Before Li Mu became the Stoneware Overlord, he already had a perfect business operation plan.
In view of the fact that the Stone Age wouldn't last long, and by the end of the year, the entire online game market would have to give way to the super beast of the online game world, the Legend of Mir 2. Therefore, Li Mu knew that the Stone Age Overlord wouldn't have much profit margin for him.
Without an online payment channel, he could only sell it offline. He also needed to build a sales network from scratch. He did not know how long it would take for him to sell twenty to thirty thousand copies a month. Therefore, from now until the end of the year, the revenue generated by the Stoneware Overlord in his hands was estimated to be at most one million yuan.
One million yuan was indeed a lot, but the value of the industrial chain was only tens of millions after being in the business for so long. The so-called industrial chain was the value created to support the entire profit chain.
Production, testing, maintenance, channel distribution, and terminal sales. Every step had to make money. Not to mention that Li Mu did not have the ability to build a sales network that could sell tens of thousands of copies a month, even if there was a ready-made network in front of him and the profits were evenly distributed, it would be amazing if he could get thirty to forty percent of the sales of three to four hundred thousand yuan a month.
The payment methods in this era were very simple. Online payment had not really started yet. Hangzhou's Boss Ma did not even have Taobao, let alone Alipay. Therefore, the current bottleneck of online payment was huge. Even for online games like "Stone Age" and "Legend of Mir 2", card sales had to rely on countless internet cafes to do offline distribution. There was no way to realize online transactions.
Currently, most of the plug-ins were sold in the form of monthly packages. Like card sales, the terminals were also sunk to internet cafes. The plug-ins distributors would cooperate with internet cafes all over the country and entrust the internet cafes to sell the plug-ins' monthly packages. After a year and a half, many plug-ins' monthly packages could be bought directly in internet cafes.
However, for Li Mu, he only had himself and Zhao Kang, as well as three to four hundred yuan. How could he open an online store that could sell tens of thousands of copies a month? It was simply a fool's dream.
Therefore, Li Mu had already prepared two sets of plans for himself.
After the development of the Stoneware Overlord was completed, he would first open a 15-day free trial period. This was also why he let Zhao Kang familiarize himself with the various online promotions.
Although online payment had not been opened yet, the speed of online dissemination was extremely fast. His Stoneware Overlord's auxiliary function for the players was almost several times that of Abbe plug-ins and other stone tools. Not only was its function powerful, but it also had the consideration of smoothness and user experience. The overall effect was far superior to similar products.
In this way, the free trial version could create a word-of-mouth effect in a short period. There was no reason for it to be free. It was easy and easy, and no reason to be rejected by users.
Li Mu's method was very mean. From the very beginning, he had the idea of completely destroying the market and directly cutting off the income of Abbe or other plug-in development teams. It was just like how 360 antivirus was free in the past and praised countless antivirus software companies.
Once Abbe, who already had a business model, suffered a devastating blow, they would definitely not sit and wait for death. There were only two choices in front of them: immediately develop a plug-in that was more powerful than the Stoneware Overlord, or find the maker of the Stoneware Overlord to cooperate.
The possibility of the former was zero. Li Mu's programming level was not something that these plug-in developers could compare to, so they could only do the latter.
This was also the first of Li Mu's two sets of plans: wait for the other cheats to contact him, especially Ah Bei's cheat. If they contacted him, he would directly pack up the Stone Age Overlord and sell it. The Stone Age was still very popular at the moment, so selling it for a few hundred thousand wouldn't be a problem.
If the first plan was unsuccessful, then there was only the second plan left, and that was to promote it himself.
It would be much more difficult to promote it himself. Even if Li Mu and Zhao Kang broke their legs this summer, they might not be able to sell much. However, it was better than nothing. If they worked hard, it would not be a problem to earn tens of thousands of dollars. If they could find some local agents among the players and users, then the speed of promotion might be even faster.
However, Li Mu did not favor the second plan. It was too slow, and he needed fast money. When "Legend of Mir" was released, it would be suitable to use the second plan to catch a big fish.
Therefore, he hoped that everything would depend on the Stone Age Overlord's release, and how much of an impact it would bring to the commercial cheats of the Stone Age!
…
On the night of July 11th, Li Mu finally completed the development of the Stone Age Overlord on the second floor of the Spider.
The free trial version of the Stone Age Overlord was officially released on several gaming forums.
Zhao Kang's hard work for the past few days had immediately paid off. Previously, under Li Mu's instructions, he had requested for free stone cheats in various Stone Age forums and chatrooms. Therefore, he had a certain "mass base."
For example, there was a post on a Stone Age forum that was posted a few hundred times. It was posted by Zhao Kang. His username was "Standing Pig." The content was simple: "A high school student who has no money to buy cheats, begging seniors to introduce a free stone cheats!"
At first, Zhao Kang did not want to add the word "begging" as he felt that he would lose face. Li Mu rolled his eyes at him. Obviously, he did not have the internet's thinking. In the future, when you bring a screenshot of an action movie and ask an experienced driver to show you the way, who knows how despicable you will be. In the online virtual community, why care so much about face?
Zhao Kang had no choice but to follow Li Mu's request.
Unexpectedly, the word "begging" attracted the attention of many people. These days, netizens were very enthusiastic. Many people replied, saying that the free cheats did not even have one-tenth of the functions of paid cheats. If one only used the free cheats, it would be almost impossible to move an inch in the Stone Age.
There were also people who advised Zhao Kang to stop playing. Studying was the most important thing.
In short, the replies were all positive.
Two days later, "Standing Pig" posted another post: "Seniors, I finally found a free stone cheats. Its functions are better than all other cheats. I'm here to share it with everyone!"
These days, forums already had the ability to upload attachments. The size of the cheats developed by Li Mu was only 5.6MB. However, most forums limited the size of attachments. An attachment could not be larger than 1MB. Without a choice, Li Mu could only use compression software to compress the cheats into six compressed packages. Then, he asked Zhao Kang to upload them together.
Just the attachments were not enough. Li Mu also made a lot of screenshots, including the interface of the cheats, the functions, and the actual effects in the game.
Even if there was a fixed template, it still took half a night to post this kind of purely manual effort.
As Zhao Kang posted on various forums, Li Mu kept refreshing the posts.
These days, there were many netizens but little content. Any random forum, Hao123, had millions of daily visitors. It was enough to show how little content there was on the internet. Therefore, any random forum now had a large number of users.
At 1 am on the 12th of July, an hour after the first post was posted, the number of downloads had reached 638. The number of comments had reached 56. Most of them expressed their curiosity and wanted to download it to try it out.
Li Mu was not in a hurry. He knew that a good product needed time for the users to continue to experience it.
Therefore, Li Mu did not pay attention to these posts anymore.
After Zhao Kang posted enough posts, he went into the game to promote it. He first announced that he had found a free cheats. Then, he gave the players the address of the forum where the cheats were posted, so that they could download it and try it out.
After that, Zhao Kang used the sockpuppet account he had registered to reply to his own post. He used all the words he could to praise the power of the cheats, which were free to try out. It was unprecedented.
Zhao Kang took on the role of the Internet Water Army and shills.
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