Li Mu slept past twelve in the afternoon, but he was only asleep for six hours. He was thinking about his plug-in the whole day, so his sleep quality wasn't good.
When he woke up, his parents had already left for work and he was going to call Zhao Kang to go to the internet cafe to see how the plug-in was faring in the game.
Prior to the release of the plug-in, he made a new QQ account, and left his number on it, indicating that if anyone wanted to cooperate with him, they would have to call his number.
As soon as he walked into the living room, the phone rang.
It was Zhao Kang.
Similar to Li Mu, he also didn't sleep well.
Although he didn't know much about technology, and especially about plug-ins, he spent his night in the front of the computer advertising the plug-in and felt what Li Mu said when having a water army was important. He felt a magical, yet subtle force drawing netizens towards trying the plug-in.
He knew what it kind of meant, so he also wanted to go back to the internet cafe to see how things went.
The two agreed on the phone to meet at the gate of the community, and from there, they both went to the cafe.
The number of clicks on the first post reached 80,000: there were 54,301 downloads and 9,791 responses about it.
Don't even mention Zhao Kang, but even Li Mu was excited.
Zhao Kang excitedly counted the dowloads from several posts, and in just a several hours, there were over 120,000 downloads in total.
There were only a scare amount of free good products. This plug-in caused a powerful cohesion, that brought the netizens together, and after they downloaded the free plug-in, they didn't come back to write their thanks.
Li Mu only considered this plug-in as only the seed of making himself known throughout the beginning stages of the internet. He wanted this seed to help him growing into a towering tree.
At the same time, there were seven or eight young people sweating anxiously in a residential house in Zhongguamcun, Yanjing.
There were the current workers of Abbey Plug-ins.
They were formed when two external teams, Abbe and Chiba, merged together. At the beginning, Chiba was making their ownown paid plug-ins in Stone Age. Some people in Abbe were jealous of them making money, and developed a similar plug-in and put it in the market for free, which ruined the Chiba's profits. In the end, they decided to merge together in order to make money together.
After a few months after they merged, they monopolized the plug-in market in Stone Age and made a lot of profits The income from the settlement they made in June exceeded 200,000 yuan.
They originally decided to take advantage of the summer vacation in July in order to pass 300,000 yuan in revenue, and they had already begun to reorganize their sales team, and were preparing to bypass provincial agents and pass their plug-in directly to the retail terminals. Last night, a developer in the group accidentally saw Zhao Kang's post.
In the beginning, the developed downloaded the free trial of th eplug-in with a scornful attitude. After only a few minutes, he lost his attitude and went to warn his team.
Then, the entire team was stunned by the plug-in that was just released.
When the last free plug-in came out, Chiba's group realised that they only had two options; they either had to not make money, or make money together with Abe.
Xi Quanyu finally agreed to merge with Abe after becoming desperate to try and maintain their profits.
Now, Xi Quanyu didn't expect that another similar situation would happen again so soon.
The horrible thing about the new plug-in was that it was too powerful and it was much more convenient and smoother to use than the Abe's plug-in.
This feeling was like "Sun Rising Masculine" preparing to hold a concert along with "Spring in the Spring" in a town. Then Wang Feng himself runs over and holds a concert in the same city at the same time. As a result, Wang Fang took all of the people that were preparing to go to their concert.
This was just bullying!
The person in charge after the merge was Sun Peng. He was the former founder of Chiba. After Abbe came out and disrupted the situation in the plug-in market, he decided to take the people from Abbe. Because Abbe had gained a lot of popularity when they released their free plug-in, they decided to rename themselves Abbey Plug-in.
Sun Peng thought that this merge would be able to get rid of all of their competitors, but suddenly another person had popped up.
Since the morning, Sun Peng's phone hasn't stopped ringing.
During the age where receiving calls and calling people required several cents a minutes, Sun Peng's heart was bleeding.
Every call he was getting were from the agents selling the plug-ins.
Agents were generally divided by provinces, and Abbey Plug-in found an agent in each province. There were responsible for expanding into the internet cafes in their province, as that was where they got their sales.
Now, many people who bought their plug-ins were demaining refunds. The reason they had was very simple; they found a better plug-in and it was free. Why wouldn't they switch?
Although customers who asked for refunds were unreasonable, this situation was filling Sun Peng with indignation. Users who spent money on the plug-in couldn't find Sun Peng, so they went to the owner of the cafes to protest.
The owners only sold plug-ins as a side business, as the main business were the people who went to the internet cafe themselves. Offending this group of people wouldn't be good for their business.
Therefore, the owns could only seek an agent to protest, and the agetns couldn't withstand the pressure of so many internet cafes. They then requested Sun Peng to refund the players who's month didn't expire yet.
Some agents even gave Sun Peng a seemingly good plan for refunds. Each month would be worth fifteen yuan, and each day would be fifty cents. The amount of days the customer had left would be refunded according to the rate of fifty cents times the amount of days they had left.
Sun Peng wanted to refuse but he couldn't because it would make the group's reputation drop.
He was responsible for the plug-in development, and was responsible for issuing monthly activation codes, which would then be passed to provincial agents, which then, in turn, would be passed to the major internet cafes.
Since the sales terminals had to travel all the way to internet cafes, and selling the plug-ins was only a side business, the owners weren't willing to make advanced payments to the agent, so the order of the funds and the activation funds went in reverse.
Funds would be collected by the internet cafe over the month and be given to the agents after every month. After the agents received the money from the cafe, they would then take the amount they were promised from the total and then give their money to Sun Peng. For every activation code sold, the internet cafe owner would have to have a guaranteed profit of at least four yuan. Otherwise, an internet cafe might not even be able to sell over a hundred copies. If they had too little money, they didn't have to worry about it. If they sell it and record it, then after sending their agent the right amount of money, people were able to make 300 to 400 yuan a month.
But after all, an internet cafe was filled with dozens of machines. How many people could go there in a month? In addition, there were people who only went there to chat or play stand-alone games. Only a small number of players played Stone Age. Among this already small group of people, only a small number of people would actually spend money on plug-ins.
After this, provincial agents would deduct three yuan from each activation code.
After many layers of exploitation, there were only eight yuan left that went to Sun Peng. He still had a lot of things that the eight yuan had to do, such as paying the rent, purchasing equipment, pay server costs and employees, and pay for the food of the workers.
In the team, there were also money that had to go the core staff, and they were divided out according to their respective proportions. Sun Peng received little money, and there wasn't that much left.
Looking at all of the requests for refunds from agents, Sun Peng couldn't refuse even if he wanted to. The money that was made this month were still in the hands of the internet cafe, and they refused to hand over the money this month. The provincial agents also weren't able to do anything about this.
Sun Pen gritted his teeth and said, "Okay, refunds are possible, but the accounts after the refunds must be summarized to us, and we'll deal with them together!"
The distributors ignored his words, but they were very aware that the popularity of the new plug-in would destroy Abbey Plug-in in the future and realized that there was going to be no opportunity to cooperate with them.
After an hour of continous phone calls, Sun Peng's face turned green, and the few people in the studio were ashamed. They were all technicians who had learned about programming, but they all knew there was too big of a technological gap between them to try to even somewhat replicate the free plug-in on the forums. They felt like they were the special effects team on the online drama "Tomb Raider", and saw the special effects in Hollywood blockbusters.
"Boss, what should I do?"
In this small group, Sun Peng played the role of boss. He distributed all of the plug-ins, and the other people could only make money if they stuck with him.
Sun Peng's face was ugly.
"The distributers want us too refund the user, and he's deadset on doing that. It seems like we won't make any money this July."
"That's more than 100,000!" They already calculated the sales volume and the profits they would make, and they wouldn't be able to receive any of that.
At this time, a technician blurted out, "Their downloads have just exceeded 200,000!"