Game Making: Start By Healing the Player

[[ Hello again from Nebula Games, we would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to all our beloved players and fans. With your support, ‘Undertale’ has just passed 500,000 copies sold.

He knowledge of our work being recognized fills us with DETERMINATION ]]

After the official post was published.

Many media outlets and indie game designers were once again hit by a wave of shock.

Why? Because they saw his previous post not too long ago.

3 days after launch, the game sold 100,000 copies. Now only a week has passed and the sales were already passing 500,000 copies?

Isn’t that a bit insane?

More and more articles covering the rise of ‘Undertale’ were being produced.

[ Sales exceeded 500,000 by the 10th! The rating remains over 9.7! ]

[ What’s the deal with ‘Undertale’? ]

[ Studying the subversion of RPG conventions: ‘Undertale’ ]

[ What does it mean to tell a story? ]

In the beginning, most indie game designers weren’t all that interested in the spat between Zhong Mei and Chen Xu, or in ‘Undertale’. But now, almost every one of them was doing some level of research into the game.

While good reviews on media outlets were not worth that much, the sales figures were definitely convincing, and it showed them all that there was a previously untapped market for this kind of game.

As for the media outlets, they’ve published similar articles recently, so they mostly just updated or reused some of that content.

Praise flowed in as more people got their hands on the game, its quality was impeccable. Even if you wanted to purposely find faults in it, it was difficult to find an angle of attack.

Under heavy media coverage, ‘Undertale’s popularity began to truly soar.

The game has sold over 500,000 copies so far. But with such feverish popularity and reputation, it is obvious to everyone that it has yet to plateau.

At the same time, this surge has attracted many melon-eaters and drama fans, drawn in by the initial face off between game designers. They swarmed and flocked around Zhong Mei’s official blog, trying to scrape up the slightest hints of a reaction.

It’s a shame that the posts that started it all were deleted.

The comments section was also closed off.

One could say that he has become somewhat of a laughing stock these days. His name took a hit after failing to meet Chen Xu’s challenge.

And with ‘Undertale’ being such a huge hit right now, many players simply couldn’t let this chance go to waste. Especially the players who previously enjoyed ‘Mirror’, this group was the most vicious in their assault.

Unable to directly post their messages on Zhong Mei’s blog, they flooded outwards, posting on social media and forums, even going into Chen Xu’s official blog to tag Zhong Mei in their comments.

• [ @ Teacher Zhong, hurry up and criticize ‘Undertale’, games are art! How can this kind of shitty game be allowed to rise so high!? ]

• [ @ Teacher Zhong, please come out and say a few words! ‘Blooming’ will definitely show ‘Undertale’ how to be a good game right? Why does it only have 50,000 sales? ]

• [ @ Teacher Zhong’s games are art, these primitive players must not know how to appreciate art. It’s not that the game’s not good, it’s the players that aren’t good ]

• [ @ Mr Zhong, go ahead and keep talking, your words are very inspiring ]

Underneath Chen Xu’s few blog posts, many messages tagging @ Zhong Mei were posted. While many were outright insulting, the ones that got thousands of likes were the funny ones.

As for Hepai Style and Zhong Mei?

Two words: Play dead.

He didn’t actually want to stay quiet, but he really couldn’t come up with a decent counter.

His usual way of doing things was to use the enemy’s strengths to attack their weaknesses.

If their sales were higher than his, he would talk about word-of-mouth.

If their reputation was better than his, he would talk about art.

If they were more artistic than him, he would talk about sales.

If these things weren’t possible, he would be more thick-skinned and use less sensical metrics such as game length.

In any case, he would always try to compare using points where he was better.

But he couldn’t do that right now.

It was all blown up.

And it didn’t help that his ‘Blooming’ was priced at 40 yuan, 4 yuan more than ‘Undertale’.

So, he would just lay low, ignore the messages, and bide his time. He doesn’t believe Chen Xu can replicate something like this in his next game!

……………………

With increased attention, came increases in statistics. ‘Undertale’ continued to rise, enjoying a stable, rising growth trend.

On the 15th of August, it was officially one month since the release of ‘Undertale’.

The total sales count finally went past 1 million, a feat that ‘Mirror’ could not achieve.

And when the news broke, countless indie game designers began to question their lives.

At a price of 36 yuan, even considering the fees of many third-party platforms, Chen Xu would come out of this with at least 10 million yuan guaranteed.

Not to mention the fact that the DLC for ‘Mirror’ was also released during this time and sold very well.

But leaving ‘Mirror’ aside, it can be said that the sales of ‘Undertale’ are carried entirely by its excellent storyline and design choices. Leading many game designers to analyze the characteristics and features of the game, hoping to gleam further insight.

For Nebula Games, which was still in its infancy, the success of ‘Undertale’ has brought both fame and fortune. Hitting over a million copies sold in the domestic market alone.

Chen Xu was conducting his own research as well.

Just like in his previous life, the console market in this parallel world is relatively niche, while PC and mobile gaming is more prevalent. The gaming market, however, is much larger here. The China he was in now, for example, had a market eclipsing even his previous life’s massive 700 million domestic player count.

And that was just domestic, if he counted the overseas market too, how frightening and exciting that would be. So the market is there, the challenge was simply to captivate them, which ‘Undertale’ has successfully done, so far.

The second thing is that compared to his previous life, Chen Xu has optimized the intensity of the graphics.

After all, the previous version of ‘Undertale’ was largely the work of a single game developer, with the help of crowdfunding.

Manpower and resources were very limited.

Besides, for an already good game, having improved visuals would be a plus instead of a minus. People only complain if the graphics are too bad, nobody complains that the graphics are too good.

Chen Xu is very satisfied with the current trajectory of ‘Undertale’. As for the overseas market, there are different policies to adhere to, so he hasn’t thought about it in the short term.

‘Mirror’ did not pass the official review in China at all. So it was released on the overseas version of the platform.

But ‘Undertale’ was a completely different story, it passed the review with no issues and was launched on the official domestic platform.