Chapter 95-1: Definition of Game Currency (1) |
Primordial Altar.
The 42nd day since the game launched.
At this moment, Qi Sheng was flipping through the data feedback compiled by Guide.
[Number of players: 18,325 (online 14,238)]
Number of contained Primordial Traits: 22.
Player sacrificial power output per hour (real-time): 52,932.
Average Inherited Soul level among players (for each individual player, the average level of Inherited souls embedded in Star Veins): 18.3
Owned Territory Nodes: Emperor’s Mound Village (rule class), Shadowed Cavern (resource class), Devilfall Pit (resource class).
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This also sped up his recruitment of new players.
Now he issued new game qualifications to the outside world every day, continuously recruiting promising newcomers to join.
As the number of players increased, he was considering building a new batch of functional buildings similar to the test tower within Emperor’s Mound Village.
If conditions permitted, he even wanted to open land auctions for purchase, allowing players to freely build shops.
For example, the Three Great Demonic Sects often mentioned by forum players could easily open shops in Emperor’s Mound Village with their production volumes to expand their sales channels.
But at this stage he still took recruiting players as the core goal, so these ideas had no driving force for implementation yet.
After all, players are the productive force.
With every player’s own growth in strength, they could steadily bring him an upward curve of sacrificial power revenue.
During the period of compiling statistics, he also discovered an amusing matter in the game.
Many paying players were complaining that the price of purchasing sacrificial power with cash had risen considerably again, and that it could only be bought in scattered bits, making bulk purchases difficult.
At the beginning of the launch, the exchange price of sacrificial power to cash was 1:50, and at this stage it had risen to 1:175.
The main reason for this was still related to the game’s special environment.
Out of curiosity, Qi Sheng researched the price fluctuations between game currency and real-world currency.
He discovered that the largest factor affecting game currency was supply and demand.
An excessive supply of game currency makes the total amount exceed the needs of the demand side, so the ratio falls.
Conversely, when demand exceeds supply, the price rises.
There were four main reasons behind fluctuations in supply and demand.
First was the production and consumption mechanisms of the currency.
If too much currency is produced in the game leading to insufficient consumption, the value of the currency declines. Conversely, if consumption is too fast while production is insufficient, the value of the currency rises.
Second were economic activities within the game. For example, the lottery event he launched could cause a sharp short-term rise in the price of exchanging sacrificial power for cash.
In other games, this kind of activity might appear in the form of event dungeons, special quests, or spending events, causing either massive currency output or massive consumption. All of these affect the exchange ratio between game currency and cash and influence supply and demand.
The third reason was players’ purchasing power, which means the number of paying players.
When there are many paying players, the consumption of game currency is large and demand climbs accordingly.
When there are many Game Gold-Farmers, the output of game currency is large, causing demand to diminish after it is continuously satisfied.
The fourth reason was market speculation. Some players with a head for numbers would use price fluctuations of spiritual materials, currency, and other resources in the game to speculate by hoarding resources or currency, buying low and selling high. These behaviors further exacerbated the volatility of the exchange price between game currency and cash.
Monster World happened to possess all of the factors that drive game currency prices upward.
Especially the number of paying players, which far exceeded the number of Game Gold-Farmers.
In a game, even a small group of high-spending players already has a big impact on the economy of a given server.
Before he crossed over to become Emperor’s Sign, he had encountered pay-to-win games where a small number of high-spending players influenced prices across an entire server.
For example, the game Fantasy Westward Journey, which in his memory had a very old-school feel.
High-quality equipment in it could sell for seven to eight digits in cash. Later on, about 95% of a server would be multi-account Game Gold-Farmers supplying the remaining 5% of high-spending players, providing them with better content experiences.
Or an even older game, Legend.
In that game there were even cases where a single-digit number of high-spending players supported all the Game Gold-Farmers in a server.
There were even cases of one person single-handedly supporting an entire server’s players.
The characteristics of such games were free trading, as well as high consumption and low output. If paying players wanted to become stronger, they had to purchase in-game resources from Game Gold-Farmers.
The situation in Monster World was even more extreme than in those pay-to-win games Qi Sheng had experienced before crossing over.
The number of high-spending players was extremely large. At the time, in order to meet the real-life needs of Game Gold-Farmers, he even specifically recruited several super high-spending players who were willing to invest huge sums of cash in the game in exchange for game resources, causing sacrificial power to remain in a state of perpetual undersupply.
As for the output of Game Gold-Farmers, it was simply unable to shake the rise in the price of sacrificial power, nor could it meet the needs of paying players.
In earlier games there had been ways for Game Gold-Farmers to operate multiple characters to increase efficiency.
But in Monster World, every player had only a single controllable character, and there was no possibility of multi-account gold farming.
Guide had done the math.
Even if the current number of Game Gold-Farmers increased by several dozen times, it would still be unable to satisfy the sacrificial power consumption needs of paying players.
Moreover, Game Gold-Farmers in Monster World also needed to consume sacrificial power to become stronger; otherwise they might fail to keep up with the growth rate of the Swarm and the Black Tide. So they could only sell small amounts of sacrificial power, with the rest needing to be converted into strength.
And the sale of small amounts of sacrificial power was already enough to meet the real-life needs of Game Gold-Farmers, with a surplus besides.
Therefore, the price of exchanging sacrificial power for cash being set at around 175 was the result of game currency being in short supply.
Belonging to the category of priced yet thinly traded; many Game Gold-Farmers have even established stable sales channels with major guilds, and the sacrificial power they produce simply does not circulate to the public.
This results in ordinary paying players finding it very hard to acquire sacrificial power.
One can foresee that in the future, as players’ strength increases and sacrificial power output rises, the exchange price of sacrificial power for cash will not decrease, and may even continue to show an upward trend, because late-stage settings that consume sacrificial power will also increase.
On this, Qi Sheng had indeed considered one question.
Since the game’s output is so profitable, if Monster World fully opened game qualifications, who in the future would still be willing to continue working in reality, when they could entirely meet real-life needs through in-game output.
In response to this question, after analysis Guide provided an explanation.
It stated that the real world had long since entered the era of artificial intelligence, with all manual labor handled by robots. Ordinary people entering virtual worlds to create real-world income was precisely the trend of the times, and a phenomenon already present in this era.
The jobs that still exist in the real world are basically AI technicians, mechanical engineers and maintenance personnel, high-end R&D personnel, and so on, the kinds of work AI cannot complete on its own.
Therefore, driving ordinary people into virtual worlds to provide virtual employment positions is something the Human Federation government, and even many alien forces, have been doing.
Using virtual positions as work-for-relief.
This is also one of the main reasons why the price of virtual game pods is set very low, and in some regions they are even distributed for free, allowing them to spread to thousands of households.
The development of the era has made the ancient concept of a ‘demographic dividend’ disappear completely.
With AI robots already able to meet society’s production needs, population growth brings more burden than dividends.
So when players on the forum mentioned that this game might bring about a concept of wealth redistribution, it indeed had some truth to it.
Paying players allocate real-world wealth to Game Gold-Farmers in exchange for game resources, allowing nearly solidified social wealth to flow downward to the lower strata, indirectly narrowing the wealth gap in the real world and achieving a wealth redistribution effect.
After brief consideration, Qi Sheng no longer paid attention to this issue.
Because whether they are paying players or Game Gold-Farmers, their trading of sacrificial power does not affect his cut.
Paying players spend, and Game Gold-Farmers also spend, all of it consumed in improving strength.
And the sacrificial power he takes as a cut will neither decrease nor increase.
After a simple discussion of this issue with Guide, Qi Sheng no longer concerned himself with fluctuations in the price of sacrificial power.
His consciousness at this moment switched to Guide’s clone perspective over the Colorful Mist Sea Region.
One could see dim-blue spirit patterns on the ground taking the array core as their starting point, roaming ceaselessly as if with self-awareness, interweaving and entwining, converging on the ground into delicate and intricate beautiful motifs.
Guided by the continual infusion of Yan Ming’s spatial power.
All the spirit patterns seemed to be given life, and above the spatial spirit patterns they gestated one energy rune after another that pulsed and flickered. Following Monster World’s operational laws, they echoed one another, their emitted energy wavefronts docking together and gradually outlining a vast spatial teleportation framework.
During this process, every flicker of the array core released flowing energy to sustain the expansion of the spirit patterns.
Observation showed that completion of the stabilized spatial teleportation array was not far off.
[T/N: I decided to significantly increase the length of each chapter from now onwards. Enjoy!]
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