A person concealed by the darkness, moved his pale bony finger made visible by the light emitted by a sleek glass screen and touched a glowing icon that read “New Mail”.
A female voice boomed in the room, now reading “A brief history of Royal Road and Virtual Gaming”.
“Royal Road was once touted as the world’s best VRMMORPG, 40 years later stood at rank 26th. Though it significantly fell in rank and revenue, it was still a popular game, and known as a “must play classic”. The game was legendary from grandparents to little children. It had all the elements covered, mystery, thrill, fantasy and more. Everyone who owned a Virtual Space Console had played it at least once. The game had literally defined the future of VRMMORPG’s from both a game outlay and planning to technical programming aspects.
However the game became a victim of its own success. Driven by the ambitions of its new CEO (the third CEO) to increase profits, the company Unicorn saw the number of daily players rise from a few hundred million in the initial years to over 3 billion in 8 years. The secret to the massive player increase was that the game had been made free to all. The monthly fee system had been scraped away and replaced with in-game advertisements, every in-game hour an advertisement would pop up in front of the users view. The company then rolled out a premium account which was advertisement free (this premium account was slightly more expensive than the original monthly fees). Many stock market analysts hailed the brilliant marketing strategy as the future of all gaming, with a single move the CEO secured the company’s financial and market position.
But that’s when the decline kicked in.
The game was already 15 years old, most of the older players had beaten some of the higher level quests and explored most of the virtual world. In their eyes the game had already been beaten by about ~85%. The first wave of quitters were players who were hardcore gamers tired of playing the same game.
The second wave were again, older players. To maintain game difficulty balance between new and old players, the game AI provided quests in similar ratio. But given the number of new players, there were more Difficulty level E quests than S. Given the fact most of the older players had been playing for plus 10 years, even an S quest was considered too easy. This problem was later corrected by the introduction of SSS, SS, and SA difficulty quests. But the roll out of the solution came in too late. Most of the of the older players had already left the game by then.
Then, came the anti-competition regulations which deemed several of Unicorn’s marketing strategy as uncompetitive and monopolizing. Unicorn was forced to curb its own marketing strategies giving other game developers breathing space. Though Unicorn still maintained market leadership, it could no longer increase its market share at a breathtaking pace.
Hardware played a huge role in the development of VR games. Royal Road was based on the first generation VR space consoles. The shift from one console generation to another took substantial effort, time, and money. The second generation of VR space consoles garnered a lot of attention; Nerve Gear. Claiming to be more realistic than its predecessor, players were rushing to get hold of Nerve Gear. Royal Road too upgraded to Nerve Gear (at great expense). However a single event changed the course of VRMMORPG. A hotly anticipated VRMMORPG game title showed the world how virtual gamers could be held hostage in the virtual environment. With the death of nearly 4,000 gamers, a global “Standardized Console Act” was passed. The Act required all Virtual Reality players to use standardized government approved consoles (Nerve Gear was banned). Unicorn was faced with two options, either let players incur the huge cost of the console or subsidize it. In the end, believing the worst was over, Unicorn rolled out subsidized consoles to all existing gamers, in the hope to maintain market share and make money-off retained players. Financially this Act only affected Unicorn as it was the largest VRMMORPG provider, with nearly 80% market share.
But the Standardized Console Act was only the beginning of the onslaught. The global health and safety standards then required all global VRMMORPG to firewall the games internally based on geographic locations and number of users on a particular server. This safety procedure aimed to ensure that in case of a virus outbreak or internal system failures, the danger could be localized. By creating firewalls, Royal Road was cut into 30 parts. No information / players could communicate with a different server. (So players in Americans could never play against Koreans). The move was considered too strict and received mixed reviews (from players and developers). It added a huge financial burden on Unicorn (being the largest player) as they needed to buy server space for every region with more than 100 million players and then replicate the data of maps, quests and AI programs. Items traded on Royal Road crashed in some markets and soared in others. The net impact on trade could be said was zero, but for players who were part of international guilds (or had international friends), the firewall cut them off from those whom they knew and thus left a bad taste.
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Unicorn’s pain did not end there; several studies were also published, highlighting the negative health implications of Virtual Gaming. Soon, several countries passed Virtual Gaming Health regulations which essentially taxed gaming companies (like Unicorn) based on the size of the user base (again Unicorn was severely affected by this, having 75% market share). The idea the government had was to coerce Unicorn (or other gaming companies) to pass the tax burden to gamers.
Unicorn’s CEO lobbied heavily against this form of taxation. Initially, Unicorn tried to bear the tax on its’ own, but the costs were astronomical. Thus, it was forced to charge all users a nominal fee. This became the pivotal moment in history which led to Unicorn’s collapse. The day they charged the nominal gaming fee, nearly 500 million players quit the game. These players were the least loyal to Royal Road. Unicorn’s share prices nose-dived downwards, the financial noose began tightening around Unicorn’s neck.
Little by little, new games chipped away its market share. As competition grew, Unicorn failed to retain it’s top talent. In the end its decline became inevitable. As of today, Unicorn has 6 game titles with 10 million users, of which 4 million are Royal Road players. Many stock analysts gave their views on what lead to Royal Road’s decline. The most agreed upon one was, that Unicorn became too big too quickly, thus finding it difficult to adapt to the changing market. Though the firm tried launching other game titles, none of them really took off. The total user base proves that. 5 titles and 6 million players…”
The pale bony finger now clicked an icon “Skip”.
The computer automated voice then changed to a man’s voice. “I guess you already know all this. After all this is ‘you’ we are talking about. Our stock is trading at less than 2,000 won from its peak of a million. I bet it hurts you emotionally and financially given your long associated history to Royal Road and the 5% stake in Unicorn. If it does, then I’ll cut to the chase, the bottom line is Unicorn is on the verge of financial collapse and we need your help. The 8th CEO just resigned from Unicorn today, let me know if you're interested in filling up the role, Lee Hyun.”
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Authors Note:
1. Thank you Knaivvs for helping to Edit the Fanfic. :-/ I really hate paying attention to grammar and spellings. I apologize to readers, if the English is not up to mark or down right atrocious, I have a shortage of time in daily life, so I usually pen down chapters spontaneously on inspiration and post them without proof reading. :-/ i'll try to ensure fewer mistakes, but no promises.
2. The answers for those wondering at the mention of Nerve Gear whether the game is SAO. Yes, it is.
3. Please feel free to comment on how or what you feel after reading the fanfic chapter (its good encouragement to an author) and I do take readers view seriously. So your suggestions and criticism won't go unseen / not replied to.
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Connect to Royal Road – Elementarem Vim next Chapter?YesNo
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