"Indeed, just like the president said—this kind of world is extremely hollow. It looks like it has infinite possibilities for exploration, but in reality it's very monotonous."
After that, no one at Gamestar Electronic Entertainment paid much attention to the rest of Mickford's launch event. The games revealed afterward were all fairly conventional. It was obvious that the real focus of this conference was that Infinite World game.
On the internet, however, the game's promotional trailer had generated an excellent response.
Many players exclaimed that once released, it might become a god-tier masterpiece.
An infinitely explorable world—how tempting was that?
It seemed as if the human genome itself was deeply engraved with a spirit of adventure and exploration.
From the great voyages of the Age of Discovery to modern space exploration, humanity had always been moving outward, constantly pushing toward the unknown.
That was the charm of this kind of game: infinite possibilities.
Yet after Gamestar Electronic Entertainment's game departments gathered to study it carefully, they discovered that this kind of procedurally generated world really wasn't very fun.
In the launch presentation, the game's demo looked beautiful—lush landscapes, cool-looking randomly generated creatures.
But once you actually let a computer run an infinite world on its own, a problem immediately surfaced: randomly generated content doesn't necessarily conform to human aesthetics.
Sometimes it produces scenery that's downright bizarre.
You could try to explain it away as "different cultures from different worlds," but this is a game. A game exists to serve players.
If a game makes players uncomfortable, then the game itself has a problem.
What's more, since everything is randomly generated, even the developers themselves might not be able to accept the artistic styles that emerge.
"What if the AI goes through several more iterations? Wouldn't the random generation improve?"
"No. The computational load required is far greater than simply calculating NPC behavior. That's not something a commercial product can handle—it would require enterprise-level supercomputers. Those things cost millions of dollars each. Do you think ordinary players could afford that?"
"Then what if we use AI to pre-generate some planets and include them directly in the game files?"
"That's even more impossible. Think about how many art assets and how much content a single planet would require. Data for billions upon billions of planets would overwhelm any storage device."
"...So is there really no solution?"
"It's not unsolvable—just not now. We'd have to wait decades for the cost of supercomputers to drop enough for true civilian use. Only then would it be possible to present a truly rich, infinite world."
The department heads huddled together, analyzing the feasibility of creating this kind of infinite-world game.
In the end, they all reached the same conclusion.
With current technology, it was almost impossible to realize what had been promised at the launch event.
Even in Takayuki's previous life, No Man's Sky—despite its reputation turnaround—never truly fixed the fundamental problem of its hollow universe.
The developers had merely added more gameplay systems through later updates, covering up the emptiness with additional mechanics.
But that, in itself, was somewhat backwards.
The original vision had been to give players countless vivid, diverse worlds, each filled with novel experiences.
In the end, the game became a mishmash of many different gameplay systems stitched together.
The No Man's Sky developers themselves must have suffered deeply.
The gap between their original dream and the final product was enormous. Faced with an unbreakable wall of scientific and technological limitations, they could only do what they were capable of—quietly working to make amends for their earlier mistakes.
Fortunately, their efforts eventually paid off, and their team's reputation gradually recovered.
"Then doesn't this game border on false advertising?"
"Yeah… it kind of does."
"How does Mickford dare to do this? Aren't they afraid this could completely destroy their game division?"
"I don't think it's that serious. This is just one development team they invested in. Worst case, they can just abandon it."
"Ah… what a pity. The idea behind this game is actually fantastic. It's just ahead of its time. If it had been developed ten or twenty years later, it would probably look completely different."
Everyone couldn't help but sigh.
At the same time, they felt it was unfair to those developers.
The concept itself was genuinely innovative.
They really did create a nearly infinite world—but because current technology couldn't keep up, the game couldn't deliver what it was meant to.
Honestly, if circumstances allowed, they would even have liked to lend a hand.
But this was a competitor.
Still, they were secretly pleased to see a rival potentially heading toward trouble. All they had to do was sit back and watch the drama unfold.
Mickford's popularity had surged recently.
Many players showed enormous interest in Infinite World, and Mickford's stock price rose by more than ten percent as a result.
That a single game's explosive popularity could directly affect a company's stock price was something even Myron Cass hadn't anticipated.
So video games had this much influence?
When so many players expressed optimism about a game, investor confidence naturally skyrocketed.
If he released a few more blockbuster games like this, wouldn't the company soar straight to the top?
Of course, he knew that was wishful thinking.
Games like this were rare strokes of luck. Even Gamestar Electronic Entertainment had only produced a few of them.
But this time, he was standing right in the eye of the storm.
Without hesitation, Myron Cass increased his investment in the frizzy-haired young man and his team, adding another fifty million dollars to their budget.
Fifty million dollars was already enough for most studios to develop a mid-sized or even large AAA game. Clearly, Myron Cass's level of attention toward this project had risen significantly.
However, not everyone was blinded by this sudden success.
The frizzy-haired young man himself felt uneasy about Infinite World.
It wasn't that he thought the game was bad. As a technically minded developer, he knew better than anyone where the bottlenecks were.
This wasn't something that could be solved simply by throwing more money at it.
Because of Infinite World's popularity, Mickford ramped up its marketing even further, pushing the game as a once-in-a-generation masterpiece—something you'd regret for the rest of your life if you didn't play it.
Several times, the frizzy-haired young man wanted to explain things to his boss, Myron Cass.
He felt the boss needed to calm down. The game had clear limitations, and many originally planned gameplay features still hadn't been implemented. Those would require a lot more time. Ideally, the release date should be postponed.
But just as he was about to speak up, the head of the game development department stopped him and issued a blunt warning.
"You'd better not say that to the boss. He won't be happy hearing it. If he gets angry and pulls the investment, is that what you want?"
Seeing the young man hesitate, the department head continued coldly:
"With the momentum this game has right now, even if the final product isn't that great, it'll still make a ton of money just off the hype. You really don't need to care so much about whether the game lives up to its original vision."
"In this world," he said flatly, "making money is king. Do you understand?"