Pei Qian took a deep breath, trying hard to calm himself down.

Something was wrong.

Stay calm, he must stay calm!

Now Pei Qian finally understood what the three men’s expressions were really about.

Huang Sibo was staring at the computer screen, woodenly refreshing it over and over, because the game’s data far exceeded his best expectations—he found it unbelievable!

Xiao Lü was restless, obviously because he was excited!

As for Bao Xu, he was indeed contemplating his life, but the reason for his contemplation was completely different from what Pei Qian had imagined…

“Mr. Pei, champagne!”

Xin Hailu smiled and handed over a bottle of champagne.

Pei Qian glanced at it. This was a uniquely shaped champagne bottle with a platinum sleeve covered in English writing. At a conservative estimate, it must have cost at least five figures.

But Pei Qian wasn’t in the mood at all.

Because he knew that the money the Sea Fortress earned him probably couldn’t be spent even if he bought several hundred more bottles of such champagne!

But with everyone watching, Pei Qian couldn’t just storm off.

He couldn’t let anyone become suspicious about the system or the existence of the challenge itself!

Pei Qian took a deep breath, accepted the champagne, and popped it open with a loud “bang.”

Pale golden liquid gushed out, accompanied by the unique aroma of wine, and the festive atmosphere instantly exploded throughout the office!

Everyone began to cheer. The two girls at the reception desk took out handheld party poppers and confetti cannons they had prepared in advance, and the office was showered with golden rain!

People began singing and dancing; Xiao Lü was even about to slide on his knees in excitement, but was pulled back by Huang Sibo.

Amid this enthusiastic atmosphere, Pei Qian forced out a smile: “Good job, everyone. Keep up the good work.”

Maintaining his smile, Pei Qian walked into his office and closed the door.

Watching Pei Qian’s back, Huang Sibo couldn’t help but sigh with emotion.

“Sure enough, everything was in Mr. Pei’s plan!”

“He already predicted all this would happen, so he wasn’t excited at all. For Mr. Pei, this is just an ordinary event!”

“Ah, compared to Mr. Pei, we’re like a bunch of inexperienced kids, getting complacent over a little achievement…”

“When will I ever have a mindset like Mr. Pei’s…”

As Huang Sibo was sighing, he refreshed the backend once more.

Sea Fortress was a complete hit!

Of course, Huang Sibo believed that since this was a game directed by Mr. Pei, its success was very normal and reasonable, nothing to make a fuss about.

After analyzing Mr. Pei’s design intentions, both Huang Sibo and Bao Xu had a feeling that this game would likely succeed!

They just didn’t expect it to be such a huge hit, even knocking down Bullet Mark, developed by Tianhua Studio!

What surprised Huang Sibo even more was that this time, Mr. Pei had come up with something new!

With Ghost General, Mr. Pei had already demonstrated how to achieve the best marketing effect at minimal cost.

Back then, Mr. Pei blazed a unique path by promoting within artist circles, successfully spreading to the general player community!

This time, Huang Sibo had been constantly expecting Mr. Pei to find another distinctive path, using a similar efficient approach to achieve promotional effects.

He had even thought of several cost-effective promotional methods himself.

But now it seemed that all his speculation was wrong.

Mr. Pei hadn’t planned to promote it at all! Because Mr. Pei knew that this game could become popular even without promotion, relying solely on players’ word-of-mouth, organic growth, and the platform’s automatic recommendation mechanism!

How domineering, how confident!

This level of self-assurance required such precise judgment of the market!

Even when popping the champagne, Mr. Pei maintained that calm, confident expression, as if he had merely completed an insignificant task.

Huang Sibo was thoroughly convinced!

…

…

In Pei Qian’s own office.

He slumped in his chair, unable to recover for a long time.

What was going on? Had the script been switched?

Why???

Why did the game become a hit when I didn’t promote it at all?

Is there any justice?

Is there any law?

This just didn’t make sense!

This time, there was no Ruan Guangjian actively promoting for me, so which part went wrong???

Pei Qian tried hard to calm down and opened his computer, attempting to reconstruct what had happened.

He wouldn’t rest until he figured this out!

Logging into the official game platform, Pei Qian finally saw Sea Fortress’s accurate data.

He couldn’t help but shudder.

After being online for a week, the number of concurrent players had reached 100,000!

And this probably wasn’t even the peak.

The concurrent player count reached 100,000 not because there were only 100,000 players, but because Sea Fortress’s rented cloud server bandwidth could only support 100,000 players, with many more players queuing outside…

Under normal circumstances, server costs don’t account for a large portion of online game operation expenses, unless it reaches the terrifying scale of World of Warcraft or League of Legends.

For ordinary mobile games, if a server has about 3,000 active users, renting a cloud server only costs a few hundred yuan; the expensive part is mainly bandwidth—the more concurrent users, the higher the bandwidth requirements, and the costs increase dramatically.

For lightweight card games like Ghost General, server fees weren’t a major expense.

The same applied to Sea Fortress. As a battle-type FPS game, many people were playing single-player mode, which was all local computation. The battle mode was also divided into rooms, without situations where hundreds of players participated in nationwide battles simultaneously.

After dividing into rooms, the server bandwidth pressure was much smaller compared to large-scale multi-player MMORPG games with many players on the same screen.

Moreover, since Pei Qian had calculated that Sea Fortress would be a complete failure, he hadn’t prepared much bandwidth for it at all!

However, after just a few days, Sea Fortress had exploded from a few hundred active users to 100,000 concurrent online users, and many players were now queuing!

And as of now, over a thousand Fire Qilins have been sold, netting more than 400,000 yuan!

Pei Qian completely collapsed into his chair.

Over 400,000 yuan wouldn’t be difficult to spend.

The problem was, based on Ghost General’s experience, this was just the beginning!

As Sea Fortress continued to boom, next week’s revenue would exceed 400,000 yuan. With the surge in player numbers, they would sell even more Fire Qilins. Calculating this way, the first month’s revenue would be at least 3 million yuan!

This was after factoring in discounts.

Due to Pei Qian’s pricing strategy, Sea Fortress was a free game—free to download, and there was nothing else for sale in the game except for the Fire Qilin!

This meant that a small number of wealthy players would buy the Fire Qilin, but ordinary players had nowhere to spend money!

If Pei Qian had learned from other pay-to-win games and created more gift packages and special offers, this revenue could easily be increased two or three times.

Despite deliberately restraining players with pricing strategies to keep them from reaching for their wallets, they still netted over 400,000 yuan in one week!

What the hell was going on???

Pei Qian felt dizzy.