Universe Infinite Canteen

"Are there other project teams here? No, that's not right, if it's about small games, it should be independent game producers."

Ma Lu snapped his fingers, "Independent producers are great, generating power for love and sprinkling joy all over the world."

"What are you thinking? His games are designed to kill people," Pigeon said seriously.

"Ah, Squid Game?"

"Something like that."

"Brother Pigeon, you've seen Squid Game too?" Ma Lu asked curiously, "Which character do you like, do you know the second season is about to air?"

White Dove glanced at him and didn't answer those questions, "Anyway, if you see him, remember to notify me immediately; this person is very dangerous."

"You haven't even told me his name or what he looks like, how am I supposed to know who you're after?"

"He calls himself Gold Medal Producer, but up until now, no one has seen his true face."

"Hmm... Only a name?"

"Stretch out your hand."

After Ma Lu did so, White Dove turned and plucked a feather from beneath his wing, then placed it in Ma Lu's palm.

"If you encounter that guy, just burn this feather, and then..."

"Then you will come to capture him."

"Then make sure you can win the game, don't end up dead," Pigeon said.

"Ah?" Read new chapters at My Virtual Library Empire

"Stop saying 'ah', he doesn't hide his game locations well, but he has a special method to block all contact between the players and the outside world, except for my feather, there's no other way to notify anyone outside."

"But it still takes me some time to pinpoint the exact location," Pigeon said.

"How long?"

"It's hard to say, quickly maybe about fifteen minutes, but it could be half a day if it's slow."

"Not to criticize, Brother Pigeon, but why do you have to be like those cops in Hong Kong movies, only showing up at the end of the movie?"

".........."

"Just be careful yourself," Pigeon said, "If you manage to capture Gold Medal Producer, I'll owe you a favor."

"Can your favor be cashed in?"

"No, but if you make some borderline moves in the future, as long as they're not too outrageous, I might pretend not to see them."

"Wow, can you really do that?"

"Using a saying from your world, 'Where there are people, there's Jianghu,'" Pigeon said, "I'm not that heartless."

"Alright, I'll keep an eye out for that Gold Medal Producer, especially if he comes to my restaurant to eat."

Seeing that Ma Lu agreed, Pigeon quickly left, mentioning that he still had to notify other visitors from Different Dimensions.

Ma Lu then wandered around the neighborhood a bit longer before going up to the second floor to use Zhen Ye's PS5 to log onto Red Ridge, planning to check the current operational status of the game.

He first looked at the online player count and saw there were 419 people.

Following last week's promotional collaboration, Coconut Jelly had distributed about 1700 game discs, of which Boss Hu alone took 50, plus the 300 that Baldy distributed on the first day.

Exactly 2000 discs, and according to the data from the operations centre, retention was roughly around forty percent.

This incredibly impressive figure took Baldy and others by surprise.

Usually, if a common mobile game can have a more than 10% retention rate in the first week, it can be considered excellent.

Even more so for Red Ridge, which has many debuffs on top of it.

-- Must have an optical drive to play; higher battle difficulty than Souls games; extremely scarce resources; a vast map paired with slow movement speed; and a bunch of small settings that seem realistic but are constantly vexing players.

Yet, still nearly forty percent of players stuck it out, which besides the huge allure of Atonement Cake, naturally, there were other reasons too.

Some were reasons Ma Lu could think of from the start, while others were beyond his expectations.

For instance, Boss Hu not only brought a number of employees to play and help him farm Pie Coupons but also brought his shrewd business-minded brain into the game.

Just when I was self-satisfied over selling a lousy backpack for 6000, Boss Hu had his subordinate hand that backpack to him, then told him to continue picking up Black Mud in the Muddy Swamp.

Previously, without a backpack, a player could only pick up three or four pieces of Black Mud at a time since there was no place to put them, and they had to come to the edge of the swamp.

But with a backpack, one could pick up ten Black Mud in one go and then slowly come ashore, doubling the efficiency compared to before, thus greatly reducing the time to farm backpacks.

That's not the end of it; Boss Hu immediately had all his subordinates pick Black Mud upon entering the game, gathering the effort of dozens of people, and it only took an hour and a half to collect the second backpack, increasing the efficiency a bit more with each additional backpack.

The time to produce the third backpack was further reduced, and soon after, a group of people had managed to reduce the production time of a backpack to just half an hour.

As the days passed, Boss Hu had 40 backpacks after just three days.

As I stood there stunned, Boss Hu made another decision to rent out the backpacks obtained thereafter.

Other players could rent the backpacks by the hour and pay the rent with Pie Coupons. Logs and labor were acceptable payments if they didn't have Pie Coupons.

Simply put, renting a backpack for an hour required picking Black Mud in the swamp for 20 minutes.

Whether that rent was reasonable or not, at least it provided the players with the possibility of using a backpack early on.

Even if you were determined to own a backpack yourself, you could still form a group before going to the swamp to pick up Black Mud. Even having to work for Boss Hu for a quarter of the time, the three-fold efficiency was still a profitable deal.

Moreover, for those players uninterested in picking Black Mud and just wanting to fight monsters, Boss Hu would suggest that they form teams.

In fact, these past few days, new players also realized that the monsters around Newbie Village were unreasonably high-levelled, not something one person could handle. Some left in frustration, while the remaining players had already started to team up.

There was no need for Boss Hu to suggest this; what he actually suggested was that a team could rent a backpack together.

Yes, there's no rule that a person must have one backpack each.

Especially now, when everyone is lacking high-quality bones and combat power is still quite poor, going out to grind low-level monsters is like tackling a difficult raid, often requiring half a day of careful positioning and cooperation to kill them, so there's really no need to fuss over having many backpacks.

One backpack per team was enough to meet daily needs, and thus each time before a fight, just by picking up Black Mud in the swamp for 5 minutes, they would have a backpack to use, a prep time everyone could accept.