Chapter 90: Chapter 89: Professional Players Enter the Arena

Translator: 549690339

The next day was Sunday, and the mobilization of old players showed no signs of slowing down.

If anything, more people were on holiday and more new players got their hands on the console, making the situation even more bustling.

Although the term “old player mobilization” did not rank high on the Spiritual Rhinoceros’s hot topic list, it remained in the teens and could not make it into the top 10.

This was because players spent their time playing the game rather than browsing posts on Spiritual Rhinoceros.

Lincoln could see the detailed backend data.

From last night to now, there had not been less than one million players online at the same time, and the peak on Sunday reached a staggering 1.6 million concurrent users!

Thankfully, the advanced distributed virtual world construction technology they adopted ensured that the more players were online, the more abundant the computational resources became.

Otherwise, their rented computational resources would have collapsed the server a long time ago.

During this process, a large number of old players were randomly matched together, sometimes resulting in two white-robed veterans with complete collections meeting each other.

When this happened, most old players would chat for a while, and if the conversation was just average, they’d scatter, log out of the game, and wait to be matched with a new player again.

But if the conversation went well, they might even forget their original goal and start chatting after adding each other as friends.

This greatly enhanced the social aspect of the game.

Of course, the group most affected by this mobilization event were the new players.

Both on Spiritual Rhinoceros and in the revamped “Traveler of the Wind” player community by Lincoln and Xiaomeng, new players were posting everywhere.

They talked about the people they encountered in the game, the interesting and moving moments during their journey together, and marked the time of their meeting and parting very precisely, hoping to find their gaming partner.

Although theoretically, it should be much easier to find an encountered player due to the targeted nature of this event compared to random matching of the past, the sheer number of posts made it as challenging as finding a needle in the ocean. Only a handful of players managed to locate their travel companions in the end.

However, the influx of a large number of players quickly livened up the player community.

Among the new players during this event, a special group also emerged.

Strictly speaking, they were all very standard heavy-duty players, even more dedicated than ordinary heavy-duty players, and could be considered core players.

These were Esports professional players.

However, the professional players in this world were completely different from what Lincoln remembered.

It was still due to the short development time of games and the rapid advancement in technology, so there was no truly dominant game in the market.

Early Esports competitions were small-scale events for amusement, and there was no such profession as a professional player. Everyone was an amateur, and competitions were for socializing and entertainment purposes.

However, the promotion and maintenance of game popularity through competitions proved to be very effective.

Soon, game developers began to take notice of this and started organizing competitions for their games, offering substantial prize money.

With prize money on the line, players began to study games and train their skills more seriously.

At this point, the competitive nature of the competitions became more intense.

However, the prize money at the time was not much, generally around 100,000 to 200,000.

While it may seem like a lot, it was not worth the effort to organize teams and travel long distances to compete in another city.

Moreover, these competitions lacked consistency. They might be held once or twice when a game was popular, but once the popularity died down, the competitions would naturally stop.

So players at this stage took a more casual approach to competitions. If there were competitions in nearby cities, they would form a team with friends and participate in them for fun.

Competing players still saw it as an opportunity to earn some extra money; if they won, it was a big payday, if they lost, it was just for fun.

This situation lasted for several years until VR game manufacturers, backed by strong capital, entered the field and began organizing their own competitions, gradually changing the status quo.

The iconic event was Wild Island Game, organizing a competition for their top game “Gunfire”, raising the prize money for the champion to 2 million, a leap of several orders of magnitude!

More importantly, they explicitly stated that the competition would be held on time in mid-June for the next five years!

It was these stable competitions and the high prize money for the champions that gave birth to the embryonic form of eSports clubs.

Later, more powerful game companies followed suit, announcing their own competitions.

As a result, clubs could participate in over a dozen different competitions each year, with the prize money for champions continuing to climb.

Thus, eSports clubs found the soil to survive.

They gathered talented, capable players to form clubs.

They provided them with a better training environment, stable salaries, high bonus incentives, and sent them to various different venues to win more championships and generate revenue for the club.

It started like this.

Until some managers discovered that the champion’s prize money pales in comparison to the money earned from endorsements?

After successfully securing a clothing endorsement for the club’s ace player, the operation of the eSports club began to step onto the path of full commercialization.

Nowadays, eSports professional players have already become a very formal and widely recognized profession.

After all, to become a professional player, the standard is insanely high.

You need not only to have superb gaming talent but also to have an extraordinary physical fitness, being able to train for 6 hours a day on an omnidirectional treadmill at a high load!

What’s even crazier is that, for commercial value considerations, you must also be handsome!

Here, there are no disheveled, greasy-haired eSports players with acne and dark skin, because they can’t get endorsements and thus have no commercial The professional eSports players here could be pulled out and directly formed into a boy group!

Lance is such a talented, hardworking, and young yet wealthy professional player.

He is the same age as Shuihua, has been in the industry for less than three years, and already has 17 endorsements, with booming popularity and an annual income of over a million.

At the same time, he is also a pursuer of Princess Camille Victoria’s close friend Patricia.

Previously, Shuihua took the princess and used connections to visit the eSports club where Lance was to experience “Blaze 3”.

Her acquaintance was Lance.

Unfortunately, even though Lance has great conditions and good looks, Shuihua simply isn’t attracted to him.

Camille Victoria once gossiped why Shuihua feels that way?

As a result, Shuihua said: “He is too familiar; just thinking about being together feels like a moral pressure.”

It’s only because the two had grown up as neighbors, and their parents had been friends for half a lifetime that Shuihua could continue to have the nerve to bring Camille Victoria to borrow VR equipment to play games after explicitly rejecting Lance.

Even though Lance sighed, he could only agree to help, otherwise Shuihua dared to complain to his parents when she went home.

The two families were just too familiar! Both sets of parents treated the other’s child as their own.

It’s just a pity that Shuihua simply doesn’t feel anything for Lance.

Before Lance confessed to her, she even seriously helped Lance connect with her girlfriends.

Of course, not Princess Camille Victoria.

It’s not because of status or anything; Shuihua simply thinks that Princess Camille Victoria is too outstanding. And Lance…. he’s not worthy!