Chapter Fifteen: The Reign of the Stone Tool Overlord

Before Li Mu became the overlord of the stone tools, he had already devised a comprehensive commercial operation plan.

Given that the peak popularity of "Stone Age" would not last much longer, and by the end of the year the entire national online gaming market would be making way for the super-beast of the industry, "Legend," Li Mu clearly understood that there was little profit left to be made from the Stone Tool Overlord. Without online payment channels, he could only rely on offline sales, and would have to build a sales network from scratch. Who knew how long it would take before he could reach a monthly sales volume of twenty to thirty thousand units? So, from now until the end of the year, the revenue the Stone Tool Overlord could generate in his hands would likely top out at about a million.

A million might sound like a lot, but the entire Abe Add-on, after all this time, had only created an industry chain worth tens of millions. The so-called industry chain refers to the value it creates to feed an entire chain of interests. Production and development, testing and maintenance, channel distribution, and terminal sales—every link needs to make money. Leaving aside the fact that Li Mu was in no position to establish a sales network capable of moving tens of thousands of units a month, even if he had such a network at his disposal, after splitting the profits, he’d be lucky to take home thirty or forty percent of the three or four hundred thousand in monthly sales.

Payment methods in this era were extremely limited. Online payments hadn’t truly begun yet; even Mr. Ma in Hangzhou hadn’t started Taobao, let alone Alipay. Thus, the bottleneck for internet payments was severe—so much so that even online games like Stone Age and Legend had to rely on countless internet cafés nationwide to distribute their game cards offline, with no way to handle online transactions.

Currently, most add-ons were sold via monthly subscriptions, and just like game cards, their final sales points had sunk down to internet cafés. Add-on distributors would forge partnerships with cafés all over the country, commissioning them to sell monthly codes for the add-ons. In another year or two, many add-on codes would be available for direct purchase in cafés.

But for Li Mu right now, he only had himself, Zhao Kang, and three or four hundred yuan in capital. How could he possibly build a network capable of selling tens of thousands of units a month? That was pure fantasy.

So Li Mu had already prepared two strategies.

Once he finished developing Stone Tool Overlord, he would first launch a fifteen-day free trial. That was why he’d asked Zhao Kang to familiarize himself with various online promotion methods. While online payments weren’t yet possible, online dissemination was extremely fast. His Stone Tool Overlord offered players auxiliary functions several times more powerful than the Abe Add-on and any other Stone Age add-on, not just in terms of features but also in smoothness and user experience—the overall effect far outstripped similar products.

With the free trial version going live, word of mouth would spread in a short time. Free and effective—there was no reason for users not to accept it. This approach would hit the Abe Add-on and other paid Stone Age add-ons hard.

Li Mu’s approach was ruthless—his plan was to thoroughly disrupt the market from the outset, cutting off the revenue streams of the Abe Add-on and other development teams. It was like when 360 Antivirus became free and wiped out countless antivirus companies.

Once established add-ons like Abe, which already had commercial models, suffered a devastating blow, they wouldn’t just sit and wait to die. They would be left with two options: immediately develop an add-on more powerful than Stone Tool Overlord, or find and cooperate with the creator of Stone Tool Overlord.

The first option was impossible. Li Mu’s programming skills were leagues beyond those of the current add-on developers. All that was left for them was the second choice.

This was the first of Li Mu’s two strategies: wait for other add-on studios, especially Abe Add-on, to reach out to him. If they contacted him, he would simply sell Stone Tool Overlord as a package. Stone Age was still very popular at that moment—selling it for several hundred thousand wasn’t out of the question.

If the first plan, the package sale, didn’t work out, then only the second plan remained: promoting it himself.

Self-promotion would be much harder. Even if Li Mu and Zhao Kang exhausted themselves all summer, they might not sell much. Still, something was better than nothing. If the two of them worked hard, earning tens of thousands over the summer was feasible. If they could find some local agents among the players and users, things might progress even faster.

However, Li Mu didn’t favor the second plan—it took effect too slowly. He needed quick money. Only after "Legend" launched would the second plan be suitable for a slow, long-term strategy.

Therefore, he was hoping for everything to hinge on how much impact the launch of Stone Tool Overlord would have on the commercial add-ons of Stone Age!

…

On the night of July 11, Li Mu finally completed all development work on Stone Tool Overlord on the second floor of Big Spider.

The free trial version of Stone Tool Overlord officially went live on several gaming forums.

Zhao Kang’s efforts over the past few days immediately bore fruit. Previously, following Li Mu’s instructions, he had been searching the main Stone Age forums and chatrooms for free add-ons, building a certain "grassroots foundation."

For instance, Zhao Kang’s post as "Standing Pig" on a particular Stone Age forum had been bumped hundreds of times. The post was simple: "High school student can’t afford add-ons, humbly begging the veterans to recommend a free Stone Age add-on!"

At first, Zhao Kang was reluctant to use the phrase "humbly begging," thinking it undignified. Li Mu simply shot him a look—he clearly didn’t have the internet mindset yet. In the future, when he was scouring for "guides" with screenshots of adult films, who knew how low he’d stoop? Why care about dignity in a virtual online community?

Left with no choice, Zhao Kang posted as instructed.

Unexpectedly, the phrase "humbly begging" attracted plenty of attention. The netizens of those days were extremely enthusiastic. Many replied, saying that free add-ons had barely a tenth of the features of paid ones and that using only free add-ons in Stone Age was nearly impossible.

Others urged Zhao Kang to stop playing and focus on his studies, insisting that was what really mattered.

In sum, the responses were all full of positive energy.

Two nights later, "Standing Pig" posted again: "Dear veterans, I have finally found a free Stone Age add-on with features that utterly surpass all others. I’m here to share it with everyone!"

By then, forums already supported file attachments. The add-on Li Mu developed was only 5.6 MB, but most forums limited attachments to under 1 MB. Li Mu had no choice but to split the add-on into six compressed files and have Zhao Kang upload them all.

Attachments alone would not suffice, so Li Mu also prepared plenty of screenshots—of the add-on interface, the feature options, and the actual in-game effects.

Even with a standard template, this manual posting process took half the night.

While Zhao Kang posted nonstop on all the forums, Li Mu kept refreshing the threads.

In those days, there were many netizens but little content—even a site like hao123 could boast millions of daily users, showing how content-starved the internet was. As a result, every forum had a large base of active users.

By 1 a.m. on July 12, an hour after the first post, the downloads had reached 638 and there were 56 replies, most expressing curiosity and saying they’d downloaded it to try.

Li Mu wasn’t in any rush. He knew a good product needed time for users to experience it.

So he stopped monitoring the threads.

After Zhao Kang had posted enough, he moved on to in-game promotion. He would announce in chat that he’d found a free add-on, then share the forum link with other players for them to download and try.

Next, Zhao Kang replied to his own posts with alternate accounts, praising the free add-on in every possible way, hailing its features as unprecedented.

By himself, Zhao Kang played both the shill and the hype man.

Li Mu understood that the next phase was to wait for the word-of-mouth effect to form. One tells ten, ten tell a hundred—in the pure and enthusiastic internet world of the time, these users would surely become the Overlord’s "spontaneous promoters," the grassroots army that would spread the word on their own!