Almighty Game Designer

After a month or so of development, Thunderbolt Tabletop finally entered the official app store as well as Emperor Dynasty Gaming Platform!

The ‘Recommended this month’ spot on the Emperor Dynasty Gaming Platform now had a banner ad for Thunderbolt Tabletop. Other than the usual art and name of the game, it also had a slogan.

“Who’s the poker king? Win virtual game pods in tournaments every week!

There were tens of millions of active users on Emperor Dynasty Gaming Platform, and up to two million concurrent users. The effects of being on the front page of Emperor Dynasty gaming platform for a month could not be understated.

Chen Mo also promoted the game on his Weibo and Thunderbolt Gaming Platform at the same time, essentially promoting the game everywhere he could.

Many fans who paid attention to this matter knew that Chen Mo was about to release a new game. But none of them thought that Chen Mo spent over a month making a tabletop game.

What a waste of the promotional spot!

The players were actively discussing the matter.

“Unbelievable, Chen Mo decided to not continue making games that scam money? That’s impossible! Did the old Chen Mo finally return?”

“What, why did you make tabletop games? There’s no future in tabletop games! You should’ve just made more pay-to-win games!”

“What a waste of the promotional spot. That spot was used to promote large VR games in the past, but Chen Mo decided to promote tabletop games! My goodness!”

“This only took a month, could it be any good?”

“Stop wasting your time on things like this! Get back to working on the sequel to Plants vs Zombies alright!”

“There are already so many tabletop games! Emperor Dynasty had already been in the business for too long, you’re far too late to the party!”

“A gaming pod every week? He really put down the money for this, but why do I feel that the money isn’t going to be well spent…”

“That’s three pods every week, they have one for all three games!”

“Fine, I’ll go take a look. I’m in need of a gaming pod anyways.”

“…previous poster, you still don’t understand Thunderbolt gaming’s antics? If it’s too good to be true, it probably is!”

“But… It’s a competition!”

There were various different types of comments.

However, most of them were drawn in by the idea of “free gaming pod every week”.

Chen Mo had also posted the rules for the tournament on his Weibo.

Thunderbolt Poker, Dou Dizhu, and Mahjong will have a competition each.

From Monday to Saturday, 10am to 10pm, there will be a competition every two hours, there will be a certain amount of tables decided by the number of players who decide to enter. Each table will have a limit of fifty to sixty people, and the priority will be given to players that haven’t played that day.

Of which, 10am, 12pm, 2pm and 4pm are all free to play, free to entire and had registrations in advance. The 6pm and 8pm rounds were paid tournaments and registrations were still available thirty minutes after the start time, and the entry fees were decided via bids using Happy Beans.

The prizes were split among the top three of each tournament, 60% for first place, 30% for second place, and 10% for third.

Free games gave a large amount of Happy Beans and a small amount of credits. The paid tournaments on the other hand would have a large amount of credits as prizes.

And on Sunday, the first fifty players based on the credits for that week will enter the final table, and the first three places of that tournament will receive prizes.

First place: one R gaming pod, valued around eight thousand RMB.

Second place: A high end PC, valued around ten thousand RMB.

Third Place, a flagship smartphone, valued around seven thousand RMB.

There was a competition for all three games, meaning that Chen Mo will be giving out close to three hundred thousand RMB worth of prizes every week.

Moreover, this was different from prize draws as those can be rigged in favour of the company. But as Chen Mo was hosting a competition, there was no refute whoever was better at the game to be able to get first place, and there was no way to fraudulently control the outcome of that.

The VR gaming pods in this world were priced from fifty thousand to two hundred thousand. Chen Mo’s pick of one valued around eight thousand RMB was considered mid range, but it was more than enough as there were PCs as well as smartphones as prizes too.

Once the news was out, it spread like wildfire in tabletop games communities. Moreover, with the help of Weibo, more and more players knew about this, and many players who don’t usually play tabletop games were also drawn in by the prizes.

As it’s not a draw, but a competition, moreover a tabletop game competition.

Many gamers felt that they stood a chance in games like Dou Dizhu which are more luck reliant, and could potentially win the tournament if they had good luck. Moreover, the game was completely free, and the competition was fair, so many players wouldn’t mind trying their luck.

Even if they couldn’t win a gaming pod, a PC or a smartphone weren’t bad either!

—

On the day of release, Thunderbolt Tabletop reached over two hundred thousand downloads, showing no signs of slowing down!

Free game, small size, complete new player guide, advertisement on Emperor Dynasty Gaming Platform, Prizes from the competition… These were all reasons that drove the number of downloads to the sky.

Of course, eighty to ninety percent of players were there to join in on the fun, all hoping they could be the lucky one to win the gaming pod.

“My goodness, there is so much guidance for new players! Luckily you can skip it. Do you need that much guidance for such a simple card game?”

“It treats new players quite nicely. I never quite understood the rules, but at least it’s clear to me now…”

“It really does have a tournament mode. You just keep playing until a winner emerges? Seems more fun than playing in public lobbies.”

“Thunderbolt Poker? It’s a new game?”

“I feel like the competition for Dou Dizhu and Mahjong is too strong. Doesn’t the winner of this new poker game get a gaming pod too? I’ll try that out.”

After looking deeper into it, the players realised they must enter the final table on Sunday to have a chance of winning the prizes, but in order to get into the final table, they must play at the other tables from Monday to Saturday in order to get enough credits.

For example, the evening rounds gave more credits, but they required spending Happy Beans to enter. This meant that players had to choose between entering the normal competitions, or spend their money to purchase Happy Beans.

Moreover, many players noticed that Thunderbolt Poker might be a good way to win prizes.

The more popular games such as Dou Dizhu or Mahjong that had more players would have stronger competition. However, Thunderbolt Poker also had a gaming pod for first place, and all the players had to start fresh, meaning that it was much less competitive.

This meant that there was a large number of players trying out Thunderbolt Poker to try and exploit this new type of card game to win prizes.

Many players tried to play on the first day, resulting in many public lobbies as well as the tournament mode being overloaded, further increasing the popularity of the game.

The popularity of Thunderbolt Tabletop never went down on various gaming leaderboards as well as trending topics. It was more than likely that the amount of users would continue to grow explosively!