Chapter 506 - Lessons Learned from Failure (1/2)

May 1st, Sunday…

Pei Qian came to the cafe near his school again. He was going to meet a new game designer. Only 1 million yuan out of the total amount of 1.8 million yuan was allowed by the system for school fees. There was 800,000 yuan left.

Therefore, Pei Qian asked Assistant Xin to search for a designer that had a certain reputation and had worked on some failed projects previously. He wanted to learn from some successful experience.

As to why the designer should possess some reputation even though he had failed before, it was because Pei Qian wanted to eliminate the interference of personal ability factors as much as possible.

If a producer himself failed and was worthless, the system would not allow him to charge so much tuition fee. On the other hand, if his failures were not outstanding enough, then there would be nothing they could learn from him.

What would Pei Qian learn from if someone was filled with failures? What if he learned something insignificant, would that not be a waste of time?

He had to find a successful and capable designer. The factors of failure on them would be very obvious like a ‘highlighted’ passage, easy to learn from.

What He An said was wrong. It was about the main reasons for success for Tengda. A large scale error correction exercise.

This big boss was mainly talking about his own failure, which was standard for Pei Qian.

Wouldn’t it be a combination of what He An and the producer said today?

He managed to spend 1.8 million yuan giving lectures to himself. He also managed to learn some professional game production knowledge.

If he could pass the test by the system during settlement and would be able to make money-losing games based on what he learned…

Wouldn’t he be earning money like a king?

Compared to He An’s ‘asking wrong questions’, this big boss would be directly giving his ‘standard answers’. The knowledge of losing money would be easier for Pei Qian to absorb this way.

Pei Qian was, therefore, very excited about this meeting!

This game designer arrived not long after he reached the cafe.

“Hello, Boss Ma! I’m Qiu Hong!” A man, with fluttery long hair, in his thirties shook hands with Pei Qian cordially.

Pei Qian had looked through Qiu Hong’s resume before he arrived.

Different from He An’s long glorious resume, this Qiu Hong’s game production career could only be said to be bumpy. His resume could be regarded as a template for the middle-aged generation in the current domestic games market.

After entering the industry in 2001, he joined a large domestic game company as a systems designer. He successfully developed a Xianxia theme client-side game. Of course, that was a game with paywalls.

After two years, he managed to jump ship to another game company with the success of this game. He became the main designer of a certain Western Fantasy client-side game. The project was axed after its poor performance for an entire year of development. After that, he changed to another game company and continued to be the chief planner producing a war-themed game with paywalls. He was successful this time and had obtained an impressive monthly turnover of more than 100 million yuan.

The war game could be regarded as an evergreen game. Its revenue might have declined after half a year, but it still operated for three years. It had accumulated a good reputation for Qiu Hong.

Relying on the prestige accumulated with this project, Qiu Hong decided to set up his own business, a game company with the investment that he had found. He developed another game with paywalls only to fail again.

Qiu Hong was currently in a state of dejection because his venture had failed. He was about to relax and do nothing when he got the news that someone was willing to spend 100,000 yuan to listen to his lecture. He readily agreed and came to Jingzhou.

Pei Qian was very satisfied with Qiu Hong’s resume.

To make things simple, the higher one climb, the worse the fall would be!

This person was obviously focused on domestically-produced games with paywalls. He had achieved a monthly turnover of 100 million yuan as the chief planner five or six years ago. That was obviously something worthy to be proud of.

Moreover, these two failures did not seem to have happened because of money.

The first failure was that the company he jumped to had huge spending power, ready to spend as much as it took to create a masterpiece for that era. They were not short of money.

His second failure was also when he obtained enough funds from investors to start his business. He was not short of money either.

However, even so, Qiu Hong-who had a successful career and ample experience in the game industry—failed in his venture.

Huge investments, heavy losses. Millions in funds went down into the drain. That was in line with Pei Qian’s expectations!

Pei Qian firmly believed that there must be something worth learning from in Qiu Hong’s experience!

The waiter brought their coffees. They chatted as they sipped on.

Qiu Hong briefly introduced his resume. There was a very obvious difference in attitude between He An and him.

He An obviously exuded the aura of an industry giant and successful person. His qualifications crushed 99% of designers in the industry. He gave lectures based on his interest and had his own arrogance.

He would absolutely go ahead with his own contents even if ‘Ma Yang’ were to give him 200,000 yuan per lecture. He would leave if things didn’t go his way.

Qiu Hong was completely different. He might have experienced success before, but he knew that he was still a nobody in this industry. He was, therefore, very polite and was willing to share whatever ‘Boss Ma’ wanted to hear.

Qiu Hong was a systems designer after all. Moreover, he only created domestically-produced games with paywalls. Such a designer usually had distinctive features; that was that they would not be troubled by money.