By eliminating the risk at its earliest stage, the AI chip burnout incident instead became an excellent publicity opportunity for Gamestar Electronic Entertainment.
Gamestar Electronic Entertainment replaced the latest AI chips for players free of charge and also gave out vouchers that could be redeemed for any game.
Even consoles from unaffected, fully functional batches received a unified gift of video games from Gamestar Electronic Entertainment.
In this world, the practice of giving away games for free had not yet become fully mainstream.
This was because Gamestar Electronic Entertainment completely dominated the electronic gaming platform market, making it extremely difficult for other companies to snatch customers from under its nose.
Even if other manufacturers wanted to give away games for free, it would be hard to achieve the desired effect, so they simply abandoned the idea altogether.
Unless a game had a history of ten or twenty years, it was rare to see it given away for free—even discounts as steep as 90% off were uncommon.
Gamestar Electronic Entertainment, however, was very generous, giving players several well-known titles from previous generations for free.
These included the first six installments of Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy up to the seventh title, as well as Super Mario 1 and Super Mario 3, which were popular back in the FC (Famicom) era.
These games would be distributed weekly over the course of the next year, and players could claim them for free through their accounts.
Both Gamestar Electronic Entertainment and the players were delighted.
This move to restore its reputation also saved Gamestar Electronic Entertainment tens of millions of dollars in marketing expenses.
Of course, that still wasn't enough to fully offset the losses caused by the recall.
But the overwhelmingly positive player feedback made it all worthwhile.
After the incident passed, sales across Gamestar Electronic Entertainment's major titles rose noticeably, with Cyberpunk 2077 seeing the largest increase.
This was because more people became curious about what kind of game could actually burn out a console.
Subconsciously, people believed that a game capable of doing that must be exceptionally impressive.
And in reality, it truly was.
After scrapping one console, Kazuo Murakami took out a new one just minutes later and continued playing, seemingly without any fatigue at all.
He had already cleared the game using seven different character backgrounds.
Although all seven paths led to the same final ending for the protagonist, the gameplay experience was vastly different each time, with every background offering its own unique enjoyment.
It felt as though he had played seven completely different games.
Murakami suddenly felt that selling this game for only 59 dollars was practically a loss.
A game like this wouldn't be overpriced even at two or three hundred dollars.
Of course, that was just a figure of speech—actually selling it at that price would scare off many players.
In Cyberpunk 2077, Takayuki placed special emphasis on strengthening the storyline of another major character, Jack, allowing players to form an emotional bond with him and experience a massive emotional shock when Jack died.
Takayuki also added more narrative depth to Adam Smasher, the final boss.
Different character backgrounds required different strategies when facing this final boss.
Later, Takayuki still felt it wasn't enough. He simply told the team to let their imaginations run wild and come up with as many ways as possible to defeat Adam Smasher, giving players countless methods to resolve the final boss and discover endless fun.
And that was only part of the game's many details.
Carson had already become a household name in Europe as a professional football game esports player and had once won the final championship of the Gamestar World Cup.
His favorite games were naturally football games, followed by fighting games—because fighting games were his wife's favorite.
At first, neither of them paid much attention to Cyberpunk 2077.
But after Gamestar Electronic Entertainment's public relations response to the crisis, both of them grew curious about the game and decided to buy it and give it a try.
They soon discovered that this was far from a simple open-world game.
In this game, you could even become an outstanding martial arts master or an underground football player.
The experience was genuinely interesting.
Gamestar Electronic Entertainment possessed the very best development teams, covering nearly every game genre and boasting extensive development experience. When so many developers with diverse expertise came together, the open-world game they created was almost flawless.
It featured racing mechanics comparable to Forza, first-person shooting on the level of Titanfall, and large-scale world design experience from teams that had worked on Grand Theft Auto. Going even further, it also included stock trading, management, construction, tower defense, strategy gameplay, and more.
Both Carson and his wife felt that discovering this game so late meant they had missed out on so much.
They should have tried it earlier.
In a family home in a remote city, a middle-aged man in his fifties stared blankly at the screen, watching the final boss, Adam Smasher, lying on the ground and slowly dying.
"Dad? How was it? Exciting, right?" the young man beside him asked eagerly.
"So this is the video game you've always loved? I really… I really didn't expect this…"
For a moment, the middle-aged man didn't know how to describe what he was feeling.
Ever since Cyberpunk 2077 was released, he and his child had sat down together every evening after work to play the game.
They studied how to make money in the game together and worked through side quests together.
As time passed, the father-son relationship should have grown more distant—but because of this game, their bond became as close as it had been when the child was young.
Of course, neither of them consciously noticed this change. They were both completely immersed in the captivating Night City.
In the game's dialogue, Night City is described as a place that mesmerizes people, drawing countless individuals toward it and making them throw themselves in without hesitation.
That was exactly how they felt.
The entire game experience was like personally living through an ultra-long, incredibly realistic movie.
And most importantly, this movie had an unmatched sense of immersion—you were the protagonist, and every action you took affected the development of the city.
"Dad, this is top-tier gaming. I'd even dare say that after this game's release, it might take many years before another game can surpass its scale and charm."
"The best game? It really is a bit too good. Even now, I still haven't fully recovered from it."
Early on, Jack's death deeply shook the middle-aged man.
Over his fifty-plus years of life, he had experienced far more than his child.
He had once witnessed a coworker die right in front of him—a coworker who had also been a good friend.
When he watched Jack die in the game, he subconsciously thought of that old friend. As Jack's eyes on the screen gradually became empty, it felt as though he had returned to that moment of watching his coworker die.
An indescribable sorrow filled his mind.
And immediately afterward came anger.
In the past, he had believed that movies, games, television, and animation were merely entertainment—unreal things that could never truly move him. At most, they had only caused fleeting emotions.
But Cyberpunk 2077 was different.
This kind of first-hand, lived-in immersion was simply too intense.
The emotional impact was overwhelming.