Chapter 231: A New Bonus Distribution Method
After seeing Zhang Zuting off, everyone at Shangyang Games got busy editing the footage into suitable advertisement clips.
Advertisements placed on web pages, video platforms, and other locations all had different requirements in both format and duration. For example, some sites only allowed banner or pop-up ads, while others supported short clips of a few seconds or a dozen seconds.
Therefore, the same piece of footage had to be reworked into many different versions.
When trimming a several-dozen-second commercial down to just a few seconds, they naturally had to think about how to preserve the most essential parts of the ad copy.
It was at this point that everyone began to realize just how forward-thinking President Pei was.
The video they had recorded—no matter how you cut it—could easily turn into a perfect browser game ad!
Because Zhang Zuting's lines were all short phrases, each packed with information, the clips could be freely trimmed and rearranged without affecting the overall meaning too much. This gave the editors a huge amount of flexibility.
And if, in the future, players got tired of a certain ad, they could just tweak and re-edit it slightly—and voilà, a brand-new one!
"President Pei, Zhang Zuting's Mandarin isn't that good—it sounds kind of awkward. Should we get a voice actor to dub over him? Voice work's not that expensive nowadays," Ye Zhizhou suggested.
Pei Qian immediately shook his head. "No, keep it as it is! You've got to trust in the actor's skill and line delivery. Besides, this natural, unpolished feeling can invisibly make the audience feel closer to the ad. If we replace his voice, it loses its soul, understand?"
"Uh…" Ye Zhizhou faintly felt something was off with what Pei Qian said.
But after thinking about it again, he figured—the ad was already this awkward, so why worry about editing quality anymore?
According to Director Lin's theory, the reason President Pei had hired a washed-up Hong Kong actor to make such a cringey video was precisely to attract traditional browser game players.
If that was the case, the ad didn't need to look high-end at all—in fact, making it a bit awkward might actually make perfect sense.
With that thought, Ye Zhizhou dropped the issue and obediently focused on preparing all the promotional materials. Once the game development was done, they could launch a massive ad campaign across every platform.
So far, Blood War Anthem: Enhanced Edition had been in development for about a month and a half.
Although the game was being built from scratch, its gameplay was largely based on Blood War Anthem's already mature mechanics. Most of the art asset requirements were clear, and they only needed to be updated or upgraded.
The bulk of the work lay in the art department—and since the art assets had been outsourced to several different studios, production was progressing quickly.
According to estimates, the game should be completed by early September—slightly ahead of schedule.
Finishing development early meant more time for testing, fine-tuning gameplay data, and getting ahead of competing products—
In short, there are many advantages.
Now that the promotional work was all settled, Ye Zhizhou planned to devote all his energy to development, so that players could experience the game as soon as possible.
. . .
Meanwhile, Pei Qian was also keeping himself busy.
He was monitoring the progress of Tengda Games' development while also keeping a close eye on Feihuang Studio.
Development of Turn Back Before It's Too Late was going smoothly as well. Its current completion rate was around 60%, and judging by that pace—with testing, adjustments, and optimizations included—the game's official release would likely come around mid-October.
Pei Qian instructed Li Yada to release a playable demo soon, because he wanted to try it himself.
On one hand, he wanted to see whether the game's difficulty matched his expectations. On the other hand, he was looking for an opportunity to secretly sneak his "President Pei exclusive weapon" into the game—hidden in a place no one would ever expect.
After all, the system required him to clear the game by his own skill.
To be fair, Pei Qian wasn't exactly bad at games—but he definitely wasn't good, either.
He was just an average player, the kind who could occasionally carry a match when playing casually with friends.
The system's requirement for him to "beat the game himself" existed mainly to prevent him from exploiting loopholes.
For example, what if Pei Qian set the first level's basic monsters to be N times stronger than the player's base stats—with attack power, attack speed, and movement all completely overwhelming? Then even the best players would get instantly killed in one hit, and only a handful of top-tier experts might barely scrape through.
That kind of setup would amount to deliberately scaring players away—which would obviously be unreasonable.
So, with the system's rule in place, it meant that an above-average, reasonably skilled player—one who understood the game mechanics well (as Pei Qian would) and was willing to try repeatedly—should still be able to clear the game eventually.
That way, even if the game turned out to be a bit difficult, at least most players would still feel like it was possible to finish it if they stuck with it.
Of course, someone as clever as Pei Qian already had a counterstrategy in mind.
He considered the problem from three angles:
First—the system said he had to clear the game, but it never said how long it would take!
If he played the game a hundred times—starting from the demo release and only finishing the day before launch—that still counted as clearing it.
Second—the system didn't specify how he had to clear it.
If he secretly hid an incredibly overpowered weapon in some obscure corner of the game, one that no normal player would ever find, he could just use it to mow down everything in his path. That would count as clearing it too!
Third—the system didn't say which ending he had to reach.
If the game had multiple endings, and one of them only required completing, say, 30% of the content, then as long as he finished that shortest route, it still technically counted as a "clear," didn't it?
With that, Pei Qian was fully prepared. He was just waiting for the Turn Back Before It's Too Late demo to drop, so he could sneak in his exclusive weapon and start practicing.
In another two or three days, once the demo was out, President Pei would be busy again.
It might sound tough—but as the saying goes, "endure the bitter to reach the sweet." If he wanted to lose money, he had to work hard for it!
After all, Turn Back Before It's Too Late had a total investment of nearly twenty million yuan—failure was not an option!
Apart from that, Pei Qian was also considering making some adjustments to the company's policies.
Currently, Tengda Games offered both project bonuses and profit sharing: 15% of a game's net profit was distributed among all employees as bonuses.
Feihuang Studio had a similar policy, giving out 30% of its profits to studio members as rewards.
Pei Qian had set up these systems with good intentions—to distribute as much of the company's earnings as possible, thereby reducing the amount of system-managed funds he held.
But after some reflection, Pei Qian realized this policy had a major flaw!
With profit sharing that generous, of course all the employees would focus solely on making money!
Take Feihuang Studio, for instance: their last documentary hadn't earned much profit, so Huang Sibai and Zhu Xiaoce only received their base salaries—not a single yuan in bonuses.
Although Pei Qian had already set their base pay fairly high, from their perspective, even if the documentary earned them praise and critical acclaim, their actual income had dropped significantly.
So that's probably why they decided to make a tech review + short video program this time—increasing their "sponsorship intensity."
Could it be related to this whole bonus system?
Of course, they surely also wanted to live up to President Pei's expectations—to make Feihuang Studio more profitable so he wouldn't have to keep covering their losses.
But wanting to earn more bonuses for themselves was definitely part of their motivation too.
The more Pei Qian thought about it, the more wrong it seemed.
This bonus distribution system was basically drinking poison to quench thirst!
Sure, in the short term, it meant more money was being paid out, but it also massively boosted everyone's enthusiasm for making money—bringing that vile, hateful thing called "profit" even closer to Pei Qian himself!
So this system had to change!
Of course, taking away their bonuses was impossible—only a monster would do that.
Besides, if Pei Qian kept all those bonuses in his own hands, wouldn't that just make life harder for himself and increase the pressure to lose money?
What he needed was a win–win solution.
Something that would still distribute money to the employees, but also make them less obsessed with earning profits.
After thinking it over for a bit, Pei Qian soon came up with a great idea.
He would keep employee benefits roughly the same—maybe even raise them slightly—but change the basis for bonus calculation from profitability to reputation!
In other words, instead of handing out bonuses based on how much a project earned, they would now be given out based on how well it was received!
The better the public reception, the bigger the bonus.
For example, even a project like the Breaking the Cocoon documentary—which lost money—could still grant a full bonus payout if its reputation score was high enough.
He could create a reputation rating system with four grades: S, A, B, and C.
Each project would be evaluated and, based on its rating and overall investment, the corresponding percentage of the bonus pool would be distributed to its team members.
The exact structure could vary depending on the type of project.
For instance, games usually generated long-term revenue, so their bonuses could be distributed over a longer period.
Videos, on the other hand, got most of their traction in the first three months—so those bonuses could be paid out all at once.
This way, employees would gradually shift their focus from profit to reputation.
They'd be encouraged to make projects that might lose money but earn praise.
That way, he wouldn't make a cent—yet he'd still hand out generous bonuses to everyone. Two birds with one stone! Perfect!
Of course, there would always be the rare project that both earned a lot and had great reviews.
But those would be exceptions.
In most cases, good reputation and high profits were mutually exclusive—hard to achieve at the same time.
So Pei Qian decided to look deeper into the feasibility of this plan and come up with a detailed set of rules, aiming to implement it before the next game launch.
Once this new rule was established and widely accepted by employees, its long-term effects would be enormous—truly a benefit "for generations to come."
Just imagining all his employees pouring their hearts into reputation-focused projects instead of profit-driven ones made Pei Qian feel as though the entire company had suddenly become noble and virtuous!
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