Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

Chapter 1310: Chapter 1177: Official Trial Begins!

Chapter 1310: Chapter 1177: Official Trial Begins!

[Here we go again?

Yet another major piece of news released at market close?

Can’t you let me dump my real estate stocks first?]

The Vortex Forum’s sub-forum [Era of Daxia] is a financial section.

Following the announcement from In Yunmeng, the place instantly blew up.

Unlike the rest of the world which was elated and ecstatic, people here could only feel their heads buzzing.

Just yesterday, due to the semiconductor news released after market close which caused turmoil in that sector, all the veteran leeks were left in a panic.

Fortunately, today the Daxia stock market moved against the trend and rose, earning most people money, which offset the impact of the semiconductor stock price drop — Daxia’s overall stock price soared, but enterprises related to the traditional silicon-based microchip industry still inevitably experienced a decline.

However, the number of falling companies was very few, and compared to the overall rising trend of the market, they didn’t cause much of a stir.

But just as the forum was celebrating at market close, with everyone still boasting about how much they had earned today, another major piece of news dropped.

Now it was real estate’s turn to plummet.

And it seems there’s no remedy.

Source: AllNovelFull.com, updated on Ɲ0νǤօ.сο

All of you working in real estate can’t possibly also sync up with carbon-based chips or start building office towers in the virtual world, right?

This downturn, it seems, no one can save!

What’s infuriating is: the time of the announcement was exactly at market close, and because the market would be closed over the weekend for the next two days, there would likewise be no transactions.

The next trading session will be the day after tomorrow!

“Damn it, is Lincoln doing this on purpose?!”

“Most likely, such a big move must have been thoroughly thought through.”

“It’s too late to say anything now, just wait and see how those real estate companies wield their magic over the weekend!”

“No point talking nonsense, just you wait, the rent for office buildings is going to start dropping.”

“Hmm…

come to think of it, doesn’t that sound like a good thing?”

“Who knows.”

…

Posts were filled with veteran leeks venting and discussing.

Although the situation seemed dire, they were all battle-hardened veterans, and besides, only the real estate stocks were affected, which was a limited scope — after all, Daxia’s main industry nowadays is technology, the very sector that’s about to take off again.

Everyone could see a brighter and grander future ahead.

So overall, the veteran leeks remained calm, not too worried about what would happen in three days.

But some places were different.

As previously introduced: the closing time for the Daxia stock market coincides with the opening time of the London Stock Exchange.

So—

London Stock Exchange: I’ll fall first as a courtesy!

New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq: Brother, we’re right behind you, just a step away!

Only Daxia was enjoying the show.

…

…

With one big piece of news after another, netizens were indulging in gossip, discussing this and that, completely distracted from their work.

Compared to them, game streamers were much more straightforward—

After seeing the announcement for the [Cradle Plan Demo Gameplay Conference], Yi immediately logged off to sleep and conserve energy, totally ignorant of the following events.

With June just around the corner, the scorching heat of the afternoon made everyone lethargic anyway; Yi laid down and instantly found himself in Dreamland, waking up at 5:30 in the afternoon.

He turned off the alarm, rubbed his face, washed up, and started live streaming!

He would use the remaining half an hour to decide what to play first.

The page for [Cradle Plan] hadn’t officially gone online, but the community already wasn’t completely in the dark about the game demos available to play.

Many development teams had already been promoting and generating hype online for a while; some works that were well-received had earned considerable attention early on.

Now that all game demos were being released simultaneously, they naturally attracted more players to try them out.

Compared to the unknown works, this was an advantage, but also a disadvantage.

Because players would have higher expectations for these well-known titles.

If the quality of the work was solid and met those expectations, they could likely secure a top 10 spot in [Cradle Plan] and truly release their own games in the virtual world.

But if the quality is mediocre, causing players’ expectations to fall flat, that sense of letdown will significantly lower their game ratings.

This is a double-edged sword.

However, that has nothing to do with streamers.

Yi swiftly set up a live-streaming room voting, allowing viewers to vote on which game to broadcast first.

And the result was as expected, the top three were indeed the hottest titles from the [Cradle Plan]—

Dragon Knight

Succubus Prison

Earth Fire

“Great!

Let’s start with Dragon Knight!” Yi was a bit excited.

Because Dragon Knight was also one of the titles he was most looking forward to.

The development team for this title hadn’t released much information, only a rough outline of the gameplay, and the story was completely unknown.

All anyone knew was that it was a Western-style fantasy story, where players, as the protagonists, had to raise young dragons, train themselves, go through tough trials, and ultimately become honorable Dragon Knights, taking their grown dragons into combat to become heroes.

At first, Yi didn’t react, finding the story a bit too cliché and lacking excitement.

He might not have raised dragons, but he had raised plenty of dinosaurs on Dinosaur Island—the place where even the transportation had changed to riding dinosaurs to get around.

He might not have ridden a Western dragon, but he had ridden Shirley’s transformed White Dragon, so he already had experienced being a Dragon Knight!

So this game seemed only moderately appealing to him.

But later, players discovered a blind spot—why was it “raising” a young dragon and not “breeding” a young dragon?

The development team released a gif as an answer:

A young dragon, in the cold silver light resembling ice, transformed into a silver-haired young girl with horns on her head and a tail on her back.

This gif quickly caused a sensation among players!

So the emphasis of this game isn’t on combat, but…

becoming a nanny?

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After that, the development team released more information about raising dragons, showing that raising a child was quite troublesome—

Players had to travel with the child, hunt and cook for her, provide nutrition, educate her in magic, earn money to buy magical saddles, trim dragon claws, clean teeth gaps, and treat sore throats caused by fire breathing…

In short, it was very troublesome but looked incredibly fun.

Since then, the game has maintained a consistently high level of interest.

Succubus Prison and Earth Fire were different genres.

If described in the simplest terms, one was “a man’s journey to the 100th layer underground” of alien exploration, while the other was “shooting everything to smithereens” in an exhilarating gunfight.

The underground in Succubus Prison was filled with a large number of abyss monsters that were difficult to understand yet possessed astonishing destructive power.

Players had to continually traverse dangerous environments, figure out ways to strengthen themselves, and delve as deep as possible underground.

But no one knew what was at the very depths of the underground.

This successfully piqued the curiosity of players.

In the end, Earth Fire managed to achieve such high popularity with its gunplay, naturally making it not an ordinary contender.

They designed a multitude of firearms with quite preposterous effects, such as gravity guns, teleportation guns, sonic guns, hypnosis guns, biochemistry guns…

providing players with an endless supply of novelty.

At the same time, they also pushed the concept of “thrill” to the limits.

Their “firearms” line-up even included one with a range of 60 meters, a kill radius of 800 meters, capable of firing cloud explosive bombs—and it could even triple fire!

They highlighted an absurd level of power.

All three of these, Yi had decided early on that he would play, so as soon as the Cradle Plan page went online, he began searching through hundreds of colorful demo images for Dragon Knight.

— Cloud Dream didn’t care about your popularity and treated all titles equally, simply organizing them alphabetically by initial letter.

Soon enough, Yi found a demo image of a silver dragon carrying an adult man and a silver-haired young girl, titled Dragon Knight.

He was about to click into it.

—But before he could click, his peripheral vision inadvertently swept across the demo image in the next row below Dragon Knight.

The demo portrayed a young succubus girl, an older succubus sister, and a mature succubus with an explosive figure—all part of the same image.

Its name was—Succubus Prison.

Yi’s finger hovered in midair.