Emperor of solo play

Chapter 3 : A Class You Can Play Alone (1).

2010 was the era of smartphones. They changed the lives of millions of people.

But technology continued advancing, and in year 2030, the smartphone era came to an end. It was now the new era of virtual reality. Peach Corporation’s virtual reality connection device, V-Gear, gave way to the beginning of this era. For just 20,000 dollars, any household could dive into the world of virtual reality.

The smartphone era was nothing in comparison to the VR era. Virtual reality did not just absorb the technologies of the real world, as new content developed just for the virtual world.

Among them, virtual reality games were the most popular.

Game companies didn’t hesitate to invest millions or even billions of dollars into developing this new technology. As a result, they could release higher quality content than any other business in the world.

At the same time, it was the start of a war.

Due to their investments and preparedness, their games had similar quality, and none stood out as the best.

It was the beginning of a warring era.

Game companies experimented with new methods of raising their market shares, and many went bankrupt as a result. The one that put an end to this warring era was not a game company, but an AI developing company called Tobot Soft. It was with their AI program that Warlord was created.

Warlord.

With a typical fantasy setting, the game was not too different from the other games in the market. In fact, it was much tamer compared to games where the players battled in space or flew in the air with wings.

It was the scale of its world and its stability that made it unsurpassable by others.

Tobot Soft’s secret lied behind a management artificial intelligence program called M.I.

Simply put, the game wasn’t controlled by the company but an artificial intelligence program. Its initial development cost was huge, but the management cost was ground-breakingly small. At a time when the price of VR game programmers was soaring to the sky, the method proved to be especially efficient. A.I.s didn’t need a salary.

Plus, it was easy to copy and mass produce an A.I. Hiring a thousand professional programmers took at least six months, but obtaining a thousand copy of an A.I. took only about a month.

Countless A.I.s worked to control and manage the server, and as a result, Warlord became a game that surpassed any other game in existence.

March 11th, 2035, a year after the game made its debut, the player base was well over one million. By its 4th anniversary, the number rose to over ten million, worthy of the game’s title as the greatest game to ever exist.

Ten million was not a small number.

To play a VR game, one needed a VR device. Peach Corporation controlled 70 percent of the VR device market and its cheapest VR device, the Level 1 V-Gear, cost 20 thousand dollars.

In addition, one needed 2,599 dollars just to create a Warlord character. Upon creation, one could play the game free for 3 months, but afterwards, there was a monthly fee of 799 dollars.

In Korean standards, it cost 20 million won to buy the gaming device, another 3 million to make a character, and 800 thousand more every month.

There were ten million people who could meet such requirements.

An economist once said,

“If you calculate the average income of a Warlord player, it would be about 80 thousand dollars. A game with over 10 million players and an average income of 80 thousand. That’s enough purchasing power to match a country’s.”