Chapter 25: One Million Copies Sold

Game Development: Starting by Healing the Players 

Chapter 25: One Million Copies Sold 

“Thank you to all the players for your support. Undertale has now surpassed 500,000 copies sold.”

After Chen Xu posted the announcement on his official Weibo account, some indie game designers and media outlets who had been following him were stunned.

Why?

Because they seemed to have seen an announcement with exactly the same format before.

It had taken Undertale just three days after launch to surpass 100,000 copies, and now, only a week later, it had already broken through 500,000?

That growth was terrifying!

As a result, another wave of articles about Undertale appeared online.

“500,000 Copies Sold in 10 Days! Rating Soars to 9.7!”

“A Must-Play! An Indie Game Masterpiece!”

“Overturning Players' Understanding of RPGs! A Truly Unique RPG!”

“An Absolutely Stunning Game!”

As far as indie game designers in the industry were concerned, some of them hadn't paid much attention to Undertale before.

But now, they were all studying it seriously.

If positive reviews alone weren't enough to prove anything, then Undertale's undeniable sales figures were right there in front of them. Clearly, there was a genuine market for this kind of game.

As for the media outlets, well, they had already published similar articles before.

They could simply reuse them.

Just change the headlines and they were good to go.

These gaming media outlets were unanimously praising the game. After all, Undertale was simply too explosive.

It had the word of mouth.

It had the sales.

And its overall quality was practically flawless.

On top of that, its unique meta-game design left countless players and game designers amazed.

For a game like this, even if someone wanted to criticize it, it was difficult to find a convincing angle from which to attack it.

Under the media's relentless barrage of coverage, Undertale's popularity began soaring.

Although the game had already surpassed 500,000 copies sold, its exceptional reputation and unique appeal clearly meant that 500,000 would not be its final sales figure.

At the same time, the game's enormous popularity also attracted plenty of players who had previously just been watching the drama from the sidelines.

Many of them went straight to Zhong Mei's official Weibo account.

Unfortunately, the Weibo post in question had already been deleted.

He had also directly disabled comments on his account.

It could be said that this guy's reputation among ordinary players was truly terrible.

Now that Undertale was exploding in popularity, players who disliked him—as well as those who simply wanted to watch the spectacle—naturally weren't going to let the opportunity pass.

Some of the players who had previously played Mirror were especially formidable when it came to stirring things up.

Although Zhong Mei had deleted his post and disabled comments, Chen Xu's official Weibo account still had the original post.

So countless players flocked to that old post from Chen Xu and started tagging Zhong Mei.

“@Zhong Mei, Teacher Zhong, hurry up and criticize Undertale! Games are art! How can you let a game like this strut around triumphantly!?”

“@Zhong Mei, Teacher Zhong, come out and say something! Bloom can definitely crush Undertale, right? What do you mean it's only sold 50,000 copies so far? I don't believe it! Teacher Zhong's game is art! Surely these players simply don't know how to appreciate it. It's not that the game is bad—the players are the problem!”

“@Zhong Mei, Teacher Zhong, keep going! What happened to all those things you said back then?”

Under the only few posts on Chen Xu's official Weibo account, the comments were now filled with people tagging Zhong Mei.

Some of the more representative sarcastic comments had already received thousands of likes.

And as for Zhong Mei now?

Two words:

Playing dead.

In reality, he didn't want things to turn out this way either.

But what could he do?

His original strategy had been to attack his opponent's weaknesses with his own strengths.

If your sales were higher than mine, I'd talk about word of mouth.

If your word of mouth was better than mine, I'd talk about artistic merit.

If your artistic merit was better than mine, I'd talk about sales.

If all else failed, I could even shamelessly compare the length of our games.

Basically, he would always choose whatever aspect he was better than his opponent in and compete on that ground.

But now, that strategy no longer worked!

He was getting completely crushed in every category.

He couldn't exactly say that his Bloom cost 40 yuan and was therefore four yuan more expensive than Undertale, could he?

So Zhong Mei decided to play dead.

He simply refused to believe that Chen Xu could make another game this good.

…………………………

Under the watchful eyes of the entire gaming industry, Undertale's numbers continued to rise.

Thanks to the game's excellent word of mouth, its subsequent growth remained remarkably steady.

Even when Chen Xu publicly announced that Undertale had surpassed 500,000 copies sold, the sales curve continued trending upward.

Then came August 15.

It had been exactly one month since Undertale officially launched.

Its total sales finally surpassed one million copies.

It had achieved a milestone that Mirror had never managed to reach.

The news that Undertale had sold one million copies in its first month left countless indie game designers completely stunned.

At a price of 36 yuan per copy, even though the majority of Undertale's sales came through third-party platforms, one month of sales alone was enough to push Chen Xu's revenue past ten million yuan.

And that didn't even include the DLC for Mirror, which had also been released during this period and had sold quite well.

Putting Mirror aside, it could be said that Undertale's sales were entirely driven by its excellent story and game design.

This prompted countless game designers to analyze Undertale, studying its characteristics and the reasons behind its success.

For the fledgling Nebula Games, Undertale's success could truly be described as a victory in both fame and fortune.

Compared with the Undertale of his previous life, the parallel world's version had achieved one million copies sold in its first month relying solely on the domestic market.

Chen Xu also took some time to analyze why.

The first factor was the environment of this parallel world.

Just as console gaming had been relatively niche in China in his previous life, while PC and mobile gaming were mainstream, the gaming market in this parallel world was simply far larger than it had been in his previous life.

In his previous life, China was often said to have 700 million gamers, but there was a great deal of inflation and ambiguity in that figure.

The situation was different in this parallel world.

Even if he ignored the overseas market entirely and looked only at China, the size of the market was already enormous.

After all, China was the world's most populous country.

The second factor was that Chen Xu had significantly improved the game's visual presentation compared with the version from his previous life.

After all, the original Undertale had been the work of a single indie game developer and had been made using crowdfunding.

Both manpower and funding had been extremely limited.

For a game, good visual presentation was always an advantage rather than a disadvantage.

After all, there were certainly players who would refuse to play a game because its graphics were too poor.

But there was practically no one who would refuse to play a game because its graphics were too good.

At this point, Chen Xu was already extremely satisfied with Undertale's sales performance.

As for the overseas market, because the policies of this parallel world were somewhat different from those of his previous life, he had no plans to pursue it in the short term.

Mirror, for example, had never passed domestic approval and had instead been released through official overseas platforms. Although those were still official platforms, the nature of that release was completely different from Undertale.

Undertale, on the other hand, had already been released on domestic platforms.

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Tn: I updated the story once a day, but if you want to see more chapter of this story ahead of time, please go to my Patreon.

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