Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

Shuihua certainly didn’t lack money, but she loved to hear interesting stories.

And middle-aged men, most of all, had no shortage of stories, especially those who were eager to make money, they had plenty of tales to tell.

So she deliberately created a small account and added quite a few middle-aged “older brothers” and joined several groups.

In these groups, she saw many people’s stories.

Those who had gone through divorce, widowhood, wives running away, brothers running away with money, middle-aged bankruptcy, working four jobs a day to pay off debts…

All the joys and sorrows of life, exposing her to the reality of the world.

When she saw this invitation, she didn’t pay much attention to it, because extra-income groups like this often pop up.

Such groups usually don’t last long – they’re bustling when you can make money, but as soon as that stops, everything cools down, and people naturally disperse.

But this time, this group was very different.

After taking a few glances at the chat content in the group, Shuihua realized: this was actually a group for grabbing Cloud Dream game consoles!

The familiar “older brothers” in the group were chatting excitedly: “Reselling it will make at least seven times the profit!”

Shuihua didn’t say anything and just lurked to observe.

After watching for about ten minutes, she guessed that this group must have been created by professional scalpers for the purpose of buying and reselling.

She couldn’t help but wonder: how many similar groups are out there?

Thinking of this, Shuihua hurried to call Camille and tell her the news, asking her to pass it on to Lincoln.

This made Camille even more restless.

She sat in her intricately decorated Virtual Riverside Courtyard, on a swing wrapped in flowers, without even the slightest inclination to sway, just staring blankly at the boats on the river.

At some point, she finally heard the sound of Lincoln logging into the virtual world – a Hwamei bird call that she had specially set up.

She quickly got off the swing, opened a teleportation gate, and rushed to see him.

After dealing with matters outside the game, Lincoln returned to the studio and logged into the virtual world.

The moment he logged on, he saw little intern Camille Zhu stepping out of the teleportation gate, approaching him.

Having been in such a hurry, the little intern almost collided into his chest.

Seeing Lincoln’s face up close, Camille was startled and quickly stepped back, feeling her face turning red again.

Looking at the anxious princess, Lincoln asked curiously, “What’s the matter? Why are you in such a hurry?”

“Easter egg!” The flustered Camille blurted out, but quickly realized her mistake and changed her words, “No, I mean, I have something important to tell you.”

Lincoln blinked, “More important than the Easter egg you thought of?”

“Stop joking, it’s really important!” The agitated princess dragged him through the teleportation gate to her Riverside Courtyard.

Before Lincoln could find a seat, the princess anxiously said, “We’ve been targeted by scalpers!”

She then showed Lincoln her chat history with Shuihua and the screenshots that Shuihua had sent.

Lincoln blinked. At first, when the princess mentioned scalpers, he didn’t pay much attention.

He had already taken measures against scalpers when the second batch of Mirage consoles were released.

If scalpers wanted to buy from other players, there was nothing he could do to stop them.

But if scalpers wanted to use a bunch of small accounts and software to snatch up stock?

In your dreams!

If scalpers wanted to use a large number of accounts to grab stocks, they’d need a large number of ID numbers, as well as the corresponding mobile phone numbers bound to those IDs for verification.

When grabbing stock, they would also need to verify identities before making a payment. Even if they had ten thousand IDs and managed to grab a hundred consoles, there wouldn’t be enough time for them to verify all the identities.

Once the verification timed out, the order would be cancelled and put back up for sale.

Moreover, this situation is actually impossible. If scalpers dared to use thousands of accounts to participate in panic buying at the same time, Mavis would definitely detect abnormalities and directly freeze the applications, or even directly block the scalper’s accounts.

That’s why Lincoln didn’t worry too much about the scalpers before.

But looking at the chat history in Camille Victoria’s hand, he found that scalpers had actually given up using software and started organizing groups and using manpower to cause trouble!

This would be very difficult to distinguish.

Although this situation helps Mirage maintain high prices in the long run, it completely contradicts his original intention of lowering the prices! He had no plans to take Cloud Dream public anyway, so why drive up the price of the equipment!

He wanted users! As many users as possible!

He hadn’t even had time to lower the price yet, and the price was already going up seven or eight times over there, what a joke!

“Thanks, and help me thank Shuihua too, she did a big favor. “After thinking about it, Lincoln said, “When the Second Generation Mirage is completed, I’ll give you each one.”

“Second-generation Mirage?” Camille Victoria was just about to say no need, but then she heard the shocking news.

“It’s a secret!” Lincoln made a shushing gesture.

Camille Victoria subconsciously reached out to cover her mouth, but she quickly realized: this is a virtual office, who can eavesdrop here!

She stretched out her hand annoyedly to hit Lincoln.

Lincoln didn’t hide either, taking a few hits with a smile, the Little Princess didn’t use force, her soft little hands gently caressed him, which could hardly be considered a punishment at all.

Camille Victoria blushed before she finished, and collected her hands uneasily behind her back. She changed the subject and said, “What do you plan to do?”

“Three-pronged approach. First, limit sales to one unit per person, those who haven’t bought it can keep trying, but once they buy it, they enter a half-year cooling-off period, during which they cannot buy again; if there are problems, they must return it to the factory for repair.

Second, order reviews will be stricter. Large orders coming from the same IP address will be rejected outright. Multiple people asking to ship to the same location will be frozen and reviewed.

Third, strict enforcement. I’ll accelerate building up the Legal Department, and if we catch any scalpers, we’ll directly report them for illegal business operations, serve as a warning to others!”

“Hmm, should that be okay?” Camille Victoria was still a bit worried; as someone who doesn’t understand much about business operations, she only knew that scalpers were an old problem that couldn’t be solved.

“Don’t worry, it should be enough.” Lincoln reassured her, “If someone can really bypass such strict restrictions and stockpile consoles, I’ll release 10 million new units next week! We’ll make sure they lose big time!”

Since they already had plenty of money now, and after selling the 5 million units this week, they could afford the production cost of 10 million Mirage units.

There were still some risks, but on the weekend, “Assassins’ Alliance” would officially go on sale and they would be able to recover a lot of their funds,

In short, scalpers must die in his hands!

Lincoln immediately began writing an announcement and released it on the

Internet.

Shuihua secretly took out her mobile phone during class break, and the group that was just established to grab the goods was still very lively.

— Princess knows that she won’t disturb her during her third year in high school, so she won’t find out about Lincoln giving her a second-generation console until the evening.

However, when she opened the group chat, she found that the content of the chat had changed greatly.

“Game over! I thought I’d found a long-term channel for making money, but it’s over before it even started!”

“What a waste of excitement!”

“It’s not too bad, think about how hard it was to grab the console before, it was a big deal to get one; now it won’t prevent us from grabbing one!” “True, even mosquito legs are meat, no matter how thin.”

“You call making tens of thousands of dollars in profit from grabbing one console a ‘mosquito leg’? Are you rich now, bro?”

“Ah, it’s still such a pity.”

Shuihua also clicked on the chat box and joined in, “Yeah, it’s such a pity!” She can’t let her cover be blown!

Let alone let these people know that she’s the one causing trouble!