Chasing Stars in Hollywood

When countless media outlets were trying to contact Simon to verify a series of explosive revelations, the Hearst Group continued to leverage its media platforms over the following days to release numerous heavyweight gossip items related to Simon. These included claims that Catherine was actually Simon's mistress, Simon was involved with the wife of an action movie star, and the Westeros system had interfered in the 1993 New York mayoral election.

Unfortunately, while most of these might have been true, the Hearst Group failed to produce much substantial evidence.

Without evidence, it's just slander.

In a society like the USA, defamation is a very serious crime.

Simon was not going to sit idly by.

While quietly mobilizing the Westeros system's legal team to gather materials for potential lawsuits, the Westeros family's PR team also launched a full-scale counterattack against the Hearst Group's media revelations.

Moreover, the Westeros company took a tough stance, issuing a stern warning to other major media powers in the USA: in this incident, any that stood by the Hearst Group and participated in the uproar would forever be the enemies of the Westeros system. If they chose to be enemies now, there would be only confrontation in the future, with no possibility of reconciliation. The Westeros system would no longer offer any chances for cooperation.

Faced with Simon's uncompromising statement, not only did several established newspaper groups negotiating cooperation with Igreat back down, but many other traditional media forces, after initially following the trend a little, quickly pulled back.

Unlike the complete fallout between the Westeros system and the Hearst Group, other media forces knew that if they got involved, they would be leaving no room for themselves.

Some of the old media families couldn't understand what kind of madness had gripped the Hearst family.

Even if this recent upheaval truly caused the Westeros couple to turn against each other and led to a divorce battle that weakened the Westeros system, what good would it do the Hearst family?

However, there are always many inexplicable things in this world.

Perhaps the Hearst family believed that by making a move like this, they could make Simon Westeros, like many of the Hearst family's enemies in the past, taste the power of the century-old media family's control over public opinion, thus retreating in fear and even actively seeking compromise.

But, it's clearly no longer a hundred years ago.

The Hearst Group originally intended to use its media platform to lead a public outcry against Simon Westeros, akin to the massive manipulation of public opinion it achieved at its peak many years ago. However, when other powerful North American media companies quickly backed down, the Hearst Group was left exposed.

Most people believe they are very smart and can see through many things.

When they saw that the media platforms attacking Simon Westeros were all part of the Hearst Group while other newspapers either stayed neutral or even defended Simon, the credibility of the Hearst Group's revelations plummeted.

Simon Westeros' handling of the initial 'waist fairy' and 'leg fairy' tax evasion incident even won him a lot of goodwill from many netizens, most of whom were women.

This young super tycoon did not rush to publicly deny and distance himself when his two lovers were arrested by the IRS, as many other wealthy celebrities would likely have done. Instead, he openly had his legal team bail the two women out within an hour and generously paid their back taxes.

Furthermore, to prevent the two women from being harassed by the media, Westeros immediately sent his private jet to fly them out of New York.

Even many husbands might not go to such lengths.

A man who can provide such a sense of security to any woman, isn't it only natural for him to have many lovers?

As for the Hearst family.

The entire situation had been clearly exposed on the internet.

This once notorious media family, which had risen to fame through sensationalism, not only failed to keep its business promises but also sought to retaliate with its media resources, showing no sense of integrity and losing all justification for its continued existence.

During this period, Doris Fletcher, who kept exposing her former employer's privacy, was also thoroughly investigated by the media.

This woman, who had once enjoyed generous treatment from the Westeros family, not only failed to be grateful but had been caught red-handed selling her employer's privacy to the Hearst Group and was forced out. Now, she was clearly stirring up trouble again for her own benefit. How credible could she be?

When Doris Fletcher tearfully revealed in an interview with a local TV station under the Hearst Group that she was kidnapped by Simon Westeros and dumped on the remote Tierra del Fuego, nearly dying, it did not garner sympathy but instead made many online commentators express satisfaction.

For a traitor, being sent to Tierra del Fuego was too lenient.

She should have been thrown directly to Antarctica to feed the penguins.

Thus, after all this turmoil, the whole affair had little real impact on Simon. It merely caused some fluctuations in the stock prices of various listed companies within the Westeros system due to market concerns about a possible divorce.

However, when some hedge funds noticed that the short contracts they dumped were immediately absorbed by the market and that Westeros-affiliated capital was generously lending out shares of its subsidiaries, they quickly suppressed any big short-selling plans.

The volatile tech stock market in March 1994 had already made many hedge funds suffering huge losses as jittery as a startled bird.

The sensitive movements in the hedge fund sector quickly transmitted to the stock market.

Although the core companies of the Westeros system, such as Cisco and AOL, experienced continuous price fluctuations in the last few trading days of March, they did not see the downward trend of the first half of the month.

Many perceptive individuals realized that Simon Westeros was deliberately not clarifying.

March was the last delivery month of the first quarter, with many hedge contracts to be settled and a large number of new positions to be established.

Keeping the market uncertain was the best way to attract capital to take risks.

If the Westeros couple publicly clarified that their marriage was intact, regardless of the truth, the stock prices of companies like Cisco would stabilize, and many hedge funds that had suffered heavy losses in March would be even more cautious and unlikely to enter the market rashly.

This was indeed the case.

In recent days, Cersei Fund Management Company had liquidated $5 billion in long stock contracts while continuing to establish $2 billion in new long positions, keeping the total long position in tech stocks at $9 billion.

Meanwhile, as of March 31, Cersei Fund Management Company's total funds had grown from $5 billion at the beginning of the year to $6.7 billion. The $1.7 billion profit in the first quarter represented a 34% growth rate, exceeding the annual return of many hedge funds.

If this trend continued, Cersei Fund Management Company was on track to deliver no less than 100% net annual returns to investors in 1994.

The operations of Cersei Fund Management Company and the lesson learned in March had already led more hedge funds to turn to tech stock net long positions, which was the main reason why Cersei Capital's long position in tech stocks shrank from $12 billion to $9 billion.

With fewer short-sellers and no takers for long contracts, Cersei Capital's operations team was preparing to operate directly through the stock spot market.

With the Nasdaq tech stock sector continuing to rise, directly buying tech stocks at this stage, as long as one could suppress greed and exit at the right time, would still yield substantial returns.

Overall, under the strong suppression of the Westeros system, the storm stirred up by the Hearst Group, while revealing some unknown aspects of Simon, had almost no substantive impact on the Westeros system.

Users did not stop using the World Wide Web because of Simon's negative news, nor did viewers stop watching Daenerys Entertainment's films due to his scandals. The capital market continued to chase after Westeros concept stocks, and the first-quarter growth momentum of various Westeros subsidiaries remained strong.

As for Simon's personal reputation, being a person with an inner strength as hard and cold as ice, the external disturbances over the years had never truly changed his state of mind.

The public tends to forget.

When the storm passes, more people will see only a figure standing at the top of the world's pyramid, whom everyone can only look up to. Even if there are still negative feelings, it's hard to say whether they stem from genuine moral principles or pure jealousy.

April 1st, Friday.

April Fool's Day.

On this day, while the Hearst Group continued to tirelessly attack Simon using its media platforms, Igreat Company suddenly released what seemed like an April Fool's joke of industry news in the morning. The news was about the first web-based social game in internet history, "Happy Farm," which had been opened last Friday. This was the first practical application of Igreat Company's Flash animation technology in the field of online games.

From its official opening at 9 a.m. last Friday until 9 a.m. on April 1st, "Happy Farm" had garnered 6.97 million players in just seven days, thanks to direct recommendations from the Igreat Portal homepage and leveraging Facebook's massive user base.

6.97 million—what kind of concept is that?

In recent years, very few Nintendo console games have sold more than 5 million copies in total.

Therefore, a social game that had attracted 6.97 million users in just one week was hard to describe with any term other than "miracle."

Of course, some people immediately realized the unique nature of this game.

"Happy Farm" was a free social game, with an in-app purchase system, but most users could play freely without spending money. Thus, this disadvantage seemed to be completely outshone by the real sales of console

 games.

With typical console game prices being sixty to seventy dollars, if "Happy Farm" had the same 6.97 million sales, the concept would be completely different.

However, Igreat Portal also announced the first week's revenue for this pioneering Flash social game.

In just seven days, with 6.97 million new players, "Happy Farm" brought in $2.61 million in revenue through relatively simple in-game fertilizer items.

$2.61 million might not seem like much, equivalent to the sales of only about thirty or forty thousand game cartridges.

But no one could ignore the fact that this was just the first week's income for "Happy Farm."

Even if we don't consider the continuous increase in the number of "Happy Farm" users, maintaining a weekly income of $2.61 million theoretically means an annual total revenue of $135 million.

$135 million—this is no longer a revenue scale that most console games can match.

However, the actual total revenue of "Happy Farm" will surely far exceed $135 million.

This game, showing a phenomenal trend just one week after its launch, is still in the initial stage of its user base explosion.

In the official press release of Igreat Portal, the global user base of "Happy Farm" is expected to reach 50 million in the next two years, with projected annual revenue of $300 million to $400 million.

Although the article also candidly acknowledged that the lifecycle of social games might be short, lasting only about two years, even with an average annual income of $300 million to $400 million, in two years, we're looking at a total revenue of $700 million. Whether for EA, the developer, or Facebook, the operator, this would mean making a fortune.

It's important to note that a well-known Facebook game blogger recently revealed that the development budget for "Happy Farm," which took only two months, was mainly the salaries of the development team, with the total production cost being less than $1 million.

A budget of less than $1 million yielding $700 million in revenue over two years—this could be described as printing money.

With Igreat Company's official report, many users who were not very interested in "Happy Farm" initially flocked to the Igreat Portal's direct game link. Some even registered on Facebook just for this game.

Both online portals and traditional media, attracted by the sudden boom of "Happy Farm" following Igreat Portal's report, quickly turned their attention to the game.

Then, as reporters gathered information for next day's reports, more people realized that the root of "Happy Farm's" success might not be the game itself. Of course, for players, this web game, which combined casual social interactions and utilized Igreat Company's Flash animation technology, was very interesting and playable. But its success fundamentally lay in Igreat Company's near-monopoly on a massive user base.

In recent years, industry analysts who had been following the internet industry wondered how Igreat Portal would monetize its enormous user base. In the past few years, Igreat's main revenue sources were software sales, rapidly growing advertising business, and e-commerce. Although these all leveraged Igreat's vast user base, the connection was not very direct or tight.

This led some media to predict that as the internet user base continued to grow exponentially, facing huge operational costs, Igreat Company might have to split up its exclusive network access to reduce costs.

Or the opening of MSN Portal and AOL Portal was due to this reason.

Now, a social game with a production budget of less than $1 million had directly demonstrated the vast commercial potential of Igreat Company's enormous user base.

Two years, an expected total revenue of $700 million. According to the industry's discovered profit-sharing rules, Igreat Company would first take 20% of the total revenue as operational costs. This might contain up to half of the profit margin. The remaining 80% would be evenly split between Igreat and EA, the developer under Daenerys Entertainment.

In sum, Igreat Company could earn over $400 million from the expected $700 million total revenue. Even after deducting all marketing, operational costs, and subsequent taxes, the net profit is expected to be no less than $200 million, netting $100 million annually.

In the 1993 Fortune 500 list published in March, only 129 companies had annual net profits exceeding $100 million.

For Igreat Company, this was just the revenue from one social game.

Since this model has proven successful, would Igreat Company stop at just one game?

Of course not.

It's foreseeable that in the future, only in the field of online games, leveraging its massive user base, Igreat Company could continuously generate huge profits.

For Simon, who deliberately flew from Los Angeles to San Francisco on Friday because of "Happy Farm," the game's explosive success was both surprising and expected.

In history, "Happy Farm" was the first social game copied by North American game developers to achieve huge success.

China's "Happy Farm," launched in 2008, was phenomenally successful. In 2009, an American game studio, Zynga, quickly followed up with "Farmville," a knockoff of "Happy Farm." Leveraging the rapidly growing Facebook platform at the time, it became the first social game on Facebook to surpass 10 million users within two months.

In the following years, "Farmville" reached a peak player base of over 80 million, bringing in substantial revenue for Zynga.

At its peak, Zynga was so profitable that they held lavish weekly parties, gave employees international trips, and built a headquarters in San Francisco worth over $100 million. Compared to a struggling studio that sold the rights to "Happy Farm" to Tencent for a few million, Zynga was incredibly successful, with their IPO later receiving significant market attention and their market value once surpassing $5 billion.

This time, the new "Happy Farm," personally led by Simon, leveraging Igreat Company's near-monopoly on the internet gateway and being the first internet social game developed using the new Flash animation technology, did not exceed Simon's expectations by reaching close to 7 million players in just one week under the strong recommendation of Igreat Portal, which had over 20 million daily active users.

The peak user base for the previous "Farmville" was 80 million. This time, Simon did not find Igreat's team's prediction of 50 million global users for "Happy Farm" unattainable.

In just the first quarter, North American World Wide Web access users had exceeded 52 million, with the number of internet users reaching 85 million. The global internet user base was close to 150 million.

By the end of 1994, the North American internet user base was expected to reach 115 million, with the global figure close to 200 million.

Looking ahead to 1995, with the large-scale explosion of overseas internet users, the global internet user base could even reach 400 million.

This is the foundation for "Happy Farm" to reach 50 million global users.

On the other hand, the current internet is akin to the TV industry during the monopoly era of public TV networks.

Because cable TV and streaming video entertainment had not yet emerged, North America's major public TV networks often saw phenomena like the final episode of "Seinfeld" drawing over 70 million viewers, something unimaginable in the later era of cable TV and fast-developing streaming.

Similarly, the current internet lacks the variety of entertainment content that existed in the "Farmville" era. At that time, there was already "World of Warcraft," YouTube, and single-player games close to movie-level production quality, and smartphones were beginning to emerge. Users then had many other entertainment options.

Now, at least until other similar social casual games appear, there is only "Happy Farm."

Furthermore, the phenomenal success of "Happy Farm" has a very clear non-replicable nature. In both China and the USA, the two companies that created phenomenal farm games subsequently launched products that did not break their own records.

Therefore, Simon believed that 50 million peak players were possible even just in North America, let alone globally.

When a game's user base is large enough, even if only a small portion contributes a small amount of revenue, the combined effect can leave many blockbuster games in the dust.

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