Li Mu already had a perfect business operation before he started making the plug-in.
Accounting for the fact that "The Stone Age" was already popular for so long,and that by the end of the year, "Legend" would take its spot, he knew that there wasn't a lot of money to be made with the game.
Without an online payment channel, he could only sell his plug-in offline. He needed to buil a sales network from scratch and he didn't know how long it would take to sell 20,000 to 30,000 copies a month. Therefore, during the short duration he has to make money, he estimated it to be around a million yuan.
One million yuan is quite a lot, but the entire Abe plug-in markey had already been doing it for so long but the industry was only valued at about ten million yuan.
With every plug-in, they needed production, development, testing, maintenance, decide which channel to distribute it to, and building a channel network. All of those steps required a small sum of money. Even if he had a ready-made network for his plug-in, the benefits would have to be distributed, and he was lucky to even get 20% or 30% of the profits made from selling 300,000 to 400,000 copies a month.
There also weren't many payment methods during this era as Taobao, let alone Alipay, haven't been created yet. Therefore, there was a huge payment bottleneck, and that meant that there was no way for people to use online transactions.
Presently, most plug-ins would be sold on a monthly basis in internet cafes. Plug-in distributors would send their plug-ins to the cafe on a monthly basis, and people could directly use that service for a month at that internet cafe.
For Li Mu, who was working only with Zhao Kang and only had a few hundred yuan, how could he even try to replicate all of those steps? That would be impossible.
So Li Mu devised two plans for himself.
Both of the plans involved having a fifteen day free trial of the plug-in, which was why he asked Zhao Kang to get familiar with online promotion in-game.
Although online payments haven't yet been opened, the speed of online transmission was extremely fast. The actual effects of his plug-in was double that of any Abe's plug-ins, and it wasn't just in its function and speed. It was also powerful and comprehensive enough to exceed any effects in similar products.
In this way, the word of mouth effect can be replicated in a short amount of time, and it was free and easy to use. In this way, he would negatively impact the other plug-ins that players used in "The Stone Age".
This method was very detrimental. When he first thought of this, he thought about completely destroying the market first, which would ruin the income of the companies who make plug-ins.
However, once Abe Plug-in's realized that their business was getting impacted, they wouldn't sit still. There were only two options for them then: either develop a plug-in that was better, or find the person who made the plug-in and collaborate with them.
The possibility of the former happening was zero. Li Mu's level of programming was too advanced compared to the external plug-in developers. They could only do the latter.
His second plan was to wait for other plug-in studios to contact him.
Considering that Abe's Plug-in would be mentioned in the national media in the future, he wanted to beat them to it so he thought of a handling plan. If they wanted to cooperate with him, he could just sell it to them directly and have them do their own work with it. That way, he would be able to ignore the money that needed to be spent for it be maintained.
If that didn't work, he would have to resort to the other half of the plan.
He would have to sell it himself. If Li Mu and Zhao Kang worked their butts off during summer, they would still make some money but not as much as if they sold it directly to Abe's plug-in. They could earn tens of thousands of yuan, and if they discover some local agents amount among players, this would progress much faster.
However, he isn't inclined to that option because it would be too slow. He needed money fast. The second option would only be viable when "Legend" comes out, and when time wasn't an issue.
But in the end, it all depended on how much of an impact Li Mu's plug-in had in "Stone Age".
Uh...
On the night of July 11, he was finally finished with making the plug-in.
The free trial of the Flintstone Hegemon V1.0 was officially launched in-game.
Zhao Kang's efforts over the past few days had immediate results. Becuase he had sought out many chat rooms that often partook in plug-ins, he had a bit of a foundation in those places.
For example, a post on one of the forums that had hundreds of replies was published by Zhao Kang, under the name of Standing Pig. The contents were really simple. It read, "High school students who have no money to buy plug-ins? Begging your seniors to introduce you to one. A free Stone Age plug-in!"
At the beginning, Zhao Kang was unwilling to use the word free in the title and felt down. Li Mu gave him a glance, realizing that Zhao Kang didn't really understand the internet. In the virtual community, who cares about face?
After hearing Li Mu's reasoning, Zhao Kang had no choice but to comply with Li Mu's request.
Unexpectedly, the word "free" attracted the attention of many people. Netizens were very enthusiastic these few years, and many people have realized that free plug-ins don't have even one-tenth of the functions of paid plug-ins. If only free plug-ins were used, they would barely make an impact in their gameplay.
Some people advised Zhao Kang to not play anymore, and that he should be studying instead.
In short, not many people tried it.
Two nights later, Standing Pig posted another post. This time, it read, "Seniors, I finally found a free 'Stone Age' plug-in that is better than all other plug-ins. Here, I'll share it with everyone!"
This year, BS already had the function of attaching files. The size of Li Mu's plug-in was only 5.6 MB. However, BBS limited the size of how much an attachment can have to 1 MB. Li Mu could only compress the plug-in into six seperate files into a compressed package and let Zhao Kang upload that altogether.
It wasn't enough to only have the plug-in, so Li Mu also had screenshots of the gameplay when using the plug-in.
Even with a fixed template, posting that took a whole night.
Zhao Kang kept on posting that in various BBS while Li Mu kept on refreshing the posts.
This year, there were many netizens but little content. Any post could have millions of daily visitors. Internet content was scarce, so any BBs could have a large amount of readers.
At 1 am on July 12, one hour after the first post was posted, there were 638 downloads, and the number of messages reached 56, with most of them expressing curiousity about the plug-in.
Li Mu knew that good products took time for users to experience them, so he didn't follow those posts anymore.
After posting a few posts about it, Zhao Kang went into the game to publicize it. First he said that he found a free plug-in, and told them about the forum it was on to let them try it themselves.
Subsequently, Zhao Kang used his main account to reply to himself, prasing the free plug-in to the heavens.
Zhao Kang worked alone as the only water army.
Li Mu knew he had to wait for the conversation about the plug-in to pick up. In the current internet world, pure and enthusiastic netizens would become the 'tap water' of the plug-in, and would unknowly contribute to Li Mu's and Zhao Kang's cause.