My game, you have no right to award

Chapter 128: On the Ascendant
The working atmosphere within Megvii Games has returned to focus from extreme impetuousness.

The employees worked together and overtime to carry out the final optimization work on the main body of "Nether Mountain and Sea".

Every week they have to iterate the beta version and fix a large number of crash-causing bugs.

The work is mainly led by the programming team and engine engineers, and the QA team is responsible for simultaneous testing.

The game text has also been locked and packaged to avoid affecting various translations and localizations in the future.

Now, any modification to the text will have a ripple effect. As soon as the Chinese text changes, they have to resubmit the original translation to all localization companies, and then these companies will retranslate the changed content.

Putting aside the extra money involved, the risk of making such a change with the release date only two months away is simply too great.

And how much can the quality be improved by modifying the text now?

After weighing the pros and cons, Zhou Kuang believed that directly locking the text was the best option, and there was no need to change the text of "Netherworld Mountains and Seas".

They had already passed the Steam review a long time ago. They submitted a version in early February, and Steam took about two weeks to review and approve it.

The begamer platform should have submitted its application at the same time and pre-sold the game after passing the review.

However, Niu Tieming said that they don’t have to worry about whether it will pass the review or not. Regardless of whether it passes or not, it will be announced as passed, so that "Youming Shanhai" can be pre-sold directly.

After all, this is just a formality. The main reason they want a sealed version is to check and avoid some sensitive content.

Just modify all of these before going online and release a special version.

This approach gives Megvii Games greater flexibility. They don't have to worry too much about the version submitted this time, they only need to care about the version that is finally launched.

Logically speaking, such a process is definitely not in compliance with regulations, but the Antarctic Group turned a blind eye and did not pursue Niu Tieming.

The only risk is that the final version launched contains huge errors, at which time it will definitely be held accountable.

Zhou Kuang and Niu Tieming have known each other for some time and know each other quite well.

He knew that Zhou Kuang was a cautious man, so he believed that he would not make a mistake on such an important project.

……

……

……

The days passed, and the release date was getting closer and closer.

The popularity of "Netherworld Mountains and Seas" shows no signs of waning, but becomes even hotter as the release date approaches.

On Bilibili, there are no more analysis videos about trailers, because almost every detail of every trailer has been analyzed in countless ways by various up-loaders.

Whether it's conspiracy theories, verification based on the original Shan Hai Jing, or inferences based on interviews with Kuangshi Games, someone has already made videos from all angles.

So now, whenever an analysis video is released, no matter what method is used, it is almost always a copy of the work of others.

As the saying goes, the first person to come up with an idea is a genius, the second is a mediocre person, and the third is a fool.

Naturally, no up-loader wants to be regarded as a fool by netizens and fans.

However, posts discussing the sales of the game "Youming Shanhai" are refreshed by hundreds or even thousands every day.

"Netherworld Mountains and Seas" has been occupying the first place on the game sales list since the second day after the pre-sale started.

In China, "Netherworld Mountains and Seas" naturally occupies the first place firmly and has never been shaken, and on the overseas Steam best-selling list, it has been hovering in the top five.

Before this, not to mention that there were no games in China that could achieve this, even many popular foreign blockbusters could not always stay at the top of the best-selling list in China. So naturally, many players want to know the current sales volume of "Nether Mountain and Sea".

Some players are spiritual shareholders. They strongly support "Youming Shanhai", so the more it sells, the happier they are.

Just thinking about it makes me feel so good.

Some players are simply curious about how many copies of a domestic 3A game can sell?

There are also some domestic peers with vested interests who, out of jealousy, want to belittle the success of "Youming Shanhai" and use all kinds of strange angles to underestimate the sales of the game.

After all, Megvii Games has not disclosed the sales of the game so far.

Or they want to prove the potential and prospects of the domestic gaming industry through the success of "Youming Shanhai".

The former is short-sighted, only seeing that Megvii Games is making money, but failing to see that it has expanded the entire domestic gaming industry.

The latter is for their own consideration, knowing that the emergence of "Youming Shanhai" will be of great benefit to domestic game developers like themselves.

The more successful "Youming Shanhai" is, the bigger the domestic gaming industry's pie will be. Regardless of whether the final result is the expansion of existing companies or the entry of big players from other industries, it will definitely allow game developers who are already in this industry to eat a larger share of the pie.

Whether it is salary, status, job security, etc., it does not come with it.

"Netherworld Mountain and Sea" is suspected to have sold two million copies

In a video about speculating about "Netherworld Mountains and Seas", the up-host showed a foreign steam data website.

"Look everyone, this is SteamDB, a website that records relevant information and data about games on Steam."

"Before 2018, the sales figures for every game on Steam were easily available, for example using websites like Steamspy."

"The method they use is to use a crawler to record all the games each player owns, then add up the totals and calculate the approximate sales figures."

"However, Steam later updated its users' privacy settings, hiding the games in the user's game library by default. This resulted in websites like SteamSpy no longer being able to obtain real and accurate sales data."

"This almost cuts off any third-party website's source of data on Steam game sales."

"Sites like steamspy lost their relevance overnight and their traffic plummeted."

"Their revised algorithm has significantly reduced the accuracy of sales estimates, and compared to before, it can only be considered a reference level."

At this time, the up master in the video opened the steamdb website, opened a game, and pulled it down.

"However, on Steamdb, you can still see the sales forecasts for each game from different websites."

"For example, for this game, four third-party websites gave different sales forecasts. They may not be accurate, but at least they give people room to choose."

"And the Netherworld Mountains and Seas..."

Up paused, opened the page of Youming Shanhai, and scrolled down to find "Owner estimations", which is a prediction of how many players on Steam own this game.

"PlayTracker estimates that Netherworld Mountain and Sea sold 138 million copies."

"VG Insights predicts sales of 176 million copies."

"Gamalytic's forecast is 198 million copies."

He clicked on the last link and a number popped up on the screen.

"SteamSpy's forecast is 285 million copies."

(End of this chapter)