Chapter 124: President Pei in Despair
Chapter 124: President Pei in Despair
"This website... its Chinese name is Aili Island?" Pei Qian looked at Huang Sibo, trying hard not to show how shocked he was.
Huang Sibo nodded. "Yeah, ilid—it's a homophone for Aili Island in Chinese."
Pei Qian was speechless.
Damn it... that actually does make sense!
"Alright, President Pei, we’ll be heading out now. We need to think seriously about the studio’s future plans over the next few days."
"Here’s hoping President Pei’s Daily Life and Game Producer both make big money!"
Huang Sibo and Zhu Xiaoce waved their evil curses and began packing up their equipment.
The entire office was full of joy and laughter.
Pei Qian, expressionless, returned to his office and silently typed in Aili Island’s website address on his computer.
The page loaded.
Seeing that familiar interface, Pei Qian was now sure of it.
This was absolutely the Bilibili of this world!
He quickly opened Qiandu to search for more detailed information on the platform—and instantly regretted it. The more he read, the colder his heart grew.
Aili Island was one of the earliest bullet comment video sites to emerge in the country. While it hadn’t been around for long, it was growing rapidly and now posed a real threat to traditional video giants like Fanshu.com.
What’s more—unlike the Bilibili he knew—Aili Island was filthy rich!
Though still operating at a loss, it had been jointly funded by Shenhua Corporation and Qiandu, two financial powerhouses. This gave it the capital to spend big on acquiring exclusive rights to all kinds of popular series.
To make matters worse, since Qiandu was also an investor in Aili Island, any search done through Qiandu would prioritize results from Aili Island’s site.
‘A turbo-charged version of Bilibili?’
‘Bilibili mixed with iQIYI?’
‘I’m so screwed…’
Pei Qian slumped back into his executive chair, his whole body devoid of strength.
He had thought his death sentence would be delivered at 8 PM that night.
Now he realized—the sentence had already been signed and sealed.
This was the price of being unfamiliar with the world!
He had always been wary of video platforms in this world—especially ones starting with A or B. He kept his guard up against them at all times.
But never in his wildest dreams did he expect that this world’s Bilibili would be reversed, turning from bilibili into ilidilid!
And that strange Chinese name, Aili Island, completely threw him off. He assumed it was just some obscure, doomed little website—not worth worrying about.
Now things were super awkward.
After a long moment of stunned silence, Pei Qian, feeling a bit hopeless, summoned the system panel.
[Wealth Conversion System]
[Host: Pei Qian]
[Profit Conversion Ratio: 100:1 | Loss Conversion Ratio: 1:1]
[System Funds: 710,000 Yuan (↓290,0000)]
[Personal Funds: 48,223.5 Yuan]
[Special Task This Cycle: Own any physical storefront under the company name, located in either a commercial hub or university district.]
[Special Task Completion Reward: +10% personal fund conversion bonus at settlement.]
Looking at it now, the system was still technically in a loss state.
But not for long.
Since the last settlement, Pei Qian’s main sources of income remained the two games: Ghost General and Ocean Fortress.
With no new paid content added, Ghost General’s revenue had started to decline rapidly. Still, it was bringing in over a million yuan a month in revenue, with net profits around 600,000–700,000 yuan.
With the number of active players steadily increasing, Ocean Fortress was seeing a consistent rise in monthly revenue. It was now nearing 7 million yuan, with a net profit of around 3.5 million yuan.
Even though they only sold a single skin—the Rainbow Neon Fire Qilin—it didn't matter, because the domestic FPS player base was enormous!
Currently, Ocean Fortress has become one of the top FPS games in the country. A large portion of players from Counter-Terrorism Plan had migrated over. Thanks to Tengda’s continued expansion of server capacity and bandwidth, more and more players were joining. So instead of plateauing, the game’s monthly revenue was actually still climbing!
After all, FPS games tend to have long lifespans.
Over the past two and a half months, these two games had brought Pei Qian a net income of over 9 million yuan!
Add in the initial 1 million yuan in system funds, and the total revenue exceeded 10 million yuan.
As for expenses:
-
Feihuang Studio: 1 million yuan
-
Game Producer development: over 3 million yuan
-
Marketing and paying streamers: 300,000 yuan
-
Moyu Internet Café: around 3.5 million yuan (including 3 months' rent)
-
Company rent: less than 400,000 yuan/month
-
Employee salaries: over 200,000 yuan/month
-
Miscellaneous costs: brings total monthly overhead to around 800,000 yuan
In 2.5 months, that’s roughly 2 million yuan
Add all that up, and expenses come to a bit over 9.8 million yuan!
Of course, he wouldn’t know the exact figures—that’s what the finance department was for.
All he needed to do was glance at the system fund value each day and figure out how to spend money as fast as possible.
Originally, the numbers were under control—he had successfully reduced the system funds to under 800,000 yuan.
If he could just do another aggressive round of spending before the end-of-month settlement—showering staff with bonuses and doing a public spending spree on company funds—he could whittle that number down to 100,000 yuan or less.
Then, at the next settlement, he’d personally pocket over 800,000 yuan!
But all of that depended on one thing: that the new game, the short video, and the internet café either made no money, or barely made any.
The internet café, for instance, was perfect—it was losing over 300,000 yuan a month, which suited his goals beautifully!
But now, the problem has arrived.
Although President Pei’s Daily Life hadn’t aired yet, judging by its current popularity, it would easily earn at least 1 million yuan once released.
Of course, he wouldn’t receive all of that, but the system had to allocate at least a portion—no way to argue around it.
Meanwhile, Game Producer's sales were still rising. In the remaining half-month, it would likely sell another 200,000 copies at the very least!
These two together meant 3 million yuan in revenue!
The internet café could still lose money, yes—but compared to such massive income, it was a drop in the bucket, barely making a dent.
If he stopped doing anything from now on, a generous estimate would place his final net profit at around 2–3 million yuan.
A pessimistic estimate might even see profits reaching 4–5 million yuan!
If he earned 4 million yuan, the system would convert that into 40,000 yuan—not terrible for someone whose current personal assets were just under 50,000 yuan.
But the problem was perspective.
If he had managed to stay in the loss territory, he could have gotten 700,000–800,000 yuan from the system!
That was dozens of times more!
Pei Qian let out a long sigh.
At this point, there was nothing he could do. He could only let fate take the wheel.
If the numbers ended up close, just like last time, he could organize another last-minute spending spree.
But this time… things were different.
He could only take things one step at a time.
Pei Qian felt a quiet, melancholic sorrow creeping in.
Wasn’t this supposed to be triple insurance?
How the hell did it turn into this…
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