Chapter 132: OO Game Center [Additional Chapter 2]

Pei Le's strong-handed suppression finally managed to settle these newly successful youths back down, forcing them to resume their training. Of course, there were still a few idiots among them—after all, the e-sports circle was never short of idiots. But it did not matter; Boss Huang would soon teach them the true meaning of the power of capital.

Following this, the fame of these e-sports players grew increasingly widespread, becoming known to a larger and larger audience.

However, according to the teachings of the great Chinese philosopher Laozi, things always reverse when they reach their extreme. Once the hype surrounding these e-sports players reached its peak, it would inevitably begin to decline, slowly fading into obscurity until the arrival of the next major news headline.

All Boss Huang needed to do was to pinpoint this turning point and then hold a press conference.

On January 1, 2001, coinciding with New Year's Day, Mr. Liu Xiangjiang, a representative of the Jiangnan Group and concurrently its Global Vice President, accompanied the focal figures of public opinion—the players who had won three gold medals at the WCG, along with 12 out of the 16 professional players who had participated in the WCG—to jointly host a press conference. There, they announced the establishment of the Jiangnan E-sports Club.

Pei Le was appointed as the club manager, responsible for the operational management of the entire organization. All these players would officially join the club to participate in various national and even global e-sports tournaments, striving to win greater and more prestigious honors.

The emergence of this news gave a fresh surge of momentum to the e-sports news cycle, which had otherwise been on a downward trend. This announcement signified the founding of the country's very first professional e-sports club, and one backed by a major enterprise at that, endowing it with extraordinary significance.

Many predicted that in the future, nationwide top-tier e-sports leagues akin to China League One or the Chinese Super League might emerge, leading to an even more vigorous development of competitive gaming.

In short, the hype soared once more.

Three days later, as the hype began to recede, the second major wave of news arrived. Ms. Leng Zhimeng, CEO of OO, together with the players of the Jiangnan E-sports Club, appeared before the cameras to announce to all attending media that OO had invested 3 million RMB to hire the Jiangnan E-sports Club as the spokesperson for OO's newly launched product, the OO Game Center. They would handle promotional campaigns and endorsements for the platform, while simultaneously organizing the First OO Game National Invitational Tournament and the First OO National Online Chess and Card Invitational Tournament.

Naturally, it was also announced that OO would launch the brand-new OO Game Lobby, which would enter full open beta on January 5th, the very day after. According to details revealed by Leng Zhimeng at the scene, this OO Game Lobby would operate as a standalone software while remaining integrated with OO; a new OO icon would be added to the OO UI, allowing users to enter the game lobby directly with a single click.

At the same time, Leng Zhimeng disclosed that the first batch of the OO Game Lobby would feature nine titles upon release, including three mainstream standalone games and six independently developed OO games.

Furthermore, the daily training sessions of these professional players would be scheduled to take place within the OO Game Lobby. Players using the lobby to game would actually have a chance to run into the legendary WCG champion players!

As soon as this news was made public, amplified by the massive traffic and influence of the WCG champions, it instantly garnered tremendous attention.

By the following day, much like the launch of OO Voice previously, Huang He and Leng Zhimeng remained stationed at the company's control center. Only this time, OO had made far more thorough preparations: the server room had been expanded, and the cooling system had been completely redesigned, ensuring they had nothing to fear even if server loads tripled.

Additionally, the power supply grid had been upgraded to handle higher loads, making both Huang He and Leng Zhimeng feel that everything was foolproof.

Yet, a crisis almost struck anyway. Due to an instantaneous surge in traffic, the network bandwidth of the company's servers exploded... Huang He was entirely helpless against this; it was a matter for Wenzhou Telecom. If Wenzhou Telecom refused to upgrade their network services, Huang He could only watch with frustration as the server's traffic data blew up.

Fortunately, Wenzhou Telecom did not simply pull the plug on Jiangnan. Therefore, although the download speeds during the first few hours were slow enough to make countless people curse angrily, they managed to push through. Gradually, a batch of users succeeded in downloading the software and began experiencing the OO Game Center.

When players first clicked open the OO Game Lobby, a prompt would pop up indicating that OO was already running and asking whether they wished to log in directly using their OO account.

Players could choose to log in directly with their OO credentials, but if they preferred not to, they could also opt to register a new account.

This would redirect them to the OO registration webpage, where a new OO account could be created.

Once logged in, users entered the main interface of the OO Game Lobby.

The primary color scheme was blue, maintaining a consistent aesthetic with OO and embodying a minimalist sense of beauty.

After a brief experience, quite a few people exclaimed in surprise: Isn't this just Asian Alliance, also known as the AG Game Battle Platform?

Asian Alliance was the country's earliest gaming platform, founded in 2000, and currently stood as the largest battle gaming platform in China. Thus, when the first wave of users experienced the OO Game Center, they discovered it was essentially identical to Asian Alliance.

Yet, upon closer inspection, it appeared to be something else entirely.

First of all, the AG Gaming Platform was merely a platform used for multiplayer connectivity when playing standalone games; fundamentally, it functioned as a backend auxiliary software.

When players opened the software interface of the OO Gaming Platform, however, they discovered that the top-tier UI already featured icons for six games: OO Landlord, OO Flying Chess, OO Chinese Chess, OO Poker, OO Go, and OO Plane Shooting.

In addition, three other game icons were displayed in a greyed-out state: StarCraft, Warcraft II, and Half-Life: Counter-Strike.

Curious players immediately conducted hands-on testing and quickly discovered that the top six games starting with the "OO" prefix were already pre-installed and could be played immediately with a single click. This was quite unlike the aforementioned Asian Alliance, which required users to first open the platform, enter different game rooms to search for opponents, locate the game's file path stored on their local computer through the platform, enter the LAN lobby, and then navigate a series of complex settings just to play a networked game.

OO Games was completely different. Clicking a game launched it directly, and the game itself featured an integrated matchmaking function. Players could select rooms within the game to play, offering a user experience countless times more convenient than Asian Alliance.

This discovery prompted players to exclaim once again: Isn't this just Lianzhong Games?

Yet, this OO platform was undeniably not Lianzhong Games, because Lianzhong only featured chess and card games, whereas the OO platform also included three mainstream standalone masterpieces.

Although the icons for these three games were greyed out, clicking them brought up a prompt stating that if the user already had the game downloaded on their computer, the platform could directly locate the game's startup icon and illuminate it.

If the game was not installed on the computer, the OO Game Lobby thoughtfully provided a download service. Players could download games directly through the lobby, and upon successful download, the OO platform would install them automatically. This was equally convenient and spared many people the hassle of manual installation.

The subsequent gaming experience mirrored that of the six native OO games: without any complex configuration, players simply entered the game via the OO Game Lobby and could easily access various rooms.

Most importantly, the OO Game Center also offered a one-click matchmaking feature. This directly bypassed cumbersome and time-wasting operations such as entering rooms and waiting for teammates to ready up, instantly matching players with ready opponents in under 10 seconds to start the game.

The gaming experience was vastly superior to that of Asian Alliance.

Only then did players suddenly realize that the OO game platform was essentially a stitched-together hybrid of Lianzhong Games and the Asian Alliance battle platform. Nevertheless, players declared that they absolutely loved this Frankenstein-like creation that was the OO Game Center.

Consequently, on its very first day, the download and installation volume of the OO Game Center reached a staggering 300,000. This daily installation figure remained consistently high thereafter, and within just one week, the user base of the OO Game Center surpassed 1.8 million—a startling milestone proudly announced by OO on its official website.

This news thrilled everyone within OO, but it left three companies in deep misery. Naturally, two of them were Asian Alliance and Lianzhong.

As the two hegemons in the battle platform sector, although Asian Alliance and Lianzhong had their share of troubles, at least they had been free from competitive worries. With no direct competitors in sight and each focusing on different domains, they had coexisted peacefully, enjoying a rather tranquil existence.

That peace lasted until the sudden appearance of the OO Game Center, which caught both companies completely off guard.

Asian Alliance, in particular, had always seen its battle platform operating at a financial loss. At its peak, it boasted concurrent player records exceeding 200,000, placing enormous demands on server capacity. Yet, Asian Alliance was not wealthy and could not afford massive server investments, resulting in subpar gaming experiences for players, marked by frequent disconnections.

Originally, with no competitors around, players simply had no choice but to accept these frequent disconnects as their fate. A mere month prior, Asian Alliance had even announced the introduction of a point-card billing model: playing for a full day would cost around 1 RMB in point cards, amounting to roughly 30 RMB a month.

Well, Asian Alliance had been driven to a desperate measure. After all, their servers and bandwidth expenses ran into the millions every month. Lacking a massive financial backer like Huang He, charging fees had become their sole path to profitability.

Yet, no sooner had they instituted the billing system than the OO Game Center arrived. Within a single day, the number of players on the Asian Alliance platform plummeted by more than half, nearly driving the company's CEO to vomit blood right there in the office.