"President, it looks like Takayuki's 'God of Games' aura is finally cracking."
In the president's office at Surii Electronics, a group of mid-to-senior managers from the gaming division were gathered. The atmosphere was relaxed.
Even though Gamestar Electronic Entertainment didn't publicly disclose their game sales data, Surii Electronics had its own industry channels to estimate fairly accurate numbers—though the public might still be left guessing.
Within the industry, uncovering such figures wasn't difficult.
Their research had revealed the general sales situation of Monster Hunter.
A first-week million was indeed impressive.
But the drop-off in sales was equally dramatic. Based on projections, the second week's sales were expected to drop to below 300,000 units.
For the so-called "God of Games," that was already a poor result.
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Most of Takayuki's previous titles had shown steady growth. Such a sharp decline was unheard of.
"Even gods fall eventually. It's normal—if someone could stay at the top forever, that would be truly frightening."
"Let's not get complacent. We still need to keep producing great games. Just because the opponent is faltering doesn't mean we can relax."
As president, Hayakawa Ueto made sure to keep his team grounded.
This was clearly a stumble for Takayuki—enough to ease the pressure on Surii's side, if only slightly.
Still, Hayakawa couldn't help but feel a tinge of regret. If they had launched a first-party title during this same period, they might have been able to take advantage of Monster Hunter's lukewarm reception and grab some market share.
He asked, "Do we have any first-party titles ready to launch earlier? Maybe we can catch this opportunity to scoop up some players."
A subordinate quickly caught on to Hayakawa's thinking."We have a fighting game we've been preparing—meant to go head-to-head with Street Fighter. We could release it early. The action tuning isn't quite perfect yet, though."
"'Battle Summit,' right?"
"Yes."
Hayakawa remembered the game. He had personally requested it. Marketing had already begun, and players were interested—many wanted an alternative to Street Fighter.
After all, one fighting game couldn't satisfy every player's taste. Creating similar titles was part of Surii Electronics' strategic roadmap.
Sure, the action mechanics weren't perfectly tuned—but he had already seen the game in its near-final form, and it was impressive.
Here, he couldn't help but once again appreciate the power of the Unreal Engine.
It wasn't just strong for 3D games—it was equally great for 2D. Many publically available systems and values made development smoother, and Surii's developers only had to tweak them slightly to achieve solid results. It was a very developer-friendly tool.
Without Unreal Engine, Surii's teams would still be getting stomped by Takayuki's.
But this led to another problem: the company's overreliance on Unreal Engine. Whether that was good or bad… was still unclear.
After thinking it over, Hayakawa decisively gave the order:
"Move up the release. Announce it today, start disc production immediately, and officially launch in three days."
The benefit of disc-based games was clear: fast production and low cost.
If it had been cartridges, it would've taken at least half a month to mass-produce a million units.
But with discs, multiple factories running at full capacity could churn out a million in just a day.
Hayakawa's three-day launch window even accounted for transportation to retail stores.
Surii was extremely efficient in logistics. With disc factories in the U.S., Japan, and Europe, their titles could blanket key markets rapidly.
Hayakawa wanted to capitalize on this opening to pull players away from Gamestar.
That said, he wasn't overly optimistic. This was just one stumble from Takayuki—and not even a quality failure, just a poor difficulty balance. The player base still held strong loyalty to him, so Surii couldn't afford to drop their guard.
In fact, Hayakawa had previously been considering launching a game similar to Monster Hunter, just to keep pace with Takayuki. But after seeing this possible "misstep," he thought it might be smarter to hold off on that idea—or at least not make it too difficult, to avoid scaring players off.
Unlike Hayakawa's calm and strategic mindset, YOO's CEO Nagao Ame was openly gleeful.
A stumble from Takayuki was a rare event—possibly the first ever.
As a web portal owner, he saw huge clickbait potential in this.
Takayuki's "fall from grace" was prime traffic bait, and he wasn't going to let it go to waste. He even rejected a few lucrative ad deals just to keep his headlines front and center.
"Takayuki Fails Miserably!" "God of Games Falling from His Throne!"These headlines flooded YOO's homepage, seemingly determined to ride Takayuki's name to new engagement highs.
Seeing Takayuki fail gave Nagao more joy than making money.
In response to YOO's eye-catching headlines, Gamestar Electronic Entertainment launched their own counteroffensive, with support from Facebook's news platform, defending Takayuki's reputation.
Gamestar's loyal fans quickly joined in:
"It's not that the game is bad, or that it looks bad—it's just difficult. There's no difficulty adjustment, and that's the real issue."
Some players claimed that if there was an optional difficulty mode, they'd happily jump back in.
However, Gamestar officially rejected the idea.
Monster Hunter, they said, was meant to be a hardcore hunting experience. Difficulty adjustment features didn't fit the game's core identity.
YOO's team immediately latched onto that:
They claimed Gamestar had become arrogant, unwilling to listen to players, only making the games they themselves wanted to make. They declared that such an attitude would inevitably lead the market to "teach them a lesson."
Takayuki's "God of Games" image was declared on the verge of collapse, and YOO even suggested buying out Gamestar at a "reasonable price" to help them "cut their losses."