Chapter 412 - 407: Development

Chapter 412: Chapter 407: Development

April in the Capital City still carried a slight chill.

Ever since the Cat and Mouse feature film exploded in popularity nationwide during the Spring Festival, taking the number one spot in current box office history, Qitian Animation’s fame across the internet reached an unprecedented peak.

As the head director, Jiang Xia had accomplished such an astonishing feat despite being only a college sophomore, leaving many in awe.

During this time, Qitian Company received numerous media interview requests, but Jiang Xia politely declined them all.

His reasoning was simple: he just wanted to quietly create animation and present the best possible works to the public.

When word got out, he was immediately praised by countless netizens. They called President Jiang a principled man who didn’t let a little success go to his head. They felt that only by maintaining such a sincere passion for animation could one create a masterpiece like Cat and Mouse.

Seeing the online comments, Jiang Xia just gave a faint smile and made no further response.

Qitian Animation had been getting too much attention lately, and the employees had grown restless. This wasn’t a good thing. He needed time for the entire company to settle down and refocus on the animation itself, rather than the praise from the outside world.

After the Cat and Mouse feature film finished its theatrical run, it was immediately uploaded to D Station.

However, this time it wasn’t free. D Station introduced a Premium Membership system for the first time. Certain works labeled "VIP" required either a Premium Membership or spending 30 "coins" to temporarily unlock them for viewing.

Considering you could earn one coin per day, 30 coins represented a month of user activity. It sounded a little steep, but it was a way to watch for free without spending actual money.

Although many people online attacked D Station, claiming it had forgotten its roots and sold out, paying for content was a perfectly normal thing in this parallel world that respected copyright.

Besides, you could still watch it without paying by using the free coins.

Think about it: if the Cat and Mouse movie was available for free immediately after leaving theaters, wouldn’t that be a huge slap in the face to the loyal fans? The ones who paid to see it in cinemas would have been made into complete fools.

Therefore, the Premium Membership viewing model received support from many people. If you didn’t want to spend money, you could just patiently spend a month unlocking it with coins.

After all, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. D Station’s operations and maintenance cost money, don’t they?

If D Station went under, where would they ever find another site with such integrity?

Moreover, the Premium Membership wasn’t mandatory. Even for regular users, all the basic functions they were used to would remain unaffected.

Of course, the Premium Membership did come with perks.

For example, user nicknames would turn a prestigious and eye-catching red, there was unlimited access to VIP videos, video quality was upgraded from 720p to 1080p, you’d get discounts on merchandise purchased through D Station, and bullet comments could be multicolored, and so on.

At a glance, the benefits might have seemed pretty standard, but just look at the competition, QQ. Its membership was practically useless, yet so many people still paid for it every month.

The key was that Jiang Xia hadn’t set the price too high. For just 20 a month, you could enjoy the prestigious member benefits.

Given Qitian Company’s excellent reputation, many netizens rallied behind the slogan, "Pay for love and faith!" Within just a few days, a small but notable group of Premium Members had already emerged on D Station.

The view count for the Cat and Mouse feature film also exceeded 700,000 in a short period. If this were converted to box office revenue based on the membership price, it would be roughly equivalent to almost 10 million, since a large number of those viewers had used 30 coins to unlock it.

However, this was just the beginning. The Cat and Mouse feature film would be permanently available on their own platform, and its view count would gradually increase over time.

Looking at the backend data showing nearly 400,000 Premium Members, Jiang Xia was a little surprised. The number was slightly higher than he had expected.

D Station currently had over 20 million registered members, with more than 10 million daily active users. Given those numbers, Jiang Xia had estimated they’d get around 200,000 paying users, so he was surprised to see that number had nearly doubled.

This was perhaps because D Station had become the largest youth culture community and video website in the country. After a year of growth, it had cultivated a large base of loyal users.

But even so, the journey to cultivate paying users was still long and challenging.

To reach the scale of over 20 million Premium Members like B Station in his previous life, he estimated it would still take several years of development.

In mid-April, the Dili Dili app, fully compatible with iOS and Android systems, was officially launched. Its icon was a small television set incorporating the shape of an auspicious cloud.

From then on, users could watch D Station videos on their iPhones anytime, anywhere, which once again brought a massive amount of traffic to D Station.

He estimated that by the second half of the year, the domestic smartphone market would enter a golden age, with domestic manufacturers entering a phase of rapid development.

By then, the D Station app would leverage the rapid expansion of the smartphone market to quickly capture the mobile-end market share.

In the animation field, Slam Dunk had been updated to its fifty-first episode and was firmly occupying the number one spot for hot-blooded shonen series. Its excellent plot and character designs had won over a large following of fans, both basketball lovers and non-lovers alike.

Although Qitian Animation had designated Slam Dunk as a free-to-watch series from the beginning, the value of the various merchandise derived from this IP had long since exceeded its production costs.

Not to mention the basic character figurines, the co-branded jerseys, basketball shoes, basketballs, sports drinks, and more—each of these ventures could bring Qitian Animation millions in revenue.

Game companies had even contacted Qitian Animation, wanting to acquire the rights to make a Slam Dunk game, but they had yet to reach an agreement on the price.

As a reincarnator, Jiang Xia was well aware of the money-making power of games. A good game’s monthly revenue could easily exceed a hundred million or even a billion. Thinking of the explosive hit Honor of Kings from his previous life, its average daily revenue for the entire year had exceeded a hundred million. This was far more profitable than making movies.

If not for his limited energy, he really wanted to start up a game company and let this world’s Penguin know who’s their daddy.

But that was just a thought. Even if he invested in a game company, its technological prowess in the gaming field would be no match for Penguin’s.

The more likely scenario was that after painstakingly recreating a classic game from his past life, it would be copied by Penguin shortly after. They would then leverage their massive user base to crush his version.

Therefore, it was better to keep digging deep into the animation business. At least in this arena, Qitian Company had already established a lead that put them in a class of their own.

Even if Penguin made a strategic move into the animation and comics industry in a few years, they could never do it better than him.

Such was Jiang Xia’s confidence.