35 - Advances
Gabe kept releasing new Residual Devil Chapters once a week. Each week he released a Chapter with a different Boss Battle. The Players were shocked when they opened the jar that contained Ethan's daughter's head, some were even traumatized, but Gabe didn't intend to make the game any less scary for these weak Players. If they really couldn't bear to see things like that, they had to realize their limits so as to not do something stupid in a mission and eliminate the team.
When Gabe released Chapter 3, which was where the Players had to break into Donna Beneviento's dollhouse, he took a moment to watch the Players' livestreams, as he was quite interested in that part. In the other world, Gabe remembered seeing some streamers who played the first part of the game very easily, but when they got to this dollhouse, a lot of people stopped playing because of fear!
Everything in this house was designed in such a way that the psychological terror only increased as one went along. As much as the Player was not in danger, their heart would constantly be beating at an accelerated pace due to the laughter a giant monster with a mouth of almost 1 meter in length, laughing with the voice of a baby while running after the Player was terrifying.
Just as Gabe imagined, the same thing happened in this world.
"No, no, I don't want to, please…" A streamer was lying under one of the dollhouse sheets while crying in fear of the noise the monster baby was making as it ran around the house looking for him.
If the tears weren't a great indication of the emotion the Player was feeling, the wet floor under the bed made it clear that the Player was completely terrified, so much so that after another 5 minutes of walking through the house, when he entered a red room full of doll pieces scattered all around, the Player couldn't take it anymore and gave up, deciding to disconnect from the game and just play it another day. The same thing happened to hundreds of Players, who, at different times, decided to stop playing.
Of course, after these Players saw how much their aim improved after playing that part of the game even while just holding a pistol and pointing it in the direction ahead of them while afraid, the greed for improving skills and the boredom of trying out other games took over, and it made the Players try again to overcome their fears in Residual Devil.
For Chapter 4, where the Players had to defeat Salvatore, Gabe made the battle a bit more difficult and interesting, but it wasn't as memorable a battle for the Players as the first battle against Dimitrescu nor the creepy dollhouse.
At that point, Gabe managed to make Chapter 5 the last Chapter in the game. Initially he intended to make the game more than 10 chapters in length, but with the amount of Mana he was getting from the game, he thought it would be better and more captivating to release weekly chapters that were 5 to 10 hours long with each Chapter focusing on one Boss.
And that decision proved correct with the amount of Players the game had, as well as how much mana it received in the last two weeks!
[Residual Devil: Village]
[Downloads: 16.199]
[Average Play Time: 7.1 Hours.]
[Accumulated Mana: 115,012]
[Available for withdrawal: $28,897]
[Available Mana: 4,376 (110,636 Mana Spent)]
Looking at the total amount of accumulated Mana that Residual Devil yielded, Gabe had a huge smile on his face. The amount of Mana he spent was also quite high for a reason. For the past two weeks he had not only been accumulating Mana, but every time the Mana available in the game reached 20,000 Units, Gabe would absorb 10,000 Units into his Mana Pool and increase it by 100, which meant Gabe now had 900 Mana!
He had spent another 50,000 Mana Units this week to increase his Mana Pool to 900 Mana Units, while he spent another 12,000 Mana Units to develop Chapters 3 and 4. This left him with only 14,000 Mana Units available in Residual Devil, and to develop the last Chapter, Chapter 5, Gabe spent a total of 10,000 Mana Units, leaving only 4,000 Mana Units left for him.
But he wasn't disappointed by this; he was far from being disappointed. In just one game with little more than a month of release, he managed to do something that ordinary Developers took months, or even years, to achieve.
Now he needed just a little over 5,000 Mana Units to reach the 1,000 Mana Units growth for his Mana Pool, which would make him a true Developer Rank E!
Chapter 5 needed 10,000 Mana Units because Gabe had a bold idea. In the original game, both Heisenberg and Ethan died because they were dumb. Heisenberg was a brute who had gone crazy under Miranda's control, while Ethan was an emotional wreck who didn't know how to do anything rationally.
Because of that, Ethan had to kill Heisenberg to die for Miranda soon after, or rather, be unconscious for a few hours before reviving and having to kill himself to kill Miranda.
Considering that there could be Players who wouldn't try to make the same decisions as Ethan, Gabe decided to create two endings: one where the Players could follow the story to the original conclusion where it would lead to the same ending as the original game that Gabe had played, and another where the Players could accept help from Heisenberg and join him in killing Miranda. That way the battle could be easier and everything would make more sense in front of rational Players, as they would be upset by having to repeat the stupidities that Ethan played out during the game just for the story to follow as it should. More emotional Players, however, might also end up fighting the idea of Heisenberg wanting to use Rose as a weapon against Miranda.
Residual Devil, with over 16,000 downloads, had already been downloaded by nearly 100% of Rank F Players in the city plus an increasing number of Rank E Players who were downloading the game after hearing about it. The biggest factor that contributed to the spread of the game to Rank E Players other than word of mouth among Players and livestreams was the Residual Devil program that finally aired on SBT. Because of the intensive publicity the show got, both due to the game and Sandstone Bay Television promoting the show during commercials for other shows in the programming schedule, the first episode had a huge amount of viewership.
This was good news for everyone involved with the show, but when the second episode aired, they were even more shocked.
The show's first episode had done very well, reaching 41% of the city's televisions currently tuned in to the broadcast, but when the second episode came out, the number of viewers went up to 63% of the city! Both regular people and Players were excited about the show and amazed at how much fun it was to watch a video with a Player acting like an actor just like Ethan would, which made it that much more immersive for everyone.
SBT was worried that the program would not attract as much attention because it was recorded inside a game, but no one would have imagined that with each episode the number of viewers would increase more and more. Even with the gory scenes, viewers watched without changing the channel at all.
On the internet, the program was the most commented subject.
[Wow, this Residual Devil program is really good!]
[Who had the idea to turn a game into a TV show? Why didn't they do this before?]
[I do not know either! Residual Devil is so much fun! The action scenes are hundreds of times more realistic than the fake blood they use in other shows…]
[You are not Players, right? I can understand why you were confused when thinking about why there aren't other programs like Residual Devil that came from games. The answer is simple: It's not possible!]
[It's not possible?]
[Don't other games let you record and act like a TV show?]
[My son agreed with this comment, he said that the other games cannot even be called games close to Residual Devil.]
[Serious? Are other games really that bad?]
[Bad? Dude, my dream is to become a Player, so I look for Player related things all the time despite being an ordinary person without awakening Mana even though my parents forbid it, but I have to tell you, close to Residual Devil the others games can't even be called games, that's just a bunch of shiny weapons that people hold to kill monsters endlessly.]
[That's why it's impossible to make other TV shows like Residual Devil, as other games don't usually even have a story.]
[Too bad, at least we have Residual Devil to watch, I wanted to be a Player when I was younger, but after I awakened Mana and saw the games were so boring I stopped following that path and just started focusing on news about monster attacks on cities. Who knew such a great game would come out? Now I even feel motivated to follow Players who are playing Residual Devil again.]
[The Developer of Residual Devil is a genius! Not only did he make a very powerful game, he also made a very entertaining TV show! Congratulations!]
Reading those comments, Gabe was quite pleased with the public's reaction.
The program was shown late at night, starting at 10:00 pm and ending at midnight every day. Since it was a violent program, SBT scheduled it for that time slot so that children would be unlikely to watch it in secret. But despite the show running at such late hours, after the first episode, even ordinary people who were supposed to wake up early felt the need to stay up a little later and watch this show that everyone was talking about.
Before long Residual Devil dominated the subject of ordinary people and started to attract widespread attention from people in other cities too!
//NunuNote//
[Bonus Chapter 4/6]
Mass Release Target XD:
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Top10 = 3 Bonus Chapter
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Bonus Chapters will be released on next week, based on preceding performance of the novel. Don't forget to vote for more chapters!
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