Tong Qifeng had long anticipated that Zhu Jianchun would blame the sudden changes at Hua Yue Entertainment on the company’s veteran employees.
He didn’t intend to explain anything—in fact, he was somewhat happy to let it happen.
Regardless of whether Tong Mingwei would eventually return to Hua Yue, Tong Qifeng didn’t want today’s events to affect him.
So Tong Qifeng followed Zhu Jianchun’s line of thought and said, “Jianchun, I’m not trying to criticize you, but you’re too impatient. How long has the company been in your hands, and you’re already going after the veterans?”
“Brother-in-law, I…”
“Enough! Jianchun, I know what you want to say, but flip-flopping is not something I’ll allow. You need to broaden your horizons a bit. We’re all in the same company, and everyone wants the company to improve. Do you understand?”
Zhu Jianchun nodded with a look of reluctance.
“Good that you understand. You can go now.”
After leaving Tong Qifeng’s office, Zhu Jianchun—who had just looked so unwilling—instantly put on a poker face.
When Zhu Jianchun returned to his own office, sure enough, someone was already waiting for him.
“Mr. Zhu, what did the boss say?” the director of the business department asked anxiously.
“I couldn’t feel him out. The old man’s excuse was that I’ve been too harsh on the company’s veterans.”
“So what do we do?”
“Nothing! The old man brought that up, so we definitely need to slow down. I wasn’t planning to clean out all those old geezers in the short term anyway.
So let’s just play along with the old man’s stated position and take our time. The old man being willing to work a couple more years is actually a good thing—with him around, the company won’t fall into chaos, and we might even have fewer concerns.”
Luo Ming was unaware of the earthquake at Hua Yue Entertainment. At that moment, he was in Rong Mu’s office, deciding with Rong Mu which server provider to use.
After the two laid out their respective views, neither could convince the other.
However, they did reach a consensus on one point: either Century Internet or Huawei’s servers would work—both were excellent, with little difference between them.
In that case, they chose the simplest and most direct way to decide—rock-paper-scissors.
“Rock, paper, scissors!”
“Rock, paper, scissors! Damn! Er Ming, you little bastard won again!”
Luo Ming smiled. His winning was inevitable. Rong Mu would definitely throw paper on the first round—Luo Ming played it safe and matched him with paper. After confirming that Rong Mu’s habit hadn’t changed, Luo Ming felt confident.
Given Rong Mu’s personality, when he saw someone play the same thing as him, he would directly switch to scissors.
Luo Ming did the opposite—on the second round, he threw rock and easily beat Rong Mu.
“I’ll defer to you on the servers, but where the server center gets built and how—that’s up to me, agreed?”
“I won’t interfere with any of that, but you need to give me an estimate of the cost,” Luo Ming said after thinking it over.
“Including the servers, under 100 million yuan.”
During this time, Rong Mu had surveyed the land near the Fen River.
There weren’t actually many plots that could satisfy fast internet speeds, power supply, and convenient water access for cooling.
Only two places were relatively suitable—one about 70 mu, and the other 13 mu.
Land prices in Bingzhou weren’t expensive—about 2,400 yuan per square meter.
(PS: In 2014, the urban village where I live started planning for demolition. The idle land at that time was bought back at 2,400 yuan per square meter.)
One mu is 667 square meters, so that comes to about 730,000 yuan per mu. The 70-mu plot was too big and would cost too much. Moreover, according to Luo Ming’s plan, Zhuo Guang’s headquarters would eventually move to a major city—what stayed in Bingzhou would only be Zhuo Guang’s servers and game development department.
So they didn’t need too much land. The 13-mu plot was just right.
Calculating it out, purchasing the land would cost about 20.8 million yuan.
Since they were college student entrepreneurs with certain support policies, Rong Mu estimated they could secure the plot for 20 million.
Then there was the construction of the server center.
Rong Mu had found a professional engineering cost estimator to evaluate it. If built as a 12-story office building, the construction and installation costs would be roughly 10 to 15 million yuan.
In addition, there were permit application fees and taxes. For commercial buildings, these might be higher—between 600 and 700 yuan per square meter.
Subsequent factors like structural type and level of decoration would also affect the total cost.
But overall, it should be manageable within 30 million.
30 million plus 20 million for land is 50 million, and the remaining 50 million would be enough to purchase servers.
Luo Ming thought it over and found it reasonable. After all, a new server center wasn’t just for storing servers—Zhuo Guang’s future game department would be based there too.
And they had to buy land as well, so spending around 100 million was quite reasonable.
So Luo Ming nodded in agreement.
Seeing Luo Ming agree, Rong Mu smiled too.
At this point, the two had reached a consensus on the server center.
“By the way, Er Ming, there’s another thing. Didn’t Sister Shan help you apply to register the patent for D encryption? The patent application has been submitted,” Rong Mu said, changing the subject.
Luo Ming’s eyes lit up. “Both domestic and international?”
“Yeah.”
“Great, then we can talk to Steam and Sony.”
“So I’ll go contact them?”
“Contact Steam first. For Sony, I’ll have Senior Zhao leak the news to his friend, and his friend will tell Sony’s upper management.”
“Alright, let’s do it your way.”
Luo Ming left Rong Mu’s office to find Zhao Ningyuan, while Rong Mu directly sent an email to Steam.
Actually, Steam had already noticed something unusual about Plants vs. Zombies during this time.
Normally, a game this popular would have been flooded with pirated copies long ago.
But now, nearly two weeks after Plants vs. Zombies launched, not a single pirated version had appeared.
This struck Steam’s upper management as extremely incredible.
So they had their people try to crack Plants vs. Zombies, and that’s when they discovered the existence of D encryption.
Steam’s CTO, John, quickly learned about D encryption. After running some tests, he said with great interest, “This Chinese game company’s anti-piracy method is really quite good—very creative.”
“So, John, can we replicate something similar?” Steam’s CEO, Billson, asked.
“Boss, I suspect their company has already submitted this algorithm for a patent. It wouldn’t be hard for us to develop something similar—the hard part is completely bypassing their patent.
If we can’t bypass it, that’s infringement. One lawsuit from them and we’d have to pay damages.”
“How long would it take to bypass it?” Billson asked.
“I haven’t had time to fully analyze this algorithm yet—I’ve only done some simple testing. But I’ve heard from our people that it’s quite complex. Based on my understanding of them, when they say something is quite complex, bypassing it would take roughly half a year.”
Billson frowned at that—half a year was far too long.
“Boss, I think we’d be better off just asking this Chinese game company directly how much they want for this algorithm.
If their price isn’t too high, we can save ourselves the trouble and just work with them.”
“John, the way you’re talking, I’d almost suspect you’ve been bought off by them. They just contacted me.”
Two days later, Steam’s CTO John brought his team to Zhuo Guang’s headquarters.
John wasn’t visiting China for the first time, but the places he’d been before were all major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. This was his first time in Bingzhou.
This city, not far from the capital, had its own character—ancient-looking buildings could be seen everywhere at first glance.
John was very interested in these old buildings. In fact, he had studied architecture in university—he only switched to computers because architecture wasn’t easy to find work in.
As it turned out, John discovered he had quite a talent for computers. In just ten years after switching careers, he became Steam’s CTO.
And when John met Luo Ming, he had a strong intuition that this young man was just like him.
But unlike himself back then, this young man seemed very confident. Though he didn’t talk much, everything he said hit the nail on the head.
After some preliminary probing, both sides had a basic understanding of what the other wanted. During the lunch break, both sides held internal discussions about their new negotiation strategies.
“Er Ming, Steam probably isn’t looking to acquire or buy out our D encryption outright. Everything they said earlier was just their pitch—they’re trying to test our bottom line.”
“I know.”
“So what do you plan to do?”
“Just stick to the plan we agreed on. As long as one game under Steam uses our D encryption, we get 2% of the revenue, and they also have to help promote my game.”
“Isn’t 2% a bit low? Steam’s CTO came in person, which shows they take our algorithm very seriously.”
“I know that. The revenue from anti-piracy protection is definitely worth more than 2%—maybe even 20%.
But when dealing with platforms like Steam and Sony, we really don’t have much room to negotiate. We’re too small. If we set our price too high, they’ll probably just choose to bypass our patent and develop something similar. With the D algorithm as a precedent, that wouldn’t be difficult for them.
So the best approach is to sacrifice some of our interests in exchange for a cooperation opportunity.
And Mu Tou, don’t forget—our patent doesn’t target platforms; it targets game companies. For games under the platform, we charge 2% in patent fees, but for game companies, it’s at least 5%.”
Hearing this, Rong Mu’s eyes lit up. He knew how to negotiate now.
Meanwhile, on the other side, John had told Billson everything about the morning’s negotiation process.
Billson smiled slightly and said, “John, these two young men are very clever. They’ve already decided to trade the benefits of the D algorithm for our support. Their target isn’t us—it’s other game companies.
In that case, go ahead and drive a hard bargain. Squeeze their profits as much as possible.”
“How much is ‘as much as possible’?”
“1%?”
“1% is too hard. Billson, I can’t do it.”
“Then 2%—no more than 3% at most. I imagine these two young men started with an asking price of 5%. Just be firm and push the price down. After all, we have the upper hand right now,” Billson said confidently.
