Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

Chapter 859: Chapter 817: The Dissonance of Overseas Players _1

Bob’s prediction was on the mark.

Of these 16 people, 13 are now in Chang’an City.

Only the remaining three had to give up because they had to go back to their hometown for New Year’s.

After all, something like an omnidirectional treadmill, if you want to mail it back to your hometown and then back, not to mention the cost, just dismantling and reassembling it is a big hassle.

As for the million-dollar championship prize, there certainly is hope.

But is it high?

Perhaps not necessarily.

Especially for the 13 people who skipped the competition and are now gaming in Chang’an City.

These 13 people have one thing in common — they are all members of the Night City Fight Club.

And they gave up the competition because they are certain they couldn’t win.

Why couldn’t they win?

Because the number of Night City Fight Club members participating in the VR Boxing King Global Championship and progressing to the top 128 to 64 stage, far exceeds these 13 people.

Thanks to frequent club internal competitions and friendly sparring, the high-skilled players have a clear understanding of each other’s abilities.

After the launch of “Iron Fist,” the club organized a competition for players with Wild Island equipment — the results did not change the strength comparison in the virtual world of combat.

So these 13 people are quite certain: among the remaining 128 contestants, any of the remaining 31 members of the Fight Club will have more than a 90% chance of defeating them.

And the chances of beating them all and making it to the top three to win the prize are so slim, it’s almost impossible.

So giving up doesn’t hurt at all.

These people are strong enough, and in reality, they are essentially martial arts practitioners.

Some of them learned traditional Kung Fu from a master in a martial arts school, while others learned modern boxing from a coach.

They have another commonality, that is, they like the method of close combat.

So after entering Chang’an, most of them looked at the swords at their waists and just stuffed them into their weapon storage boxes

When bandits appeared, they chose to fight hand-to-hand.

But this is undoubtedly very unwise!

Especially with “Martial Arts Skills: Body (Beginner Level),” aside from a slight increase in physical fitness, it can hardly provide them any help.

Because their own technique has already surpassed the auxiliary level of beginners!

The result was an unambiguous serious injury and collapse.

Afterwards, half of them admitted defeat, started to use a sword as arranged by the System, and the other half started contacting the Forging Master of the Blacksmith Guild to arrange a pair of metal wrist and hand guards for themselves, to see if they could improve their combat strength.

…

When the Cloud Dream Works staff noticed the Posts in the forum, they had already started discussing it in the group chat:

“These people are really stubborn. Shouldn’t we add Heavenly Silkworm Gloves that block sharp weapons to the game to help them?”

“The problem is that if we add this, it’s not just they who would want it. Everyone would.”

“Are you sure they are going to wear the Gloves on their hands instead of stuffing them in front of their chest for protection or wrapping them around their neck for protection against decapitation?”

“Ah…this…” the proposer was lost in thought.

“Let’s think about it later. Don’t think about work today, just relax.” said Randall

—As the “Iron Fist” operation team suffers, the developers and operators of “Chang’an” are cheering and celebrating.

Sales celebration posters, with one after the other, created an unprecedented media hype. The player online rate kept soaring.

How could such a good trend not excite them?

In the Office group chat, Lincoln started another red packet party — actually, it was Xiaomeng who was tossing them.

When Lincoln and Xiaomeng were lying on the small sofa watching the live broadcast, Xiaomeng occasionally grabbed two handfuls of red packets and spread them joyfully in the air.

That told Lincoln: the sales of “Chang’an” have reached another million.

He was actually somewhat puzzled about this.

“Chang’an,” this game, is purely based on the ancient Huaxia context, and it sells very well in Daxia, which is something he had anticipated.

But for overseas, there should be a substantial cultural barrier.

It’s not like the games before, which were basically set in a modern context, whether Eastern or Western, they can easily get immersed in it.

But the backdrop of the Tang Dynasty, with its food, clothing, housing, transportation, cultural history, in all aspects, forms a vast difference from Western culture.

Lincoln believes in the quality of the game and is confident in sales.

But in his expectation, this should be a relatively slow-burning process.

The first wave should bring in the players from Daxia, followed by players from the East Asian cultural circle and a small number of Western gamers, and finally, rely on word of mouth and gamer social circles to bring in overseas players on a large scale.

But it’s not like that at all right now.

“Chang’an” had a lot of overseas players pre-order even before it was available – Lincoln could understand that these are all rather enthusiastic game enthusiasts, or loyal fans of Cloud Dream.

But after the launch, the sales explosion was a bit surprising to him.

So far, in the sales of “Chang’an”, more than half of the proportion are even overseas players!

This is indeed surprising!

After thinking long and hard, he could only come up with one reason: it is probably due to the uniqueness of the Tang Dynasty era.

The “Tang Dynasty”, as one of the most flourishing dynasties in history of Huaxia, is not a totally unfamiliar epoch for overseas players.

In particular, the Tang Dynasty before and after the prosperous Kaiyuan period, both culturally and militarily, was almost at the world’s leading level, and greatly impacted overseas.

So much so that “Tang” became the term for Huaxia in foreign countries, not just as a term for the country, but even everything related to Huaxia, was termed as “Tang”.

People were naturally “Tang people”, and the streets where Tang people lived were called “Tang streets”, evolved to the present day, they are the famous “Chinatown”.

Faced with such a prosperous, powerful dynasty at its peak, who wouldn’t be interested?

Just like players in Daxia, when they talk about the prosperous period of the Roman Empire, the most powerful Eighteenth Dynasty of ancient Egypt, they would also be very interested.

They might not want to read the corresponding history books, but a well-made virtual reality game with such a background, they would definitely be very happy to tour around.

With this in mind, Lincoln ruffled Xiaomeng’s head and said, “Show me what’s going on with the overseas streamers.”

“Yep, no problem!”

Xiaomeng waved his little hand, and the familiar anchor images in front of Lincoln were minimized and moved to one side, with the center occupied by overseas anchors.

In the center were the live streaming rooms of Ivan Ivanov and Turner.

Probably because of the unfamiliarity with the game’s background, these two didn’t do any fancy operation, just followed the task plot.

After being held back by Second Miss Chen, they also entered Chen Mansion.

But when Second Miss asked them about Jianghu stories, both were a bit dazed.

‘Jianghu? What’s that?’

The translation and explanation of this word by Cloud Dream left both of them a bit puzzled.

To Turner, it seemed like a group of knights without knighthood status walking among civilians, punishing the bad, helping the good, occasionally fighting and killing each other.

For Ivan, it was even more difficult to understand, “Meaning… Cossacks help serfs chop bandits story?”

Such serious deviations obviously make it difficult to tell a good story.

This is not a serious problem, the development team when designing, did not expect every player to be a martial arts enthusiast, able to speak eloquently about martial arts stories.

The goodwill of Second Miss can also be increased in other ways than telling stories.

Visit her often, give a little gift, tell about what you’ve encountered in Chang’an City, can also improve the goodwill.

Just not as fast.

So after telling a story, albeit with some stumbling, they were not asked to stay by Second Miss, after a meal they left Chen Mansion and continued with the later plot.

By the time Lincoln looked over, the two had already found their distant uncle and entered the plot surrounding Teaching Workshop.

Faced with the task handed over by the NPC, they accepted naturally and followed their uncle into the Teaching Workshop to look for clues.

But Ivan, looking at Cloud Dream’s annotation for “Teaching Workshop”, was a bit puzzled:

“The families of criminals? Shouldn’t these people be banished to Siberia to grow potatoes?”

“And they can live in such fancy places to work?”

He looked at the exquisite and luxurious interior of the Teaching Workshop, and couldn’t quite understand.

“Prostitution”, this profession, was completely legal during the Tsarist Russia era, even though it’s illegal in Russia today, the punishment is minor, and there are no shortage of practitioners, at least a million or so.

In the environment Ivan lives in, there aren’t many people who discriminate against sex workers.

When this distant uncle told him about how “pitiful these women are here”, he really couldn’t muster any sympathy …

Ivan is just like that, players from Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Greece and other countries where sex work is completely legal, that sense of inconsistency is even stronger …