90: Chapter 90 But what makes us human

It was past ten in the evening, and the lights were still bright in a room at Spark Games that had been specially converted into a data monitoring center.

After a busy day, Jiang Yuan finally had a moment to rest and catch her breath.

However, she didn't stay in the breakroom or the pantry with her other colleagues to enjoy the various delicacies delivered from the restaurant after a long day of exhaustion; instead, after exchanging a few brief words, she came here to continue monitoring the data.

The large tiled screen in front of her was divided into twelve data modules, and while the most core sets of numbers were still fluctuating, they had largely stabilized.

On the left, the cumulative download count had just surpassed five million. Although a large portion of this was driven by various incentives, it was still a good thing that it had made them aware of and download the Spark Game Platform.

On the right, the real-time concurrent user count for "Minecraft" had peaked at 560,000 around nine in the evening before settling back to the current figure of over 430,000.

Looking at this data, which could be called luxurious for any new platform, a bright and captivating smile bloomed silently on Jiang Yuan's exquisite face, and her nerves, which had been taut all day, finally relaxed completely.

To be honest, although she had great confidence in the black technology contained within the Aurora Engine and the game "Minecraft", whenever she thought about how, in both her past and present lives, almost no platform from any company domestic or abroad had achieved truly glorious success and stood toe-to-toe with Gabe Newell's Steam, this confidence would inexplicably turn into a source of pressure.

It made Jiang Yuan—who, since her transmigration, had always appeared calm, detached, and cool as water, like a cold and aloof female sword immortal—become anxious and full of apprehension.

She feared "Minecraft" would fail, feared the Spark Game Platform would crash upon launch, feared...

These worries seemed ridiculous; after all, the success of "Minecraft" had long been proven by the glory of her past life—it was unquestionable and unparalleled!

But the reason humans are human and not gods is that no one can perfectly control their emotions in every situation.

Therefore, even though Jiang Yuan had long ago finalized hundreds of CDN edge nodes covering the entire country with the three major carriers and had joined forces with top cloud providers to reserve a terabit-level elastic bandwidth pool, and, relying on the distributed architecture of the Aurora Engine, had built an account gateway and business server cluster capable of stably handling five million concurrent connections, allowing the P2P distributed architecture to sink down to the player's local client, it could be said to be as stable as could be.

Yet, in the ten minutes before the platform and game went live, the young girl's heart still raced uncontrollably, as if it were about to leap out of her chest!

However, as the head of Spark Games, the one and only "god" who had never experienced any failure or even a setback since founding the company, no matter how turbulent her emotions were inside, when facing her colleagues on the surface, Jiang Yuan could only tighten her exquisite, flawless face and continue to feign a confident appearance, as if everything were under control!

Fortunately, this emotional volatility vanished without a trace two hours after the platform officially went live.

By now, it had transformed into the afterglow of a massive success, allowing a proud and satisfied Jiang Yuan to savor the memories of the struggle as a way to enhance her happiness.

Although it was still too early to tell whether this glorious start could eventually lead to a beautiful scenario where, by relying on one game after another, they could split the market evenly with Steam, or perhaps even knock it down with a single punch, that didn't stop Jiang Yuan from opening a bottle of victory wine right now, sitting here happily by herself, and enjoying the beauty of her new life reaching a brand-new stage.

She didn't know how much time had passed. Her mood finally calming down, Jiang Yuan remembered the purpose of coming here despite skipping dinner. She tapped a few keys on the keyboard, opened the backend management interface of the Spark Platform, and began to check the core data one item at a time.

As lines of data came into view, Jiang Yuan clearly saw that in the regional distribution of players who downloaded the platform, first-tier and new first-tier cities accounted for 58%, second-tier cities accounted for 23%, and the remaining 19% came from the sinking market.

As for device distribution, Windows accounted for the majority, while OS accounted for 3%, and the remaining 2% were various Linux distributions.

What Jiang Yuan cared about most, of course, was the curve of the average online duration: fifty-six minutes, and it was still rising!

As someone who could barely be considered a veteran in the gaming industry, Jiang Yuan knew very well the weight of this number.

In her past life, if a domestic PC game's average online duration on its first day of public beta could touch three hours, it was already an absolutely high-quality project, a shining cash cow in the eyes of investors. And those that could reach over five hours were, without exception, classic products that remained popular for many years afterward.

At that time, Jiang Yuan had seen too many games with grand public betas; although they could rely on massive publicity to flood the game with a million players on the first day, in the end, due to reasons like poor quality or lack of content, the average online duration would be less than twenty minutes, first-day retention would drop below 20%, and they would completely fizzle out shortly after, without even making a splash.

But "Minecraft" was clearly different.

The core charm of this game had never been about how awesome the graphics were, but rather its true, unrestricted nature.

Theoretically speaking, as long as your imagination was rich enough, you could completely create any world you wanted to create and play any game you wanted to play within "Minecraft".

This point was the biggest reason why "Minecraft" could remain evergreen and become an eternal classic for a generation.

After carefully reviewing all the core data, only then did Jiang Yuan have the mood and time to surf various platforms to see what kind of impact and surprises today's launch of "Minecraft" and the Spark Game Platform had brought to the world.

Taking out her phone, Jiang Yuan furrowed her brows in thought for a few seconds. She first opened Bilibili, where Spark Games had invested the most in this promotional campaign, and was just about to type "Minecraft" into the search bar.

But she was shocked to see that at this moment, the number one trending search was "Minecraft," which was clearly listed and very conspicuous.

She blinked in some astonishment. Jiang Yuan whispered to herself, "I remember we only invested in information feed and splash screen ads for the pre-registration period on Bilibili; we didn't buy any fixed trending spots at all, and we didn't even do any list maintenance... So, this is all real-time traffic driven by the players and viewers themselves?"

With this thought in mind, Jiang Yuan hurriedly and curiously clicked on the number one trending topic, intending to see what was going on.