At this point, Myron Kess had poured more than half of the game division's resources into Infinite World and had little interest in dealing with Gamestar Electronic Entertainment's invitation.
The Olympics weren't being held in the United States anyway. He had no passion for video games, and even less of the kind of idealism about games that Takayuki possessed.
To him, video games were purely a money-making tool—a means to boost the influence and sales of his smartphones and PCs.
Right now, the hype surrounding Infinite World was already no weaker than Cyberpunk 2077 had been in its early days.
Well-versed in marketing and promotion, Myron Kess directly instructed his team to launch an aggressive, high-intensity marketing campaign.
This game was destined to be a groundbreaking product, and their brand would rise again thanks to Infinite World.
By now, Myron Kess had already invested over a hundred million in this game—and he was still generously increasing that investment.
Compared to the enthusiasm of Myron Kess and the marketing team, the young developer with the afro in the game development department looked deeply frustrated.
"This technical bottleneck just can't be broken."
The afro-haired young man stood with more than a dozen others, discussing the development of Infinite World.
"Is it really impossible to add multiplayer gameplay?" he asked first.
Another programmer with a technical background shook his head. "No. At least not with the current schedule. Unless Mikfow is willing to delay the project by another six months, we simply can't make the networking tech work."
"Six months…" The afro-haired young man sighed. "The boss wants us to release the game yesterday."
He looked miserable.
Then he asked again, "What about the building mode? Can that be implemented?"
The programmer replied, "That mode is even more complex and difficult than multiplayer. First, we need enough time for modeling. Part of that work can be handed over to AI, which would save us quite a bit of time—but even so, with the current schedule, it's still impossible. If only we'd had enough people from the very beginning."
The afro-haired young man said helplessly, "A hundred people is already the maximum Mikfow is willing to provide."
Infinite World was this young man's dream game.
He had loved video games since childhood and devoted himself to game technology development.
One day, when inspiration struck and he conceived a nearly infinite world, he was ecstatic.
He brought his dorm mates together to start developing the game and created its basic prototype.
But a prototype alone wasn't enough—the game needed far more content to fill it out.
Relying solely on the gimmick of an infinite world was no fun at all.
As a player himself, he could at least tell whether a game was fun or not, even if he couldn't clearly explain why it wasn't fun.
Up to now, after countless brainstorming sessions, the team had envisioned many different gameplay modes for this title.
These included building mode, multiplayer mode, combat mode, space battles, raiding, bounty systems, and more.
Only when these systems were combined would the game truly feel interesting.
When they first took the stage to promote the game, these features were used as selling points and successfully attracted a lot of attention.
But so far, the only features they had actually managed to implement were the infinite world itself, a very rudimentary space combat system, and simple resource gathering and spaceship production.
If Gamestar Electronic Entertainment were making this game, Takayuki would likely have decisively assigned a team of over a thousand people and scheduled a development cycle of more than three years.
Only then could the game's content be sufficiently rich—rich without becoming repetitive or boring.
At Mikfow, though, the funding was indeed generous, but manpower was handled with extreme stinginess.
Myron Kess flatly refused to hire more employees for game development.
He was willing to outsource some asset creation.
But realizing all of the afro-haired young man's ideas that way was extremely difficult.
Outsourced teams might painstakingly produce assets, but the core development team often couldn't integrate them into the game due to technical issues.
Once integrated, numerous bugs would appear—and fixing those bugs took time too.
In the end, the biggest problem was simply not having enough time.
And Myron Kess was absolutely unwilling to budge on that point.
He believed games didn't need to be made in such fine detail—having eye-catching gimmicks was enough.
That alone would attract players.
"I'll go talk to the boss again and see if there's any way to get the release delayed," the afro-haired young man said.
At this point, he was out of options.
He even felt a bit of regret—he should have gone to Gamestar Electronic Entertainment back then.
They might have paid a little less, but they would probably have been easier to work with.
After all, that was the company run by the god of games.
But thinking about that now was meaningless.
A few minutes later, the afro-haired young man returned dejectedly to the group with bad news.
"The boss won't agree to a delay. We can add another fifty people, but that's the absolute limit."
"Fifty people…" someone said bitterly. "That's meaningless for a project of this scale. There's barely more than a month left until release—it's impossible."
The afro-haired young man clenched his teeth. "We'll do our best. No matter what, at least we'll have tried. If the game doesn't perform well at launch, we can slowly make up for it afterward and add everything we originally wanted to create."
"That's all we can do…"
The dozen core developers returned to their workstations, each weighed down by heavy hearts.
They had gone nearly six months without a break, working more than twelve hours a day.
In reality, much of that time wasn't very productive.
But they had no choice—when they hit technical roadblocks, all they could do was rack their brains for solutions. If they couldn't solve them, they were stuck.
After seeing the afro-haired young man off, Myron Kess was actually in a pretty good mood.
That was because the hype around Infinite World was indeed strong. Quite a few people had already bought Mikfow's PCs and consoles in advance just for this game, boosting sales by more than 50 percent compared to before.
This, in turn, had caused Mikfow's stock price to surge rapidly in a short period of time—overall, a very solid return.
At this point, even if the game's reputation completely collapsed after launch, it wouldn't matter much.
The hardware had already been sold.
Players could rage and refund the game if they wanted—he had already made his money through hardware sales.
And besides, even if this game failed, didn't he still have other games to fall back on?