Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

Chapter 536: Chapter 516: NetDragon Reverse Completion!

Caught in an inner conflict, Hank’s thoughts raced:

Compared to the weekly racing competition, would the possible daily appearance of giant dinosaurs be less important?

However, compared to the uncertain prospect of winning the championship, wouldn’t securing a dinosaur pet be a better value?

“Pah!” He shook his head fiercely, “What am I thinking! If I participate, I’ll definitely win the championship!”

“Yes! That’s right! The championship is mine! I will be the winner!”

“I am the King of the Track! The king on the track!”

Noticing his hesitation, Hank quickly did some mental pep talking.

[00:59]

In the final minute of the countdown, “King of the Track” gave up the tempting virtual pet, collected his thoughts, and focused on the track.

He still chose the racing competition.

Not that the virtual pet wasn’t enticing, but according to the personal sponsorship contract “Fierce Horse” gave him, there was extra prize money for winning the “Indiscriminate Death Race” championship!

Moreover, this prize money was quite substantial!

Based on Hank’s life experience: when you’re hesitating between two choices, in most cases, you can directly choose the one with more money.

Last three seconds of the countdown —

Everyone madly revved their engines, the furious roar of the engines mixed together, ears trembled, and hearts pounded!

“3, 2… 1, start!”

“Boom~ Boom~ Boom~~~”

An array of uniquely designed cars rushed off the starting line, marking the official start of the fourth “Indiscriminate Death Racing.”

…

…

Forty minutes later, at the awards podium.

The awards ceremony for the fourth “Indiscriminate Death Racing.”

This was the third time “King of the Track” stepped onto the awards podium.

Last time, the race involved a truck that would actually explode!

When he saw a Mud Truck from a distance, he couldn’t help but wonder, “Racing with an off-road truck? Is this how wild it’s done?”

As he tried to overtake the truck, he suddenly faced a brutal explosion: The truck, 6.8 meters long, instantly erupted in a massive explosion!

It wasn’t just a simple explosion; as it blew up, the truck sprayed fuel around. Cars within 10 meters were all unlucky.

Not just “King of the Track” Hank, but his old rival “Swinging Train” and a close-by unknown player, all met Yama together.

Hank couldn’t figure it out. Why did that guy collect so many explosives just for that one momentary explosion? What was he aiming to achieve?

You’re exploding to death with your opponents, what’s the point? Are you trying to retaliate against society?

In any case, that was the only time Hank didn’t make it to the awards podium.

Unfortunately, he still wasn’t the champion this time, and when he stepped onto the runner-up podium, he felt no joy, only frustration.

“Sigh, I should have gone and fought the dinosaur if I knew it’d end up like this.”

At this point, the third-place winner walked onto the podium. Players didn’t care much about order.

The third-place winner removed his hood and struck up a cheerful conversation, “What dinosaur?”

“Of course, the giant dinosaur on Dinosaur Island! Don’t you…?” Hank turned his head to look at the third-place winner, but his expression froze when he saw his face.

“Cody?! What are you doing here?!”

“It’s not just me, I just saw Edward too.” Cody helplessly shrugged.

“Edward?!!” Hank’s voice spiked even higher.

A man with ordinary features but an inexplicably comical vibe walked up and stepped onto the championship spot, casually chiming in, “What’s up? Why are you calling me?”

No wonder Hank was shocked. These two happened to be the two higher-ranking professional racers in the domestic league!

“Didn’t you two say you don’t play Cloud Dream games? During the offseason, you should be training non-stop and getting ahead, right?!!” Hank was astonished, “Are you two teaming up to trick me?!”

“No.” Cody quickly explained, “I really didn’t play when you asked. But you specifically called to ask, right? I got curious why you’d ask, so I bought the equipment and came in to have a look.”

“Yes.” Edward chimed in, “You actually called to ask, so it can’t be a simple matter. Don’t we have to investigate?”

“Smack!” Hank slapped himself in the face, feeling only one word could describe his state of mind at the moment—

Regret!

Why did he run his mouth off for no reason?!

“So, you guys decided to surprise me by joining together today?”

“No, today is actually my second time participating. However, I didn’t know what I was doing the first time and got squashed by a huge iron ball.” Cody still gets a little scared when he reminisces about that enormous iron ball falling out of the sky.

Edward wasn’t a first-timer either, “This is my third time participating. The first time, I just couldn’t outrun others, and last time I got confounded by an exploding Mud Truck.”

“Hold on…you guys have raced here before?”

“Yeah.” The two answered simultaneously.

At this point, Hank wasn’t concerned with the two anymore, as he immediately thought of another terrifying thing, “I heard that Cloud Dream’s consoles have been sold to Europe already…”

After all, Europe is the home of the world-class Formula One championship!

Although top-tier Formula One drivers may not be able to unleash their full potential in a chaotic, violent virtual world, such top-tier players cannot be ignored!

Could it be that these masters will join the competition in the future?

Or is it possible that someone is already hiding in the crowd, adapting to this chaotic competition, just like Cody and Edward before?

Thinking further: Will Cloud Dream launch a standard car racing game in the future and then hold related global competitions?

If Cloud Dream really does this, how much money would Lincoln, who always likes grand scenes, be willing to spend on organizing such an event?

So, going one step further: Is it possible for Cloud Dream to organize an event in the virtual world that rivals Formula One, becoming another racing holy land outside of Europe?

Cody and Edward looked at each other, obviously thinking of similar questions.

This made them feel tremendous pressure, but at the same time… extremely excited!

After all, it seems that Cloud Dream is fully capable of doing this, it just depends on whether Lincoln wants to do it or not!

As they were daydreaming, the awards ceremony began, and the host started announcing the results—

“In this Indiscriminate Death Race, the third-place racer—[Hitchhiker]!”

“Runner-up—[King of the Track]!”

“And our champion—[See-saw Car]!”

Hank looked at the two of them with an open mouth: “You guys!”

Are you here to mock me?!

*

This night, another important thing happened quietly—

In NetDragon’s R&D center, the reverse engineering of Cloud Dream’s Mirage Console was finally completed.

After repeated confirmations, Wesley immediately informed his boss, Zack.

The two rushed to the core laboratory of the R&D center overnight—these past few months, the lights were always on every night, and the engineers who signed the confidentiality agreement were also working in shifts.

Wesley originally planned to work in three shifts, not to consider the engineers’ endurance, but to maximize their focus and efficiency.

However, considering the confidentiality requirements, they eventually compressed the number of people as much as possible and extended individual working hours.

Of course, this does not mean that only the engineers who signed the confidentiality agreement are involved in reverse engineering, but they are the only ones who can access the machine and understand where the core technology and codes come from.

Even so, except for the core team of five, the remaining engineers were not explicitly told that the machine is from Cloud Dream.

—Although this is an open secret: Is there a second company in the world that has virtual reality technology?

Getting the core code without authorization, there must be a catch!

But if the company doesn’t say anything, just assume you don’t know.

I am just an ordinary screw. The company gives me the code to study, and I don’t know anything else other than work.

As for their peripheral engineers, they were really not informed about anything and were simply organized to study the distributed code.

But by now, they have begun to have a vague idea of what the code is, and have started to get excited.

However, none of that matters now that the most critical work has been completed.

“So, we can build our own virtual world now, right?” David asked the five engineers at the meeting.

“Strictly speaking, it’s a replica. We can only develop and build along the existing technology line,” replied an engineer cautiously.

“Can’t you use different programming languages to rebuild it?” David, a business major who didn’t understand the technology very well, tried to ask based on his own understanding.

“No, we can’t. We haven’t fully understood every line of code. In fact, many of the code structures here are still black boxes to us. However, these black boxes are separate modular units, and we’ve figured out the functions of each module. We can use the code for now, but we can’t rebuild the underlying structure yet—at least not now.”

David frowned. This was quite a ways from the ideal outcome.

—But it wasn’t unacceptable.

Reskinning and rehousing is nothing unusual in the industry. Not to mention in the gaming industry, it’s also common in the mobile phone industry.

It’s just that Cloud Dream hasn’t gone open-source, so they might cause trouble later on.

But with good software confidentiality, it won’t be easy to catch them off-guard, and then they can stall for time, all while building an engineering team to rewrite the code.

By the time they’ve stalled for a few years, reached a settlement, and paid some compensation, they can seamlessly switch to their own copyrighted code. Job done.

As for the potentially high compensation?

Creating a virtual reality game now is minting money!

Just look at how Cloud Dream is making money!

What might seem like astronomical compensation now may just be a drop in the bucket later on.

Besides, NetDragon doesn’t have much time to waste—

The previous expansion of “Blaze 3” did bring them back some blood, alleviating some pressure, but December is approaching, and the end of the year is near.

The loans they took out before are about to be due.

The tide of employee resignations has slowed down, but it hasn’t stopped.

Under such circumstances, NetDragon… no longer has much time to wait.

So David decided—let’s gamble!!

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