AN:/ Thank you for the lovely comments on my other Free Guy fic!
Look, he tried. The surveys, focus groups, they all said the same thing.
Objectively, the game sucked. It wasn't even a proper game! It was like some shitty nature documentary except more boring because it was all virtual. No player interaction meant no microtransactions, just subscriptions and, let's be real here, there was no money in subscriptions.
People kept sharing their passwords for god's sake!
Life Unlimited was set to fail commercially if published.
FOCUS GROUP 4: LIFE UNLTD.
AVERAGE OVERALL SCORE: 2
GENERAL COMMENTS: "Slow and dull" / "What do I get to do?" / "Pointless" / "Good concept, not for me though" / "Nice graphics"
Full Report
Let's wind back time.
Antwan had never been the "cool dude", the roided up beach blonde jock with a massive ego and half a brain to balance it out.
He wasn't the smart nerd either. The guy with the brains and the math who was scrawny as anything but had the ideas to change the world.
His name was "Antwan" for fuck's sake, a French name with a New Zealand spelling on a young man just did not cut it in America. So he owned it instead, brassy and bold and screw you too. He called his company Soonami, doubling down. In the end, he made himself a success. He made himself someone you had to take seriously, someone who got interviewed by magazines and got a panel at E3.
"The secret to my success? Well, I like to be involved. I don't just sit on my arse in my ivory tower, y'know? I've gotta be there in the trenches adding in my own little touches, yeah? It's not a Soonami game if I haven't been involved at the ground level."
No, he was what one might uncharitably call an opportunist. He called himself an observer of potential. Because that, that was his talent, his skill. He saw what others didn't.
His first commercial game was Stab Race, a mediocre racing game where you could upgrade your car with weaponry to deal damage to the other players that was a mediocre hit on the PS2, followed by a bunch of PC simulation games that performed well enough to take Soonami from tiny underdog to recognised name.
What people didn't get was that the people who worked on those were reliable.
Unimaginative.
Obedient.
They were never going to make the company the big bucks.
"So what, is it an RPG? Strategy? Puzzle? What's the niche, who's the demographic, who will buy this?"
"It's strictly observation. The creatures develop over time, from very basic simple loops to more and more complex behaviour. You see life evolve in front of you."
"Huh. Interesting. Take me through the AI, what's going on there?"
It didn't take long after online play took off for Antwan to realise the potential of microtransactions.
Porting Stab Race to the PC as Stab Race: End Of The Line, stripping out most of the objectively cool weapons and gadgets to add them to the online store along with a bunch of barely-legal homages to popular franchises and adding in an online multiplayer mode made him a literal fortune. People went crazy over different car skins, "limited edition" weaponry and upgrades - solidifying his faith in franchise IP at the same time.
He got the best he could get, imaginative and creative and visionary to build new pointless overpriced crap for gamers to buy, new achievements for them to celebrate in game and out.
Stab Race: EOTL didn't survive past its fourth year because - he held his hands up - he overdid it. He shouldn't have made the Elite League pay-to-play. That was on him, a lesson he learned, yadda yadda whatever.
Still fired the one who suggested it first though.
But it wasn't the only feather in the cap so to speak and he was angry more than worried about the future.
"Y'see, I can see this going places. Really, this is incredible work - I'm definitely interested. Leave the demo here, I'll get my guys on a contract, we can see if this works, yeah?"
About six months after Stab Race's stats started to tank, he was introduced to a niche simulation game with a brand new, totally unique AI engine by one of his Fresh Talent Gurus who had been stalking MIT for new employees.
Obviously he wasn't that excited - brand new AI was usually code for overhyped crap when it came from students - but he trusted Andie, she'd brought him six of his best programmers last year. So he checked out the demo.
It was good. Unpolished but good. But there was one big fat glaring problem blaring away.
He sold what people bought, and they wanted consequence free violence. Look at GTA, CoD, the Hitman games when they were popular...
They didn't want art.
This was art.
"Look, I know this is breaking your heart, it breaks mine too! I bought the game and, and, it just doesn't work."
"Oh, it works!"
"Well, yeah, Millie, the nuts and bolts and bits all work, all function, but the game, the gameplay, doesn't work. No-one wants to buy a game they can't play. I'm sorry, nobody wants this, but I'm shelving it."
He wasn't a bad guy. He was a guy who had made a creative venture into a working, viable business with over 600 employees and a building of its own. That came with sacrifices, and if those sacrifices were mostly made unwittingly by others, well... the whole 'unwitting' part meant they'd never know, what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them, and he got to stay in business.
The money machine would continue to go brrrrrr.
"If you want, I've always got room for talent. And you both have talent, I'm serious about that. I can see your potential clear as day."
