people couldn’t find, and used it to breeze through the game, that would still count as completion.
Lastly, the system didn’t specify which ending he needed to complete!
He could create multiple endings for the game, with one ending requiring only about 30% of the game content. As long as he completed this shortest ending path, wouldn’t that still count as completion?
So, Pei Qian was prepared. As soon as the “Turn Back to the Shore” demo was released, he would arrange to insert his exclusive weapon and start practicing.
The game demo might be available in just two or three days, and then Mr. Pei would have to get busy.
It sounded a bit tough, but as the saying goes, “Endure the bitterest hardships to become the best.” If he wanted to lose money, how could he not work hard?
After all, the total investment in “Turn Back to the Shore” was nearly 20 million yuan—no room for failure!
……
……
Besides this, Pei Qian was considering slightly changing certain company policies.
Currently, Tenda Games has project bonuses and profit-sharing, with 15% of a game’s net profit distributed as bonuses to all employees.
Fei Huang Studio was similar, with 30% of profits distributed to studio members as a reward.
Pei Qian’s original intention in establishing this system was to distribute as much of the earned money as possible, reducing the system funds in his possession.
But after thinking about it for some time, Pei Qian suddenly realized this system had a major problem!
With such high project profit-sharing, employees naturally focused all their attention on making money!
Take Fei Huang Studio, for example. Since the documentary didn’t make money last time, Huang Sibo and Zhu Xiaocai only received their base salaries, without a penny in bonuses.
Although Pei Qian had set their base salaries quite high, for them, despite the documentary gaining a reputation, their income had genuinely decreased.
So, was their decision to do digital product reviews and short videos this time, increasing their money-making efforts, related to this?
Of course, they certainly hoped not to disappoint Mr. Pei and wanted Fei Huang Studio to make more profits, rather than always having Mr. Pei fill the gaps.
But earning more bonuses for themselves was probably also part of their motivation.
The more Pei Qian pondered this, the more wrong it felt.
This bonus distribution system seemed somewhat like drinking poison to quench thirst!
Although it distributed more money in the short term, it greatly stimulated employees’ enthusiasm for making money, bringing that evil money closer to Mr. Pei!
So, this system had to be changed!
Of course, deducting these bonuses was impossible—that would be unconscionable.
Moreover, keeping all these bonuses for himself would just create problems and increase the pressure to lose money, wouldn’t it?
Therefore, Pei Qian needed a win-win solution.
One that would distribute the money while preventing employees from being so keen on making profits.
After brief consideration, Pei Qian quickly thought of a good method.
While ensuring employee benefits remained generally unchanged or even slightly improved, he would change the bonus standard from profits to reputation!
In other words, previously bonuses were based on how much money a project earned; now they would be based on the project’s reputation!
The better a project’s reputation, the higher the bonuses. Even projects that lost money, like the “Breaking the Cocoon” documentary, could receive maximum bonuses if their reputation was good enough.
For instance, each project’s reputation would be rated as S, A, B, or C. Based on the project’s investment, different reputation ratings would correspond to different percentage bonuses distributed to project members.
The specific distribution method would also vary for different projects.
For example, game projects generally generate profits long-term, so their bonus distribution cycle would be longer, while video content’s popularity mainly concentrates in the first three months, so those rewards would be distributed all at once.
This way, employees would gradually shift their focus from profits to reputation.
Encouraging everyone to undertake more projects that didn’t make profits but gained reputation—this way, Mr. Pei wouldn’t earn money and would still distribute substantial bonuses to employees. A win-win situation, wouldn’t that be wonderful?
Of course, there would certainly be projects that both made money and had good reputations.
But such projects were ultimately the minority.
In most cases, good reputation and high profits conflicted with each other, making it difficult to achieve both.
So, Pei Qian planned to consider the feasibility of this approach a bit more, establish specific rules, and strive to implement it before the new game launched.
Once such a rule was established and accepted by all employees, its impact would be far-reaching, benefiting generations to come.
Just imagining all employees racking their brains to build a reputation rather than figuring out how to make profits, Pei Qian felt like the entire company had become more noble!